Ablutions

Got everything out of the way today, all that personal hygiene, bath on the deck, washing my hair (so much easier with it very short), trimming the nails. I'll shave and take a sponge bath every day, but I needed to set myself for the week ahead. The week before a major show opens is a lot like the week before your daughter's wedding. There are ways in which I'm a lot like a wedding planner. It's all about logistics. You do the prep, you have things delivered at the correct time, you do the deed. Like with anything, you learn the ropes; a modicum of brain and you get better at it. There will be problems, there are always problems, the secret is solving them in ways the audience doesn't notice, and even that skill is a learned thing. What I knew was that I was prepared, and that I was clean and well-rested to start the week. This is nothing, really, compared to mounting an opera. After the ablutions I make a nice stir-fry with onions, peppers, asparagus and a can of roasted tomatoes, which I served myself on a bed of left-over mashed potatoes, excellent with lots of black pepper and a splash of balsamic. Mashed potatoes are a perfect medium, slippingly on the tongue. I'm hardly an expert witness, can barely defend what I say, mostly I'm deeply mired in tar I want to get out of. Like that mastodon, howling at the moon and trying to move his feet. What is iconic, is only iconic because we notice. Sure, I have a few niches, where I squirrel away gods, we all do, it's a genetic thing. Mysticism is high on the list, even Benjamin is close to incomprehensible. Try to read Hegel. He and Hannah must have had sex, but it's hard to imagine. They must have talked the whole time. Imagine that conversation. Say you'd been holed in the confessional, waiting for some kind of release, but you knew you'd done some very bad things, you, were, in fact, guilty, and you wondered how much they knew. Power's out, I have to go to bed, have we learned anything? I stay up awhile, reading by oil lamp, but still no power, and I can't SEND. Finally, to bed, sleep troubled by dreams of boxes. Up early, I stop at the old Bodie's, now Pit Stop, for a breakfast sandwich and a carton of chocolate milk; go down below the floodwall, because there is river fog. Open up the museum, D arrives, coffee, and we unpack the remaining art, several large ceramic pieces and the rest of the fabric art. The new programmable looms are amazing. D has some errands to run, so I ferry boxes to the basement, must be 60 or 70 of them, and when he gets back we take down all the temporary panels. The space is as open as it can be, which is good, for the fund-raiser and then the wedding. The bride was in today, realizing they had to move the actual wedding out of the theater and into the main gallery because their RSVP number is already 170. That about maxs us out, but I expect the list to grow to at least 200, people will be hanging over the upstairs galleries rails. An awkward show, the art I mean, because it's a 'Best Of" which means that's there's no theme, just a lot of nice pieces (94, I think) and they need to be arranged in one of a great many orders. Infinite maybe, the number of possible orders. There are three of us here, that could do this, a large number, considering, more than twice as many as one. But what we enjoy is doing it together, fun, a kind of game. I mean 'game' there in a limited sense. There are three pieces by an artist we had trouble with a couple of years ago. He doesn't understand loading, We've agreed on a strategy to deal with his work, but I don't like even having to agree on a strategy. If a piece really wants to fall over, who am I to stand in the way? Failure is almost always a good thing, you learn something about limits. In your comfort zone, you learn almost nothing. I know you see what I mean. We need to fail, repeatedly, before we gain any altitude on a steep scree slope. You slide back as a matter of course. What we call "gaining your footing" which is certainly true, that you do, learn how to walk, but it becomes a metaphor for the very way you conduct your life. That I walked thus was therefor whatever. The next step. I have to step back here, because I thought I was making sense. The various conjugations. I have to go to sleep.