PureSchmaltz

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Resettling

Resettling
Paul Gauguin:
Manao tupapau [She Thinks of the Ghost or The Ghost Thinks of Her]
(1894/95)


"The playing field suddenly seems wide open."


I peeked into The Muse's office yesterday and found her desk barren, her large display monitor and high speed printer gone, returned to The National Lab as a sure sign of her retirement. We returned to a different place than we left. Further, we returned different people than the ones who left, too. The cats were the first to notice. We came as ghosts and, once familiar patterns disrupted, neither cat seemed to know what to do with our presence. It took a day for them to switch back, or really attempt to. The house, too, seemed changed. Absent the presence of The Muse's career responsibilities, the place seemed more open, freer. It would take some Resettling to settle back in here, though I wonder if there might not be any real back to begin settling into. This rehabitation might well be an invention.

People our age refer to their forever home.

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HotPillow

hotpillow
Ary de Vois: Jacob’s Dream (1660 - 1680)


" … just as long as I don't have to make a steady habit …"


The Muse admits to being a hotel snob. After all those years spent working for the lab, through which she most months traveled at least a few days, she developed certain standards, certain expectations for what a hotel should and should not provide. Because she stayed at first class hotels when traveling on business (Why not? She received the government rate!), her previous minimum standards shifted upward. Believe me, we've stayed at some marginal digs, the kind author James Elroy referred to as HotPillow joints, implying that their primary business might not be providing places of rest but of salacious exercise. Few experiences prove quite as upsetting as discovering, typically at about three in the morning, that your sleeping room is adjacent to a brothel. This sort of thing rarely happens in your higher class lodgings, but probably only because they feature more effective soundproofing.

Now that The Muse has retired, she loses some of her previous perks, government lodging rates among them.

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Trans-IT-ioning

trans-it-ioning
Caspar David Friedrich:
The Woman with the Spider Web between Bare Trees (1803)


" … deferring arrival into our future together …"


The Muse retired three days ago, but because we haven't arrived back at The Villa Vatta Schmaltz yet, she's still Trans-IT-ioning into whatever she will next become. The traveling days serve as a buffer, allowing us both to try on fresh identities, and I say "us both" because while she's retired, my role changes, too. One cannot change any element within a tightly-bound system without also effecting every other piece, and our relationship's no exception. The Invisible Husband might not have retired, but his role significantly shifted with The Muse's. I think it a significant blessing that we're sort of dawdling our way back home, since it provides an opportunity to stumble across a fresh identity or two and try them on along the way. These things take time.

We visited The Golden Spike National Monument on our way through Utah, perhaps a premise to extend our Trans-IT-ioning, but a worthwhile one.

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TakingTime

takingtime
Weegee (Arthur Fellig): Weegee by Weegee (c. 1953)


"a thief for this day"


The outward trip insisted upon arriving "on time," for we travelled with purpose. The Muse had obligations, presentations to perform, and she could not afford to be tardy, so I drove as if MakingTime. Returning, The Muse freshly retired, urgency seemed to have been bled out of us by then. She lazed around until she was good and ready to get up, and I patiently played along. I felt anxious to get back, as I always am on the return leg of any trip, home calling, but she seemed in no hurry so we began the day's drive with the morning already half gone. Further, I drove passively, not insisting upon even keeping to the speed limit, cruising for something other than progress. We passed through Glenwood Canyon. Any day marked by passage through that timeless portal proves remarkable, whatever else might happen.

We found a mediocre barbecue joint for lunch, where I was served what seemed like a cud of pork and The Muse, an over-done and dry rib, each more satisfying than they had any right to seem.

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ExilesEnd

Exile'sEnd
Gustave Courbet: Panoramic View of the Alps,
Les Dents du Midi
(1877) unfinished work


"We gained a garden at the cost of losing that world …"


When does an exile end? The homecoming just begins the exit, for attachments made out there still hold. The Muse retained her position, so she continued connecting in more or less the same fashion after relocating home. She became a remote worker, just like any other until The Damned Pandemic started lifting. Then, she'd occasionally return, working in borrowed space, back into the workplace she'd inhabited before. Her exile followed her back home, her liberation incomplete until this week when she formally retired, turned in her credentials, and forfeited her computer and phone. Her departure almost seemed like the start of yet another exile as we drove through Golden, a town we'd grown so damned familiar with during the actual exile.

I, too, sensed the continuing connection, my well-practiced role of The Invisible Husband during the exile, continued even after we returned home.

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Morebility

morebility
Charles Laborde: Traffic, Montmartre (1925)


"Mobility has become its opposite."


My mobility will very likely be the death of me, for I cannot seem to deny the primal urge to move. My dissatisfaction with simply sitting invites me into perhaps the most self destructive habit on this planet, driving. The imagined freedom of the road goads many into what I might label Morebility, the morbidity of movement; movement for its own sake, movement as compulsion, movement as self-justifying. In the small city to which The Muse and I have settled, traffic only rarely presents a problem. When the travel time across the whole place takes about eight minutes during the peak of rush hour, such as it is, nobody's really in the business of seriously trying to limit the number of cars on the road. Along the Front Range of Colorado, though, traffic has become much more than a problem. It seems more a disease as each takes their leave and the roads quickly clog, filled to beyond their design capacity for several hours each day. Rush hour moves at a snail's pace. Freedom of movement becomes a parody of itself.

The Gods, of course, absolutely love this stuff.

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AThousandMiles

athousandmiles
Katsushika Hokusai: A Mild Breeze on a Fine Day (Gaifu kaisei),
from the series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei)”
(c. 1830/33)


" … enough distance to change the past."


I woke up AThousandMiles away from home, and feeling the distance. I sensed a deep familiarity along with an accompanying alienation, for this place, once the site of our extended exile, no longer belongs to us or us to it. When we owned a home here, I could at least believably imagine that I belonged. Since we left, I'd hardly given it an idle thought. Yet here I am and here it is, confronting each other again. Me, with my muscle memory still so well-tuned to this context that my fingers remember when to change the cruise control speed in perfect anticipation of an upcoming change. I remember which lane sets me up for the turn, just like an old hand.

I notice that this place has not stood still in my absence.

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StoryOuting

storyouting
Unknown Artisan(s)-Netherlands, early 16th century:
Story of Perseus and Andromeda (early 1500s)


"We are stories perhaps never coherently told …"


Faced with the existential crisis a birthday brings, I long ago ceased shopping for relief. I decided that I could not possibly buy myself out of this dilemma brought on by the urgent need to give the very best gift. In the past, I've usually resorted to producing a poem, and there've been plenty in their time. [I excuse The Muse her …, you get the drift.] I've sometimes produced an original song, one of which was the first ever Folk Noir tune and another, which accurately predicted our future. (The Invisible Husband, circa 2011.) This year, The Muse's Day happened when we were away. I attempted to write a poem while creeping around our shared hotel room but the context didn't feel right and the words wouldn't come. Writing a poem, especially one of potential importance, will not just come if beaconed. It must be reckoned with. It comes when it's ready and never entirely due to any sense of urgency, which most often serves to scare off the damned thing, anyway. Birthdays, as I said, produce existential crises.

We had five hundred miles of two lane blacktop looking at us, a day of traveling ahead.

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MakingTime

makingtime
attributed to Mewar Stipple Master:
Prince Amar Singh Drives His Own Elephant (c. 1695)


" … I will have become a system …"


What am I doing while I'm driving? That's a complicated question that gets down on one knee and begs an equally complicated answer; but I'm a simple man, one more prone to simplification than explication. I hold deep suspicions about anyone attempting to definitely answer that question, for too many moving parts get involved, along with human emotion. No, my friend, that's one terribly, terribly complication question.

I, myself, seem barely present when driving.

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LeaveTaking

takingleave
Jean-Léon Gérôme: Leaving the Oasis (1880s)


" … having re-earned our presence by being good and gone."


Folk songwriter John Gorka once insisted that as a traveling performer, he left more often than he ever came back. There was a time when The Muse and I lived like that. We lived as if on a continual grand tour, departing before gravity could catch us, always on the move. The Damned Pandemic slowed our viscosity. We rarely take leave now. A whole other existence lays on the flip side of mobility, a settled life, a more dependable existence. One can come to think of one's self as indispensable by default, since the home place rarely needs to get along without one's presence. Absence becomes unthinkable and the promise of LeaveTaking feels like an existential threat. I spend a few days in growing denial before finally accepting the inevitability less than twenty-four hours before departure time.

In the final hours, The Muse suggests that we might fly instead of drive, and I put down my foot. With This Damned Pandemic, I won't fly.

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TheIrrelevancies

theirrelevencies
William Michael Harnett: Memento Mori, "To This Favour" (1879)


" … inevitably slipping into a growing good twilight."


Mastering TheIrrelevancies might be that true purpose of advancing age, for youth becomes obsessed with establishing the relevance nobody can take to their grave. A younger generation will always be on the heels of any one spawned before it, and they must and will find the flaws in their forebears' arguments if they ever hope to gain prominence for their own. Some try to fight this trend and attempt relevancy until the ultimately bitterer end, an exit inevitably rendered ever more bitter and irrelevant, but irrelevancy by omission turns out to be a much, much different experience than irrelevancy by commission, the former a form of humiliation, the latter holding hope for at least some sort of salvation.

The GrandOther fulfills her part in this grand scheme by purposefully discounting pretty much everything I mention.

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CellAbrate

cellabrate
John Singer Sargent: The Birthday Party (1885)


"Each birthday just reminds me that the lifeday's the thing …"


I can't say how much I appreciate all the birthday greetings I received yesterday. I can declare that I deeply appreciated each and every one and would have written a lengthy response to each had the volume not overwhelmed me. Many insisted that I should take the day off to celebrate, which I did, but probably not in the way any of my well wishers envisioned. There was no cake. In these Damned Pandemic times, no gathering. No party, no favors. No rabble roused, nothing soused. I celebrated as I damned well pleased, as I secretly prefer. I engaged in my usual activities of daily living a tad bit more mindfully than usual, appreciating what I had, not seeking to acquire any more than I already possessed. No presents. No pretenses. I reheated leftovers for supper, fled to bed early, and slept a sleep of angels. Happy, happy birthday, indeed.

I remember when I was about ten, my parents organized a birthday party for me.

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Schrödingers

schroedingers
Giovanni di Paolo:
Saint John the Baptist Entering the Wilderness (1455/60)


"May I prove worthy of my future …"


Each morning, I sit before my keyboard possessing another unstated story. In some ways that story will only degrade from that initial point, for with each finished sentence, its potential further collapses into just whatever it will be. At the moment of inception, it could include anything. By the time I finish writing it, or call it done enough, it will have become a definite and smaller presence. It will have become unique and specific rather than general and infinite. In this way, I seize each day.

I'm coming to acknowledge that first moment as a Schrödinger, in homage to Erwin Schrödinger, who, in 1935, attempted to criticize an interpretation of a quantum condition by explicitly describing a paradox whereby a hypothetical cat may be considered simultaneously both alive and dead as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.

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PlotTwisting

PlotTwisting
Edward Burne-Jones: The Garden Court (1870–75)


" … the ability to fall apart into unanticipated constituent bits …"


The standard fairy tales seem anything but standard, for each story prominently features some barely believable PlotTwisting. What might have begun as a straightforward stroll to grandmother's house, invariably turns into something much more interesting and, frankly, barely believable, if believable at all. Wolves do not as a general rule wear a grandmother's clothing, even after swallowing her whole. They rarely consent to crawl into anyone's bed, let alone come inside, even to chide a remarkably innocent and gullible Little Red Ridinghood, who, remarkably, does absolutely no riding in the whole story, though in the story's final scene, she does manage to perform some major surgery—or is that an autopsy?—as she extracts whole and otherwise unharmed, though apparently unmentionably slimy, her previously swallowed grandmother from the wolf's belly. The whole story's allegory, twisting in an uneven wind.

Your story and mine are, if scrutinized, hardly any less believable than the least of Hans Christian Andersen's.

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LivingInTheDark

livinginthedark
Marsden Hartley: The Dark Mountain (1909)


" … blindness seems to help me see some things better."


The more we learn about our universe, the more light seems an alien element. Our Earth, like its moon, naturally produces almost no light, but depends upon light cast by a rather distant sun. We "see" into our universe by means of light, mostly the ultraviolet kind we cannot sense without mechanical assistance. What little light we manage to produce, fleeting and dim, slips through our fingers, gone almost before we sense it and certainly leaving more than ever arriving. In a galactic sense, we LiveInTheDark. Nobody in any distant galaxy has been tracking me by the light we emit because we hardly qualify as even a dim bulb in the firmament, though we still remain eminently capable of sometimes feeling absolutely full of ourselves.

Most, and me included, hug close to our light sources.

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DoggedDays

DoggedDays
Pieter van der Heyden (engraver),
after
Pieter Bruegel (artist):
The Four Seasons: Summer (1570)


" … as if splooting somewhere in the middle of a frozen food aisle."


I abandon my bed just after midnight, wondering if night cooling has finally rid us of the previous day's heat. These Dogg
edDays of summer exhaust me. The Muse does not complain as I disappear to lie in front of a box fan or into the shadows of a lengthy mid-day nap, replete with disturbing dreams. These dreams further exhaust me, refreshment presently beyond my grasp. I hold my compass heading but make little progress. The Muse asks what I have in mind for dinner and I reply with a distracted, "Nothing," before resuming what I wasn't doing before she asked. Friends flee to the beach where fog and cool breezes bring respite. Here, wheat harvest continues and the air fills with chaff and dust and the scent of diesel engines. A flour mill burned down last weekend in Pendleton, victim of a bad bushing and an inattentive watchman. The initial fire was quickly drenched and a watchman posted to monitor for flareups. The watchman was pulled after a few hours and a couple of hours later, that fire flared and nobody was there to report the incident. By the time the brigade returned, the place had burned into a smoking shell, a total loss. Blame the DoggedDays of August.

August rhymes with exhausted.

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Mutualizing

mutualizing
Giuseppe Baldrighi: Lion (1750s)


" … this world is better off, too."


I start most days with a period of interspecies communication, Mutualizing, with Max our cat. He initiates these sessions. I'm uncertain about the details from his perspective, but I suspect that he's showing me appreciation and respect when he ambles into the library to hop up onto my lap and stretch out for a scratch and a purr. We share not even the odd verb, but I sense that we're conversing after a fashion. The chat always starts with some questions and tentative answers. Sometimes, he hesitates but consents to allow me to pick him up by the scruff and plop him onto my lap. Other times, he clambers up onto the chair back and climbs down my shirtfront. He quickly settles in, sometimes for no more than a minute—"Just checking in," he seems to say—and other times, he'd stay for hours if I didn't have business to attend to after an hour. He usually lingers for a half hour, sprawling, completely vulnerable, trusting and peaceful.

I cannot imagine a more reassuring way to start any day than to have a fine cat, who could easily choose sublime independence, decide to share some of his wildness with me, seemingly appreciatively.

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Sloughing

sloughing
Margaret Bourke-White:
World’s Highest Standard of Living [Silver Gelatin Print]
(1937)


"Arbeit macht frei!"


I fail to explain, even to myself, how I came to live this essentially binary existence where I'm either working hard or hardly working, producing something or Sloughing off. There seems to be no middle ground, or none that I've found. Even when I manage to tucker myself out, I have not even then earned a rest. What respite I grant myself, I account for as laziness, pure and simple. What rest I take, I consider sloth rather than rejuvenation, and I allow myself only the barest minimum. Beyond that, I start accumulating guilt about failing to properly apply myself. I consider myself to be a wasting asset, one which degrades, whatever I engage in, for I tend to fall short of full engagement, which would be a state with which I cannot quite relate, but recognize only by its absence. I'm confident that I've never experienced full engagement. I'm just a dabbler, I suspect.

I hear politicians divide our great population into two otherwise undifferentiated parts, the hard workers and the intolerables.

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Relentlessness

relentlessness
Jean Antoine Linck: Study of Weeds (1800-1850)


" … more like who I was when I started …"


I feel most impressed with the utter Relentlessness of this universe, where nothing, it seems, succeeds like excess. Particularly in this season, Summer, where I find myself up most mornings, dragging hoses, watering. Weeds which stand outside the watered perimeter thrive. I have no idea what they survive on, for the ground cracks and presents as distinctly unpromising, yet there's always something adapted to even the most wanting place. Give a patch of clover an inch and it will at least attempt to overgrow the whole lawn, growing stronger, shrugging off weed killer, multiplying before exponentiating with abandon. Each plant, each species, seems to lack a governor and quite naturally, Relentlessly, seeks dominion.

I speak emphatically about community, about giving and sharing, but our role models seem indifferent to such.

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Heap

Heap
Alfred Sisley: The Seine at Port-Marly, Piles of Sand (1875)


" … enriching our historical record …"


Future archeologists should be able to fairly accurately map our rhythm of life at The Villa Vatta Schmaltz, primarily by excavating our noble compost Heap. The Heap holds sequential record of our dining year from which even half-baked archeologists should be able to piece together a decent portrait of our preferences and practices. I noticed yesterday that we'd re-entered the Green Chile part of the year, which has always been squeezed in-between the cherry/apricot/plum Stone Fruit season and the now impending tomato time. We put up produce in turn, producing piles of pits and peels which we dutifully pile on top of The Heap, thereby laying down our gastronomic self portrait.

Very little goes to waste here.

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Unseen

unseen
Jacques Callot:
The Uneven One with a Cane, from
Varie Figure Gobbi (1616)


"I am also the sum total of what remains Unseen …"


The following day, my vision returned with a vengeance, in HDTV-quality as if to remind me of all that I had not been seeing, of all that I had not noticed, of all that had recently gone Unseen. I found it humbling to discover what I never really suspected, a prominent blindness. I gratefully never caught myself incapable of seeing. I never quite suspected the depth of my blindness, and presumed that I was experiencing just a slight reduction, a general fuzziness, but I had for months, perhaps a year or more, lost whole dimensions. The vision I experienced that next morning, following the cataract replacement lens clearing laser procedure, were nothing less than extraordinary. A fresh world presented itself to me, distracting in its detail. Colors brilliant, even the muted ones; the textures, profound.

I suspect that blindness must be one of those states that does not exist in any moment. It exists in reflection, by comparison.

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Seeing

seeing
Reijer Stolk: Gmünder See mit Traunstein (1906 - 1945)


" … no more than an annoying background mumble eliciting a muffled scream."


I might privately admit that over recent months, my vision had gone to shit, but I would never otherwise consider admitting this because vision, Seeing, seems such a personal and private experience. My optometrist commented—in no more than an aside, really—that it appeared to him that the lens installed during my cataract surgeries three years ago were starting to look a little cloudy. Cloudy, I thought? But I believed that the cataract surgery would be the last such insult to my eyes, to my vision, that they wouldn't require additional procedures. So much for belief, for I later learned that pretty much everyone who receives that surgery needs a follow-on procedure a few very short years later. I told my optometrist that I'd get back to him later on the subject, thereby entering that first stage of acceptance, denial.

A few weeks later, I'd grown weary of fuzzy perception.

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Installing

installing
Louise Pithoud:
Male and Female Bacchants Installing a Herm (1792)


"I consider them ours."


Installing comes after design and fabrication, and little of either of those earlier stages really prepares anyone for the final challenges. This is where idea finally meets its context, where imagination finds its anchor. Final boundaries and ultimate limits finally come into play. There was probably no way to fully prepare for this day other than to acknowledge it coming. The ruminating that dominated design matters little now. The overlooked will have their day. Last minute surprise will complicate the whole conception, a final reckoning occurs. Reputations might well be threatened and might be made. Be very afraid. It won't matter.

I warmly anticipated Installing the new front porch stair railing.

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Mac&Pleas

macnpleas_
Miep de Feijter:
Hans en Frans verkleed als Alkmaarse kaasdragers
[Hans and Frans work as
Alklmaase cheese carriers] (
c. 1928 - c. 1941)


" I eat my share warmed over …"


A time will come, because it always has, when I will once again be called upon to make "my" Mac&Cheese, my famous Mac&Cheese. My Mac&Cheese became famous because The GrandOtter liked it, or, more properly, loved! it. I made it for a few dinner parties, too, and many proclaimed it the very best they ever consumed. It thus became famous, though dinner party proclamations tend to be heavily lubricated and contextualized by a generalized camaraderie. Nobody ever openly criticizes dinner party dishes, and some gushing seems common to all of them, still, I had reason to believe that my Mac&Cheese was at least pretty good. I knew it was unusual, for I didn't use milk in my cheese sauce. I used stock, which makes a fine sauce without delivering what usually turns out to be a milk pudding sort of base. My Sauce Velout
é provides a better foundation for the cheese. I also usually avoid using actual macaroni in my Mac&Cheese.

Mac&Cheese is always, really about the cheese.

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IfOnly

IfOnly
Willem Claesz Heda: Still Life with a Gilt Cup (1635)


" … slinked home without salvation …"


The Muse suggested a drive up to the top of The Scenic Loop to show her visiting nephew John a different part of this valley. We soon found ourselves standing beside a dusty road, threshing wheat in our palms, working on creating gluten balls for chewing. It's long been our practice in harvest season to glean a stalk or two from the periphery of a wheat field and wonder at the magic within them. The Muse counts forty-five kernels from one head, recalling how her father could count one head's kernels and fairly accurately project the bushels per acres he'd harvest from his field. The Muse reports word of bumper crops this year, with eighty bushels per acre on dry land and twice that from irrigated fields. Her dad counted forty bushels a bumper crop in his place and time.

We drive on, working that wheat paste as if it were chewing gum, up further into the mountains, since John lives in South Dakota and has rarely seen mountains.

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Periphery

periphery
Gustave Caillebotte:
Les raboteurs de parquet [The Floor Planers] (1875)


"I just live here."


When The Muse holds a gathering, I prefer to work the Periphery. I'll busy myself with some self-appointed responsibility perhaps only distantly related to the proceedings. I'll flit in and back out again and very likely spend the bulk of my time offline, on the back deck, perhaps, grilling something intended for the table later. I might greet a few people at the front door, but rather quickly disappear, only to reappear to lead a brief guided tour of recent home improvements. I'll suggest a beverage and see that it's delivered, stay for a brief conversation, then evaporate again. I'll contribute, but on my own terms.

I found it curious whenever I took to a stage as either a performer or a teacher that I never seriously intended to become anything like the center of anyone's attention.

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Break

break2
Gustave Caillebotte:
Study of a Man with Hands in His Pockets (1893)


"The Break seems beginningless until it doesn't."


Autumn sends a postcard sometime in August to preface the coming season. After a forever hot spell, one morning brings goose flesh or the strong suggestion that it might still exist, a distinct impossibility just the day before. Nothing never ends, not even nothing, not even that seemingly endless heat, the one that had so rudely interrupted Summer. Summer seems three separate seasons now that global warming has imprinted her presence. Early Summer's an extension of Spring, Mid-Summer's an ordeal, and Later Summer's Early Fall, clearly not yet Autumn, but reminiscent of it in the early mornings and later evenings. Later Summer seems a welcome respite, a Break from the frightening Mid-Summer melting point.

Cool eventually intrudes.

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Fittings

fittings
Mary Cassatt: The Fitting (1890–91)


" … we might just as well be satisfied with the process destined to ultimately delight us."


In the house I grew up in, the music room—the room with the piano and also the room where 'us kids' could isolate to practice our band instruments—doubled as the fitting room for my mom's seamstress business. She'd make wedding dresses and ball gowns, and she'd escort a steady stream of society ladies into that room to try on their new creations. Some pieces required multiple Fittings, as completion took on an iterative nature. There are apparently many elements of dress construction which can only be approximated without the person who will wear it present. Custom made clothing demands a great deal of patience. My mom would pin together seams for later sewing. Occasionally, she'd have to pull out the old seam ripper to completely redo something. It all seemed so exacting.

These childhood experiences tipped me off to the fact that complicated constructions do not come in one-and-done forms.

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Reward

reward
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardine:
The Attributes of the Arts and the Rewards Which Are Accorded Them (1766)


"I'll just have to wait and see …"


I sat in the dentist's chair feeling consigned to enduring my well-deserved penance. I had, after all, avoided dentists for more than a decade while I failed to work through a small trauma, a slight so minor, so seemingly routine, that I might have not even noticed, except I'd noticed and blown it all out of proper proportion, and there I was, collecting my just deserts. Except this work didn't seem all that onerous, especially when compared to how I'd for so long imagined it would be. Compared to my pre-catastrophizing, this was nothing. I imagined the same routine work being undertaken fifty years before under the technology and fumbling hands of my childhood dentist, Himmler Pearson, who always seemed to revel in the discomfort he imposed. More modern practices emphasize patient comfort. I almost expected to be offered a brandy and a Montechristo, but wasn't.

With little left to do but imagine through what once would have been the excruciatingly painful portion of the procedure, I began to consider what, if not punishment, if not penance, was I experiencing?

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Bloggering

bloggering
Edouard Vuillard: Orchard (1897)


"I seem to need to work in stone tablets."


I blog, and therefore, am. Am what? Well, a blogger for starters and by extension I suppose that I become a writer, though blogging isn't precisely what one might call writing, for blogging's pickier than simply writing. It requires considerable classification and codifying in order for the finished product to properly display and organize. I blog in series, relating all my production into quarterly segments, my current Againing Series, an example of this convention in action. Each addition, each fresh post, must satisfy a few qualifications before it can be published by posting. Each must have a unique title, for the blog software goes a little crazy when it encounters two identical titles, even when those titles belong to different series. Title must be unique, so, once I've decided upon a topic, which first often amounts to little more than a proposed title, I search both my blog archives and its Resource file to ensure that the proposed title has never been used before. I often find that I need to adjust what I thought would be the title to work around this uniqueness convention.

Molly or Max, my cats, might show up just about then, seeking breakfast and reassurance, providing distraction.

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Vectoring

vectoring
Jacob van Hulsdonck:
Still Life with Meat, Fish, Vegetables, and Fruit (c.1615–20)


" … a narrowing and no longer terribly elegant Broadway."


When my first wife and I moved to Portland, OR, in December 1975, we arrived as refugees. We marveled at the supermarket produce aisles after surviving two winters living in rural NE Pennsylvania, where produce seemed scarce off season. In Portland, all things still seemed possible. We took a main floor apartment on a bus route—by which I mean, the Belmont bus actually passed through our living room four times each hour— and we set about creating our future. Our future, like all futures always have, would get cobbled together by means of Vectoring, a process by which billions of possibilities get winnowed down to a single manifestation. Nobody actually understands how this process works because it has altogether too many moving parts and nobody stands positioned to monitor or even sense the presence of all of them, or even of most of them. We attend, instead, to the few within our purview and project what we expect to result.

The result famously manifests as something other than what we expected, and we might, as I did this weekend, consider how it was that Portland's present manifested out of its past.

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