Didn’t get out of bed until noon today. Made quick work in getting out of the door. Only place I want to be lately is in the paper studio.
I’ve spent the last few days caulking and molding the walls and painting the floors so that all of the water from paper making doesn’t flow into the neighbors studio. Last week I flooded her studio pretty good. Today I sorted our excessive quantity of felts into sizes and quality and stowed them in less unsightly places. I reassembled the paper studio, beat my fiber and started pulling sheets.
I made about 120 sheets today.
One of the interns told me that people talk about how much I’m in the studio. I tried to explain to her that this is my medicine. I need the sense of purpose, I need the exercise in discipline, I need to be productive…
She thinks that it is work, but it’s not.
It is an obsession.
I want perfect sheets. I want hundreds of them. I know that I have to work to get to the place where I can make perfect sheets and someday it will happen.
I want to make journals for all of my friends and i have a lot of friends. Big goals.
But she doesn’t know that when it is quiet in the studio and it is just me and the sounds of the other people walking on the other side of paper thin walls and I pull a sheet the water sounds beautiful and it doesn’t much seem to matter that I am insane, and all of those babbling crazy thoughts which blow inside my head like private hurricanes of confusing personal histories, caused by the evaporation of so many good intentions because there is another sheet of paper in this world. Another possibility.
Twenty of them can make a journal. Something small in which to doodle. A caring gift from a friend who now creeps weirdly in a paper laboratory in a town nobody would ever think to look for him in, brooding productively over so many beautiful but absurd fragments of memories, thinking of all the people who have enabled this crazy life to have endured the stress and pressures of time and financial hardship. Thinking about the war and death and the horrible smell of O.C. spray and how all those men in Oscar Block were probably innocent and how an article said that George Bush knew they were innocent. So why did they send me? Now is not the time to be thinking about the military. “This has nothing to do with Vietnam Walter.”( The Big Lebowski)
I am learning an entirely different routine of motions than those that I learned in the service of this country. I treat my beaters with the same respect that I used to afford my M-16. I zero my sheets and slow my breathing and hold my hands steady. It is all in my muscles now. The sheets are as identical as bullet holes. When I am done I hear the word discipline in my head and I clean everything meticulously because I love it and I need it to be well.
I like it. I love it. I want some more of it.
The Drews and JT are in Iowa now. It seems that they have some characters on their hands. I love the workshops where the weird ones turn out because I do so love it strange. We all do in Combat Paper.
Our summer season is coming. With Eli and JT both having kids, Phil cutting off contact, Mike building the commune, Matt drunk and lost in Europe, Mattoter calling erratically between hallucinogens asking for advice on shotgun decision making at the airport with a question mark and a strong desire for booze and sun, DCam doin it all on the road in a VW bus and me holed up in Kalamazoo the only one of us with steady access to a studio it seems like things are going to get plenty strange.
Everyone, including me, is checking in at the VA. With any luck and a lot of patience we will be able to do all of this work for free. I guess I am already doing it for free, but I’m just that kind of guy.
The police are driving by. Goodnight.
The Paper Trail 