Hanging Ron Isaacs

I had to touch-up paint in the gallery, then sit at the front desk (hell of a day for no receptionist), then lunch before I could start. That's when the confusion began. Some of the pieces are labeled, some of the pieces are not here (Ron is bringing them when another show of his closes, several days after this show opens) and I need to know the width of the missing pieces before I can hang a couple of walls. I can get started, because several pieces hang on single-piece walls. Ron's work is almost impossibly delicate, leaves made out of veneer plywood. I've hung him before, but Marc and TR, when I call them to help assemble and hang the first piece, the largest piece in the show, are both nervous. These works have to go directly from their foam lined boxes to the walls, there is no intermediate step, as all of the outside edges are fragile. You can't stand it or lean it. I get four pieces hung and feel pretty good about that. After the first large one, I don't need any help holding the piece, I'd rather hold it alone, but I do need TR to slip his delicate hand behind, to make sure the wire goes over the pan-head screw set in a plastic anchor. It's fairly nerve-wracking work. I go outside after every one, out the front door (I usually smoke out back) to the Esplanade, where there is sunlight and a bench. I haven't had this much fun in ages, realize no one else wants to handle this stuff, and I'm the go-to guy. But the paper-work doesn't make any sense and I don't know which piece is which. End of the day, I have four major questions, and a slew of minor, positional, ones, and I'm exhausted. To simply do the math on one of these pieces boggles the mind. What do you mean by top, and what do you mean by bottom. And I have to know the distance between a fixed wire and an irregular line, so it's necessary for me to see the back, which means lifting the pieces out of their cradles, so I can lay down on the floor and take some measurements. Half the height of the piece, minus the distance between the hanger and the top, plus 57 inches, gives you the magic vertical spot. For what it's worth, the number is often very close to 67 inches. I'm not sure that means anything. Rain, again, it beats against the roof; meaning, it seems to me, is a compromise between something that might have actually happened, and something we might imagine. Not to cast a doubt on the nature of reality. Phone was, out again last night, so I'll just continue, Day Two of Hanging Ron Issacs. I got five more pieces hung and all the little pieces unpacked. One of the pieces was actually five separate components and required a paper pattern. I know I hung the horizontal red dress too high, but that might be a good thing because Charlotte will probably want to put the signage under it. It's a logical place because that piece is the only horizontal. Not to excuse a mistake. That particular 'dress' is about a size four, with spaghetti straps, a fitted bodice, and a flared skirt. Difficult to determine the horizontal center-line. My hands were shaking a little at lunch, so I took a break and talked with a painting teacher from the college, who brought three of his classes over today. And the residency person, Debbie, was in the classroom all day with students. Then this evening, Marc had to stay late, because the high school art teachers were doing a workshop with Debbie. I was done in, brain dead, or I would have volunteered to stay in his place. Thick gray overcast driving home, everyone had their lights on at five-o-clock. The color is beautiful right now, a hundred shades of yellow. Driving through the State Forest is a canopied trip. There's a bush I can't identify, that can only be described as scarlet. Another that is medicinal orange. I don't know my bushes well enough, or butterflies. I'd better go, thunder storms moving in. Read more...

Simple Pleasures

Saturday, the incessant clatter of life in even a small town was getting to me. I can hole up at the museum, the thick walls offer some protection, but the sirens and helicopters put me off my feed. Listening to one of The Cello Suites on the way home, the D Minor, in the transcription by Edgar Meyer for double bass; got to the top of the driveway and just sat there, for several minutes, while the piece finished. The Jeep was warm, from the trip home, and the seat was heated, I rolled down the window, and smoked a cigaret. When the music was over, I turned off the CD player, and sat there for a good while, listening, as the natural sounds became audible. I often sit on the back stoop and listen to bugs. At times this can rival the very best jazz. I come inside and turn on Black Dell, it's quite cool in the house, in the fifties, and she likes it like that, she hardly makes a sound, beyond me tapping out a sentence. I build a small fire in the cookstove and the cast iron makes some noises as it expands. But it's very quiet, for the most part, and peaceful. I need the peace and quiet more than I ever have before. It allows me to unfold my mind. I did call my friend Joel, because I needed to hear his laugh, and because he's my mentor when it comes to cracking jokes (and farts) in tight spaces. You and your sweetie in a mummy bag. Hard to hide the warts. It occurs to me that those halcyon years on Cape Cod were fundamentally important. Not that I stopped but that I started learning. Whatever was meant. Lovely day, 55 degrees. Just above freezing this morning, so it must have been a hard freeze down on Mackletree. Well into my bacon, potato, and egg breakfast weekend. I read too much yesterday and today, resulting in a smallish headache. Read a review of a new show in NYC of the work of Balthus, just after mentioning to Charlotte that one of the Trapley paintings in the Renaissance show reminded me of him. I Iove Balthus, his silent film approach. Slapstick. I tend to defend losing causes. I haven't been a Cubs's fan, all these years, for nothing. Some rules: never cut short a session, always pinch-hit in the bottom of the ninth, and never, ever, admit to fault. Read more...

Wild Dogs

Shawnee Dingoes. All of them half-breeds, bred down, for the most part, from dogs people just dump out in the state forest. Most of them die the first year, victims of parasites or vehicles, but a few survive, the smart ones, and form into packs of four to six. Imagine a map, with overlapping Venn circles. I live, on this map, where two different circles overlap. One pack is Black Lab derivative, and the other is based on Hound and Beagle. I don't like them and they don't like me. I used to throw rocks at them. I was in Big Lots, the last time I did my laundry, and they had these large bags of marbles: transparent, colored, designer marbles. Intended, I think, to fill a dish, and then, maybe, you'd stick something in them. Marbles as decoration. Cheap marbles, as it turns out, and I should have bought them all, but I did buy one bag, and it's a lot of marbles. Count me among the blessed. Figuring to recover some of my spent shot, ever frugal, I set up a little shooting range, for those of us who have advanced from throwing rocks to using a sling-shot. New rubbers on my wrist rocket, thanks to Kim, and I'm pretty good. The shooting range is a tree-tip pit, and most of the marbles bury into the root ball. An enigma for some future historian. A cluster of blue glass balls at the base of an oak tree. Must mean something. Anyway. After my stint at the range, where my target was a Neco Wafer, balanced on two nails stuck into the clay, I was walking home, and I heard the Hound pack coming toward me. The Alpha Male of the Hound pack is a Blue-Tick gone wild. A feral scary dog. When he peels back his jaws to reveal his teeth your first inclination is to foul yourself. I hit him squarely in the chest, with a blue marble, and the game was over. I win. You'll never queen that pawn. It says something else, about accuracy. What can I say? I'm good with a sling-shot. Up most of the night, editing myself, which mostly involved deleting words and considering commas. Writing for clarity, a first draft always is heavy in repetition, at least in my case. A tendency to repeat either the subject or the verb. I tend to catch a lot of this, as I'm writing, because I go back over any given paragraph so many times, to see where the narrative is going. I get so engaged in the subordinate clauses that I lose the point. Sometimes I make a note on top of the folded pile of papers on the left-hand side of my desk, knowing I'm about to digress, but I often just repeat the punch line as if it were a mantra, which, of course, it is. As Goethe said, "All forms are similar, and none are the same./ So that their chorus points the way to a hidden law." Thinking about that, I forget the exact context, but it had to do with something Levi-Strauss had said about mediation; and spending some hours with this beautiful book Neil had sent me, "The Glorious Nothings", a facsimile reproduction of Emily's jottings on envelopes; and considering a question TR had asked; I concluded that, in fact, the shape of the envelope and the seams, did, in fact, affect the text. It's on a par with rocket science, trying to be clear. Ezra was just trying to be clear, the fact that he's so arcane is mostly just a slight on our reading habits. Olson. "A Bibliography..." and McCord's great gnomic list: they require that you read. Copiously and endlessly. After being stuck in the elevator twice, I always carry a book with me; something to read can be the difference between night and day. A quiet couple of hours in the elevator can actually be a pleasant experience. This new Zinfandel, that TR recommended, is quite good, after a few hours of being opened. It's quite tannic, but after a while the fruit becomes apparent and it has a great mouth-feel. I'd better go, while I have a connection. Read more...

Bolilers

Dennis, the boiler man, finally got to the museum today, and I spent a good part of the afternoon with him in the basement, plying him with questions. I have a little bit better understanding of the system now. M and C brought Ron's pieces upstairs this morning, and the ones that are unwrapped are stunning. We need to hang that show next Tuesday and Wednesday. Then start preparing for the big fundraiser. I have about a dozen things, and the list grows, to research before I give my talk. I want to be sure I'm accurate about insignificant details. Then the girls come, for Thanksgiving, a lot of cooking and eating and drinking decent wine. I'm glad they want to stay in town, it's difficult for me to be 'on' 24/7. Besides, they can't live without running water, and I need a serious bath, so this is all working out. I should be able to get in a shower-bath-shower, before they even get here, that Monday they check in, before Thanksgiving, when I'm paying for the room; and be set for a year; mostly just a matter of scrubbing off dead cells. I need to pick up a luffa sponge, and some lotion to re-hydrate my seriously dry skin. When I get up to pee and go outside, in the frost, the back deck is slick with ice. You have the dew point, then you have freezing temperatures, and you end up with black ice. I hobble about, with a cane, that third leg, mostly so I can poke at things. I'm staff at the museum again today, and next week, because the rotation has come down to one. It's cool, because I can read in a warm place, but a little bit strange, the way responsibility is shared. I try not to ask anything of anyone. Damn phone is out again, finally just went to bed. Windy this morning and it was raining leaves. In places on Mackletree the road was completely covered. TR met me at the museum and we went over to the pub, D joined us a few minutes later, in town to pick up the pieces of his photography show, and we all bitched and moaned about various slights. We were very funny and Christine pretty much hung around on the other side of the bar and laughed at us. Loaded D up and shipped him out, TR, at the desk, had a conversation (set up ahead of time) with a young guy, Ben, who is planning to major in museum studies. I retreated to my garret, and read about the Renaissance. We closed up and both drove to Kroger, he pointed out the Zinfandel he had mentioned and we both got a bottle. I needed whiskey and food to last until Tuesday. I got a pound of bacon, a dozen brown eggs, a pound of butter and a back-up bag of frozen shredded potatoes. I have some great jams. I figure to just kick back and eat breakfast four times in the next two days. Bacon. I haven't had in months. There were three older women in today, I gave them a tour, and they really dug it, that I'd take them through the museum. One of them was a retired Art History professor, and we argued about several things, much to the delight of her friends. On the way home I had to stop, one rock maple had dropped all of it's leaves (some trees release all their leaves at once) and it was a pool on the road at least a foot thick. Shifted into four-wheel drive, because I thought the bottom layer might still be frozen. It was, black ice under an insulating layer of leaves, and I got up the hill fine. Home, alone, I disconnect the phone, better to not be interrupted. Read more...

First Flakes

Just a few, but enough to let you know what Mother Nature has in mind. Cold nasty day. M and C were off first thing, to pick up Ron Issacs' work for the next show upstairs. Amazing Trompe l' oeil pieces that completely fool the eye, they're constructed of cut-out pieces and strips of Baltic Birch plywood and painted so realistically that they look like three-dimensional articles of clothing, or whatever, from two feet away. Look him up on the net, his work is incredible. A slow day, and I mostly read about the Renaissance, piecing together the talk I'm going to give on the 14th of November which I suspect might be well attended. I suspect that, because everyone I've run into, that got the mailing for the Renaissance show, has said they wanted to hear what I had to say. I'm just going to talk about paper and printing, pretty boring actually, but I start making notes. It's too much information. There is no way I could be held accountable, my narrow focus is simply tadpoles becoming frogs. I'm not interested in the great sweep of things, generally, but I'm enjoying this dip into the Renaissance, and the Reformation, and Luther. 1400-1500 the Catholic church was a joke, three popes, and you could buy whatever you wanted. Indulgences, the actual forms, were the first thing Gutenberg printed. Put your mouth where the money is. I have to go, it's snowing and there's a ruckus at the compost heap, nothing I can't settle with my sling-shot. Johnny on the spot. The earliest inks were probably soot and some solvent. Boiled oak galls. But it was a substance that laid on the surface, subject to releasing, and not acceptable in the long run. Read more...

Runt Pig

A runt pig sucks hind tit, if he's lucky. More often, if there are thirteen babies and only twelve ports, he's completely out of luck. I'd usually hand-raise the runt. A soft spot. And it's nice to have a pig in the kitchen, to talk to. Grunting is certainly a language I understand. We'd keep them in a wooden "pig box" next to the stove, and everybody that came through would feed them some goat's milk. They did very well. Actually, we raised all sorts of runts in the kitchen; goats and sheep, over the years, by the dozen. Kids love to bottle feed baby animals. Raining, again, when I got up, so I put out a bucket to collect rainwater, made my yeoman breakfast, beans and an egg on toast, and headed out. Raining fairly hard by then, and I was concerned about getting down the driveway, but it was nothing, a piece of cake, which was good, because I had a tour of college students to take through at nine, and another at ten, and another at one. So on the drive into town I went over (talking out loud) how the Carter galleries had changed because the paintings had changed; and I had to also talk about the Renaissance show, and I hadn't given that talk, or much thought, yet, to that, but I have to say, I was quite good. I didn't know I knew that much. Maybe I don't. Maybe it's all bullshit. But I was comfortable with it; talked about gold-gilding and egg tempera, and I seemed to be coherent. All that can be asked. A hard frost, a freeze, really, in the hollows, for the next several nights, and it seems too early, but is actually right on schedule. A frost by Halloween, and snow by Thanksgiving. I go into freezer mode, wearing more layers of clothes and thinking darker thoughts. Basho and those last treks, walking with a cane, poking at the future. Read more...

Rain

I wasn't expecting rain, but it wakes me, about three in the morning. Early morning rain is like Mickey Hart, slightly off-beat and always interesting. I wanted to go back to sleep, but just couldn't, something about that staccato rhythm on the roof. Got a whiskey and rolled a smoke, nothing if not a creature of habit. It's so dark outside that nothing is visible, not even your hand in front of your face. So I just pee in one of those large plastic coffee cans that I keep at the back door for nights like this. I do open the door, to smell the cleansed world, a woody vetiver, with notes of rotting flowers. Not unpleasant. I lived with a couple of dancers, one at a time, and I loved the way they smelled when they came home from rehearsal. They'd always want to take a shower and I'd always argue against it. As Napoleon famously wrote to J, "I'll be home in a couple of weeks, don't bathe." We're so disconnected from smell. I tend to stick my nose right into something. It's a force of habit. I understand things better if I can smell them. It's led to some awkward moments. It occurs to me that this rain could turn to snow. Fucking winter for sure. I did get a little more sleep and still made it to work on time. Hauled trash all morning, after the staff meeting, and then two nice surprises after lunch: Kim sent me a new set of bands for my Wrist-Rocket, and Neil sent me an absolutely beautiful volume of Emily, "The Glorious Nothings". After she had done her little sewn books (fascicles) she started using old envelopes for first drafts of things. In this splendid and lovely book, with tons of white space, there are facsimiles, and on the opposite page is a transcription. There's wonderful and cogent text. Exegesis. Looking at all these fragments, in her hand, sends a chill down my spine. Next weekend, note to self, clean the stove pipe, and spend eight hours with this book. I do love primary sources. It's Emily's hand, for god's sake. I don't remember what I did the rest of the afternoon. Made some phone calls, I have to get the broilers up and operational, turn off the AC and put it to bed, I don't know how to do any off that, but I know who to call. My saving grace, I know who to call. Read more...

Reading Pollan

It's interesting to read something that so closely aligns with my own life experiences. I've covered all the same bases, though not with such scientific precision. I learned to grill first from my father, then years of graduate study with my great black friend, Big Roy, in Mississippi, and am now certified as a Master. I've learned to cook in pots too, because I never liked fast food, and for decades grew and raised all of my food. For years Marilyn and I ground our own wheat and made our own bread. Again, for decades, we brewed beer and made wine, not only for ourselves, but as barter items which actually paid for two houses, which we parlayed into a ranch in Colorado. For fifteen years we only used raw goat's milk for all of our dairy needs, including butter, cheese, and the best ice creams I've ever had in my life. I'm proud of all of those things, it satisfies some part of our brain to become competent at something, but, Jesus, what a lot of work. That and building a house a year, and running the farm and then the ranch; I can't believe, now, that I ever had that much energy. A clear day, with a brisk wind, and the leaves are falling like rain. I break a juice fast with a large potato patty topped with a fried egg and a piece of toast, then go for a walk. It's beautiful outside: the color, the slanted light, the cooler temperatures. I finally found the place, B had taken me, years ago, where a spring bubbled up out of the ground, originated a stream that flowed north, into the Ohio. It's a lovely spot, and so far from civilization that you'd need a good map to find it. Two hollows transect and the gradient is down, toward the river. The water is clean and cold. Whenever I go there, once or twice a year, I kneel on my foam pad, wash my face, and drink from cupped hands. My version of the Eucharist. It's in an area of mature trees, so there isn't much underbrush. It looks like it's maintained by a group of gardeners; what, in western Colorado, is called a park. It's one of my favorite places. I'm not a Romantic, but I could imagine filming "A Midsummer's Night Dream" there. I like to sit ten feet above the spring and have a snack: stinky cheese, crackers, sweet gherkins and a few black olives. It's a natural garden, and the filtered light is a thing of wonder. Read more...

Usual Sunday

A protein shake to start the day: eight ounces of my current fruit juice mix (currently 50/50 orange-pineapple and cranberry-pomegranate), a banana, and two scoops of protein powder; followed by a 12 ounce cup of coffee that is described by my friends, most of whom are serious coffee people, as 'quite strong'. A cool morning, like today, in the mid-thirties, I pull on an extra layer of clothes, and take a walk down the logging road to get my blood flowing. Yellow leaves, in the slanted morning light, are almost transparent, and the light is a beautiful thing. There's a colored filter that actresses like, called Bastard Amber, that makes everyone look better, and this light is like that. It's warm. I pick up a few branches, that can be broken into kindling, and take them home. When I get there, I sit on the second step of the back stoop and break them into pieces that I store in a Rubbermaid trash can, and fill the five-gallon bucket I keep near the cookstove. Next weekend I need to clear around the woodshed, the path between the house and there, and the path to the outhouse. But for now I just curled up with the Pollard book, a second cup of coffee, and read for eight hours. I have to do this once a week, my sanity depends on it. Geese fly over, and they're taking it south. We get into the whole issue of survival. Bats in the glooming, they flit about like cliff-swallows. It's very quiet, with the house closed up. I don't need much heat, so I let the fire in the stove burn out, and click on one of the oil-filled electric radiators, to hold the temperature overnight. They'll be a frost in the bottoms tomorrow morning, but it won't get below 38 degrees on the ridge, because of the way cold air flows down hill. The summer of yore, though, has come and gone, and I best be securing some hatches and battening down the sail. A reef or two extra, just to be on the safe side. When a winter wind blows at 60 or 80 mph, and the snow is moving horizontally, it's good to know you have a place to hole up. Read more...

Lunar Eclipse

Went to bed early, so I could get back up and watch a celestial event, but, of course, I couldn't see it, because the sky was occluded with water vapor of one form or another. The ten years in western Colorado stand out, in that I could always see the stars. It's not a big deal, we miss almost everything all the time. Something or other disrupts our line of sight. The staff was particularly cordial to me today and it made me suspicious. They could fire me, I mean really, I'm good at some things, but I'm a pain in the ass about others. There's always a dynamic involved, when two or more people work together. It's why I choose to be alone, as much of my time as I can manage. It's weird, isn't it? the way other people are full of shit, and we see the only righteous path. The bridge is done, it's finished, like a set if stairs might be. I drive across as if it was always there. Bridge. Over stream. Check. I have a load of laundry to do, I need to stop at Kroger, and buy a few things, sustenance, and I need to oil my beaver traps. It's just a list of things, I can do that. What would I be doing anyway? The rotation for Saturday Staff is down to me for the next three weeks. Met TR at the pub for lunch, then we spent several hours going through the three volumes of Emily's letter to identify which letters we'd used in the show. A pleasant diversion. Got Michael Pollan's "Cooked" at the library, and did get my laundry done. Pegi's kids were drifting in as I left. I have to start stocking the house for winter, always an interesting chore; and I thought about it on the way home. A case of wine and a case of whiskey, two one-pound bags of tobacco and about ten packets of papers. Ten packets of instant Ida-Reds, ten pounds of pintos, ten pounds of black beans, ten cans of tomato soup, several pounds of butter, 32 ounces of olive oil, some smoked ham hocks in the freezer, ten pounds of rice (several different varieties), I'll catch the packages of diced ham on sale, and freeze them against winter bean soups. I'm fine on chilies. Ten cans of baked beans I can have on toast. I have to carry in eggs and the multi-grain bread I favor. The object is to limit the load. I need to increase my supply of drinking water, and press another five-gallon pickle bucket (from the pub) into service for wash water. Mostly I melt snow for wash water in winter. The cookstove is going anyway, and I have a dedicated dustpan I use as a scoop. It's a mindless chore I do on a day that I'm just sitting around, reading. Melted snow has usually picked up some particulate matter, and I pour it through a tee-shirt filter. I get four filter-cloths from an old tee-shirt, two from the front and two from the back; I washed a couple of officially dead tee-shirts today, and cut them to size. I store them in a neat pile on the shelf above the refrigerator, in a nook beneath the stairs, where I also store hats and gloves and scarves. Hunter's Moon is when you start getting your winter act together. It could dip below freezing tomorrow night. Not here, where the chill rolls off the ridge, but down in the valleys, where the coldness tends to pool. I'll pay for this later, when the cold winds blow, but right now, it feels pretty good. Read more...

Halloween Show

Pegi opens her show tonight, so I spent a good part of the day getting ready for that. Two weekends, twelve performances. At the end of two weeks the place will be trashed and it'll be time to start preparing for the big lavish fundraiser. Then my talk at the museum, then the girls will be here, and I have to clean the stovepipe and muck out the outhouse before that. I'll try and do both of those chores in one day and get a motel room that night. A great lunch today, at the pub, the lunch itself was fine, a tuna sandwich and potato salad, but I was actually sitting, at the bar between John Hogan, himself, and Michael Barnhart, the music guy, and the conversation was lively. TR and Barnhart are up to some shenanigans concerning musical gloves, or musical fingertips, or something. I can barely understand what they're talking about. But it does sound cool. And they've enlisted an entire engineering class into fabricating what they need, got some money to buy the various electronic components, and have this project under way. The new bridge was open this afternoon, they did pour the bed and they must have asphalted the approaches yesterday. Three weeks ahead of schedule. I couldn't believe it, I just stopped and looked at for a few minutes. It falls into that new generation of bridges, that don't really look like bridges at all, just an extension of the road, with guard-rails. But it provides the closest connection to my ridge, and I am one happy camper, to be that much closer to home. First frost maybe Monday. It'll roll off the ridge, but I have to be aware of black ice in the hollows. Driving becomes treacherous. I'm leaning toward staying home, most of the time; if I don't go out, I don't spend any money. I've been doing the math on this for weeks, and it always comes back the same. I could leave this world tomorrow. Read more...

Sub-Text

What's being said isn't always on the surface. Even in everyday conversation what's not said might be the key. Very few things are ever literal. All those hand-prints in the earliest French and Spanish caves? Probably female. A hand person, a specialist, finally looked at them and took a million measurements, and decided it was mostly women that did the drawings. I'm not surprised. The attention to detail. Be in a specific place at a specific time. This is when the salmon come upstream, this is when the elk come down from the high ground, this is when we harvest acorns. It's all laid out, in a woman's hand. "Darling, could you kill a bear this week? We need the fat." Food storage and cooking vessels come into play, and we've pushed ceramics way back into time. We were making pots before we had a name for them. A container in which to store something. By the time we started harvesting grain, we already had a system; and I'm sure we already had names for the various stages of the fermentation process. Awoke to rain; coffee, beans and an egg on toast. Went down the creek, to get to town, because I knew they were pouring the bridge bed today. No problem getting down the driveway. It rained most of the day and I didn't want to haul trash to the dumpster, so I organized and cleaned in the basement. Supposed to be nice tomorrow, so I can deal with the trash then, and get the theater clean for Pegi's Halloween program with the Cirque, this weekend and next. The fair Fatima came in today, to request that I take two of her classes through the museum next Wednesday. I am the docent of choice. A low-key day, and I needed that, I was hurting a little, and I don't heal like I used to. That last 'and' occupied me for an hour, and I eventually decided to keep it, because I felt I needed the beat. "And I don't... ". We can have our punctuation issues in private. Going home, I was pretty sure the ford would be open, though slicker that snot on a doorknob, and it was, had to shift into four-wheel drive, and fish-tail coming up the other side. Just getting home is a chore, but the last leg, getting up the driveway, is a piece of cake; graded and compacted, it's like driving down the freeway. Or up the freeway. An ode to passage. Just a soprano and a finger guitar. Read more...

You and Me

I'd rather fade into the wood-work. I'm tired of the world and it's machinations, I'd rather hole up in a tree-tip pit with a tarp and a twig fire than listen to any more bullshit. I could see, at dawn, that it was going to be the first major leaf-fall day. A rain of orange and yellow. You have no idea. Consider the couple of trees in your yard and the way their leaves are a pain in the ass. You can't burn them anymore, so you buy a device that allows you to blow them into the street, where they become someone else's problem. Magnify that by a thousand. A four inch layer of leaves, saturated by continuous showers overnight, is as slick as anything you could imagine. I woke up talking to myself, which isn't unusual, but I sounded angry. I don't like myself when I get like that and I knew I couldn't deal with other people, so I called Pegi, at the museum, with some excuse. The dog ate my homework. I have the thought that I am actually ready for the final removal, where I stop talking at all, go to town once a week, just point at things and grunt. I learned enough American Sign in St. Augustine to ask where there was a public bathroom. There's something quite elegant about sign language. It goes through a different part of the brain. Like dance does. Silent film. And body language, the way, sometimes, a shrug carries a huge amount of meaning. I realized, when I saw my ex flirting, in a very explicit way, with an Irishman, at a dining room table that I had built, in a house that I had built, on land that I had paid for with my hard labor, that the universe was not necessarily fair. Let go of your expectations is easy enough to say, but it's natural, in the real world, or real, in the natural world, to expect that certain things would follow other things. We're hard-wired in that regard. The night is over, the sun comes up. It's hot for a while, then it gets cold. The rain has brought out the color, or rather has washed the color clean. The sumac and the sassafras are particularly lovely, and there's a hickory, down the logging road, that is almost medicinal in color, an orange very like the color of those disinfectants they put on minor wounds when I was a kid, mercurochrome? Black walnuts litter the roads. They're actually slightly dangerous, the way they can throw you off track; and the god-damned squirrels, scavenging road-kill nuts and changing directions three times as you bear down on them. Do not veer for a squirrel. Don't play his game. A dead squirrel is merely a dead squirrel. Besides, you almost never hit one, and even if you do, you can usually get a meal out of it. After a walk in the drizzle, I had to change clothes completely, soaked through to the core, but it did clear my head. I can't remember why I was in such a bad mood, something about there not being a promised land. I knew there wasn't; but I occasionally forget, imagine a world in which my feet don't hurt and there's no chance I could possibly get tangled in my sleeping bag, roll off the bed, and break a hip. I don't delude myself: if there's a bear between me and my house, I always go back to the Jeep and play Eric Clapton very loud and bang on the ground with a stick. Sometimes I do wish I lived with someone, so I could occasionally turn to them and ask if they had seen that, whatever it might be, a bear in the woodshed, a yellow rattlesnake with a mouse in it's mouth, three crows pecking at a road-kill coon I'd thrown on top of the outhouse. Whatever fiction I could create is way over-shadowed by fact. I'm not a terrorist, I'm only interested in the aerodynamics of falling leaves. Read more...

Bad Dreams

Woke tangled in my sleeping bag, about to fall on the floor. That recurrent dream where I'm doing something on top of about six sections of scaffolding that isn't properly cross-braced. A cold sweat. I slow my heart beat by thinking about driving across Kansas. Whatever works. When I wake like this, I don't know what to do with myself. I can't go back to sleep (the yawning pit) so what I usually do is get up, make a cup of espresso, roll a smoke, and start another paragraph. I need to do my laundry, stiff socks and soiled underwear; I need to stay home and read more; I need, most of all, a place to which I can retreat. Xenephon, "Anabasis". And I'm almost there, I've given up almost everything. I still hold on to a shred of decency, I only pick at my navel when I'm alone; but for the most part, what you see is what you get. I never campaigned on the side of righteousness. L. Ron and that whole pile of crap. Finally did get back to sleep, on the floor downstairs, where daylight would more likely wake me. It did, but barely, and I didn't have time to shave. Staff meeting, then Tuesday chores which always means garbage, especially after an opening. I need a Junior Assistant Janitor, truth be known I'm tired of mopping and cleaning toilets. I don't even have running water at my house, and I'm cleaning other people's toilets. No mas, as Duran famously said, eighth round, the second fight with Sugar Ray. I hate boxing, fighting generally, but I love language and that is so pure, 'no more'. On the 31st of this month I'll have $550 to spend on a computer and I'm extremely confused. I think I'm just going to buy a new main frame, then save money until I can buy an I-pad with a detachable keyboard and batteries. I'll probably have access to a satellite connection soon, and I would save money, and be able to write for five hours after the power went out; any given night that would be 42 lines, which I consider a full page and a major accomplishment. I don't achieve it that often, because I'm a slacker, and it's hard to be coherent. I'm irritable, right now, for whatever reason; can't put my finger on it, exactly, but it has to do with the way I'm perceived by others. I know it doesn't matter, but it still bothers me. Maybe I just am a janitor. Read more...

Bridge Work

Looks like they may be done with the new bridge in a week or so. I come home that way, because the crew is usually gone for the day and the ford is open. They dug the two approaches, last week, down to the road bed, which seems to be good sized cobbles (the size of your two fists together) in a matrix of asphalt. Never seen anything quite like it. Then they compacted a layer of gravel on top. Next will be the finish layer of asphalt. The structure is pure function. Two formed abutments of about 15 cubic yards of concrete each, anchored to bed rock with significant re-bar, steel i-beams spaced very close together, and a layer of corrugated steel, I don't know what that's called, that serves as a substrate for concrete. Looks like they're about ready for the finish surface. It's massively overbuilt, which was the point, so that it could carry log trucks, and it's short enough that all the axles couldn't come to bear at the same time. I don't know what they're going to do with the old bridge down at Turkey Creek, but it's a much bigger deal. They have it shut down to one lane now, and they might keep it, as a pedestrian bridge, and build a new vehicular bridge next to it. Make no mistake, the county road department rules. My understanding is that they (whoever they are) want to log some sections down Lamp Black Road and the bridges weren't up to the traffic. I'm sure some money changed hands. Every nefarious thing you can imagine is true. The body politic. I don't have a vested interest in this, I just need to know the way to come and go. I had to go to town today, as I had foolishly forgotten to buy whiskey in my haste to get home on Saturday, and I needed cigaret papers and a new lighter. This is all testament to how tired I was. Went to the museum and watched a couple of things on Hulu, did go to the pub for a pint of beer and bowl of stew, and talked with Barb for a while. She was at the opening and said that the turn-out was terrible. I don't know what's to be done about that. An extremely rural section of southern Ohio, and the interest in art is nearly nil. It's like beating your head against a wall. We curate great shows, and we treat them with all respect, in a lovely building; put out newsletters, have a great web-site, go on the radio, get written up in the papers, and we still can't draw an audience. Read more...

Paper Trail

Mac got it exactly right, the dues for Allah reference, which is specifically the flaw you weave into a rug because only God is perfect. I don't have to do that, because I make enough mistakes otherwise, but it's a nice conceit. We fall into habits. I usually go outside to pee, in the early morning, and it's bracing, I'm nearly naked and the temps are in the mid forties. Sometimes I can't wait to get back in my sleeping bag, and sometimes I start another paragraph. I never know which is going to happen. If I stay up, and it's chilly, I pull on sweat-pants and a bathrobe, usually get a last drink and always roll a smoke. If it's cold, and I don't want to build a fire, I pull on my Linda hat, over my ears, and sometimes pull on the knit gloves that she made me that keep my fingertips free. Major leaf fall. Everything is turning yellow. The Sumac and the wild grape vines. The Hickories are an orange yellow, and the Chestnut oaks go through a mustard phase. For six months everything is green, one shade or another, then it turns yellow through red, then it's stick trees and everything is black or white. I love winter, because it isolates, but I hate winter, because it isolates; I don't have a cross to bear, whatever happens, happens. I had a large (six quart, I think) cast iron pot I'd picked up at a junk store, rusted, and looking quite awful, and I'd recently found a Pyrex lid that fit it perfectly so I decided I'd restore it and maybe make a pot of chili. I have a large plastic tub I rescued from the dumpster at the lake that I keep under the house, and I always keep a can of lye around, specifically for cleaning rusted cast iron. Heavy rubber gloves, you soak the item in lye-water and scrub it with a wire brush, rinse and continue scrubbing through several changes of water. Then I fire up the grill (I suppose you could do this in the oven, with a foil-lined cookie sheet underneath) and dry it completely, rubbing cheap cooking oil into all the pitted surfaces. Then I treat the inside with olive oil and heat. When I started the project I'd put on a pot of black beans to cook. Beans, chicken stock, and onions. I'd taken one of the pork tenderloins out of the freezer. After my new pot was ready (this took hours) I cubed the still slightly frozen tenderloin into bite-sized pieces, dredged them in a highly seasoned corn flour, browned them slightly, added the beans, large cans of green enchilada sauce, diced roasted peppers, several spoonfuls of the incredible dried green chili powder from New Mexico, and pulled the pot over to the coolest part of the stove. I'd let the fire go out, but the stove was still hot. I just let it cook there the rest of the day. It's fantastic. With some corn tortillas, you could kill yourself. Read more...

Crazy

Patsy Cline running through my head. Maybe a Willie Nelson tune. Barely possible, but I think I read somewhere, I have good reason to believe, that she sang some of his songs. It could be fiction. Sara and I were discussing the Carter painting "Serenity" and realized we both had our separate fictions for the origins of that painting. She surprised me by asking if there was any way she could help me with the "Janitor College" book, and it wasn't until later that I realized there was. I need to get TR to download that file so that she can read it and see what she thinks. My rather glaring one-inch discrepancy might well go un-noticed, in the Renaissance show, because there's so much to look at. I'll correct it, of course, because of my sense of order, not that it matters. Besides, re-hanging something is not the same as hanging, G..Spenser Brown. I can do the math. We're so often wrong; even the giants fall. It's a killing field, stand back, for a minute, and look at it. Especially now that it's fall, and the weather is closing in. If we were having to judge anything at face value. The Phlox is lovely, and I'm collecting some late season mushrooms, that are fine, on toast, with baked beans. Why not? A comet could crash tomorrow. The grader ditch, just above the critical culvert, is stuffed with leaves and silt, and we have to dig it out, before the drainage crosses the road. I'm not looking forward to this, because I'll probably throw out my back, but it has to be done. Slept the sleep of the dead. Awoke in my sleeping bag on top of the bed, considered life for half-an-hour, then got up, heated water, took a sponge-bath, washed my hair, and made the trip to town. Stopped at Vic's Barber Shop and got a much needed haircut, went to the library and got a Gutterson I had missed "The Other". He's a good writer. Went to the museum and watched a cooking show on Hulu. And, as I was officially not working, a beer with lunch at the pub. Next time I go there I'm going to take my own pita bread, because those damned tortilla chips are just too salty. Lady Staff Day there, Astra in the kitchen, Christine and Lindsay out front. I was early, for the lunch trade, and Lindsay was sitting on a stool down at the serving end of the bar. I did a double take, because I'd never seen her with her hair down. It's lovely, fine, blond hair that just hangs straight down. I told she was particularly fetching today. She got up and went around the back of the bar, chatted with me about sports and small towns all through my lunch. When she wasn't serving. Said she'd never been called fetching. Christine would come over, Astra came out of the kitchen to banter a bit. Astra is one smart lady, takes no prisoners, nor suffers fools lightly. I like her. When I got back to the museum, the bosses were there, everything was done, everything was under control, and, mid-afternoon, I decided I just wanted to get home, I didn't want to go to an opening. I'm not contractually obligated to attend openings, and I just didn't feel I could deal with a crowd. So I came home. It was a smart move. I got home safely, and I'm safely within the parameters of all the food groups: I have whiskey and tobacco and a dozen eggs. A kind of test run, I make an omelet with some mushrooms and a sprinkling of cheese; it's very good. The toast I eat with a knife and fork, because I've slathered it with a hot red-onion jam that is excellent. It's so very good, you should try this at home. A walnut of butter, slice a large red onion into quartered slices, very thin, and cook them for maybe an hour; if you're reading a book at the island, this isn't a problem; then add something sweet, honey or sorghum molasses, and stir it constantly into a mass. This is good with any meat, hell, it's good on cabbage. Not to mention toast. And you can put a fried egg on anything. The Gutterson novel engages me in the early evening, as it concerns two friends, one of whom becomes a hermit, in the Gnostic tradition, and it's difficult to not draw parallels. I wanted to stay for the opening, but I just couldn't; I wanted, more, to come home and write a paragraph. Which I've done now, and feel much better. The crass and ass-kissing ways of the world matter less to me when I'm sitting at my desk, considering a specific comma. It's a folly, of course, but it keeps me off the streets. Read more...

Final Push

Got to town early and went to Kroger to do a bit of shopping, picked up a protein fruit smoothie, to prepare me for the day. I had all the labels trimmed, so I made tape loops and started affixing them to the walls. Meanwhile, Charlotte, who had gotten to work at six in the morning (she couldn't sleep) and then Mark, pretty much did everything else. I was working on the labels until nearly three, then hauled trash away. Physically and mentally tired, after two weeks of pushing, but it is all well and truly done, and I don't need to be back at the museum until mid-afternoon tomorrow, to set up for the opening. Plenty of time for a sponge bath and a hair wash and an early beer at the pub. The show is beautiful, with the gallery cleaned, the floor mopped, the last of the lighting done. When I was setting labels I did notice that I'd made a one-inch mistake, in one place, but no one else has seen it, so I call it dues for Allah. And there's a small set of paintings that don't look quite right (12 inches by 12 inches each) but it's because they're not exactly the same size, they're unframed, and the canvas is bunched differently on the corners. I do the best I can, and Sara says it's fine. Astra greeted me so enthusiastically, lunch at the pub today, that all the other patrons turned around to see who it was. I didn't talk to anyone, which is unusual; I just sat hunched over my bowl of soup, and thought about what I needed to get accomplished in the afternoon. You pull off an installation, you get it done, there's an enormous sense of satisfaction. Sara said to me that it was our show, because I could hang anything so difficult, but it's her show, because she had the vision. I'm a mere technician. Maybe not mere, but still, a technician. Read more...

Lefty Frizzell

Jazz playing softly on the radio. Bill Evans. When the news comes on, at six in the morning, I turn the radio off, not that I'm in denial, but I can't think clearly, listening to the latest stupidities, and I wanted to start another paragraph. I'd only been up a short while, and I was shuffling around in my bath-robe and slippers, making a double espresso, rolling a smoke, reading some paragraphs from a few years ago, wondering if I should read them at Chautauqua. This is a big deal for me, being acknowledged; not sure I'm worthy, actually. I'll take their money and the free meals and the hotel room with running hot and cold water, be a fool not to, but I doubt that I could teach anyone anything. I'm a behind-the-scenes kind of guy. When the lights go up, and the mingling begins, I usually disappear. Dizzy Dean was once asked why he was such a successful pitcher and he replied that he threw the ball where they couldn't hit it, which about sums it up. I installed this show so well, in point of fact, that it looks like it was never done. It looks so well, that we expect it was manifest. There's a element of pride involved, I want (especially) certain people to know that I'm the one that hung that group of paintings just so; but I also feel strongly that work needs to be displayed in a proper manner, and I'm capable of doing that, so it's not a big deal. I need to shave and go to work. I have to hang the entry wall. The drive in was particularly beautiful, the dappled light. Saw a flock of about twenty turkeys, stopped and watched them for ten minutes. Everybody arrived and got right to work. They got the lighting done and it looks fantastic, then, at noon the three of them left for the day to spend time in Alan Gough's studio, picking the paintings for a big show in the spring. I went to the third floor and made labels, then came down to the common room and trimmed them. It's a lot of labels. Have to put them all up tomorrow. I'll be making little loops of blue painter's tape for an hour. The bottom of labels are at 57 inches, and I have a story-stick (two yard sticks taped together) to find the height, then level them by eye. TR walks around and adjusts. He's got a good eye, and he's a little compulsive. I wish he'd been available to work with me on this show, but the bosses had him doing other stuff. I pretty well installed it alone, after working on the Carters the week before. I'm exhausted, but just one more push-day, and I can sleep late Saturday, go in at noon, lunch at the pub, then set up for the opening. 5 - 7 Saturday night. Four of the six artists will be there. I can stay until 6:30 and still get home before dark. If something gets interesting or I drink too much I can always bunk in town. I can at least stay long enough to eat finger-food, have a beer, and make snap-judgements about people based on what they smell like. There actually will be a great many interesting people, and, at this point, I know most of them. There'll be some interesting clothes, interesting shoes and ankles, and that interesting ebb and flow of language when people talk about art. Sara was surprised that I was going to show up at all, but I want to meet the artists, because I've been so intimate with them, for the last several days; that I feel I'm in their wheelhouse, and I want to talk about, with them, their work. Read more...

Confusion

Some sort of confusion outside, two in the morning; enough to wake me from a dead sleep. I was so exhausted, yesterday, I stopped by Kroger and got sushi so I wouldn't have to cook (the other option was beans and an egg on toast) and a bottle of whiskey. My feet and my hips hurt. The floor, in the main gallery, is ceramic tile, over terrazzo, over concrete, and it is bloody hard. I need better shoes. Sara has been on me about this for several years, but I'm like a back-country Pentecostal preacher, and I can't imagine having more than one pair of shoes. Actually I have four, work boots, winter work boots, house slippers, and the shoes I wear every day. The confusion outside was two very large white dogs, I don't know what they are, Bulgarian Bear Dogs, and they're fighting over a road-kill squirrel I brought home for the crows. I run them off, with a couple of rocks. Large dogs and bears. The alternative, I suppose, is that you let these things happen unanswered. I've just about given up on the system. But I still have rocks, and I can throw them. Not necessarily to applaud myself, but you should know I throw rocks with great accuracy. I did get back to sleep, then overslept and was a few minutes late to the museum. Right to work, hanging the last of the paintings. I got the grouping of six done first, and they're almost perfect. I had to use a few tricks. Mark and Sara got the lighting all finished while I was hanging the last few pieces. It looks wonderful. Everyone was quite complimentary about the job I'd done. Between D's show upstairs, re-hanging the Carters, and this show, I'd used all of the larger hanging hardware, and bought out the hardware store. Just enough of everything. I've never used so many plastic anchors, and the walls are going to look like Swiss cheese when this show comes down. But over the January break we're having some plaster repair done; and the entire main gallery, with its vaulted 25 foot ceiling, repainted. Nothing is sacred.. Read more...

Running the Math

I'm not much good at complex math but I can run simple numbers like a savant. I mumble to myself the whole time, so I look like an idiot. Each painting takes a different set of numbers, and I chant them, out loud, so that I don't have to remember them. It's a matter of constant measurement and getting to the small legal pad, where I do the figuring, before I forget the number. The first number is the horizontal centerline for each piece on a given wall section. You measure the wall, then you measure the width of each piece, you add those up, and subtract it from the wall length, then divide that by the number of pieces plus one, and that gives you the spacing. I strike a centerline at about 57 inches above the floor (which is the vertical centerline (there are two centerlines here)) because I need a reference point. Then you do a vertical calculation based on where, exactly, the hanging hardware is, on the back of the painting. I get confused, and always run the numbers twice. I no longer bother with eighths of an inch, because they just don't matter. There are thirteen bays, in the main gallery. It's a lot of math. I wear out mentally, before I wear out physically, so I often take a walk when I get home, to settle my brain. I don't go far, and something always catches my attention: the web a September spider spins between saplings, a pile of dropping I don't recognize, that new fall light. The commute to work has become quite beautiful. The color is coming on, and Kentucky, across the river, is a lovely thing. At work, I started hanging right away and continued until four-thirty, when I was effectively brain dead. Almost done with this part of the job, still have the front wall to hang and a couple of very large canvases, that, after all the panels, seem incredibly light. Then while M and C and Sara are lighting the show, I have something like a hundred labels to make and then affix. Great day today, except for being exhausting, the work is so good that almost every piece was a treat to install. I stopped at four-thirty, because I had the last grouping on the last wall to hang and they were exactly the same size and being hung in a tight arrangement. Hanging things that are the same size, in a tight grouping, is very difficult. because the hanging hardware is going to be slightly different. There are six of them, hanging two-by-two, and I did the center set perfectly, but then my brain shut down. I'll finish the other four first thing tomorrow, when what's left of my mind is more sound. The problem is that they have to be within very close parameters or they look like shit, and they're on one of the physically hardest walls in the museum, every attachment requires a plastic anchor and it's difficult to adjust them an eighth of an inch (this is the one situation where the eighths of an inch are still in play, because the human eye is so goddamn sharp), but I have some tricks. And I'm sure I'll have to play them. I always want a show to be installed to the highest standards, but this show I want to be as close to perfect as I can make it. This woman Koo Stadler, I think is her name, working in egg tempera, is amazing. I'll meet her Saturday night, when we open the show, a couple of her pieces blow me away. The one word out of my mouth, in over four hours, was "damn", when I stubbed my toe, going for another glass of wine. Read more...

Phone Calls

I'd been off the phone grid for two weeks, and everyone was afraid I was dead. A legitimate concern, considering my lifestyle. I could be dead in the woods and it could be weeks before anyone found me. But I'm happily alive. Never been better. Late music, Blind Faith, "Can't Find My Way Back Home", and later, it's just Clapton, playing the blues. After dark it starts raining, and the staccato beat on the metal roof sends me into a reverie. I just stared into the middle distance for several hours, remembering fragments of my life; what rises to the top is not necessarily what we expect. Sandra walking in the sun, and that Catholic girl that tanned like someone from a Caravaggio painting. Not quite exactly in the service of the crown. Willie Nelson, not a day goes by. I'm just saying. Was that Judy Collins, I Once Loved a Sailor, some great soprano. Then Miles Davis, from Bitch's Brew. I'm excited about working, later today (it's Monday already) because I want to get another ten or so pieces hung, so that we'll all know the show will be fully installed by Friday. I'm not trying to please Mark and Charlotte, as much as I just want to get it done for Sara and myself. This is a very hard show to install, the hardware is a nightmare, and just lifting the pieces has already required that I go next door, to the bar, and ask for help twice. They're happy to help, I loan them things, tables and chairs and tablecloths, so there's a balance of payment thing going on, and Chris is particularly competent. One painting is very heavy, maybe a hundred pounds; I explain to him that TR and I can hold the weight, and what he needs to do is hook one side of the wire them scoot around to the other side and hook it. It takes maybe thirty seconds, and it goes perfectly. Sara's watching, and she's amazed that I knew Chris could do what needed to be done. My first choice would be Kim or Glenn, but I knew Chris could do it, and there was a great sense of satisfaction when we got that piece on the wall. Four plastic anchors in concrete, two J-hooks, and this painting is secure against anything other than a drone attack. By far the most difficult thing to hang in the show is a triple layer of small silver-point drawings. The math escapes me. I assume I'll be able to figure it tomorrow, no, wait, later today. It's just numbers, after all. Knuckle down and run the numbers. Got to the bottom of the hill this morning and there were three phone company trucks. It seems that the reconnect on Saturday was just temporary. There's no telling how much this repair cost. They joked about it, asked the usual questions about my lifestyle. One of the guys had been in my house, and he was telling the others about my staircase, which he defined as "about fifty walnut gun stocks". One of the other guys wanted to see it (he makes muzzle-loaders) and I was early, so I drove him up to have a look. He was floored, said they were the most beautiful stairs he had ever seen. I told him how Froggy Taylor had sold me the wood as Poplar, and he couldn't believe it. He looked around a little bit and remarked that he had never seen so many books in his life and he asked, of course, if I had read them all, and I told that yes I had, except for the pile on top of the dead aquarium, which were the books waiting to be read. He was a pretty sharp guy, Bob, and on the way back down he asked me what I did, and I told I read, and wrote, and installed shows in an art museum. He said that sounded cool, but he knew that it must be a hard life. He loved the cookstove, asked how many cords of wood I burned a year. I had to go, I had a show to hang. I wanted to get at least 10 hung, and I got fifteen. Still managed to get there early, and had the place opened up when Sara arrived. We went over the small changes, she had made with TR after I left on Saturday. There's a narrative to the show now. The most striking thing, though, as the pieces go up on the wall, is just the absolute beauty of so many of the paintings. I don't think I ever done such a beautiful show. Sara went over to lunch with me, at the pub, and we sat at a table instead of the bar; Drew joined us, and talked about the history of the Scioto Valley, it was a great lunch. In the afternoon I just continued hanging difficult pieces. It's one of those chores that is totally engaging. When I burned out on the math, around four o'clock, I just left.You can't do a damned thing if you can't do the math. Read more...

Sending Mail

Jesus, that was a relief. I hate it when the paragraphs hang around. Because of this dial-up connection, it took so long to send, that I was able to get a drink and roll two smokes, one of which is set aside in case I get a phone call (rarely) and I usually smoke it just before I go to bed. I greatly enjoyed the day with Sara and TR. It felt like a museum and that we were the people that were making it happen. I love installing shows, and the two of the nine bays that I got done today are very nearly perfect. It's fulfilling to do nice work. And I'm good at installing. The last piece I hung today must have been a new painting (I haven't looked at any of the paperwork on this show) because it had never been hung before. It didn't have any hanging hardware, so I had to "rig it", the phrase used in the trades for preparing something to be hung. I have a large inventory of hardware. I had the thought today that I could hang anything. It might require a few phone calls and renting a crane, but if it can be hung, I can hang it. One thing I liked very much about working Saturday, now yesterday (I had wanted to say today, but that was no longer accurate), is that it was so casual. Sara and TR and me, joking with each other, the small talk and banter. It was world-class. If it were an event at the Olympics, we would be contenders. The eye is the nose that knows. All of the changes that Sara made were spot on the mark. There's a fluidity, now, walking through the show, where one thing leads to another. I love this job, it pleases me in a way that comes right up through my toes, I feel it viscerally. That last painting, yesterday, I'd done the math, I'd rigged the hardware, TR and Sara were talking music theory, and I just raised my hand. TR knew I was ready to hang the piece and came right over, we hadn't exchanged a word, and we hung the piece, and it was perfect. A drop dead moment. This show is so beautiful it breaks my heart. Let that be a test. Falstaff would have something to say, but, of course, Ariel would too. The sound of the wind wakes me, just after dawn, and a leaf-storm ensues. The leaves have lost their subtleness and rattle against each other. The three crows are back and I had a couple of dead mice in the freezer, so I took them out and tossed them up on the outhouse roof. The crows seemed pleased that they had gotten their message across. In the summer they spend most of their time down at the lake, eating left-over bait and lunch scraps. The first Pileated Woodpecker of the season, and I watch him for maybe thirty minutes checking various trees. His scarlet crest is such a pure color. The wind is constant at 10 to 15 mph, with the occasional gust sweeping across the ridgetop at 25 to 30 mph, when it hits the maximum the leaf fall is spectacular. I spend most of the day out on the back porch sipping a glass of old-vine zinfandel, watching leaves fall. It's instructional, in terms of aerodynamics, but it's also incredibly peaceful. Nothing but the wind. Trees with leaves have a lot more surface area than the bare trees of winter. Wood is so flexible. It's quite the show. Read more...

Nice Score(Note: this entry contains 12 separate posts)

Haven't prepared dinner for anyone in quite a while, no one could get up the driveway, but I'm fixing an early supper for TR and Meagan tomorrow, so I had to go to the store. I was staff at the museum today, so I went into town early to do the shopping. Baby back ribs, a couple of vine-ripened tomatoes (from the farmers market), mozzarella cheese (to do a tomato and mozzarella salad, with white balsamic vinegar and olive oil), and a bag of very small mixed potatoes, a bottle of old vines zinfandel. I always look in the remaindered bin in the meat section, and there were pork tenderloins for $2.29 each. I bought all three of them, gave one to TR, and froze the other two in the killer, zero degree freezer at the museum. Many meals for a guy who lives alone. $9.18 and I have nine meals of pork tenderloin, fingerling potatoes, and coleslaw. I might spring for a loaf of french bread rather than licking my plate. It's within my food budget, living on less than $4.00 a day. I have to watch that I don't consume more than a pound of butter a month, just for the expense, I don't give a shit about my cholesterol, I definitely am going to die, and my atoms then become something else, an acorn, a fingerling trout, something, or simply fade off into space. Energy dissipated. Not much happening at work, the calm before the storm. I agreed to meet M and C at the museum Monday (a normal day off) because we're all concerned about the next couple of weeks and want to get a jump start. Talked with TR about a variety of projects. Loaded up and headed home. It rained all night and into the morning, but the driveway was fine, no slippage. Drove the long way around, because of the horse convention down on Mackletree. The Weghorst family feels that they have every right to close the road down for their annual pig roast and The Prancing Of The Walkers. Which is fine. Even kind of cool to watch, but I'm not in the mood, so drive along the River Road, then all the way up Upper Twin Creek. A lovely drive that I take very slowly, stopping to examine specific plants. The Chickory is quite beautiful, with it's sky-blue blossoms. There's a plant at an old house-site, there's no longer a house there now, but you can tell there was one by the plantings, and I can't identify it. There's not a place to pull over, but I need a specimen to show B, he'll know what it is. As Mac recently pointed out, it's just necessary to know the right person to ask. The sauce was a bit bland, so I caramelized an onion and a red pepper, then blenderized them with some red wine, tamarind paste, garlic, lemon juice, and the pan scrapings I'd saved from cooking some highly seasoned pork medallions in walnut oil. Perfect. It goes way back on your tongue and kind of forces your teeth apart. I needed a rub, so I ground some nuts (pine nuts, pistachios, and pecans) in my coffee grinder (thereby adding Italian Roast to the mix) and added onion powder, garlic powder, various powdered peppers from New Mexico, lots of fresh ground black pepper, and some Kosher salt, to keep things on the up and up. My plan is to moisten the ribs with something, maple syrup and dark balsamic probably, then rub them with the nut-pepper mix and sear them, then wrap them in foil and cook them for two hours off the heat. I'll nuke the potatoes then finish them, in a skillet, in the juice that accumulates from cooking the ribs. This will be the best meal you've ever eaten.


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Universal Symbols

Thinking about cave art, rock art generally, and the recurrent theme of female genitalia. I was in a remote corner of Utah, a sympathetic Park Ranger had steered me way off the beaten path to a place where there was a rock face covered in images of vulvas. Dinner was great, the fact that it takes me two and a half hours to cook ribs means there's plenty of time for conversation. And I was like Joe Casual, preparing this meal, because I was Joe Casual preparing that meal. When I pan fry the potatoes, after steaming, I usually brown them in butter, but I was out of butter, due to my recent restrictions, so I drained off some of the highly seasoned fat from the ribs, and browned them in that. They were very good, the baby purple potatoes were incredibly sweet. The mozzarella tomato thing worked out well too, but I'm suspect now about the vines on which these tomatoes were ripened. It certainly wasn't anywhere close to here. You can fake art, you can fake currency, you can fake almost anything, but you absolutely cannot fake a sun-ripened tomato. A minor epiphany: the power went out, TR and Meagan had just left, the phone hadn't worked for days, so I felt my way over to where I knew there was a flashlight, used that to find my head-lamp, and rolled a smoke. Finally went back to sleep, then the power came back on and woke me again. Just stayed up, had a couple of left-over ribs for breakfast. I like the new rub, using finely ground nuts, along with the other ingredients. Went in to work to bring up the packing material from the basement, M and C doing the out-going condition report and crating everything. TR came in for a while, said he and Meagan had talked on the way home and that they were perfectly willing to come over and eat anything, anytime. I enjoy their company, they're both very bright. Stimulating conversation is the price I charge for cooking dinner. TR was nervous about going down the driveway last night but said, today, that it was a piece of cake. The elevator got stuck, and we need the elevator right now, for moving all the pedestals, so I called the elevator guy, in Cincy, and he actually talked me through a fix over the phone. It involved using a special key (D had organized all the keys before he left, thank god) to reset something called Fire Recall which I would never have touched otherwise because it's out-lined in red with a slash drawn through it. I'm a student of international symbols. Just idle curiosity. Knowing what a sign means. One of the French caves, there's a drawing of fish, in the Seine, and they're overdrawn myriad times; there are some plants in the foreground and some birds in the background. It's a specific place at a particular time of the year, and the over-drawing is confirmation. These fish here then. Yep. Got my weir and a frog gig and sallied forth. Ahab ain't got nothing on me. Fuck a bunch of rumors. I never did have congress with a duck. There was a swan once, I will admit to admiring her neck. What is the name of that road? Someplace in Brewster, or maybe East Dennis. We'd meet, occasionally, and I'd talk to her about my feelings. How my fortunes have changed, now it's a trio of bedraggled crows. My phone is still out. The line is down somewhere on Mackletree, and because they're rebuilding one of the bridges, the phone company doesn't know how to get to the place where the break occurs. It's back roads and you'd need a map. The Frontier guy I talked to today knew vaguely where I was talking about. He was a city guy, didn't dabble in country roads, said they had another guy who did that, I know the other guy, Frank, who serves those of us who are isolate. There are actually two ways in, and I go out one, and come back the other. It's hard to get service when you're the end of the line. Literally, you aren't worth it.


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Nothing Unusual

Not much to go on. My mentors are mostly dead. My days are numbered. Look at the actuarial tables. Most people with my habits are already gone. The phone is still out, I tried to talk with Frontier today, but nothing came of it. I was talking to someone in Delaware and they didn't understand the specifics. Try to save someone some grief and what you get is a raft of condescension. "Well, sir, we do know what we're doing." I told him to tell them, on the work order, a bridge was out, the part of Mackletree off Route 125 was closed, and that they would have to come around on Upper Twin and go in the back way. I hate not being able to Send, because the paragraphs pile up, and I go back and read them, and I tweak a few things that probably shouldn't be tweaked, just because I can. And I start new paragraphs, endings become an issue, and then I had a bad day at work. I was in a pissy mood, I don't know why, something minor that had escalated in my mind. Being treated in a way that I don't like being treated probably. That's usually what turns my rudder; the trigger. Beat against the wind. Janus looks both ways, and I'm fucking sick of being the janitor. Not so much the work itself, as the nature of the work. The assumptions people make. I have to go sleep. The local arm of the phone company called me back today, at work and told me that my phone won't be fixed until next Monday, 9 days total outage, is that supposed to be acceptable? The other night, Meagan said she liked the stairs in my house very much, so I gave her and TR the short version of the genesis and construction. I could do a solid hour, which translates to 20 pages of text, and it's always a good story when I tell it. I should write that out. I should probably just stay home and write. The rest of the bullshit is beginning to get to me, and I don't want to begin to argue, I'd just rather avoid the issue. The noise. The expectations. I do fine when I'm alone. Admix in a bunch of bullshit, and I get confused. I have too much of my own work to do, to be down on my hands and knees scrubbing toilets. The irony being that I don't have running water at home. I'm ready to exit, stage left, throw in the towel. I don't have anything left to prove. I'd like to write a few more books. The fox springs to mind; how deeply scarred we are, by the time we reach maturity; the natural history of geese. Barnacles indeed. I'd need horns to describe my nemesis. I wonder what I meant by that. Language is so fluid. "Once I was a weaver."


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Hanging Carters

A double win situation as everyone else was dragging crap out for the yard-sale fund raiser, but Charlotte told me to re-hang the Carters as per the map Sara and I had made when last she was here. I hung all the big ones first because M and C will be on the road tomorrow, taking the ODC show to Springfield. I'd do the math, set the hardware, and go get one or more of them to do the actual hanging. Four of us did "Let Us Give Thanks" because it's a heavy monster, awkward to hang. Every single painting, I think there are 27, is changing either out, or changing placement. I'll have to completely redo the arrangement in the vault, and that's cool, I get to see everything again. The bay that I finished today is stunning. There was a bench there (there are six very nice oak benches, six feet long, that migrate around the museum) and I'd gone down to get M and C, to decide on the drawings and arrangement of same, as per Sara's request, for the middle bay. They were both speechless. They hadn't seen some of these paintings. I handled more than a million dollars worth of art today, and was ready for the day to end. I can easily finish tomorrow, and that was the mandate. Slow and careful all day, overdoing the hardware, because I love these paintings; and I love holding them up close and looking at the brush strokes. And I know so much about them. I was working by myself, alone on the second floor, and I'd talk to the damned things. 1943 was a big year. I could do an hour on the Carter family in 1943. Intimate knowledge. Not that it needs to be done, I really don't want to do it; you thinking what I'm thinking, a flounder in the night. I'll do what needs to be done, for the nonce, but I'm done with the strife, I don't want the grief, I'd rather just be left alone. As long as we're being honest, I'd have to say, I'm disappointed in my response. I should be able to do better than that.


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More Carters

Loaded out the ODC show for M and C to take to Springfield, and they were off at noon. After lunch, I started back in on the Carters. Sara called, fortunately before I hung the last bay, because there was a question about the order. Two left to hang and the vault to reorganize, so I'll need to go in tomorrow to finish. Sara said we'd do the labels on Tuesday, when she'll be back. Last Friday the bridge crew was gone when I got home, and I was able to use the ford, but they were still working. Scott wasn't there but one of his sons said that he'd see what he could do about getting me some bank-run gravel. He said it would be cheap, as he'd just get it from where they were working. I'm afraid his dump truck is too wide, and told him to come and see for himself. He said he'd just ask his Dad. One way or another, this will lead to gravel, because if he can't do it, because his truck is too big, he'll know someone with a smaller truck. Equipment operators always know other equipment operators. The building trades are all interesting, with their unique languages. They're upgrading the bridges to handle logging trucks (and Abrams Battle Tanks), back in the day, when the CCC was building bridges, 18 tons was a considerable overbuild. Coal trucks today carry over 80,000 pounds, a fully loaded logging truck, has got to be close to that, wet wood is heavy. I'd stopped to get a burger and onion rings because I thought I'd be going the short way home, but after the gravel conversation, I had to turn around and go the long way, and the smell, in the Jeep, had reached a terminal threshold, so I stopped at the lake and devoured everything in a couple of minutes. You don't feel civilized, when you eat like this, but it's enormously satisfying. A book I want to write, The Sling-Shot As An Agent Of Change, has been on my mind recently, and I dug out (the correct phrase, my house is a mess) a couple of wrist-rocket type sling-shot frames that need new bands and pockets. Yes, even the sling-shot business requires specific language. It's a lovely thing, trying to say what you mean, the way a word morphs to become something else. I mail-ordered what I needed, and found a site that offered steel ball-bearings at a great price, They're 'imperfect' but what could that possibly matter? I miss, more than not, most of what I aim at, a slight pit in the surface isn't going to make that much of a difference. I was looking closely at the work I had hung today and realized that Star Yards was one inch too high. The mistake is almost always one inch.


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Fabrication

Listen, mate, we could talk about that. I only make stuff up when I need to; what's true is a relative thing. Let's say you're asleep, or you might be asleep, and there's a raucous sound. You assume a defensive pose, because it's the natural thing to do. Maybe there's a bear on the back porch, maybe you forgot to turn off the radio, maybe the power was out and when it came back on the refrigerator kicked in. I sleep soundly and am hard to awaken, but when I do wake completely it's difficult for me to get back to sleep, so I usually write for an hour or two. Last night it was two raccoons fighting over the rib bones from last weekend, so I got up and spent two hours on three sentences and a comma. On my way out this morning I met two Frontier trucks, and two guys, at the bottom of the driveway and told there was no way in hell they were going to get their trucks up to my house and that I thought the problem was down on Mackletree. They called me at the museum, a couple of hours later, and said that they'd hiked up to the house, and using an impendence meter they had determined that the problem was 500 feet down-slope on the power easement, which is where there's a power pole, and therefor Adams County Rural Electric would have to deal with it on Monday, or maybe Tuesday. I had to chuckle, these guys are making double-time, two trucks, two guys, two hours, and they determined that it's not their problem. It could take a while, for restoration, because I'm reasonably sure that Adams County Rural Electric will want the easement cleared, and that task is sub-contracted out to someone else. Wherein logistics becomes a nightmare. Finished hanging the Carters and they look great. Immediately took two women through on my first tour of the new hanging. I was brilliant, because it was this new stuff, and I know so much more about it now. I took them into the vault, to show them some of the next show and a couple of other Carters. These were doctor's wives, and I wanted them to have a good museum experience. And they were both kind of hot. I'm so dinged up right now, I'm not sure I could survive a romantic encounter. I nearly broke my wrist, swinging back the gate, so we could load-out the ODC show, an ugly bruise and a scrape that almost needed stitches but there was nothing left to stitch. I tricked out a bandage, based on paper towels and rubber bands. It'll be fine. I flushed it with alcohol. My left wrist is currently the cleanest part of my anatomy.


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One Goal

At the end of the day I realized I had completely transformed the Carter galleries. Both M and C had complimented me on how good everything looked, and it does look good. One watercolor, Star Yards. a vertical, is an inch too high, but I'll fix that when I do the labels with Sara on Tuesday. Errors are almost always one inch, hanging a painting late in the day. My math skills fall off after four in the afternoon. Bathing, in the sheep-watering trough, I notice the damage to my body; I'm beat up and hung out to dry. Good for nothing anymore, though I can hang a show, so maybe that's not quite nothing. After a long and busy week, I did what I usually do, and read all day. A Henning Mankell, and a New Yorker. The Mankell was a great diversion. Couldn't call anyone, with the phone on the fritz, and I owe phone calls to everyone. Nice fall temperatures and I had the windows open, still a lot of bug noise. The outside air had a faint smell of furniture polish that I suspect is a fall-blooming plant I haven't identified. I have a bottle of violet-oil furniture polish that smells great, someone sent it to me; I occasional break the seal just to smell it. I use that sticks-to-itself plastic called Flat-Twine to seal up volatile scents in their bottles, it's easier than wax. And if anyone out there finds a bottle 'dzing' for less than a hundred bucks, get it for me. I want to be doused with it, before they cremate me on a dry dung heap. The CVS pharmacy, on the Scioto Trail, going out of town, has a nice, glass, locked, perfume case; and whenever I'm in there I go over to see what they have. I've bought a few things, and one of the clerks, a woman I see maybe two or three times a year, asked me why I was interested in perfumes, I gave her the short lecture on scent, and now she lets me sample things. It's not like I'm a threat to society. Just because I put this perfume on your wrist doesn't mean I want to marry you, it just means I want to see what it smells like.


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Dogs

A couple of very good looking hounds, sometime after midnight. A Red-Bone and a Black-Mouth Cur, beautiful, lean, sleek; coon dogs, I'd say, out at this time of night. I tie them up, give them water, and clean out the fridge, to get them something to eat, mostly potatoes with meat drippings. They're so well trained, that they have to train me to tell them what I want them to do. They have name tags, and owner identification, but I don't have a phone. So after they eat and drink and piss and defecate I bring them inside and talk to them for a while, tell them to LAY DOWN (command voice) and they're both asleep within minutes. They'd been running all night. When the phone guys get here, later, I'll use when of those cool phones they have, that just clip into the line, to call the owner. These dogs are worth a lot of money, they're both female and their pups probably sell for a thousand bucks each. The last time this happened, the owned wanted to pay me, but I wouldn't take his money, and he gave me, instead, as payment, the location of a morel patch that has served me well. I have my computer on, a blue glow, and one compact fluorescent (9 watts) in the entryway, sat back down, to start another paragraph, and the Red-Bone came over and re-settled at my feet, went to sleep again almost immediately. The Black-Mouth cur was slobbering on the floor; and they were both twitching, remembering the night before. It's very cool, having two dogs like these in the house. I don't want a dog, any animal would be too much responsibility for me now, but it's nice to have an overnight. Angie, the Red-Bone, likes very much to be scratched between the ears. I slept on the floor, for a couple of hours, just before dawn, between two dogs. It didn't seem unusual at the time. A Two Dog Night. It starts raining, and that's a good thing, because I need water, and after the dead bugs and dirt have washed off the roof, I put out a couple of buckets to collect wash water. I'm oddly centered in this miasma, because I don't care what anyone thinks. It works for me. I need to shave and wash my hair, but I'll wait until the house warms up. First, I want to take the sling-blade to the two paths I use the most, to the outhouse and to the Jeep, and clip back the blackberry on the back deck; I do tend to let things slide. B and I share a love for old bridge abutments, quarried sandstone blocks often two feet by two feet by three feet long, twelve cubic feet times 140 is 1680 pounds, beautiful blocks of crude dressed stone. I'd love to do something with them, and if I was thirty years younger I would drag them around on ramps, with rollers, with a come-a-long, but I'm too old for that shit now, I just look at them and sigh. Just 40 of them would make an eight foot by eight foot bunker that would be impervious to almost anything. If I sank a foundation down to cap-rock, the structure could well last a couple of thousand years. A cave would be better but I'm not a cave-dweller, nor do I live in a tree-dip-pit. The twentieth-first century is hammering at my door, but I refuse to answer. Just the warmth that stray coon-dogs spread is greater than the gift of any god.


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Restoring Service

| don't care about most things, the World Bank, various conspiracies, whether or not you read my emails, what I want is just to send some paragraphs. They've become a burden to me. I don't know what to say. As I expected, the logistics are proving difficult. The sub-contractor that clears easements is busy in western Adams County, which is about as far from me as possible, and the actual person (Gretchen) that I've talked to several times is in Delaware and doesn't know what's going on. Everyone agrees that it's not a problem with my phone but with the service entry, which I knew 10 days ago. I took the dogs down to the nearest public phone, the Quick Mart, and called the owner and he met me at the Dairy Bar on Route 52, where I bought both dogs a plain footer (and one for me, with onion rings) and waited for Doug. He was thrilled to get his dogs back and stuck $40 in my shirt pocket. He knew exactly where I lived and had expected they'd end up there. I complimented him on his dogs. He positively beamed and complimented me on the fact that I could tell. Ten years in rural Mississippi, you learn to distinguish hounds. I told him I love Red-Bones above all other breeds, and that I had known a guy in the Delta who had trained a pack of Black-Mouth Curs to trap young wild hogs until he could get to them. He'd get the hog in a cage, take it home, put it in a pen, and fatten it out on corn, then take it to auction in Duck Hill, where he'd sell it to someone who wanted to claim that they'd killed a wild boar. Fair exchange, though a niche market. I almost decided to go to town, I was halfway there, but I just turned around and went back home. I wouldn't have minded having a beer at the pub, but I was more interested in whether or not I could remember what I was thinking about before the dogs. I could, probably, if I went back and read through the log-jam, but that is precisely what I don't want to do, I just want to enter the zone. Simple pleasures. My idea of a good time is eating a piece of toast. And I always enjoy a wee dram. All my relationships have failed, I've lived alone for a very long time; younger people, it seems to me, jump into relationships because they don't want to be alone. Being alone is a stigma. Not fit for reasonable congress. Yet I like alone, the way it allows freedom of movement. You get involved, and the first thing you know you're going to weddings and funerals.


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Maybe Tomorrow

I'm a little pissed but not surprised that I don't have a phone yet, despite Gretchen's promise. I'm am extreme customer, at the very edge of service, and I don't matter that much. I pay about $65 a month for a phone line and my dial-up connection and I'm no one's priority. Nobody gives a shit about the guy at the end at the end of the line. Why does he live there anyway? After the ice storm of 2004, it cost the power company and the phone company $20,000 and seven weeks to restore my service, I was the last person in the county to be re-connected. Quite the distinction. Still, it's part of the pact we sign, to be on the grid, that they will provide service, and they're not doing very well right now. I need a satellite link but their trucks can't make it up the hill, stuck inside a mobile with the Memphis blues again. It's funny that they have 99% coverage and I'm in the other 1%. It's the story of my life, but not by design; I don't choose to live at the end of the line, it's just where I find myself. Cast a net, and I'll always be at the outer-most ripple, wondering what, exactly, has happened. Rocked at the edge a of glacier, in an ocean kayak, when the ice calves. Or whatever. I've lost most of my preconceptions. Any more I take the hand I'm dealt and make the best of it. Life is a game of solitaire, it would be nice to be able to blame something on someone else, but actually, you're pretty much responsible. Sara was at work today and wanted to hang a different painting, which meant re-hanging a wall. Then we did the lighting, then I sorted through the labels and identified the paintings for which we didn't have labels. Finish that tomorrow. The phone company called me at work, and asked if I'd seen anyone working on the phone line. I said not to my knowledge, but that I couldn't actually see the phone line from my house. He said it would be done by close of day Wednesday. We'll see. M and C are gone tomorrow, picking up the last two artists' work for the Renaissance show. Then I'll set that with Sara and hang it next week. Most of the patch and repair is done in the main gallery, but I still have to touch-up paint the walls. I've been thinking a lot, recently, about backing off of the work outside. It's become a distraction, and I have so much of my own work that I'd rather be working on. Not that I would, but that the possibility existed. A series of personal essays not unlike what I've been doing, but expanded. More attention to detail. I need to recover some themes. Meaning is just beyond my reach. Meaning? Just beyond? My reach? Like that. An exploration of subtleties. I'm only allowed to do this because I have the time and the inclination.


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Getting By

I know I'm good, in terms of survival, I can live on acorns and weeds. I can make a mean beverage in the morning, from roasted ground chicory, that passes for coffee. If any of you live near a Sporting Goods, please send me a new set of bands for a wrist rocket slingshot. Send them to The Southern Ohio Museum. I had high hopes for a restored telephone, since they didn't call me at work, again, to apologize, but alas. There was sign that they had been here, someone had fixed the broken latch on my phone panel, where their service ends and mine begins. The first thing all three of the guys that have been up here do is plug in their test phone, like I didn't know to do that. Seems I need a new entry line from the pole at the bottom of the hill, an 'E-Line', as they call it. I knew from the minute they said it that it would have to involve a bull-dozer, to clear the easement and to un-spool the new line back up the hill. This repair is costing somebody thousands of dollars. I'm as nice as possible when I talk to any of these people, but I'm sure they all refer to me as "that asshole at the end of the line". There are either four or five houses, total, in the last three miles, coming in from all three directions. I grossly underestimated the cost of restoring my service after the ice-storm. I talked to Irene today, in the offices of Adams County Rural Electric; told her I was writing about the aftermath of that storm, and she said the cost of putting in new poles and running new wire was calculated at three dollars a lineal foot. $47,520 for the electric, nobody at the phone company knew what I was even asking, but we can assume a few thousand more, so fifty grand for five clients. They have to hate us. I'm a loss-leader masquerading as a normal person. Had a great day, working with just Sara, M and C on the road; we had a couple of smokes outside finished the Carter labels, and chatted about trivial things. The bridge crew was gone, when I came home, so I was able to use the ford; you can't use it when they're working, because the back-hoe they use constantly, is usually down there. I use the word down because it's a ford cut down into the bed of the Mackletree Creek. It's steep and short. I'd bought some remaindered ground veal at Kroger, and I needed to use it, so I mixed together some things and made a couple of miniature meat-loaves in the toaster oven, glazed with enchilada sauce, and the last of the miniature potatoes from when TR and Meagan were over. It was very good, and I wanted to call someone and tell them, but, alas. The Pity Factor now comes into play, so best estimate is that it couldn't be longer than another week before they restore my service. I tried to tell them. When I talked to Gretchen today, she was amused; as far as she knew, my lack of service was being addressed, and she wondered where, exactly I lived. I knew she was doing Google Earth, and she couldn't find me. I vote that as a win. She made some guesses. Well, she said, you are hard to find, and I told her I wasn't that drummer in Texas, which has become a standard line, defining something by what it's not. It's true, though, that the latest satellite image has lost me and my driveway completely. Everything is canopied. She said it all looked like a sea of green, and I told her that was the beauty of living in a State Forest. I'm disappeared. That there's a certain elegance involved doesn't escape me. It's difficult to disappear.


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Renaissance Show

I was so tired, by five o'clock I could hardly see straight. Spent the morning doing miscellaneous maintenance, then the entire afternoon unwrapping paintings for the next show. It requires such attention that it's exhausting, but it's always a treat to see new work. Uniformly fine stuff, in various mediums, but it seems like there's too much of it. It's going to be a full gallery, and the hanging will be difficult because so much of the work is on panels and is quite heavy. Stopped by Kroger, on the way home, for whiskey and sushi, and came directly home, the short way, because it rained this morning and I knew the bridge crew would be working elsewhere. I had to use four-wheel drive to get across the ford, but the driveway was great, solid and not slick at all. I cruised right up in four-wheel high. Alas, though, no gravel, no phone. I didn't expect either one, because of the rain, but I'm ever hopeful. It's beginning to affect my writing in that I now reread the previous paragraph, and often delete the last sentence. Outside of commas, I never add anything. What you haven't read is like a novella at this point, the experience of reading it (I have not read the whole thing, I just reread the last paragraph) will be as different for you as it is for me. On the weekends I sometimes work on a page for more than a day, which is why what you'll eventually see is several pages short of the actual number of days that my phone will have been out. Future Conditional. I assume you will. I told M today that we were going to have buy some hardware. This is very large show and I don't have enough large hangers. When I was re-hanging the Carters I stepped up a lot of the hardware to the next level. Large hangers instead of medium hangers, J-hooks instead of large hangers, and I depleted my supply. I've gotten much more conservative in my approach to hanging the permanent collection. They would survive, now, a modest earthquake. Artists should all have to take a course in Tape. I had to destroy a lot of bubble-wrap today, cutting it away. We use a brown packing tape from the UPS store, you can see it on the bubble-wrap, and if you fold a tab on one end, it releases. I hate having to use a knife or scissors to unwrap a painting. I've become fond of the plastic film that sticks to itself, flat twine, and I keep a variety of widths. Unpacking this show, I'm intensely aware of needing to repack it at the end of the run. Cuban music on the radio, a Mambo, has me dancing around like a dervish. I don't even like Latin music, it's so busy. Late, long after I should have been back to sleep, I put on the Grateful Dead, a very long version of Dark Star from 1972. Why I don't listen to music when I'm trying to write, is that I get completely involved. I switch over to the radio, and it's Boz Skaggs, Cadillac Walk; his first album, with Dwayne Allman playing lead, is still one of my favorites, and he has certainly embraced the blues, a choice I can fully understand. Loving the blues is a sort of affliction, where it takes your head. Living in Mississippi, where we were, to go into Yazoo City, we drove right by Parchman, and there were always prisoners, in gangs, working the ditches, under the watchful eye of guards, with shotguns, on horseback. It seemed like a movie. After the first few trips, I'd take a bag of apples, to distribute to the prisoners, under the watchful eyes of the guards; all of the prisoners were black, all of the guards were white, and everyone enjoyed a good apple. Something about profiling. A moth drawn to the flame. I'd rather not dwell on the past, but I do remember things, the way that splay of light falls across the hollow. Slanted fall light distracts me.


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Certain Limitations

Limitations, the bane of my existence. I assume I can do anything, but I can't anymore. I can't climb tall ladders or even drive across tall bridges. I'll never fly again, I probably won't drive across country, though I do enjoy the open road, because getting around Indianapolis is a pain in the ass, Des Moines is a nightmare. Got to work early, so I could unpack the last of the small paintings before Sara got in; egg tempera, very lovely, meticulous, beautifully painted. The two of us spent the entire day setting the show. Mark came down when I needed help moving the heaviest pieces. Otherwise, I just shuffled work until Sara was satisfied, a late lunch, then right back at it. We finished after four, but I didn't start hanging because there are always a few changes, the next morning, when Sara has had a chance to sleep on it. Besides, I don't like to start hanging after four, because my math skills are in decline after then, and I tend to make one-inch mistakes. I'll start installing tomorrow, and by the end of the day will know whether or not I'll need to work on Monday. I suspect I will, the show opens Friday and I'll need some slack, toward the end, to run errands and put out small fires. The original plan was for me to start hanging this show yesterday, which would have been a margin for error. My ace in the hole is that TR will be at the desk tomorrow and he can do a lot of the math for me. He's good at it, and I trust him. The math is a huge percentage of the time spent installing a show. I don't like TR's handwriting, it looks like something someone from Java, who learned English as a second language, would write, but I can read it, and that's all that matters. My handwriting is illegible. I can't even read it. I stopped taking notes when I realized they were useless. The birds were playing in the pampas grass today, they only do it at this time of year, where one of them lands near the tassel, and then a second one comes in, to weigh the stem, and it springs them both back into the air. Looks like fun. They seem to be enjoying themselves. There's a huge red squirrel that lives above the tattoo parlor. I've watched him for years, before there was a tattoo parlor. He works a three bar area, and two of the bars serve junk food, he's on a junk food diet and he's several pounds overweight. He looks like a hybrid dog with a very strange tail. I got home quickly, because it's Friday, and I knew the bridge crew would be gone, and I knew, when I got to the bottom of the hill, that I wouldn't have a phone, because there were no tire tracks and no sign the easement had been cleared. Clearly, this is going to take forever. Fortunately, I've taken some courses in anger management, and the best advice I ever had was just to go to bed. You heard that joke, right? A bear goes into a bar.


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Logical Explanation

I'm pretty sure it was a dream, but it seemed so real at the time. I had poled my pirogue up Quivet Creek where I had seeded some oyster beds. It was one of those incredibly clear days, so bright you could hardly stand to look at anything. I'd slipped into the pub, for a wee dram of Irish, and everyone I'd ever known was there, and they were all offering advice. Some of these people I knew were dead, but they were there. A cocktail party of the disembodied. I was a removed third party. I remember telling Harvey he should wear the red sweatshirt, he responded with some lines from Lorca. You haven't really lived until someone quotes Lorca, in the dark, in Spanish, three sheets to the wind; everything else is artifice. I mostly know poets, and they talk strangely, as if words mattered, with advanced degrees in sarcasm. Some of them take the cake. I have one dead friend, even when I'm asleep, he reminds to watch where I step. Do the math. Left with nothing. Went to work, met Sara, and rearranged paintings, as predicted, until noon, went to lunch with TR and had a great Wedding Soup; started hanging after lunch and got eight large pieces done while I had TR's help for the actual hanging. This show is going to use a great deal of hardware, especially J-hooks and plastic anchors. Hammer-drilling, and I already need a new bit. Definitely have to work Monday. It's going to be a spectacular show. There's some light on the walls, left over from the ODC show, and this new stuff, because there's so much gold-leaf, looks fantastic. Lighting it is going to be fun. I left at four, since I'm going to work Monday and also because it looked like it was going to rain; AND because the phone company was at the bottom of the hill when I went out this morning. The actual repair guys, and they said they'd have it done by noon. Two weeks to the day. And, yes, she said, yes, it is restored. A dial-tone never sounded so good. I going to send everything now, while the sending is possible. I didn't read back over, so probably more mistakes than usual. Read more...