Factory Time

I am remembering my dreams all of the sudden, and they are terrible.  Two nights ago, I was being held by Middle Eastern terrorists.  Last night was worse.  I was trying to insinuate myself into a conversation with two men in a bookstore.  I didn't know them and they ignored me, but I kept hanging around, grinning, commenting.  What the hell?

The lazer printer project--you know, the making one every night that some of you told me was very ambitious--was very ambitious.  That worked out for an entire evening.  It is the way of things.  I'm trying to think of the great artists and writers who worked in the factory all day and came home at night to make masterpieces.  I can't.  Even Bukowski wrote when he wasn't working in the factory.  Nope.  You must have plenty of unbroken time.  Otherwise life is too fractured to put together something from nothing.

I say that in order to praise myself and sing my heroism.  I am putting together "Lonesomeville, Pt. II" for a showing just now.  I know it has been a long project and has taken all your patience as I have only been able to focus on the one thing for so very long.  But it has been necessary.  If not for the factory, I could have put it together in a quarter of the time.  But I can only work in the margins, stealing an afternoon here, an evening there.  I think the show will be up mid-December.  And I hope to have the energy to give to something new.

I talked to John Minnicks yesterday, the fellow putting together Frankencamera.  I will be in his own hometown the middle of this month, so I wrote to him and asked him if I would be able to pick the camera up then.  I thought to light a bit of a fire without being pushy.  He said probably not, but later in the day I spoke with him on the phone and there seemed to be a sliver of hope.  There are reasons why people choose not to work for others.  Some want to get rich (all of them), but mostly they want to be masters of their time and not have to punch a clock.  And when you have not punched a clock for a long while, you get very different from the people who do.  The world's consciousness could be divided into these two disparate groups.  And the self-possessed won't be pushed around by the factory workers.  I know this and wait politely trying to hide my impatience.

And when I finally get camera, when I finally have it in my hands, I probably won't do anything with it for a very long time anyway.  It will sit on a shelf, a silent accusation, a quiet critic.  "What the fuck is wrong with you?" it will whisper over and over and over.  And I'll think, "Where do you want me to begin?"

More darkness, less light.  Autumn progresses.