Chain Saw Art
“When I get back home after a job, I turn off the car & swing my body to the left so that my feet touch the ground. That’s when it all starts to hurt. But this isn’t a complaint. I like to know I’ve done something useful. I’m one who will crawl into the weeds. I’ll tear things up, and rebuild them. My analytic prowess is unparalleled. The trick is, really, to find the people who’ll put responsibility in your court, and trust you to make decisions. I can’t work any other way. You’ll get fired if you keep undoing my intelligent design. Collaborate, yes, but don’t hire me if you don’t get what I do. And so I’ve parted ways with many a client, loving them intensely as I do, but able to realize that life is too short to wrangle over artistic details. Fly with the ones who clamber off the sofa to soar with you. Life is supposed to be fun when it’s not pounding you with karmic dross. I’ve taken on several new jobs this spring out of financial necessity, but also because I know I need to meet new people. Intuition is a miraculous thing. Say a desperate prayer while trying to fall asleep, because no one else is there to fix things. Wake up in the night, and calm yourself with the only mechanism that seems to work, which is to ask for help. I know, on one level it’s lame. But driving past the chain saw art at the Middle Branch store in East Randolph today, something occurred to me. You are way the hell ignorant of everything that is around you. You’ve seen the weathered, wooden creemee that doesn’t at all remind you of ice cream a hundred times. You even did a job at a house on the hill behind the so-called commercial district a bunch of years ago, but will never know anything about how surprised the birthday girl was to get a new patio. We just aim into the dark, don’t we. And all around us, huge tracts of rarely visited, pristine real estate stay hidden, owned by locals or bought up by rich folks. That’s how it rolls. I laugh to think that anyone thinks we have a population problem, or a problem with infection. So much freedom, so much vitality just oozing from every pore of our native country. Let’s just hope people wake up to the fact that we’re healthier than fuck. And if we aren’t, it might be more illuminating to look at how we’re being poisoned. Not by each other, but by degraded food, water and air. That’s all. All the rest of it is a huge psyops.”