"Painting #1 The first thing that catches your eye is the light, or rather two lights angled toward a single focal point, becoming a figure-eight flare at the center of the canvas. It is big, this painting, eight feet long and five feet high, the once white tarpaulin transformed into a smoky gray glitter. Or maybe what you see first is calamity, two dark rectangles slicing the frame, jackknifed, their metallic skeletons glowing in the moonlight. There are flames on the edge of the picture, as if the story doesn’t end just because the painting stops, and people who view the image have been known to walk to the far edges looking for more information, microscoping the framing wood for even a hint of added drama. The lights that flare out the center of the image are the headlights of an Amtrak passenger train, its caboose having come to rest almost perpendicular to the twisted iron track that bends and waves below it. The first passenger car has disconnected from the caboose and now makes the trunk of a T, having maintained its forward momentum and smashed the engine dead center, bending its bread-box contours into a vague V. As with any bright light, the headlight glare here obscures much of the image, but upon further examination a viewer might discover a single passenger—in this case a young woman—dressed in a black skirt and torn white blouse, her hair tousled across her face, matted by blood. She is wandering shoeless through the jagged wreckage, and if you squint past the illusion of light you can see that her eyes are wide and searching. She is the victim of disaster, a survivor of heat and impact, cantilevered from her resting position into an impossible parabola of unexpected torture, her once placid world—gently rocking, click clack, click clack—now a screeching twist of metal. What is she looking for, this woman? Is it merely a way out? A clear and sensible path to safety? Or has she lost something? Someone? In that moment, when gentle rocking turned into a cannonball ricochet, did she go from wife and mother, from sister or girlfriend, from daughter or paramour to refugee? A fulfilled and happy
we to a stunned and grieving
I? And so, even as other paintings call to you, you can’t help but stand there and help her look." ~Noah Hawley
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VIRGO
Life is going fast. In the blur of events, important details could get lost. Stop a moment to calm down. Also, remembering the lessons of the past will give you more power going forward.
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Yeah, everyone is always in a hurry - especially at work, it's deadline this and that, hurry up and grab it, power to be had blablabla. Get what you want, everyone tells me. But: Unless you're awful careful what that is, it'll be a curse to get it.
I think, we wrote a story with an apocalypse clause in it. That part was my doing, mostly. I only had a single condition for staying with him. The 'don't lie/cheat' clause. So in any single moment, the time it takes to cum, a hard pull to the brake line and the whole thing derails like
blam. The outcome might have been different if I had had more conditions than just the one - I certainly wanted more things than that and wasn't getting them. So why didn't I?
I don't know why, but I am trying to do the opposite now, trying it at work, being
very conditional in my love of it. I do love it, but still. I put forward proposal in response to the project they want me to take on next: double my raise and I want an apocalypse clause so I can just bail if I don't like the work. They'd be pretty crazy to take it. But if it has to be
me, well then, pay up and hope I don't fuck you over or simply fail. And if it doesn't
have to be me, well then fine, then get somebody else (shrug).
And meanwhile, since my personal story, had that derailment on page 222 of my life, it is as if the narrative stopped mid-sentence. Then you turn the page and see this
and I like this page, actually, in so far as I don't feel in a big hurry to turn to the next.
