Junk

The basement and the third floor acquire junk. It never leaves. I was throwing stuff away today that should never have been saved. Appalling quantities of crap, but I have the new space almost cleared, and by the end of tomorrow, there should be enough storage space, and enough work space, to put together the African Show. I'm going to need a night in a motel room, with a shower and hot running water, very soon. I can stay clean and non-odiferous, with my daily sponge bath; but a few times a year I like to shower, then soak, then shower again, rub my entire body with baby lotion, order a pizza, and watch a soccer match. It's a zen thing. I was going to stop at the pub on the way out of town, but I just wanted to get home. Got to the bottom of the driveway, at the mailbox, and realized someone had taken my mail out, opened it, and dropped it on the ground. Happened to be the day that the bush-hog mowed the verge, and my electric bill was shredded. I'm thinking about fixes for this. It's not good, you know, when you live this far out in the country, and so far away from your mailbox. These good-old-boys are brutal, but there's no chance I could ever live in Florence. So, what do you do? Get my Visa bill sent to the museum, otherwise I can't see a problem, I lose my phone and power anyway, and I can go pay a late bill in person. Why would anyone target me? I'm so innocuous as to be invisible. Seriously. I'm not a threat to anyone. Allow me my tree tip pit and a tarp, and I will gladly pass beneath notice. It's got to be that kid Travis or his Dad, imagining some slight. They don't understand, I don't like or dislike them, I just don't want other people in my life, certainly not some goddamn gypsies that just want to use my phone or get me to drive them somewhere. I'm concerned about this whole idea of entitlement. I want to be left alone. And that doesn't include taxi service or late night drug connections over the phone. I have my own problems. And the situation is becoming untenable. Taking mail out of my mailbox and opening it? I'm so pissed I'm seeing red. If I actually caught the person doing this I'd smash them in the back of the head with a baseball bat. What's the alternative? I suppose I could live in town, but I prefer the natural world. I thought, if I removed myself completely, I wouldn't have to play games. Turns out the opposite is true. Games are the coin of the realm. Nothing is real anymore. I did a survey, recently, and everything came back false-positive. What you see is not what you get. Phone was out last night and I couldn't send. Slept like a rock and woke up feeling great. More work on the third floor, two more trips to the dumpster. Nice chat with Charlotte about the Carter collection. I surprise myself with my knowledge of the permanent collection. I have my day with the Chinese students next Tuesday, so I need to spend some time this weekend figuring out what I'm going to say to them, what I'm going to read, and it all depends on what I feel their competency with the language is. I look forward to it. I like experiencing things I've never experienced, or at least I used to like them, and what did Clair say, that I'd be reading to hundreds of people at Chautuagua, and I wonder how I'll manage that without an anxiety attack. My usual target audience is between one and three. I can read well for a class at the University, maybe 16 to 25 people; my ace in the hole, is that I'll need to use reading glasses, so the audience will just be a blur. I hope they'll let me read sitting down. I read much better if I'm sitting down. I hate fucking podiums and the way they make everything pompous bullshit. If I can cross my legs, and have a glass of whiskey, I join the rank of raconteurs, and that's more certainly where I place myself. B recommended that I go back through and break each of the nine years I've been doing this, into the seasons of that year, 36 files of 83.3 pages, and that I could remember, that way, what happened when, which is probably true. God forgive me but I just added two commas. Often adding one comma means adding two commas, subordinate clauses, but when you're striving for clarity, you pretty much do what you have to do. I was thinking about this earlier, the way images emerge from the ether.