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.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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."


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.