Ma Bell

Struggling with utilities. It doesn't seem right, that my paragraphs should be restricted by the services available to me, but, of course, that is always going to be the case. It alters the meaning of beginnings and endings. Adams County Rural Electric has spent a lot of money to keep me on the grid, and Ma Bell is deep into overtime to provide me with a dial tone. I didn't design the system, I just bought into it. My only bills are Electric and Phone and Visa, and the price I pay on my body. It seems to be too high a price, from my point of view, to pay for a system that doesn't work half the time. An adequate arrangement, but barely. The back deck is covered in ice, I have to wear crampons to go out and pee. I feel old, leaning on my mop-handle, in my bath robe, wearing crampons, in the brittle cold; but it must be said, it gets your attention. I count in tens and twelves, other people factor reality with different algorithms, the average distance from your elbow to your finger-tips, or a certain fraction of moonshine, but I use the rule of thumb: simply survive. A down bag on the sofa, a crust of bread, the days are getting longer. Buck it up. It's only the real deal in so far as you can accept it, everything else is duff or puff or dust, blowing in the wind. What were we talking about? I have to cover my ears, it's cold. I've developed a flip of blanket that covers the top of my head and whatever ear is exposed. Fuck a bunch of circumstance. Good enough for me. PS, I'm not accountable. A short drink and one more cigaret. In those last watercolors Sargent was almost completely Impressionistic. From 1906 on. They're lovely. Beautiful, walking down, driving through the forest, a winter wonderland. Spent the morning gathering and hauling trash and several 55 gallon bags of recycling; then, in the afternoon, cleaned off some shelves in the basement storage room and hauled several loads of stuff for the next auction/fund-raiser. D and I started dismantling the doll cases, which are to be replaced with built-in benches, and conferred on the new doll case. D worked on a data base for the permanent collection. I have to get three pedestals out of the little upstairs gallery tomorrow and I can start painting. Actually, it might take a day of preparation. Even though the (kid's) art was hung with push pins, I'm not sure the paint will fill, and besides, when you pull out anything there's at least a tiny eruption, so each one of the two hundred push-pin eruptions needs to tapped back flat. Baseboard and door jambs need to taped. I'll just cut the line where the Cubist Gray walls meet the Gallery White ceiling. I've gotten very good at cutting edges. I learned from the great Helen Pond, who said to charge the brush fully and do it. Good advice, and profound in a way. If you try and draw the line, the junction, the interface; you don't fully charge the brush and you have to go back over every part of the line, maybe several times. Dramatically increases the margin of error. You empty the brush by extending the cut edge in far enough to use a roller. If paint gets to the ferrule, you're always working over your head, you have to stop and clean the brush, blot it dry; I try to keep two in rotation. Breathe in, breathe out, paint a foot of line. Sounds like a blues riff, something in the key of G.