Threshold Day

Threshold is a good, old, solid word, and I mean it both as a sill, and as limen, the point at which a stimulus begins to cause an effect. The way things are going I'm going to have to get a bedside clock, because my sleeping habits are skewed which doesn't matter, normally, but does matter, the few times a year, that I actually have committed to being at a particular place at a particular time. I don't take any time off, actually accumulate hours like fleas. I can't believe I just went back and added a comma. Specifically to remind me to read it a certain way. When I'm writing, like at this moment, I say the words out loud and consider every pause. The length of which. I just took another comma out, because it was misleading. And the day had barely begun. In a way, I'm already tired. Get there early so we can load the truck to take the ODC show to Kent State, but D is tangled up getting the rental agreement, and before he gets there with the truck, Sharee, the coordinator, and April, the first of the county art teachers to arrive for a yearly thing they, not a workshop, exactly, but whatever it is they do. So we've got the art teachers in the basement. Then D arrives with the truck and we load an entire show, such that it can't be damaged in transit. in about a hour. Seen this way, we're facilitators, setting up for the noon lecture, the accession committee meeting happening upstairs. Busy. I don't aspire to be someone who could talk about books, but I do read a lot. We had to load the truck before it rained., everything is cardboard, and badly packed, D needs to get on the road. The Mark Twain impersonator arrives, I settle him to his venue, his noon-time talk is really just a lecture, a conversation about Twain to set up the evening performance. Keep everyone on their toes, so to speak. What was the next thing? Right, breaking down one show and setting up another. I don't remember lunch, I'm sure I ate something. Then we're right into the mid-afternoon turnaround. An odd place to find myself. I talked to Linda, setting up a call tomorrow on the company dime. Emily removed herself, those last however many years. Set up for the Twain evening performance. One beer with B, Drew and TR and home. Fell asleep writing. Suddenly morning and I'm on the sofa, fully clothed. Coffee and a shave and back to town. Want to hear about D's trip as neither of us has been to Kent State. He said the museum was like a teaching hospital for curators and preparators. Four years at Janitor College and a master's degree from Kent State, you could have my job. We talked about handling art, remembered some situations. Walked over to CVS to get some toothpaste, and found myself in the slipstream of a very loud floral, a bank person who really knew how to walk, but had made a serious mistake in perfume choice. I wanted to throw her in the shower, towel her off, and put just a dab of 'Dzing!' on her wrists. Talked about mimesis at some length, as it is germane to D's thesis. When I got home I spent a half-hour with that word, but that was later, if there was a chronology involved. Because Sara came in, to go over some stuff with D, was the next thing, and had to leave, before we had finished a cigaret on the loading dock. D and I stayed there, to finish smoking, and Tim popped out of the bar next door, 'Noggins', and said he'd just grilled some steaks (they now serve lunch and dinner) and did we want one. One of life's rules is you never turn down a free steak. It isn't done, bad form. We follow him into their kitchen, and it's cool, must have cost a fortune. I could lose a great deal of someone's money if I had a kitchen like that, opened a restaurant, had a staff and a bookkeeper. We took the steaks back to the museum, because we were on duty, whatever, eating them with our hands. I ate the fat and everything, because, you know, winter is coming, and I need some reserves, D was more restrained. This whole alley thing could be good in terms of free food, I hadn't thought of that. I'm rolling a cigaret, sitting on a stool in the kitchen, with the door closed. because even the extraneous sound bothers me. What is authentic? Nothing I've uncovered so far. This whole construct is a guess. I think I can see certain things. Often I'm wrong. One thing I'll always do, is admit to failure maybe you see some way out of this. A cheap shot. But there's always an exit, the back door, you just move a few cases around.