Aftermath

I was early, so I could clean up, then TR showed up a little early too, and we put away the rest of the tables. I broke him in on the big four-foot dust-mop and I mopped. We agreed, he and I, that we couldn't stand to open the museum with dirty floors. I might teach him to mop, he might need a smaller mop-head, it's a body mass issue; I use a 28 ounce mop head and it might pull him off his feet. They make a 24, and I've got an extra mop pole, I could make him his very own mop. A pretty special moment, your first mop. At any rate, the museum is presentable. Which is all I really cared about. You don't want to hear shoes squeaking on the floor, to know that a note might have been passed. I guarantee perfect service. My company can actually do anything. We've already created life in different universes, we hold the patent on the magic carpet ride. Just saying. I'm surprised that what I found there was, more or less, what I was expecting. Just an observation. Atypical Affective Disorder. Nothing you would ordinarily think about. Yesterday, mopping, I was looking at the wet lines I was creating with my modified chevron, thinking they were a very ephemeral depiction of movement. A line of thought that quickly frays into hundreds of sub-thoughts. I kept putting down my mop (I was on my own time here) and wandering off to the library to reference something. "Nude Descending A Staircase", for instance, records time. Muybridge, of course. And this incredible bronze piece, not done so much as a work of art, but as a solid depiction of movement, a teaching aid, by E. J. Marey. He was one of those brilliant Frenchmen of the last half of the 19th century who were intent on figuring things out. He was a physiologist, by profession, who had developed and built the Spygmograph, a device that inscribed the human pulse on a smoke-blackened cylinder. A very interesting person. He invented all kinds of things to allow him to examine movement. One of his, I don't know what to call them, experiments doesn't seem like exactly the correct word, but whatever, was called "Recording A Gull's Flight In Three Projections", recording a flying gull from three different angles photographically, and the "Bronze Model Of The Flying Seagull" was a result of that. It's a magical piece. One reference led to another and I found myself reading a long essay on the development of the modern kitchen. Not as farfetched as you might think. It's all about movement. Count Rumford, one of my favorite people in all of history, and redesigning the kitchen was a fetish of his, enters stage left. In a servant-free house, he reasoned, being a democratic and proto-feminist guy, food prep and serving should be simplified. Single-handedly configured the modern kitchen, I, for instance, being only two or three technologies behind, use a stove of his design, where a small, isolated fire, does a great deal of work. I'm not one to waste BTUs. An advantage to being brought up poor, don't waste anything. I save those sheets of paper butter comes wrapped in, to start fires mid-winter, a stack of them, in the freezer. Despite having habits that would indicate otherwise, I'm not that strange. How well do you know anyone?