Punch List

Right there at the end, and the list is doable. An intense final push tomorrow. My truck was missing badly on the way to work this morning and I thought I'd better stay in town. Also I had gotten in touch with the phone company and they said that a repairman would call me at work and he never did, so I assumed another night with no phone and that page I'm working on there is becoming unwieldy. Long day on our feet and D and I were both wasted. We tracked down a missing painting (there is art work everywhere) and got it hung in the back hallway. Did the labels. I can't believe they're done, but they're all on the floor beneath the corresponding work. Actually got a third of them up last thing today. Sara and D do the lighting tomorrow, and I'll finish the labels and start cleaning up. The place is always a wreak after an installation. The floor is a multi-layered disaster. We started a final list, but it got so long as to be boring, we know what needs to be done. I have a lot of touch-up painting to do, in four different colors. Move the humidifiers to the basement, hang one last piece, do the signage, haul garbage, mop the floor. Doable. After work I drove over the Scioto bridge and back, the truck is seriously sick, but maybe I can take it somewhere tomorrow. Which I want to do so I can get home. I'd been over to the pub and had a few, came back to the museum and watched an episode of Modern Marvels about moving heavy things, and the phone rang. It was the Frontier repairman and he was just coming off my ridge having fixed the phone. It was their problem. He actually drove up the fucking driveway. Unbelievable. I was shocked. He said it was a cool place but it could use some yard work. He had to go through about eight feet of blackberry canes to get to the box, in which he simply replaced the modules, just as I suspected, and had told everyone that I could do, if they'd just would give me the goddamned things. But that would have been too simple. Nonetheless: I had a conversation with a woman in NYC and tried to explain how awkward the situation was, and I felt like I was talking to someone on another planet, and that she couldn't possibly understand what I was saying, but she took notes and asked good questions, and the job order filtered down to the cowboy that actually drove a 4-wheel van and serviced their 'difficult' locations. He did admit that mine was at the top of his list. I don't know whether to be proud or not. Now I just have to get home, to send that unwieldy paragraph, and my fucking truck is sick, this is like the luck of the Irish. Not that I think that particular piece is anything special, but it does, because of the timing, become a set-piece, and therefore curious in what it recounts. I think, I'm not sure, I don't have a blueprint, that it might cover setting a show. It got too large for me to read the whole thing, I'd only read the last ten or twelve lines to figure out what I was saying. I read the whole thing last night, before I signed off, and it's an accurate picture from a highly personal viewpoint. When there's a lot going on, everyone's point of view is different; even when there's not a lot going on, things are not the same. Everyone sees everything differently.. Hard to remember. The nature of reality. One of the few breaks today, Sara, D and I, out on the loading dock having a smoke, and we were talking about Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Where else could you be having this conversation?