Toward Madness

A Clare day. I down-loaded some things, and a few books came on inter-library loan. Also a Clare day as it started sunny and cooler, but there was the smell of rain, clouds in the afternoon, then rain. You could view this as a metaphor for poor John's life. Another complex person that went crazy, and there's something oddly modern about the ways. I get that far before work, arriving at 7:30 after a slow drive in, stopping often to look at some particular thing, a large white trillium, an arbor of honeysuckle that induces a coma of smell; stop twice to move box-turtles off the road, three times, on Mackletree, to remove road trash. I got to the museum early to watch a TV show on Hulu, but I was side-tracked by the ease of accessing information with a high-speed connection. It's addictive. D arrives at 9:00, we go get a coffee and scone, and I see he has remembered the necessary tools. To me, this is a funny story. The ladies, Pegi and Trish, had decided to cover the inside of the new (an improvement grant) back window, a large three-paned thing, maybe 120 inches wide by 60 inches tall, three units mulled together. It had been single paned glass, and now it's argon filled thermo-pane with insulated mullions. Money well spent. To tint the glass, so that, from the outside, you weren't looking at the back of a projection booth, was going to cost an astounding $687, so the ladies were trying to stretch a piece of black scrim across the inside trim, so you couldn't see in, and were trying to attach it with duct tape. I believe in duct tape, I've used it in life-or-death situations, the tensile strength is amazing, but it really wasn't the solution for this particular task, and they just drop the whole mess on the floor and defer to whatever we might think. This is Problem Solving 404. For this simple task, to make it look OK, we require a compressor, a pneumatic stapler, two drills, one of them a hammer-drill, lumber, and tap-cons. We build a picture frame, on the inside, and staple the scrim; it isn't perfect but it's a thousand times better than what you formerly saw, and then we apply museum signage, in vinyl, on the outside of the window, and it's cool, you know, the transformation. Suddenly, even from the back, you know this is the museum. Personally, I wouldn't have used red for the lettering, it's a little Goth. Her lips and what I don't want to know. Maybe a green or azure, as it rises in the mist. Red is so confrontational. My Jimmy Buffet stories, or my Carly Simon stories, sound so contrived, but those are the real stories; mostly I make things up, and avoid reality. Clare didn't punctuate well, used a lot archaic words, not unlike Emily. Make a note. I'm sure someone is keeping record. I just want to go back to Memphis, marching back to hell. Night train. You can hear me coming, right, down by the river, when the levee breaks. Take a number. Love might be beauty, but that doesn't mean you won't be slogging through shit most of your life. Clare tended sheep, means he dealt with the odd prolapsed uterus, field amputation, pulling the occasional dead fetus by hand. It's part of the package. You buy nature, you buy the whole dark back-side. The bone pile. Where we hide the failures, the mistakes, the various genetic disasters; inbred mutants better left on the hillside to die, and go about our lives as if nothing had happened. What he wanted (CLare) was a life in London, among the literate. But he was a fucking janitor, for god's sake, he didn't have a doctorate degree, he verbally assaulted a Shylock, and that's so politically incorrect that they really had to lock him up. Restraints are an option, but I've learned, the hard way, it's better to ere on the side on containment. Cuff everyone and ask questions later. As a matter of course, people hurt themselves and others. Best nip that in the bud. Wet sheets are good for this. If I were completely loony, and you were reading me closely, what would that make you? Just curious, because of something someone said, about my stability. I'm fine, actually, wouldn't hurt a fly, but I do have dark thoughts about killing anyone who doesn't agree with me. Clare was like Pound, I have to think about that, the way he targeted an audience. An odd couple came into the museum this afternoon, I walked them through Shane's figurative show. Both professors at Kent State. He was a German, who taught accounting, she was an American who taught German, I'm no longer surprised, so we get along famously. I show them the vault. We talk about Clare, and madness, about that desire to be other then we are. This is the best job ever.