Lost Pages

I hate it when I lose a page, no excuse, except that I work on an Apple at work and a PC at home, the formats are just different enough that some lines slip beneath the ether. The cold is a referent. Maybe I hit the wrong key. Nothing if not flexible. A teacher impressed on me once, fifth year Latin, we were translating Ovid, that language was slippery, and it was difficult to nail down exactly what was said. Which is certainly true. Left to my own devices is the way I prefer things, juggling my several lists. So first thing, I head to the paint store, because I can see that the two signage walls are going to take some time. I have about six balls in the air, and I need to finish something. A color for the signage walls would be good. Not even remotely impossible, and far from depressing, I actually enjoy the process. So I go to the paint store and the kid there calls Ron out of the back room because he's unsure about scanning a match from the announcement card. Ron looks at the color, looks at me, and laughs. Trust me, you don't want your paint guy to laugh at you. He snorted I'd be lucky to get a smooth finish in four coats. I'm thinking three, if I'm careful. A large about of solids in this color and it will tend toward streaky. I have strategies. The main problem is around the perimeter, where you use a brush to cut in the edges, everything else is rolled, and the textures are different. The signature, the stroke, they are completely different, so on the third pass I focus closely on getting the roller as close to the edge as possible. At that point, texture is everything. A complication right now, at this change-over, is that the gallery signage wall merges into the old bank structure, and someone, correctly, chalked that joint, and did a handsome job, running a finger down the entire length to create a very nice inside curve. But because there isn't an actual corner, when I tape it, to paint another color on the signage wall, the color tends to migrate out. Eventually, the entire gallery would be whatever that color was. To halt the spread, every once in a while I have to tape the wall off in reverse (we call this back-painting, I don't know what anyone else calls it) and bring Gallery White back into where we might imagine a corner to be. To tape very straight lines is difficult. I'm borderline mental about this. The whole idea of mental is an interesting subject. Me, today, for instance, all I could think about was getting home and working in 10 point Arial. I was already thinking about punctuation marks I'd be using. I love the way punctuation factors interpretation. I'm more honest now than I've ever been. And clear, I think I'm clear. Actually it's a muddy mess, there's nothing clear about it. How do you deal with longing? Cold night at home and I just wear my writing outfit into work, no one says anything and I never do shave or clean up. We just set right to the tasks at hand, painting brick red over medium blue; take off the tape from the back-painting, re-tape the new Gallery White edge, get on a first coat before noon. After a hasty lunch, we bring up pedestals from the basement, refocus lights in all the galleries upstairs, get a second coat on the signage wall. Another busy day tomorrow, so I stay in town, it's snowing at a pretty good clip by four-o-clock. At five, after I close up, I go over to the pub for a draft, and it's dead, that early, in a snow storm, which is fine by me, I just want a beer; then I walk over to Kroger, in a blinding, tear-gathering, blast of frozen rain to get an avocado. Spare me, I just wanted one, with lime juice and a little black pepper.