Supplies

Looks like a good day for traveling on Monday, temps high enough that the roads should be dry, and I'll make it off the Piedmont down to the coastal plain. It's a plan. Picked up road supplies today, then stopped at the pub for a pint of Guinness and a bowl of stew. Warmer today. Back home I split some wood, tomorrow I'll split a little more and load the house, pack, take out the air conditioner, button the house up, get out of here by 7:30 on Monday. Be a relief to just be on the road. Got a couple of James Lee Burke's on CD, at the library, that I might or might not listen to. Made a list of things to carry in the rental, in case I did get caught by weather. Winter traveling I stop and get gas more often. Carry water, some food, a blanket. Landscape is what I notice, on a trip like this. The terrain is different and I'm constantly surprised. At Janitor College, there was an optional course in wall damage. I signed up because I heard the professor was really good, a progressive dude, into change, cool; but it turned out this progressive dude was actually a Republican, in leathers, with a whip. Nonetheless, he knew his wall damage. Dr. Wally Jitters, always raving eschatology, final things, death, judgment. He died my senior year. Had built an out-door wall that he repeatedly brutalized and repaired in his famous open-air seminars. He was buried alive, and killed, when the wall was struck by a meteor during one of his classes. The students suspected a trick, some Houdini thing where he'd struggle from the wreckage and rebuild the wall. But he was well and truly dead. Final things indeed. Don't know why I thought of that, but this could well and truly be the last time my daughters see my parents. Talked to Mom this morning, and she's thrilled we're doing a non-typical Thanksgiving. My sister, bless her heart, took their pass and shopped at the commissary on the Naval Base, NAS Jacksonville is huge, and thinks she got almost everything I'll need to cook for x number of people for 5 days. Mom has been collecting tins of premium crabmeat and I can't wait to introduce her to my stripped down crab-cake: enough mashed boiled red potato to hold the crab together, salt and pepper, a squeeze of lime juice. Cooked in butter; butter, and a little cream added to the potatoes. These are on my life-list. I'd love to have a crab boil while we're down there, maybe Kevin can arrange it. Live Blue Crabs, boiled with a strong spice mix, spread out on a table covered with newspapers, everyone with their own hammer and pick. A primal meal, where there isn't much talk, mostly grunting. A tray of roasted vegetables in the middle of the table, some beer. I've gotta go. Pack, check my list, last posting for eight days. Doesn't mean I don't love you. Read more...

Last Day

Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream" is crayon (and casein) on cardboard. Not exactly an archival medium. When D and I were matting and framing some pieces for the fund-raiser, a print and a watercolor, both of which needed to be suspended on the inside of the matt, we used archival matt board, archival Japanese tape which needs to be moistened, and, as everyone I've ever seen do this, instead of using distilled water, we used archival spit. I've got to go to town tomorrow, pick up a few things for the trip, vitamin water, power bars, some trail mix, a couple of books on CDs, a big bag of dog food (B said he'd feed the dog), and some foodstuffs for the house, so there'll be something here when the girls and I get back. Sunday I need to fill all the stations of the cross with firewood and kindling. Out of here at eight on Monday morning. Someone else will have to clean the museum on Tuesday, after several weekend functions. I cleaned up the kitchen again today, set up tables and chairs. Almost all I did this week was clean the kitchen (a food event every day) and move tables and chairs around. Yesterday I felt poorly, my feet hurt and I was tired, last night I crashed early and slept like a log, this morning I was a new man. I look forward to being away for a week, no concerns but my family and a change of scenery. Route 17, from Savannah, Georgia, to Jacksonville is one of my favorite roads, across the marshes, with that fecund tidewater smell and a hundred hole-in-the-wall diners that all serve great crab and fried perch meals. Eating my way down the Georgia littoral. I can talk the talk, and my accent changes, when I cross the line into the deep south; I often just take something, on the tines of fork, back into the kitchen, and ask the cook how he'd done that. They're always completely open and unpretentious, it's the peanut oil, or the cornmeal in the batter, or something he'd learned from his mother. In Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" in the right hand panel, "Hell", there is an ultra-modern iceboat, skating on thin ice; I was examining a very good reproduction of that painting, today, with a magnifying glass, and found a thousand details I had missed. Another one, I'm far from my sources here, but I it was "Lady With An Ermine" I think it's Michelangelo, her right hand, stroking the ermine is incredible. The fingers. The implied mobility. I looked at that hand for half an hour. The painting as a whole is almost frightening, her expression and that fucking ermine, but her right hand, nearly centered in the painting, is a thing of consummate beauty. It's the best hand I ever saw. Bumps a Sargent hand, I saw in Naples, Florida, into second place. Better than God and Adam reaching across the gulf of that ceiling. This is now my benchmark hand, the hand for the ages. I find her, actually, kind of sinister, and that goddamn ermine with his black-hole eyes scares me to death, but her right hand is a thing of beauty. I'm not a romantic, as anyone who knows me would verify. So what is being said, that I respond to so strongly? Certainly those fingers, he probably didn't mean anything, just drawing some fingers. But they look like they mean something. The Smothers Brothers did a routine that always cracked me up, where confusion reached a terminal mass, the particulars escape me, something about how they had interrupted something that was said. Artist talk a lot. Confusion Metal to Tommy Smothers. He stands alone. Fuck, I lost the thread. Read more...

Cleaning Up

I know everyone has a lot to do, and I'm not complaining, but everyone mostly sits on their ass and expect things to be done. It's a disease. Take taking the skirts off the tables, never used to be my job, but now it is, because I did it once, and now it's expected. One of my problems is that I too easily take on the tasks of others. I don't mind washing dishes. I don't mind mopping the floor. D, acting where I wouldn't, told Trish to get the skirts off so we could move the tables. Easy enough. Easy enough drive in because, by local standards, I go to work late, leaving the house at 8, giving myself, always, an extra 30 minutes in case something interesting might appear. If nothing appears on the drive in, I get my free coffee at Market Street and go below the floodwall. There's always something down there. I don't know why Spell Check doesn't like 'floodwall', and it turned my 'ass-holes' into Achilles. Which I don't understand at all. The vagaries. Anyone has a fairly recent Webster's College Dictionary that they want to get rid of, it's what I keep at hand and mine's falling apart. I actually have to stand up and walk two feet to get to the dictionary table, which I do several times a day, but I need the handy, smaller, dictionary, because I'm a terrible speller. God, that storm last night. It wasn't just me, it was pretty wide spread. Expected to have to do some road clearing on Mackletree, so I allowed even more time. But since I'm so late, relatively, all the work had been done. Which freed me up for a saunter at the river's edge. I kept my hands in my pockets and picked-up nothing. I'm getting rid of stuff, I'm not collecting. On the other hand, I'm interested in doing a show based on Specific Gravity & Weight Per Cubic Foot, for which I would need a cubic foot of a great many things. I want to curate this show with Anthony, because he had a similar idea. Think about it, then send me a cubic foot of something, send it to the museum. Kim, if you do a cubic foot of cast iron, I'll come and get it. It would still be yours, of course, and I think you need one, but it might sell. I thought Kurt might do a cubic foot of live oak, because it is so close to water, .98, and is so different. There'd have to be a cubic foot of water, the benchmark. There'd need to be a couple of scales, so people could weigh things, whatever they could lift. What's a cubic foot anyway. Molecules don't align, there's a lot of wasted space. Mostly, there's wasted space. One thing we'd be talking about is density. Things dry, and get smaller, you end up with less than a cubic foot of oak and it's still more than 10% water. What are the rules? And everything shrinks at a different rate, so there are no simple answers. Take concrete, 90% cured in 28 days, 100% in 28 years. I have to line up the rental car tomorrow. I can pack in ten minutes, everything I wear is the same, 2 pair of jeans, 3 denim shirts, 5 pair of underpants, 4 or 5 tee-shirts, 7 sets of socks. A cubic foot of clothes. On second thought don't send a cubic foot of anything, I have to think about this. Phone went out last night, so I couldn't SEND. Up too early this morning, and couldn't get back to sleep. Drizzling rain earlier than forecast, and I had to wait for the driveway to firm up. An hour late for work. I've got so much accumulated time it's ridiculous, plus my four weeks of vacation. I'm using a week and a day over Thanksgiving, then two weeks, an hour at a time, getting home early in January and February, assuming I'm still on the ridge. I really can't leave the house unoccupied. When I get back from Florida I have to re-insulate the other half of the floor, maybe a four hour job, if I can get Anthony to come out and help; a brutal eight hours if I have to do it alone, what with the climbing in and out. Still a small price to pay, because my life would be so much easier. I talked to Amanda at Enterprise and I'll have a car at 8 AM on Monday. Should be able to get to Columbia, South Carolina by dark, then on to Jax by early afternoon the next day. I promised Mom I'd cook a meatloaf, with mashed potatoes and gravy. Mostly they like left-over meatloaf as a lunch meat, with a thin layer of mashed potatoes and gravy, a slice of onion; I can't argue with that, it's a perfect sandwich. Read more...

Perfect Failure

Unpleasant dream. A sense of helplessness. Can't get back to sleep. Nothing specific. Get up and make cheese grits, a cup of coffee; then sit in the dark, listen to the rain. There is no sunrise, but the day gets lighter. Eventually, I walk down the hill and go to work. The museum, and especially the kitchen, are trashed. Food AND drink functions are tough on the facilities. First, though, I have to work in the kitchen, because Trish needs space to prepare lunch for a board meeting. A lot of dishes, all the platters, and 150 wine glasses are dirty. Load the portable dishwasher with half the glasses, but don't hook it up because I need the sink, wash the sink drain-board full of dishes, then wash platters and dry them by hand. Get half the surfaces clean, for Trish to make lunch, and when I get back from my lunch I'm right back where I started. Re-clean the kitchen then put away 100 chairs and 15 tables, then sweep up debris. In real time, tonight, as I write about the day, big winds, not in the forecast, 50 mph or better, the house creaks, the trees scream like banshees. Turn on the radio to see if there's a tornado warning. Probably lose the phone. It's blowing like a bastard out there right now. Some hail. A full gale. I suspect it's just a line front, the Ohio river is often the boundary for colder and warmer air meeting. The weather anywhere is always interesting, I've lived a lot of places, this place is a cauldron of undecided. A major system can miss or hit us here, within just a couple of miles. I wanted to eat before I lost my lights so I very quickly made three crab cakes. They were almost perfect, I used nothing but a couple of small red potatoes and crab, salt and pepper; because I had Anne's remoulade sauce, which, I think, had some sweet relish in it. Excellent combination. The cakes were a bit crumbly is all. The presentation was a bit shoddy. I may start using just a little library paste. The ones tonight, I cooked them in butter, and I turned them too soon, they need to caramelize before you turn them. I'll get this down, I'm studying on it. The last one, after I had learned some lessons, was one of the best things I've ever eaten. Nights like this, I put a little single cell flashlight in my pocket, so I can find a larger flashlight, matches and some candles, then get out the oil lamps, a pen and paper. I'm rehearsed in this, things are where they need be. Now it's 4 o'clock the next morning and the lights just came back on. What a blow. I don't know what time the power went out. I'd finished the crab cakes and gotten a drink. Thank god I took off work an hour early yesterday, had a good fire going (burning ash table legs, from a Scandinavian Modern table I got from a dumpster) before the hail started. It was late enough, and I was tired enough, that I just went to bed, after knocking over several piles of books in my fumbling. Hell to pay when the power did return. Book-slides. The timbers were creaking, I'll tell you that. The house was bending, like a longboat in a heavy sea. No warning, is the odd thing. Usually they blare a warning on the radio and issue a High Wind Alert or something. I get the feeling that this one was just for me, a micro-event that focused forces on Low Gap Hollow. Picket's Charge, The Light Brigade. I'm still standing, at any rate, though ankle deep in books. The hail was vicious. The roof on the woodshed is just tin over purlins, and it sounded like a young war. Before I went to bed I went out back with a flashlight, wearing a football helmet (yard sale, $1) and the pellets were the size of marbles with the occasional golf ball. Fucking dangerous. The unexpectedness of weather. Now it's quiet. I can still hear the wind, but it's a murmur. I was never really concerned, I built this house after all, but it was like being at sea with Conrad during a really bad storm. "I set out now, in my boat, upon the sea." Olson, not Conrad, but you get the drift. Whatever I meant to write, I didn't, so rudely interrupted. Society is corrosive, nature is merely intrusive. If I had my faculties down, I'd tell a joke here, but I can't think of one. Two parrots go into a bar. The natural world is relentless, it bangs against your window. Thinking back, I prefer a cave, with a single mouth I can protect with fire. A long time ago, but I still remember. Spitting my hand-print on the sandstone wall. Read more...

Feedback

It's a good question, what you mean to me. Everything, really. I don't get a lot of feedback, I mostly write in a vacuum. Emily at Amherst. I try to be transparent, she did to, I hear her strangled voice. I try to use punctuation to clarify what the words are trying to say. Late at night, when I'm awakened by something and return to writing, or start a new paragraph, I often turn on the radio. Never when I first start writing in the evening, hell, I have to kill the breaker to the fridge when I first start writing; but late at night, it's often a line from an old blues song that gets me back to my black-haired beauty (as other people have labeled my black Dell). A somber gray day. Finish rereading Maxwell Perkins' letters, split some wood, carry a few boles into the shed, take the truck to the bottom of the hill against projected rain and snow. Perkins was strange, by all accounts, not that verbal in person, but goddamn could he write letters. He dictated his letters, mostly, as did Mark Twain his autobiography (I heard that fact on the radio yesterday) and I'm amazed. I have to see the paragraph emerging in letters, bang out the rhythm with two fingers. I think of my writing as a kind of jazz. I did actually write my last book of poems, "A Summer In Hell", 14 years ago, using a small voice actuated tape recorder, and it's difficult for me to work that way, but I was living out of my truck, my options were limited. I had a portable typewriter, but in the desert of SE Utah it gummed up with wind-driven sand. I'd get a motel room once a week to transcribe what I'd taped. Mostly the sound of wind as I drove over to Colorado to get the girls for a weekend. For the first time this season, I hear a train over in Kentucky, five miles as the crow flies. A week from today I leave for Florida, eight days off-line. I'm concerned about leaving, but I have to go, not so concerned that red-neck thieves will steal my books as that they've leave the door open. You rob a place, least you can do is lock the door behind you. Janus knows his place, a door is a portal, an opening in. Read more...

Nothing Much

A squabble over compost. I hesitate shooting a coon because I'll have to deal with the dead body. Rain sweeps in from the northwest. Colder temps. A harmonica riff, been alive in the blues. James Cotton. Robert Cray. A distant solo guitar. Draws at my heart strings. If you need me, call me. Don't wait too long. I saw a stranger with your hair. What comes around. You've got everything you need, a succession of lyrics. Janus holds the door open. Why wouldn't you enter? The next thing I thought about was waiting for me. A dust devil, a swirl of leaves, nothing that made any actual sense. Ricky Lee Jones. John Lee Hooker. Black snake. Harmonics. Leo. People rush like water down the drain. Who is that? Neil Young. That strained voice. I couldn't see the trouble underneath. Nothing ever moved. I was watching closely. The world in which we live. Doctor John. If it wasn't for one thing it was another. Mountains to the sea. Late night radio (early morning) is sometimes quite interesting. From out of nowhere, the antiphonal chanting of plainsong. A lovely sound. Sleep a few more hours on the sofa. Put on a crock-pot of grits while I was up. A cup of grits, four cups of water, and a goodly pinch of salt. For breakfast I make cheese grits in the microwave, and top them with a perfect egg. Good enough to make you cry. Suit up in the black Carhartt bibs and split some wood. Reading the letters of Maxwell Perkins, who might have been the best editor in history. The flotilla of geese I saw at the lake yesterday, several hundred, are heading further south and I'm on their flyway; off and on, all day and into the night, skeins of them fly over, with the occasional lamenting cry. A little fire of various wood scraps and I roast a sweet potato right in the firebox. I'll miss the cookstove, if I ever do get off the ridge. Over ten years cooking with wood, took five of those to learn how. I must have burned between 20 and 40 cords of wood in that time; all in a firebox that's only 12 inches wide and 15 inches deep. I wonder how hot peat burns, or cow paddies for that matter. Things that can be burned. An all wood house, filled with paper, fully inflamed, could reach over 1600 degrees. Maybe I should be cremated in my house, just thinking here, but Clay recently drew me up a legal will, so I might not die intestate, and that gets you thinking about things. Disposing of the body, that kind of thing. I've researched the laws, and it really is ok, in extremely rural areas, you just dig a hole, and bury the body in a cardboard box. All you need is a death certificate, so you have to pay the coroner plus mileage, then you have to hire Booby to dig a hole with his backhoe, and fill it back in. Maybe two hundred bucks. Why would you spend a lot on a funeral? I don't get the logic. To my credit, I never did. You're organic matter, you're going to rot. I'd rather be fertilizer for a couple of grapevines than rotting soup in a bronze casket. Booby would probably dig the hole for free. Probably only cost a hundred bucks. If we can run him through the chipper, and use him as compost, we'll pay you ten bucks. I'm here now, and then I'm gone, my major thought-stream of the day; I don't give a shit about my physical body after I'm gone, burn it, dissect it, do what you will. Even everyday living takes it's tole. The body itself, is an outfit; you see that, you know everything is a game. I've said for years, to anyone who would listen, that it was all mirrors. I could duplicate anything, if I had enough images. Duplication is fairly easy, having an idea is hard. I have to go sleep, I've done nothing other than split wood and read some letters, somehow, it seems enough. Read more...

Punch List

One thing about opening a show or having an event, is that it will happen, barring an act of god. I remember one time, during a snow emergency, that we opened a day late, but only because I didn't want to hike 17 miles on foot through 12 inches of new snow over a crust of ice. I'm not sure why people rise to the occasion, but by the end of the day yesterday, I was dead on my feet. I'm too old for this game. Mare est in turba, the sea is in turmoil, I can only do so much. The grackles play their show. The flush, when they vacate a tree, is tangible. Loops meaning nothing.  Birds, for god's sake, what could they possibly mean? We moved the police station to the fire station because of black mold. Check. Imagined health risk. Black mold can't be good. The opening went well. Maggie Taylor, the artist, was a sweetheart, the auction netted maybe 5 grand, admission another 4, wine maybe 1500, bar maybe another 500. Not bad for Portsmouth. I had fun pouring wine, chatting. I didn't wear the hat, Sharee wanted to wear it, and bless her heart. I wore my Smithsonian ball-cap. Crazy busy, opening bottles and pouring. The art crowd are drinkers, even at 8 bucks a glass, 34 bottles in two hours (and a lot of people drank beer, or the drink for the occasion, a Pink Flamingo, which is citrus vodka, triple sec, and cranberry juice). I sample all the wines, 3 white and 3 red, liked the Shiraz quite a bit, a big wine, like the zins I prefer. Sipped Maker's Mark on a few cubes for the rest of the evening, weak drinks, I stayed sober for the drive home. 14 deer on the last 2 mile section of Mackletree. Weaving between statues. If you've never done theater, or installed a show, it's probably pretty hard to imagine what opening day is like. Or maybe not, it's like having that first Thanksgiving family feed at your house, 16 relatives and you're an in-law. Like that. A list of similar events could follow. I suppose we all have them. But it is actually what I do for a living. Serving the wine, I didn't have to mingle, people came to me. I spun a line of talk. I only do this once or twice a year, so I create a fiction on the fly, a story that sounds correct, and people tend to believe me, because I'm sitting on a stool, wearing a ball cap. Go figure. I scored heavily with the board tonight, because they were drinking a little and I was serving, and I came off as a really dedicated employee, which I am, and could talk on any subject. My chit-chat tutorial was helpful. Mostly, no one listens. Doesn't matter what you say. The rules of the game are established by the playing field. And then. And then, the rules of engagement change. Went to sleep on the sofa before could SEND. Weary. Back to town this morning, laundry, soup and a Scottish ale at the pub, then opened the museum so I could re-hang the front wall which we had un-hung so we could hang the art work for auction. But first I had to pick up hundreds of little wooden skewers on which much of the finger food last night was served. At public functions people just drop these on the floor. There was a nice remoulade, for dipping. Beef tenderloin chunks, large shrimp, fried ravioli; excellent food prepared by Ann(e?) Jewitt, a board member (Asa's) wife. Also today, I was finding shrimp tails everywhere. I was hoping for enough left-over shrimp to make a bisque, but no such luck. The beef was all gone too. Olives left, so I snacked on those, while I policed corners and crevices. My first museum condom, in the projection booth for the theater. A good choice of location, because the theater was deeply dark, and we had almost blocked access by temporarily storing the shipping crates (oversized, a logistic nightmare) for "Alice" on that upper landing before you start down the awkward carpeted steps through the steeply tiered seats, down to the stage. That landing probably has a specific name, most things do, but I don't know it. We had, however, left a narrow path, because we needed to access the theater lights, which are controlled from the projection room. A perfect tryst location, whether scouted ahead of time, or just accidentally discovered. Guessing from scant evidence, I'd say sitting position, involving a pedestal. Making sense with words is sometimes a strange process. The tangents. Writing just that line, involved getting another drink and rolling several cigarettes, thinking about strange places I had made love. One, I'll share with you, I was a Senior at Janitor College, and we were a pretty good venue for road shows, the best for hundreds of miles in all directions. And there was grant money available, Bringing Art To The Far North, so we hosted a lot of events. That summer we booked a British Sitting-Room Comedy; the ingenue was a hot young thing, and I'm a fool for accents; I've been told that if I mention her name I'll be shot, so let's call her Jane. We hit it off. She'd never had the opportunity to completely release. There was a sofa on the set. After I set the ghost light, we would fuck until dawn. I digress. Hard not to. What life is. What's thrown in your face. I really wasn't going anyplace. Fucking condom, man, diverted me completely from where I thought I wanted to go. The way life is. She died early in the third act, and had time that we could, if she did her curtain calls quickly, regroup in a burrow we had wallowed under a hedge near one of the rear exits from the theater, and fuck our brains out while the patrons were leaving the building. Hard not to remember. The smell of bacon in the morning. I fried some shredded potatoes in the last of the bacon fat, fried a perfect egg, nuked an extra scone I'd scored this morning, slathered it with butter. A great dinner. Who's keeping time? Who cares what time of day it is? Read more...

Dead Modem

No telling when I'll send this. No chance to get a new one before Saturday. The current dead one is the fifth modem for this computer. Just about ready for the big event tomorrow night. Finished up my wine station today, table cloths and hand-towels, and got 22 bottles of white wine in the fridge, 24 bottles of red in the vault at 68 degrees. I'm pouring the reds, one of Pegi's moms is pouring the whites and another dealing with the cash. The wine table generates a lot of cash. I'll have to sample them all, and that's a nice perk, so I'll be able to bull-shit about them. I actually do know a lot about wine, the product of 20 years actually making the stuff, so I can talk the talk. Since this is the "Alice" opening, there will, of course, be people dressed up as characters and it is even remotely possible that I'll be wearing a funny hat. A reach for me. But a chance to be the white rabbit, and it's a really cool hat, and the very idea that the janitor would be the white rabbit is a progressive idea. I can't see what's on my head, I might do it. My tendency is to wear the ball-cap that says "Simple" but I've probably worn that mule to a frazzle. I've been practicing chit-chat. If my math is correct, or even close, five ounces is half-a-cup plus two tablespoons. Dr. White, who chose the wines, said a serving should be five ounces, so I mark a glass and practice pouring; ten repetitions and I'm within a really close margin. Close enough. The magic phrase, if you've ever been in the trades. "Close enough" always marked that point of diminishing returns. Where further effort to make something more nearly perfect was really just wasted time. You work at the top of your form when you work freely. No mediation. The moon is a ghostly galleon, behind stick trees, her bow is raised in an oncoming wave. A Japanese wood-block print. I pulled all the connections and licked them. It often helps, saliva is a good connector. Moisture merely. I have a connection. The problem is usually dust. Read more...

Preparations

Moving apace. Actually crossed more things off my list than I added. Bell-weather day. The Ladies brought out all the stuff for the auction, a lot of stuff, some of it very nice. D, between interruptions, matted and framed two prints and a watercolor, I made just one trip to the hardware store. Set up my wine station. I need to clean up on Thursday night and take in a change of clothes on Friday. Everyone else goes home to change, but I don't have that option, because everyone else goes home. I have to un-hang the front wall of the "Alice" show so we can hang the art that's for sale, and I sense that might be an issue, because the artist of the "Alice" show will be there, the show is sequential and narrative, and pieces three through eight will be missing. Not my problem. Tomorrow, I have to meet with the local wine expert and discuss how much to pour and what to say. I'll need to taste them, of course, to arrive at my own conclusions, and I probably won't spit anything out. Promised Sara I'd come in and re-hang the front wall Saturday, I'll have to do my laundry anyway, do some shopping, before colder weather returns. But my god it was lovely outside today. I watched a flock of grackles flying into and out of the Oriental Pear trees in the parking lot across the way, amusing and graceful in their swoopings and turnings. Those particular trees, 800 feet lower than the ridge, are still almost totally leafed, in beautiful scarlet leaves, and the grackles infiltrate a specific tree completely, they're packed in like sardines, and when they feel the Jones to move, it takes dozens of seconds for them to vacate one property and invade another, with various loops between. A kind of play, certainly, triggered by the change in temperature. A really smart set of birds are the ones that live at Home Depot. It's heated, for god's sake. Why migrate when you can live at Home Depot? Of course, within a couple of generations, you've gotten too fat, on pop-corn droppings, to even think about migrating, your wings have atrophied and you're too heavy to fly. Tradeoffs. I heard a great joke, I'll try to remember: if you have one minor fender bender you're not known as Crashing Tom, one night sleeping under the hedge doesn't make you the town drunk, but you fuck one pony. I'm just saying, it doesn't seem fair, she wasn't hobbled. An ungulate in heat, will accept any prick, I've lived on the farm too long. Not that I ever would, but who cares? we're all so different. You might still believe in God and I could believe everything was happenstance. The initial moment is a problem. A huge problem. I choose to carry a butterfly net and act as if nothing is happening. Fuck you and your helmet to helmet contact. I'd prefer something more considered, we might think about contracts. Read more...

Lovely Weather

Mid 30's at night, mid 60's day time high. Most of the leaves are gone. The switch back to EST means that if I have a beer with D and Anthony after work, I get home in the dark. I don't like driving after dark anymore. But they have a great Scottish Ale on tap right now. Friday night I'm pouring wine at the fund-raiser, good stuff, 6 and 8 bucks a glass. I told Pegi I'd pour the wine if she got one of her Cirque moms to handle the cash. Won't get home before 10. Deer season, will need to drive slow, especially the last five miles, on Mackletree, because the deer browse the under-story on both sides of the road. It can be a gauntlet. D ask me what I had done today, and I had to stop and think about it. I did three dishwasher loads of wine glasses, in prep for the party, took two loads of stuff to the basement, set up tables, hauled away garbage, vacuumed the plaster dust from setting 90 anchors (a job from hell, really), made numerous trips to the third floor, carrying glass and mats from the last show, spent an hour walking around the building, mostly outside, with a guy from a company who's giving us a price for doing some exterior work on the building. There's a grant involved. I'm a little sore, from working hard, and it feels kind of good. On my way out of town I stop and get a roast beef sandwich and some curly fries, no way I'm cooking tonight. The rest of this week, for that matter. I'll probably eat a burger too, all my sins remembered. A footer with onion rings, which I will have eaten before I get home, because the smell will have stopped me at the lake. This weather, I usually carry a beer under the driver's seat, because you never know. What if I got stuck in traffic? There's always a book in my pack. When everyone else is getting upset, I'm rolling a smoke, reading a book, drinking a bottle of beer. Any break in any imagined routine is fine with me. I'm heading to Florida a day early, so that if I'm delayed a day it wouldn't matter, I'll make crab-cakes and we'll talk about cornbread. I'll have to make greens. The vote is in for baby-back pork ribs at Thanksgiving, with a sweet potato thing, butter beans, and coleslaw. I'm good with that, as long as Kevin can pick the girls up at the airport, because I'll need to be cooking. Evidently Kevin and Rhea have been tweeting. Arrangements made, I'm merely the cook. Cool, I can deal with that. Variations on crab-cakes. Read more...

Expectations

There was always the assumption, that if you made it through Janitor College, you'd end up at the Met, or the Chicago Institute, or someplace where you just manipulated robots to do the actual cleaning. I hadn't foreseen hanging art as a final occupation. Had long imagined, as Dr. Quint railed, that I'd end up in knee-pads, in an area I had cordoned off with orange cones and plastic tape, with a comb, flipping bits of dry shit free. His lesson was that shit wasn't difficult to deal with, if you let it dry. You flip the shit free, after it's dry, and vacuum it up, wipe the area with cheap perfume. It's not rocket science. Turned down a lucrative gig recently, because I don't fly, dealing with the carpet in Buckingham Palace, where there's an aging Queen with old dogs. I couldn't trust myself to remain civil, even if I could fly, which I can't. At some point the dogs stay in the doghouse and you visit them there. You don't walk the dogs through the dining room. That's akin to inviting failure. The orange traffic cone was Dr. Quint's invention, he was just looking for a way to let shit dry. His stainless steel comb looked like a weapon but he just used it to flip flakes of dried matter free from the fiber of carpet. Beautiful, really. A stroke, a note, a nod to the unknown. Bach as janitor. The scene opens with a view of empty warehouses, then we focus in on a strip mall that's barely surviving, the soprano sings a lovely aria of loss, her family (oriental, Chinese) restaurant is failing, the bass counters with an argument for violence, as if that could be a solution. The tenor, meanwhile, was making off with the ingenue. The lovely daughter with buck teeth sings a ballad. Our hero, the baritone, was a orthographer who could give her the correct font. Not to be underestimated, the bad guy, the bass, argues we should kill everyone. The sultry maiden cautions we should, maybe, slow down. Opera. Read more...

Firewood

There was a required course at Janitor College, an entry level course, Principles Of Sanitation, taught by a real curmudgeon, Dr. Thadeus Quint. Mostly he railed against the trackers of dogshit into public institutions. I remembered him today because I spent the day working firewood, half-hour on, half-hour off, and due to dog and her pups, I tracked dogshit everywhere. I'd picked up a new Jeffery Deaver novel, especially to read on my breaks today, and as if to further exasperate my patience, the prose was uniformly excruciating. I threw it across the room and reread some Jim Harrison essays. Made progress on the wood, though. Cut and split most of what was in the woodshed, then policed the yard, pulling sticks I had brought home during the summer from the weeds and leaning them against trees, so they could lose their surface moisture before I put them in the shed, then hauled two truck loads of pre-cuts from the driveway. Filled the woodbox, split kindling and small stuff. A day like this, I just burn various knots and branches, junk really, but enough to warm the house, heat water to wash my hair and take a sponge bath. A very quiet day, no wind, just the occasional dried leaf giving up the ghost and spiraling down. I don't speak to anyone, mumble a few words that occur to me, yell once at the dog when she clogs the path between the woodshed and the house. I make a small batch of chorizo to form a couple of patties to have on a split toasted biscuit with salsa. It exceeds my expectations. Tiny versions of these would be great finger food. I eat the larger version with a fork, with my right hand, while I hold a book in my left, a treatise on fly-fishing. It's so still outside, right now, that a falling leaf is an event, and the quiet is absolute. All the sounds I hear I make myself. Moving my chair, grunting, that restricted cough when I take a toke. Dr. Quint made the point that there were accidents, but that when there was a horizontal pattern, it usually just meant someone was trying to get shit off their shoe. Read more...

Road Trip

Looking at the map, projecting. Going down I might spend the night in Columbia, South Carolina; on the way back, in Norton, Virginia. Just a guess, I don't make reservations. Tomorrow I need to get to town for salad makings and booze. The brindle pup is a cute thing, I think he will be a monster, hybrid vigor, he dives face-first into the feed. If I fought dogs, he'd be my first choice. I don't fight dogs, or chickens, you know what I mean. Quick trip into town for some supplies, water and liquids mostly. Spent a few hours working on firewood. Tomorrow I need to cut everything in the woodshed, then move the wood I've left along the driveway under cover. There's a good bit, spread here and there, and now that the driveway is truly passable, I can buy a round. $100 for a dry, split, small dump-truck load. Back on EST, the day winds down rather quickly. Falls into chill. I get a hell of a fire going and make another batch of biscuits. A fresh biscuit, split in half, covered in cheese, run through the oven, then topped with sliced avocado, is a revelation. Anything is good on a fresh biscuit, deviled ham and jalapenos, peanut butter, the last of a pot of beans. I had the last of yesterday's biscuits, for lunch, split, buttered, covered with canned sardines and a slice of onion, heated through. I think of this as fusion cooking. I'm probably just confused. I studied biscuit making at the hands of my mother, it's all feel, nothing is ever measured, you rub the flour into the fat until the grains are the right size, then you add buttermilk, roll it out and cut them. No big deal. But try this at home and you have flour on the ceiling, fat on the walls, and nothing that resembles a real southern biscuit. I had to watch for a long time before I realized it was a matter of feel. That fucking butterfly in Mexico, everything did affect everything else. I wasn't playing close enough attention, the story of my life, most everything passes me by. Looking at a leaf when a swallow is the story. Eat the whole batch of biscuits, one, with lump crabmeat heated in butter, with several grinds of black pepper, is so good, I actually cry out loud. Read more...

First Snow

The ground is warmer than the air, so this sleet snow shit melts when it hits earth. Still, it announces a paradigm shift. The leaves are mostly gone, soul and a witness, oh my lord. Winter again, cold wind and snow. Get on your knees and pray. Hard freeze overnight and a dusting this morning. I spend a couple of hours cleaning the cookstove, the various pipes and chases, then, finally, start a fire. The house is so cold it takes hours to heat back up. I park myself in front of the stove on my Selma, Alabama, rocking chair, reading a new Gunter Grass memoir. Not as good as his big sprawling novels (I liked "The Flounder" best), then a pile of literary criticism off-prints. Lunch is a monster toasted two-cheese sandwich with thick slices of onion, drinking very hot chicken broth. Then reading poetry by George Oppen, Skip Fox, Louis Zukofsky, then editing myself. When the oven got quite hot (450 degrees) I made a batch of biscuits and pretty much ate them all. Suit up and go for a small walk, down the logging road, more now just a trail winding through young poplars. A tear-inducing wind. It's difficult to examine color closely, through a magnifying glass, when you're crying. In the lee of a rock outcrop, where, years ago, I placed a stump seat, I roll a smoke and consider the seasonal openness across the hollows. Once again, I can see the horizon. On the way back to house, I find a tiny skull, a rodent of some sort, and I stand there, in the cold wind, turning it over in my hands (which are red, and gloveless) thinking about life and death. Nothing profound, just that they both happened; I have new puppies under the house and dying parents. When I get home I have to mute NPR and kill the breaker for the fridge, finally take off Linda's knit watch-cap, which I've worn since early this morning, and scratch my head. Scratching is such secret fun, best done alone, with no hidden camera. Never underestimate your audience. Read more...

Cold Rain

Snow tomorrow. Still haven't had a frost on the ridge top, but the bottoms of all the hollows, and the entire valley of Mackletree, will be encased in ice at dawn tomorrow. Cold flows like a liquid, settling in the lower spots. On the ridge, sumac flames a brilliant red, the sassafras is a perfect yellow. The leaves are so deep I have to walk carefully, because of the acorns under foot. I leave my truck at the bottom of the hill, hiking in with a few things, cream for my coffee, juice, a few cans of soup, whiskey, tobacco; I eat, I drink, I smoke. Mac has offered money for the transition, I may take him up on that, this brutal life is a younger man's game. What I need is hot running water and a thermostat. This would be the winter of my discontent. I can't do this, and I don't want that. I bury my ears in a down bag, I don't want to hear. Survival is a marginal thing. Phone and electricity out, so I read by oil lamp. Finally crawl back in bed, tucked under multiple layers. Drag myself upright, running late, shave wearing the sweatshirt I've altered for cold mornings (the neck band is cut out, so I can shave my neck) and head to town. Sure enough, all the roofs are covered in frost, while on the ridge it was 38 degrees. Much colder the next three nights, then warming somewhat. D and I are both exhausted, but we do the lighting, do the labels, I touch-up the pedestals upstairs, start hauling gear to the basement. Finally, at 4:30, D tells me to go home, I'm limping, and every time I stop I just stare into space. The solace of the middle distance. Hike in again, because of the projected snow. I need to clean the smoke chase in the cookstove, knock down the stovepipe, and bang on the spark prevention stovepipe cap, a task I have perfected to just leaning out an upstairs window and hitting the damned thing with a length of bamboo. I will no longer climb a ladder 19 feet in the air. I want the cookstove dead cold in the morning, so I just turn the two oil-filled electric radiators on low. It'll be cold in the house tonight, maybe 50 degrees, like winter camping in a tent. Waiting for this first frost, to kill the bugs, before I spend a long day under the house, re-insulating the second half of the floor, which I didn't get done last year. Bugs can bother me more than cold: I can put on a lot of clothes, and as long as it doesn't get below freezing inside, I'm fine. It gets hard to type, but I wear shooter's gloves, because I only type with two fingers anyway. It's hard to roll cigarettes when your fingers are cold. The area outside the main building at Janitor College, Janus Hall, imagine a snow bank eight feet tall on either side, and a trampled corridor that might have been twelve feet wide running between. Everyone rolled their own, a common denominator, and that space, that furrowed space, was dark brown in failed cigarettes. Sometimes I surprise myself. I like those last couple of sentences. The second 'that' could be replaced with 'the', but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Who would notice? I read things fifty times, because I'm looking for the nuance. Take a single paragraph of Proust and read it several times, it unfolds. Familiarity breeds content. Consider Emily. "Called Back", what a world of information is conveyed. But I don't have a degree in philosophy, so I'm hesitant to say anything. Sleet. Frozen fucking rain by any other name. Read more...

Next Phase

First phase of cleaning up, which means remove the large things, a little painting left to do. I paint a lot. Anthony came over to repaint the pedestal tops he had painted black to better display his plaster casts in the Construction show, now the ped tops need restored to semi-gloss white. He volunteered. Bless his large heart. Mostly what I did today was add things to my list. D again tomorrow and we'll mount labels, focus lights. When the show comes alive. Magic time really, when the curtain goes up, even after all these years, I still enjoy that moment. Even in the tactile arts, finishing a house, or that moment, when I was a letterpress printer, printings an edition of a few hundred, of which maybe 30 would be hardbound, lettered and signed and a couple of proof copies, that moment when the first hardbound copy was tipped into boards, was similar. The stirring of jubilation. A little jig across the floor. Anymore it's a kind of slow shuffle, over to the island to roll a cigaret and get a drink. Josh, a friend of the pub owners, is a great guy, a fireman, on 24 off 48, and they all have a second job; he's a builder, and he's hanging D's sign at the pub. We three go over for a pint, and he's attaching the bracket that will hold the sign. The sign is heavy. I wonder about his attachment. Not my job, but I have an ongoing fascination with methods of attachment. He notices my concern and explains his take on the sub-strate. There have been reports of Tap-Con failure in old brick, so he's setting lead sleeves for the Tap-Cons, I approve of his method, too strong a word, I concur, that his consideration is correct. This is hard to explain, but I looked at the method he was using to solve a problem, and found it similar to my own. An affinity. A deep-seated connection. I think we'll probably end up serious friends, I'll know his wife and kid, and way too much about their personal finance. Spare me. You get to know anyone, patterns come into play, the background, what you hadn't thought enough about. I was thinking about snakes. I don't know why. Yes I do, there was dog around. Read more...

Hanging Art

By the end of yesterday, with various interruptions, I'd only hung a few pieces, done the math for a few more. Daunting task today. But when framed sizes are uniform there is a set of numbers. Once you have these numbers, you can really fly. I roll out a board-room chair, to sit on while I do the math, but then I try and have everything at hand for D so it is a smooth operation. We were as good as it gets today. One piece is a quarter-inch too high, with that exception, the show is visually perfect. We set up three additional panels (scary units) and hang all 45 pieces. Maybe we were actually hanging for 6 hours, 6 times sixty divided by 45, we hang an image every 8 minutes. I'm so wasted at the end of the day I can't speak. We're actually done at three o'clock, which means the number is closer to 6 minutes. I waste time as a matter of course, smoke with anyone willing, out on the loading dock. I don't involve myself in politics, fucking waste of time, I do vote, and keep track of what's going on, but no longer carry a sign and might get myself shot with a rubber bullet. I could dine on the Jersey Shore, but I'd have to do the cooking. Wherever I go, I always do the cooking. Rain turning to snow. I need to turn inward, but I'm not sure what's there. I'm depleted, a shadow of my former self, I walk funny and I'm tired. Granted, we did the impossible today, but it nearly killed me. In the future I can only do the impossible every other week, it takes too much out of you. I can't sleep, there's too much to do, I wake in a sweat about the labels. The real problem with hanging a show in a day is that it would come to be expected. 45 pieces in a day? Unbelievable. Couldn't really be done. But they did it, as a matter of course. I'm tired and my feet hurt. Fucking tile floor. D and I work so well together, it's a mystery. Nearly perfect, and almost effortlessly. I throw the numbers around, a pattern emerges. I remind him what the numbers are because his short term memory is shot. I only remember certain numbers because there is a pattern. I'm a walking talking bean pole. Read more...

Math Skills

Phone was out last night, fall winds, there must be another post somewhere in limbo. Waiting To Be Sent. Set the show this morning in record time because we did arrange them sequentially and they were all numbered on the back. Turned them around then a few dozen trips around the gallery, then lunch, then James, the board member in charge of the big fund-raiser, came in and bent my ear. By the time I got around to hanging art my math skills weren't functioning. D and I need to have a major day tomorrow. I got a few pieces hung and marks on the walls for a few more, but after four o'clock we try to not hang anything, unless we're desperate and under the gun. Too many mistakes happen. What we call forced human error. I find Eli's number and give him a call, offer him the place for a price. I guess I'm serious about this. Last year's broken toe has healed badly (is that possible?) and walking isn't quite the same. A little painful when I ask too much of my left foot. Fucking damage is beginning to show. Move to town, get a bicycle and a shopping cart, something to hold me up. I could limp around for a few years. Don't rule me out. I very much want to write a book about Janitor College. I don't know what form it would take. Mostly my math skills come from notched sticks that record lunations. I do simple math really well; occasionally I venture into the unknown, where there might be two or even three unknowns at a specific place. Writing is difficult. The next thing you were going to say. I read minds, it's a sideline., was that I had guessed correctly. Of course, when you're in the groove. Everything is perfect and you're right, I'm way stupid and my hearing is bad, but I still sense things. Read more...

Nothing Matters

The apparent world is illusion. It's all in your head. There is no reality, just a consensus of opinion. A sorry base for action. Nothing makes any sense. Not to make too fine a point. And what you see is merely an altered image, not the thing itself, photo-shop, everything rearranged. Gotta learn to go back to sleep. Must have, for a little while, then up and off to the museum, to wait for the "Alice" show. Supposed to be between 10 and 12, finally arrives at 2:30. Ridiculous to pack 45 pieces in just three crates, one of them, the largest, weighs 303 lbs.and won't fit through a doorway. The other two fit through ok, had to take the monster down the alley, then up and in the loading dock; went next door to the bar and got Chris to help us get it inside and on a dolly. Pain in the gut. Should have been in maybe 9 crates. So we pop the lids and start pulling out art. They're much larger than we expected (we knew the size of the image, but weren't told the amount of matting and framing, image size is useless information) and it's a huge show. All 45 pieces hang on D rings, which is an excellent method of hanging, but the most pain-staking to install. There is no margin for error. It's after four before we get them all cheek to jowl around the perimeter. Some great images. Sara, D and I walk around, muttering. Sara will set the show tomorrow, I'll walk at least 20 miles. If I could get a single wall hung, I'd feel better about my prospects. Mostly, we'll hang the show on Wednesday, nothing I can't finish up on Thursday, and we'd still be safely within the margin. But it's asking too much, really, to hang this show in a day and a half. I have to paint the tops of all the pedestals where Steven's altered furniture resides, I have to clean the entire museum, I have to set up for the big fund-raiser, I have to fix the toilet in the basement, it's needs a new flapper valve. When you get right down to it, there aren't that many worker bees at the museum. Not a complaint, because mostly running a museum is about fund-raising and talking on the phone. Business. What I do, the nuts and bolts, is a small part. I had felt strongly that the show was sequential. I know the story. It's iconic. There's a narrative. Snow flurries on Friday. I'm not ready, this comes as something of a surprise. Then I realized I hadn't flipped the calendar page over, and it was now November, when we sometimes had snow, before the real cold kicked in just after Christmas. A bear of a show to hang. Three large prints, ten small, and 32 that are three-foot square. I'll need a good level (we just bought a new one, but D dropped it) and a string, AND a story pole: a stick, with marks where the D rings center. A show like this, the frames need to align perfectly. Not possible in the real world, because when you drill a hole in a plaster wall with a hammer drill, the surface texture controls the bit. I center my holes with a tool called a 'drift', a sharp pointed heavy punch, but I'm still at the mercy of wall texture. It's like walking on acorns, sliding on gravel, writing on an uneven surface, you don't have absolute control. Probably, if I can be within a 16th of an inch, I'll be ok. An 8th of inch you'd see from ten feet away, and it would bother your eye. I'm not really a perfectionist, but it's small things that affect (effect) what we see. I can do the math, which is complex enough, but it isn't enough, I need to sense exactly where things should go. The Installer's Paradox. I'm too stupid to assume the party line. Which would be a laser line. Straight across any affiliation. Life is more complex than that. What we're faced with is unspeakable, mountaintop removal. I have to go sleep. Good luck with the rest of it.
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