Wednesday Morning Ramblings

It's early yet, only 6:10 in the morning. Still dark outside but the birds are singing.

When I was in my 20s, I used to work at jobs that required me to be up at six or seven and I was such an insomniac that I would lay awake all night trying (and failing) to not look at the clock. (I hadn't yet learned to put the clock face down or under the bed or, as now, to get rid of the clock altogether.)  I used to play this game of "If I fall asleep right now, I can still get two hours and nineteen minutes of sleep.....If I fall asleep right now, I can still get one hour and forty-two minutes of sleep...If I fall asleep right now, I can still get thirty-seven minutes of sleep." Which is how I know two things: One is that I can survive, make it through a day, sleepless. Miserable, but functioning. The other is that the birds start singing at an ungodly hour, long before sunrise. I used to despise their singing, meaning as it did that I had gone yet another night without sleeping.

I never sought treatment for insomnia. I always just assumed it was part of who I am. It still is, but in a smaller way.

It reminds me somehow of when I went with David to New York to visit his grandparents. His grandfather was then in his nineties and would stay up very, very late in the night, smoking cigars and watching sports on television. He would get up very late in the morning and Dave's grandmother would serve him breakfast at the table. He would eat then she would clear the table and immediately serve him lunch.

I don't know why I'm talking about insomnia. I'm not particularly anxious about it anymore even though I still have it.  I'm careful when I have to drive and I haven't slept at all the night before, but mostly I know that I'm going to survive without sleep, even if that state goes on for days on end.

Amazonian

After the LUSH splurge, I hit up Amazon to order some books. Lynda Barry's website introduced me to an artist named Bill Traylor, so I ordered a book about his work (Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts). After finding out that there is an exhibition of his work going on in Atlanta right now, I was already priceline-ing airline tickets and looking at hotels near the museum when I came to my senses and realized that, for the twelve or thirteen hundred dollars it would take to get to and spend the weekend in Atlanta and see the exhibit before it closes on May 13th, that I could order every book yet written about Bill Traylor, even the out of print stuff going for hundreds of dollars. (Yes, I know seeing art in a book is vastly different from standing in front of it and seeing it with your own eyes, but...I will content myself with the books for the moment. Even though, thinking about it now makes me want to find out if maybe I could get a cheaper train ticket and maybe a less expensive hotel...and museum tickets are only eighteen dollars...)

I also ordered a book by Charles Mann called 1491, named after the year before Columbus "discovered" America. Mann wrote an article in The Atlantic about the population in America prior to the arrival of Columbus (which many historians are now beginning to believe numbered in the tens of millions). The article ("1491") is interesting as is the interview with him ("The Pristine Myth").  I'm not particularly interested in history (mainly because it has so little to do with people like me, but also because it too often has too little to do with the truth), but from reading Mann's article, it seems like he's interested in finding the truth (as opposed to inventing it), a rare trait among historians.

The other books (Mark of the Grizzly by Scott McMillion and Rose: My Life in Service to Lady Astor by Rosina Harrison) are also coming.

All non-fiction, I just noticed. I find as I get older that non-fiction holds my interest far more than novels do. I wonder why that is. Perhaps it's because some part of my brain isn't being fed with the intensive study of science as it has been in the past, so that I don't feel the need to lose myself in fiction to balance that out. Perhaps it's the effect of the internet, which has fed my addiction to instant gratification in terms of information, regardless of quality. Perhaps it's just a phase.

Stu-stu-studio

Last week Monday, disaster. A board of work, mugs half glazed, folded in half when I picked it up and I lost fourteen of nineteen pieces. It didn't upset me, since I'm incredibly unattached to my thrown work. (No point in crying over spilt mugs.) One of the women who helped me clean up remarked that she would have been much more upset if she had dropped her own pieces. I was tempted to go ahead and smash up the remaining five mugs, but in the end decided to finish glazing and fire four of them. They survived, though one has a big crack in it at the rim so it'll end up a "wall piece" anyway. (That is, thrown against the cinder block wall outside the studio.)

Sunday the studio was closed for Easter, but I went in and threw some ollas and planters with built-in ollas. (Ollas, in case you don't know, is the somewhat random name given to pots that you bury in the garden with their necks sticking up out of the ground so that you can fill them with water which then diffuses into the surrounding soil.) Monday I went in and threw mugs, larger ones. I had several skully mugs that came out of the kiln on Monday afternoon and the studio director traded for one (I got a couple of plastic bats and he got a mug). Last night I went in (mostly to gossip with Stuart, the Tuesday night teacher, and his students) and sat and handbuilt a small candle holder and a monster with an open mouth and horns. He's kind of a creepy little monster, but Stuart suggested that, since he's hollow, I should bury him in the ground and turn him into an olla. Today...probably won't make it to the studio.

I need to take some pictures of the work that's moving through.

Etc.

Lots of allergies, still. And the garden has leeks in it now, and a new Italian basil and Greek oregano. It's so difficult to resist the siren's song of the little tomato plants in their pots outside the co-op, but we all know it's too early for tomatoes to go in the ground. I'm going to get out today and arrange the patio a bit, we have some surviving perennials that need some work and there are some outdoor pieces of pottery that need homes, and the altar, always the altar. I need some marigolds, speaking of which.