Purple/Gray

Short story

Today I woke up early, and just reading/no beer the night before, was all ready for a great day of sales. I was especially fired because at the close of last night, after the Sun had gone down, a young couple wondered in. I ended up selling a big piece that had been sitting most the summer. They’re all my babies, so when one piece of art doesn’t sell, I wonder what’s wrong with my baby. It’s really nice when one that hadn’t found a home, finds one.

Because I made the sale I fell asleep deciding to buy a power sander to bust out more pieces, quicker. Of course it’s always fun when you know what you need to purchase and have a lot of choices, and Gee, what power tool are you going to end up with? There was a sale at Ace Hardware so the choice was a no-brainer, and all stoked, I go back to Studio De Herrera at 120 Gray Avenue, Santa Barbara. I put my $10 Art sign up against the chain-link fence, put out all the pieces that hadn’t sold and were still available, and get to work. A double espresso and a hit of sativa and I’m good. I finish the silvery piece pictured (though not sure it’s finished) and start figuring out what I’m going to do next.

It’s warm, but in the shade down by the beach it’s not too bad. I walk out to the street to take a look, see if there is anyone I can call to, to get them to come in and take a look. Kind of dead, I turn to go back to work, and looking east see the clouds have become a 2,500 foot wall—top to bottom—of light gray, over Montecito. I look straight up to see which way the clouds above me are moving and sure enough that big gray wall is headed to the Funk Zone. I begin putting art under the overhang, and as I’m going about this, I look east again, and decide to pick up the pace. Now I’m trotting back and forth getting and gathering up smaller pieces on the quick, getting them under cover.

The first drops I heard were like feathered bursts of a machine gun. It reminded me of drops the size I had experienced once in the American southwest, drops the size of quarters. But as they hit, I carried the last baby to safety. I had successfully gotten everything under the overhang and began positioning my chair to take in the downpour in all its glory. Suddenly a strong gust of wind, another, and all hell breaks loose. Now I’m scrambling to save what is most important as a torrential downpour goes angular—like a fool I had envisioned water falling vertically. The sound of heavy things falling and banging on other heavy things makes itself known out across the immediate neighborhood. I abandoned saving art—even the monotypes—the biggest sellers—and grab my MacBook as lighting strikes less than a football field away. I turn to run to the open door of Boathouse Crossfit, a brick building, and in my periphery I see the ten by twenty foot tenting for the beer-peddle cart—a thing groups of people do where they drink beer and peddle a big cart around downtown—lift straight up twenty feet, roll, and turn into huge six-pointed mobile impaling device.

Between my space and Boathouse Crossfit is the Segway space, where they train people with little orange cones before tours, and as I’m traversing that space, their fluorescent sign blows up with a Frankenstein sound and sparks, as a transformer down the street blows up—or was it another strike of lightning—I’m not sure. Recoiling, in passive body language, anticipating the next loud bang to be the back of my head, I turn to see the parking lot of 120 Gray as a giant gyre of debris whipped in a circle of gray and white water. At that moment I thought, this is it, lights out buddy.

It’s not often you run for your life, but I did today.

Later, as things cleared and everyone was checking all the damage I called to a somewhat full street, “Hey, I got art—half price!” It got a good laugh. Cleaning up, there was my new power tool, used once, soaked.

Silvery one

Poem for 9/1

Today is September 1st and here is Auden's poem. He wrote it upon discovering that war had broken out in Europe again, and goes into all the madness that is human life, and at the end, says—We must love each other or die, and even though we're all beleaguered in one way or another, there are those of us who are points of light, still fighting for truth and justice, and I want to be an affirmation of that…. A dated poem, but a great one.

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offense
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analyzed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

—W.H. Auden