on the getting back of grooves

Where was the discipline? I don’t know. Lost temporarily I guess.

I think I found it again in my sleep. Somewhere in the happenings of that twelve hours which seemed busier than my day I must have remembered how to do things right.

When The Flower got home from work I was already up and I tried to scare her. I don’t know why the impulse struck me. She took it well. She said she could smell me. Then she suggested that we go play music with our tap-dancing friend and his friend.  So I got all my fingerpicks and my slide and my banjo and we got in the car and it was grey.

I rolled my first blunt this morning. It was easier than I had expected it to be.

After that the music just kind of happened.

Our tap-dancing friend played the drums and his friend played the keyboard and sang and I sat in my cowboy coat and played everything I’d been too scared to play before and it felt really good because I couldn’t even hear myself so it was just all about feeling my fingers on the strings and going for the most intuitive feel and it felt free and it felt good.

I played everybody the cadence song and they made it sound really good, especially with Two-Shoes on the drums.

Then The Flower dropped me off at the studio and I spent two hours separating middle-school kid’s sheets that were just smashed together in these cubes of pulp and I had to be so delicate just to not ruin these crazy, awkward sheets. Then I had to clean off all the shit that they used so that my studio doesn’t look like a bunch of kids work in here.

I’m a fucking professional. This shop is like my science lab. People look at this shop because its right there and if it looks fucked up, I look fucked up. I don’t want to look fucked up. So its really a matter of discipline. Push myself that extra mile to make sure that it looks like somebody who works in  here cares. Not only do I have to prove to my bosses that I am a competent paper maker, I’ve got to prove to myself that I can actually excel at at least one thing.

I need this place now. I don’t think that I could live without what it is giving to me. There is that feeling when I walk in and crank the top of the dryer stack open and I pull out all of yesterdays sheets and I’m just looking at them and I know that they are only there because I did everything it took to put them there, even though it often feels like I don’t do anything.

I’m not even getting paid for this. Its as if some crazy person walked in off the streets and just started working in this under utilized space and the owners just tolerate it.

At least I have proven that it is beneficial for them to tolerate it. By it I mean me. It is beneficial to tolerate me.

I painted their floors and triple caulked where the floor meets the wall so that we don’t flood our neighbors studio and I’ve made enough good sheets that they made two journals out of it and gave it to professional paper-makers.

Now I’m using this insane machine that the dead man who built this studio made to make giant sheets of pure white cotton paper.

The machine is a box mold and deckle that is suspended in water by ropes on pulleys which connect to a foot pedal which raises all four corners at the same time. Before you raise it you have to fill the box with water and then enough pulp to make a sheet. You stir the water with your hands, or “charge the vat” while the mold is submerged and then you stand up on the pedal and the whole thing comes up out of the water. The sheet of paper is sucked to the bottom. You gotta take the bottom out (don’t even want to try to explain this process) and then slide your new sheet out of this box with about a half an inch of clearance.

Keep in mind that this screen and sheet now weigh probably 25 pounds and your arms are spread out like a bird and you’re picking things up and moving shit and there is this dangling box that is only kept up by your foot that’s gonna smash down when you step away, and there you are with this giant dripping sheet.

Then you have to get that fucking thing unto the felt which has about a half an inch of play on either side before you spill over.

Then you cover that sheet with a felt and you do it all over again.

I got to be pretty good at it. It takes quite a while, but there are eight good sheets of that stuff drying a few feet away from me at this very moment. I had to stop because there aren’t any more drying felts. Those fucking kids got them all.

Tomorrow.

I did it all right today. Cleaned everything down. I left the space looking like it should look when somebody uses it. Its a good feeling to know, confidently, that you’ve proven yourself good at your word and done things by the books.

I did cheat a little. They want me to wash the felts before I hang them up which I would gladly do if I weren’t going to use them again tomorrow. But I am. So I just wash them when I use them. They have a point. They should be clean for other people to use, but I have felts all cleaned up for other people. These ones are my babies. I scrubbed em, I cut em, and they’ve worked for me fine.

Otis Mixon is a workin man.