EST

It is 6:30 and dark as night.  My mother has come for dinner, and I have cooked the steaks, etc.  We have eaten.  She is gone.  I have cleaned the table and the kitchen.  WTF?  I am not in love with the changing of the clock.

Now I am alone.  Soft jazz plays in the background as I switch from wine to whiskey.  There are so many things to know in the world.  I am not one.

I don't know what that means.  Some words/phrases/sentences just come through the fingertips and onto the page.  It is a mystery.  It is a gift.

I just sent Q his birthday gift, a Kindle version of Luc Sante's "The Other Paris."  I have ordered it for myself as well.  I hope it will keep me enthralled for a while.  The book has been quite touted.

I went to the studio today to make something.  Anything.  I took pictures and began tearing them and pasting them onto a piece of cardboard.  I didn't care what or why.  It was simply visual practice.  I am not good at it, and I figure that if I do it enough, something good might happen.  How do pieces go together on a backdrop, anyway?  I will keep working.  But today, as I worked, I became nostalgic.  For years now, with no girlfriend, with only the will to create, I worked in the studio nights, sometimes with models, but mostly alone, cooking encaustics and making transfers and trying to figure out how to print on strange mediums.  And some nights just sitting, drinking, listening to music. . . dreaming.  I would go to the loading dock out my back door and watch the people walking by, going to eat at the Mexican restaurant behind the studio.  Sometimes I would smoke, sometimes I would drink herbal tea.  Eventually, I would make my way to a bar for a drink, then come back to the studio to finish up whatever I was doing--working or drinking or thinking.  In nice weather, the doors would be open and sometimes people would just walk in.  Sometimes I would take their pictures.  It was a place away from home, away from the worries of home.  It was a studio for creating, a studio for art.

The woman in the photograph is dead, and now I am, too.  I have eaten the food, drunk the wine, and now have had some whiskey.  Jesus, it is just past seven and I am ready for bed.  But I will watch an episode of "The Knick" before I retire with the Sante book.  Then there will be sleep. . . I hope.  Tomorrow is the factory and tree men and someone to look at my irrigation.  Shit.  People say my plumbing has gone all to hell.

They may be right.