I must not be ready to hear it. Instead I’m doing every little towel hook and last detail. I moved the powdered pigments I used to paint the barn roofing for walls, i moved them from the kitchen pantry, I cleared the hardware shelf I kept all through construction, the place for keys and users manuals, sockets that erupted from nothingness, and the card of a log cabin expert who wanted to charge me triple so I didn’t hire him.

I filed everything away into the past, and made way for my grocery bags instead. I’m getting the damned squirrels off its exterior. they are eating the building.  it’s a scourge. and the only thing known to work is feral cats? which transform any location into the bowels of hell, with their foaming, one-eyed diseases, how they die with their mouths open, and the piss smell.  I won’t have them.  I’m still applying foul-tasting sprays to the exterior where the squirrels are gnawing the house away.  It won’t work. Next will be bobcat urine, or coyote urine, and then BB’s, then fixed cats who will lay around like Hemingway’s darlings, twitching their tails at the chattering, intact squirrels.

i think of my production line life, lived in buildings like this, with tables that were production stations, forming, drying, glazing, paint enhancing. buckets of dry and wet and soupy clay, and trays of sculptures lined up in rows under soft drycleaner bags made white with clay dust, tucked under at each end, and taped with blue tape, or weighted with tools not needed until later in the process.

I think of the orders and the shows, the orders and the shows, hi-ho-the-dairy-o, the orders and the shows. for that I needed this building. this project has made me feel for Noah. Build a what?