Three Foxes

I think it's my old lover and her two kits, but I'm not sure, all those foxes look the same. "Jubilate Agno" and the most blessed cat in history. Foxes are more like cats than dogs. Madness is a relative term for what we don't understand, or think we do and really don't. Tesla and that pigeon. Who's to say? I knew a goat once, but we don't need to go there, it's not what you think, we really cared for each other, it wasn't a case of taking advantage. Robert Plant plays a guitar like it was a dulcimer. Open tuning. Sacred heart. A choral effect. Hold on, keep your eyes on the prize. Paul Simon does an African thing, something simple, about human kindness, it almost turns my stomach, but I love his harmonies. Richard Thompson without the anxiety. I have to turn off the radio because it strikes too close to the truth. Absolute silence always brings Bach out of the woodwork. I hear the Cello Suites in the subtle scraping of carpenter ants. That slight sound, of wind in the trees, is Dido calling Troy to destruction. One thing must die before another is reborn. It's the rule, right? The way things are constellated. A Mayan sense of time. Your sense of time, where I rip out a bleeding heart and hold it up to the rising sun. A metaphor, but you get my drift, how useless we are. Like a leaf on the ripple. Nothing, really. Sorry, I can't help myself, given the chance, I'll always be at least ironic, if not sarcastic, it's just the way I am, the natural world is just a target, something I can hold myself up against. You make some assumptions. Maybe some of them are correct: I'm what you imagine I might be. Shipping day, and I get to the museum early. 7:30, to meet the first truck at 8:00. On time, D shows up, we get the Modernism show loaded, signed off, and they leave for Wisconsin. Second truck arrives, we get the 7 crates of glass loaded, and the two paintings being returned to the Cleveland Museum, because they don't let their collection out of the state. Not noon and we had loaded $2,135,000 worth of art and shipped it out. Excellent feeling. I bring peds up from the basement and they're in terrible shape, start repair. D and I strip signage from the two walls, and this new generation of vinyl is thinner and stickier and must be scrapped off, which damages the walls and will require patching and sanding before painting. At that point in the turn-around where everything you get done adds three more things to the list. Ohio Designer Craftsmen show isn't in until the end of next week, so I have time for a pretty good list. A good day, nice to have all of that art out of here. The main gallery looks like what it is, a job site, my playing field. The first ten days of July promise to be over the top. I look forward to it. Responding to the call. Pegi's big show is at West High School, three performances, and it's a big deal, I give her set person paint and advice, finish rebuilding the follow-spot. Kim said, when he was here, that it would take two or three people to replace me. High praise from one of the other great problem solvers I know. I know several, actually, any one of those people from my last years at the Cape Playhouse and especially that first year at the Opera Company of Boston. We were amazing, not the least because we were smoking Syrian hash that had the state seal impressed in the middle of six-inch rounds, and taking every psycho-tropic drug that wasn't illegal. And there were a lot of them, the birth of ethno-botany. I ran a perfect show, it's really difficult to run a 'perfect' show under any circumstances, for one of the three performances of Beverly Sills' last "Traviata", after having eaten several leaves from a tree, that I had been told, might kill me. And she was effusive, this was the best performance ever. God. I'm thinking. I should get high more often.