I've lost another inch since the last time I posted, fortunately it was from my spine and not something I'd be REALLY upset about. I mean, jesus, this makes four and a half inches in five years. Mister Stumpy! So... I've resigned myself to taking the awful, monthly, poison pill my Dr has given me. Lovely stuff to fix crumbling bones. "Often results in extreme bone and muscle pain, also associated with spontaneous hip fractures." ...And there's the starter's gun and he's .....down? Oh, it was just his hip snapping in two as he stood still in from of the easel.
Oh, and how could I forget....my house! Listing ever more seriously to port, it is now being stripped, ripped and beaten into the upright and foursquare. I am interred in the last untouched room, once bright now a crowded barrow, dark and threatening where I'm surrounded by gap mouthed brown boxes in towers and mounds deep and tall. They all glower at me, resentful of me, of the one who brought this burden upon them. These dust laden boxes in heaps stacked and teetering, slouching beneath their loads in clusters all around the great room - the only room left to me - like little, post-apocalyptic shanty towns frightened of others, leaning threateningly at me, staring out blank-faced at me, at that guy who's not one of us. They have me trapped, under siege and they wait. They want my bed. That's it. Yeah, it's here in the last room with me now, too. They want to sully the crisp white sheets of my faithful four-poster bed. They want to consume it, bury it under their ugly papery bottoms. Desecrate the memories resting in my former now lamented and beached Puerto Rican Party Barge. My once raucous battleship of lust and rage where my misspent youth finally somehow ended - limply, softly giving in to it's flaccid doom.
My studio has been closed to me for weeks, now. I have enough space for my students and shoo the workers away while I teach. But, I can't paint with the workmen overhead dropping clouds of dust and firing away furiously with nail guns. Nail guns. I think Dick Cheeeney invented them. They're powered by red, squatting, round air compressors that recharge themselves with thundering motorized farts of volcanic decibel levels not heard since Vesuvius cut the one that pasted Pompey. What's worse - there are two of the infernal things so they recharge at differing times...rudy, foul mechanical toads loudly brrrrrripping at each other across the murky pond of my sanity.
Soon it will all be done, though. I figure eight, 12 weeks at the most and we can start a draw down of the troops. Raising the roof of the garage to 16ft and moving the studio out there will be the end game.
Well.....to those of you safely outside "Fortress USA" give us a thought and a prayer if you practice such crafts. It's election season when all the intelligent people hide and the toothless mobs with pitchforks and blood in their eyes take over the joint on behalf of Jesus and his Pop. Sheesh....what fresh hell are we!?
Later peeps!
