some sort of sense.
goodmorning.
maybe this will make some sense.
today is saturday. i am typing this from the central dodge dealership on sunshine street in springfield missouri. my power cord is starting to wear out. the only outlet is up by the doughnuts. i have stretched the cord from the doughnuts down across the walkway that leads up to the service window. it looks like some sort of strange social experiment, doughnuts in the waiting room of a car dealership under a glass lid that may or may not electrify you upon lifting. i am waiting for them to recreate a $200 key. again. the key they are replicating is currently somewhere under springfield. in the sewer system. let’s back up. [insert toilet clogging reference………… -here-]
today is friday. i’m headed in the general springfield direction for the weekend. there is a place in branson missouri that has been purchasing a substantial quantity of the wine that i sell every two weeks, thus giving me adequate reason to visit the town [people] i have grown to love. i deliver the wine and start heading towards springfield, already feeling the familiar buzz i associate with the whole area. the people are the main source of the buzz. the ability to walk anywhere i care to go. the ability to walk anywhere i’d care to go drink and increase the springfield buzz, thus eliminating the worry that stems from finding a drunk way back to a bed at the end of an evening.
so the buzz builds. i’m almost to springfield. there’s a house on fire. that’s not a metaphor. no it probably is, but there actually is a house on fire. flames whispering out all along the peak of the roof. the people stop, pull off the road, yank out cameras to capture the carnage. i do my gawking from inside a moving vehicle.
my springfield home is a warehouse called the art factory 417. livingspace upstairs, artspace downstairs. this place has been spitting good things since my friends that i met on the roof of the original artfactory leased it about half a year ago. this weekend they are hosting a 12 hour art-O-thon. from 6pm-6am, several artists will each create a thing. or three. these artists have spent the last couple of weeks petitioning people to sponsor them for these 12 hours of art, raising money for the art factory and a local gallery called lemondrop.
i don’t like asking people for things. i am more likely to cause myself bodily harm than ask for help lifting a television or pulling a car from a ditch or extracting a tooth. this is not a trait i’m proud of, but it seems that pride probably has at least one of his sticky little fingers in the whole mess, no?
‘would you like to give me money while i stay up all night and create something?’
just asking seems to require that i believe myself to be capable of making something worthy of being made. i managed a few pledges.
anyway. springfield buzz’s building and i’ve been feeling extra nice today, been back in the ‘flow’ after a few weeks of creative blockage so tomorrow will be good, really good, 12 hours in an environment of more flow and i’m at the door of the art factory and nobody’s here and there’s another entrance that is locked with a combination lock so i call brian to get the combo and i sort of really have to pee at this point so i get the combination and sprint upstairs to the bathroom, turn around to flush and apparently i tend to pull my shorts up while flushing because in that one maybe less than one second in which the toilet is completing its flush, my keys decide to go for a swim.
i will tell you here that i did not ONLY have to pee. perhaps this caused an extra split second of hesitation. maybe if it was only pee in there i would not have hesitated, would have PLUNGED my hand right in, rescued my keys from their watery grave and gone about the rest of my springfield weekend having gained a pleasant little anecdote to repeat several times throughout the evening. maybe if it was $268.54 floating around in there that hesitation would have disappeared.
maybe if i hadn’t been springfield buzzin’ i would have taken a little more time and care to pull up those shorts, thus causing my keys to fall out onto the floor. or fall into the toilet BEFORE it was mid-to-late-flush.
maybe the television that’s on in this waiting room just talked about flushing [a golf ball?] right as i was typing that last ‘flush.’
maybe if i hadn’t spent the first half of the night driving around springfield, acquiring a toilet snake and rubber gloves and towels and then unsuccessfully jamming the magnet-rigged snake down the potty i would have had too much time to get too much drunk and would have felt terrible alllll day and into the night rendering me unable to create whatever creation i intend to create tonight, letting all of my pledges down and mounding up even more guilt than that which i lugged back with me at the end of the evening for neglecting to meet brian after his movie finished so i could unlock his bike with the key on the keychain he loaned me so i could drive his car to the hardware store after he spent an hour or so trying to help me recover the drowning keys.
maybe. but as it is, i sit eating grapenuts from a bag [difficult], watching middle-aged, upper-middle-class men watch golf and step very high over my power cord booby trap. and as i typed that last sentence, one of said men fell victim to the trap to which i responded: ‘booby trap!’ he had a sense of humor. i warned him the first time over, and he made it once without issue. so i thought he’d be safe on the way back. i thought wrong.
skip to the art-O-thon. goodthings. creative efforts combined towards a common goal. we should do more of this.
at the end the survivors wander dazed out into the sunrise. i walk down the road a ways. an old shirtless man in suspenders walking a dachshund tells me a very involved story about a mother fox and her kits.
‘they’re wild animals, you know.’
‘oh yes, i know.’ like i’ve had just so many foxperiences.
after a weekend like this though, it just seems to make sense.
