peaceful resolution

Go Car Free, even for one Day

There has been a rising awareness of the impact that our transportation choices are having on ourselves and the world in which we live. Over the twentieth century, we got quite a bit of an addiction to the combustion engine. The speed, power, and comfort (read: laziness) which cars promote have allowed modern civilization to become almost hopelessly addicted to this little marvel of engineering. A lot has come as a result: increased productivity, a much higher degree of personal and collective mobility, long commutes to work which keep parents away from their kids, roadrage-inducing traffic jams, air pollution which kills thousands of Canadians every year, dwindling oil supplies which might be required for more important purposes (ie: food production; everything plastic in your life; electricity), and a vast increase in climate change caused by human activities.

With this in mind, we should celebrate September 22nd for what it really means. International Car Free Day was started in France in 1998, and like a stalled SUV going downhill has been growing in momentum ever since. It’s not a difficult concept to follow. Bus, ride, walk, blade – do whatever it takes to get around without resorting to the family car. If you work in an outlying or suburban area, organize a car pool for the day, which hopefully you can make permanent.

This week will see a wealth of car free activities in the city. Following in the popularity of Toronto’s "Open Your Streets" festivals, today should see a number of street parties throughout the city. Throughout in the week, numerous trips were held in which historians and local politicians led tours of the harbour, Webster’s Falls, and the city’s historic sites. If you missed it, join Ward One Councillor Brian McHattie on Sunday for a guided walking tour of Cootes Paradise, which is Hamilton’s best urban-rural area. There’s also the monthly Critical Mass, starting at Hess and George around 5:30. Check out Transportation for Liveable Communities for more details. More importantly, you could pretend that more and more of your days are International Car Free Day.

I know what you’re thinking: my job and my family are important and I can’t change my behaviour. It really isn’t as hard as it sounds. Bogota, a city of seven million people in Columbia, has been having yearly car free days in April, during which all private automobiles are outright banned. Families there haven’t suffered as a result. Alternately, the emphasis on the city’s bike and bus network has created a more liveable and sustainable community that is accessible to everyone.

More importantly, those freedoms that we have gotten used to are highly dependent on cheap oil, which is quite obviously no longer something we can enjoy. The price of gasoline will go exponentially higher – and this is from industry experts such as Matthew Simmons, CEO of the world’s biggest energy investor Simmons & Company, and Dick Cheney, current VP of the United States and ex-CEO of evil devil's reject Haliburton. When the price of oil jumps from $66 per barrel to $200, and then jumps to $500 a barrel, people will be forced to understand what their freedoms relied upon. It wasn't ideology or economic growth which gave us "freedom", but rather finite material resources which are currently being wasted by bad planning, greed, and human apathy.

In North America, we’ve gotten so dependent on cars that we feel driving to be one of the most important rights and freedoms that we have. George Bush has gone so far as to call this lifestyle "non-negotiable", and with the recent Doctrine of Joint Nuclear Operations (Google it, it’s fun!) which specifies a pre-emptive nuclear strategy for those who disagree with America’s strategy for oil domination, we might in fact learn what it means to be truly free. This right of driving is so important that any attempts to get bad drivers off the road by screening more strictly for those who don’t in fact have the propers skills to drive – perhaps with driving tests every five years -- are routinely laughed away. Again as a cyclist who routinely uses every major street in the city, I can tell you how many Hamiltonians are still under the mistaken impression that bikes do not belong on the road and riders should remain out of "their" way by using sidewalks. Time for traffic school guys. We just accept road deaths as the cost of modern civilization, and to some extent we are correct in that assumption. At the same time, luck-of-the-draw circumstance should not overule proper urban planning.

I myself do not drive, but I can understand the dependence that it fosters. When you’re young, it’s pretty fucking sweet to be able to suddenly go where you want, when you want to make the trip. I know what that feels like. I felt the same when I was twelve and got my first bike which had gears. Suddenly the whole city belonged to me. The dual feelings of speed and mobility are very addictive. Those luxuries – let’s not kid ourselves by calling these characteristics "freedoms" – I found very stimulating, and consequently I remain an avid cyclist to this day.

The thing about youth, especially around the age when you first start driving, is that your lifestyle and recreational habits tend to solidify. By your mid-twenties, you are probably acting as you will when you are in your forties and fifties in terms of habitual behaviour. For this reason alone it is important to show kids that there are indeed alternatives to automobile transit. I can’t stress enough the importance of letting children ride their bikes, scooters, and skateboards around. Please parents, stop driving to school to pick them up. Let them take public transit or find their own ways home. Nobody wants to steal your kids, you've been conned by fear.
It’s also important to let them develop their culture around these activities. The Art Gallery of Hamilton – while doing good work otherwise – should be ashamed that it’s renovation has alienated skateboarders who used the Irving Zucker plaza by fencing off half the area and enforcing "trespassing" laws when boarders do show up. These kids got exposed to the art that was visible from the outside and which might have given them ideas about their own expressive abilities. Fascist ideas about how spaces should be utilized remove a use of public space by a community, which is the whole meaning of a downtown core. Boarders aren’t the problem with the downtown core; Hamilton’s Aerotropical desire to be the longest highway stripmall in existence is what keeps the core from achieving its potential.

We’ve gotten used to accepting roads as belonging to cars; it is time for pedestrians and human-powered vehicles to take back the streets. Keep your car at home, get some exercise, and learn what a living community really and truly can feel like. It’s nice that at this point in time, we have the freedom to choose whether to drive or not. That luxury is rapidly going to disappear over the next decade and a half.

hamilton, inside and out

leaves



fallout



a bar, after the fallout, with a bit extra kicked in



we were both younger once

George Bush hates people

There’s something pointedly touching about the notion of an otherwise cocky popular musician at the top of their game twitching nervously before their first ‘political’ statement. When Kanye West went off script during an NBC telethon a week and a half ago, the American media presented the first authentic emotional response to Katrina. The second came the following week when, during a live interview on CNN, a passerby told Dick Chaney to go fuck himself. This earnestness spoke volumes about the power and influence of traditional media. It was almost as though the media outlets had opened themselves to become the voice of the people. Almost.

Let’s not blame the Bush administration wholly for this little debacle, even though his evil policies are destroying the country. I’ll be the first to point out that this may sound a little hypocritical coming from a person who published an article with the title George Bush Isn’t Evil. And I stand by this comment to this very day. Once again, he is merely a figurehead, a symbol of the collective ideologies that are driving America into the void. There was little public outcry as the White House slashed the budget of the Army Engineer Corps – you know, those guys who keep the levees operational in New Orleans. Neither did anyone complain when the Environmental Protection Agency had its mandate changed, as private companies decimated thousands of square kilometres of Louisiana’s wetlands, which would have served to absorb a great deal of the flooding (Google “Mr Bill + wetlands”...). Few Americans seem to be questioning the environmental repercussions of their consumptive lifestyles, which serve to promote climate change and increase the likelihood of extreme weather effects like hurricanes. And nobody questioned the intelligence of cutting governmental programs like disaster management. People enjoyed their tax cuts and their ability to buy bigger cars and more stuff.

In retrospect, all that so called ‘conservative’ fiscal policy smells of so much shit from a dying bull. The public as a political concept is indeed an important thing. Cities get built by people in unison, however randomly and sporadically that may occur. Contrary to the current political zeitgeist of much of North America, they do not get built by corporate strategic policy. On the contrary, corporate policies of late have centred upon raiding the public purse as the last exit strategy for profit margins.

Of course natural disasters can and do happen and are largely outside of our control, and the suffering that precipitates can indeed be tragic and long-lasting. Since civilization tends to operate akin to an archive of information, it seems appropriate to use the wealth of such knowledge and productivity to mitigate against the consequences of such disasters when they do happen.

There has been much talk in the press about why state and federal authorities did not adequately prepare for Katrina, a storm which had been well tracked by meteorological officials for several days. It was widely known that an exceptionally massive category 5 hurricane would hit the Gulf coast and make landfall. And yet no preparations were made. No sandbags or national guardsmen were deployed. No emergency food or medical supplies were stockpiled for rapid dissemination. Instead, the citizens of Louisiana were given the gold ol’ American spirit of independence. Official strategy: good luck and god bless, but to each their own.

When that strategy of independence, ie: brute survival, turned on the American dream of law and due process, adherents were called “looters” and criminals, and were immediately placed under martial law. How dare they take what is not their’s, we were told by the news media. The consequence of this action was not solely the deaths of several looters – ie black people, white looters being called ‘scavengers’ and ‘finders’ – but also Kanye West’s vitriolic response. Hey, desperate people do desperate things; that’s the reason why public institutions are needed. If funded properly, they serve to keep people from being as desperate as they might be on their own.

Ah, looting; there’s the rub. Remembering the joyful operations in Iraq, Louisiana governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco – hey, Blanco likes black people, right? – issued the following warning to ‘looters’: “These troops are fresh back from Iraq. They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary.” That’s right. While every public service that citizens depend on has been cut back to the gristle, Americans should feel secure in the knowledge that their National Guard will protect them.

After the political fallout of governmental inaction, the horrors that the Bush administration has in store for Louisiana are becoming ever more clear. First volley: the biggest reconstruction contracts are going to the Shaw Group and Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. The companies who are “reconstructing” war-torn Iraq are also going to make millions of dollars reconstructing Louisiana and Mississippi. Nobody should second-guess the priorities of this administration when it was announced that the first projects of reconstruction are naval bases and corporate properties.

Second volley: Bush suspended a Depression-era bill which protects worker wages for governmental contracts. This would allow the companies mentioned above to pay their workers minimum wage for their services, rather than the market rates for construction and related projects.

So to summarize: the Bush admin thinks that the free market is the best solution to governmental projects and consequently guts public institutions, then uses its power of legislation to alter the free market to ameliorate the profit potential of the companies involved. Can you guess who are the winners in this strategy?

Maybe I’m woefully amateur to be saying so, but how about a program which provides the people of Louisiana the resources to build their own communities back up. If they are being fed and sheltered, they would probably jump all over the employment opportunity. Obviously not everyone can help, but I’m sure that many among the hundreds of thousands of newly dispossessed would be willing to help reconstruct their cities as best as they could.

Instead, a few private companies get to gain; their commission is the misery of half a million people. The enormous costs of reconstruction are being added directly to the deficit, already bloated beyond belief by the cost of military operations in the Middle East. My own cynical armchair interpretation of the economic situation in the States is that the Bush administration wants to force the country into a recession. As the economic situation worsens in America, fewer people might be in opposition to the possibility of conscription into military theatres.

But again, that’s me flying off the handle. Bush is doing the best job that he can, which is to be the mirror-as-leader for America. People don’t want to pay taxes. They distrust governmental programmes and want the best opportunities to improve their own economic situations, community spirit be damned. That spirit of America was shown in full force with the preparedness and response to Hurricane Katrina, which the day after the hurricane saw the President strumming his guitar like Nero while Rome burned.

As a fun non-sequitur, Katrina is serving as a nice media diversion from the fact that a little piece of paper entitled “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” is reaching final approval from Donald Rumsfeld. It would allow a preemptive nuclear strike against whoever the White House deems a threat, and “revises the discussion of nuclear weapons use across the range of military operations.” Maybe they’re thinking that the use of nuclear arms would deter further hurricanes from stupidly and arrogantly threatening the U.S. Take that, Hurricane Iraq!

Xiu Xiu - La Forêt

Xiu Xiu
La Forêt
[5 Rue Christine, 2005]

Jamie Stewart is perhaps the most casually adept musician to ever sing delightfully sad songs. His albums usually sound best soon after feeling the consequences of chance unknowns that destroy the best of intentions. Many of his songs veer into gestures of melancholic self-immolation. Stewart's voice is frequently the only melodic anchor which retains any of the sentimental fetishism typical of pop. Bursts of noise bloom and open chromatically as the chorus enters throughout "Muppet Face" while, near the three minute mark, Stewart is milking doo-wop bliss for all its subconscious cabaret. "Ale" is chamber pop recontextualized as hazy and melodramatic.

Many of the songs on this album sound fragile. "Dangerous You Shouldn't Be Her" is as delicate and partial as a memory, underscored with bright and subtle instrumental undertones. You do have to work a bit to discover the many pleasures of this music, but if you stay with La Forêt you can really begin to enjoy Stewart's labyrinthian melodrama.

MP3: Xiu Xiu - Ale

all you have to do to make a map is walk around and draw what you see

Folding myself into what I wanted to be had gone wonderfully.

I had come to the bar seeking solace in a new woman, and as with everything else I did I had arrived too late. Far too late, even considering my usual standards. There was neither bartender nor bar available. I looked at my phone for the time. 3:12, long after last call. My spit came course and vitriolic. There was no way I was going to ever see her again, I thought. I walked back home. The sun came up before I went to bed.

* * * * * *

A slight and hazy buzz opened in my ears, and my eyes stayed shut. A hell of a tragic consequence, it screamed in multiphonic valency. I muttered a short prayer for the dismissal of this sound and pulled what was left of my jacket over my face. I tried to sleep for another two hours and failed miserably. The buzz kept growing insistent, so I decided to get out of my apartment as quickly as possible.

There was method to this. Putting water on my face was my absolution; staring into my pores in the mirror over the sink my penance. Coffee always left me wanting and jittery. Such is the body of Our Lord.

The walk to the studio was always my favourite part of the day. Certainly it was better than the work itself, which covered me inside and out with plaster dust and left my hands rough and a little withered.

There was never a way to pass the food stands in the Chinese district without talking to Xien. Most of the time he was waiting outside his store, watching his employees shuffle produce from basket to bin, watching it all happen. It was like he knew the streets were full of flesh but empty of skeletons – maybe he thought that conversations restored bodies whole.

“Mr. Handel, I want you to try my kiwis today. Sweetest of the year! This load will be here three days, until Wednesday. They bring back energy like sleeping. You want to try?” He handed me a slice from the fruit in his left hand while cursing the blade in his other. I was beginning to understand Mandarin, but would never be able to have anything but an uncivil conversation with anybody.

I ate the slice and thanked Xien.

“So how’s your ladyfriend? What was her name, Sarah?” Somehow without paying any attention to what he was doing, every kiwi and apple sitting in the bins in front of him became perfectly organized in under thirty seconds. I thought for a second that maybe I should hire him for the studio. A man with such a meticulous unconscious would be a good moulder or detailer. Too bad the studio wasn’t really making money from our current labours.

“She’s doing ok, Xien. We’re not together anymore.” I picked up two kiwis and an apple and motioned that I wanted to pay.

“So sorry to hear! Maybe it’s for the best. You look happier.” He didn’t smile at all when he said that. In truth I was happier.

“I don’t know about that. We had a good thing. Then I started working again.”

“Keep working hard, Mr. Handel. Good way to keep a mind together. My grandpa was in the war, eh? They worked him like dogs, and here I am!” Xien looked me straight in the eye while I handed him the coins for the fruit. I opened my backpack and put the kiwis next to some bananas that I had picked up two days before. They weren’t really edible anymore, but still brought a good weight to my bag. Health by osmosis, I guess.

“I’m going to get a new tattoo for my back.” I thought he was going to take off his shirt, but he patted his right shoulder blade instead. “A poem by Li Po, in characters. ‘We sit together, the mountain and I, until only the mountain remains.’ What do you think?”

“I think that joy and suffering are all that remains. But a mountain will do. That’s pretty, Xien. How big are you going to get it?” I begin to spin the small apple that I had purchased over my knuckles, failed after two attempts, and watched it bruise on the pavement.

“Oh, you want another one? It’s ok, I have lots to give!” Xien handed me another and I thanked him. “Keep dropping them and I’ll sell you more!” He laughed. I thanked him again and continued walking.

There was no way I would get much done at work today, I thought. It was a good thing I owned the place, although I was getting ready to fire myself for gross incompetence. Both Neil and Jodie were there to greet my arrival. They were working on the mantel for the wall of the fake castle that was our commission. It was almost finished – maybe another two or three days – and I knew that I had done little to help.

“Hey Jordan, where the fuck have you been all afternoon? It’s already after three!” Neil was painting rock details and had to remove the breather from his face to speak. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and saw that it was twelve minutes after three. Nothing clicked.

“Rough night, thanks for asking.” I grabbed my own mask and set to the other side of the wall, which was still rough, undetailed plaster. It looked like I had a good nine hours in front of me.

After three hours, I broke down to let the plaster dry. Neil joined me out back, and after a few minutes of useless small talk, he produced a spinner. We smoked in silence, then returned to work. An hour passed before anybody spoke.

“So how was your date with Becky last night? I don’t want the bullet points, but from the look of your tired face it was a good one.” Neil’s face was twisted smiley like any well-stoned bastard.

“I fucked it up. Don’t want to talk about it.”

“C’mon. I’m not going to let this go! It’s been what, three months since Sarah? Time for some movin’ and groovin’ buddy.”

“Look, she wasn’t there. I fucked up. Let’s forget about it.” I put my breather back on.

“What, you were handed the prettiest girl in Kensington and you didn’t even get there on time?”

I looked over at Jodie, who seemed oblivious to the fact that she was the only one working. I took the pretense of a breather from off my face. “Don’t worry about it. Sinking ships are better forgotten.”

“Whatever.”

We sat in silence for almost a minute before I got up to use the washroom.

* * * * * *

The walk home was brisk that night. August sometimes did that to you. There was a street parade of drunken students enjoying their last week of freedom. I didn’t mind the pyjamas they wore, but the noise of their joyful tantrums averted my gaze too much. I took a back alley to get away from it all.

One thing about alleys that I have always loved is their containment. Escape without an exit. Garbage kept you on path, but the buildings seemed to want to deny you passage, even when you could see the street ahead. Then there were the unexpectedly frequent and random encounters with people who, unlike when they are in the street, never seemed to want anything from you. I liked that purity. It was contagious, and like a disease there was no way to turn it off.

I wanted certain memories to come back to me, the ones that I had used periodically to restrain myself. I could afford them that night, being spent from the day. All of Sarah was present, every inch and every movement. I wanted to reach out to her, to force that immanence into my pores. I fell asleep with the gratification of the flesh rendered mortal.

* * * * * *

Waking from such dreams without a hangover was always tragic. It was comforting to be pained when you had spent the night in grace. A headache gave you something to accomplish, something to hope for, something to remember your time with. Once she had been gloriously Sarah, and now there was a glorious absence. What a glorious morning. All of my dirty mantras had remained intact. Waking up sober was the least healthy thing to do at that point, and I was resolved to never let it happen again.

The bed stand was covered in wasps. They had swarmed around the backpack which I had left there the night before. There must have been a few dozen, coagulating on the bag filled rotten. It was for moments like this that they worked to elevate a queen. I sat on the edge of my bed and counted. Some were inside the bag, some hovered peacefully. I felt like all my lovers were coming out of me simultaneously to walk on my grave.

I got up and went to work not forgetting my morning mass. This time, it was extended with the additional cleansing of a sacrament made holy by the applications of thirty insects.

* * * * * *

We finished the wall as well as the roof of the castle. Neon Lit Holes would get their masterpiece after all. I called the store to let them know the good news. They promised a cheque by Monday. I promised to pay Neil and Jodie on Tuesday, and they left for the weekend. I sat in the studio and thought about Sarah. She was gossamer in front of me for three hours, then I woke to find it was early into the next day. I wiped sweat from my face and got out of the windowless incandescence of the studio.

It was sunny, so I bought a watermelon from Xien’s stall. Xien wasn’t there, so I also bought some pears and bread from a stall across the street. I talked to another customer about why my clothes were covered in various substances before I decided to hit the bar.

The Bishop Ryan was one of those bars that made you want to look under the floorboards. I drank five pints in silence. Nobody except the waitress bothered me. She was pretty. At the end of the last pint, I realized what had happened. Over the four hours of my stay, I had come to observe about thirty people whose lives seemed unaffected by each other. As sudden as a decade that passes under your feet, I realized that I had begun to seek the same thing as they did. I was a complainer whose silence was liquor. But in a way I had beaten the system. This kind of loneliness had a habit of not turning on a person until it was far too late to do anything about it. Time was irrelevant when you wanted to age like wine in a dingy bar. Conversations, if they occurred, were always villainous, and you felt yourself entertained by the misery of it all. It was this vicarious joy that really oppressed me. It felt like a curtain obscuring your view of the sea. I knew that was what I had been after, this isolation from immensities that made one whole, and that thought offended me.

I paid my tab and left to go back to the studio.

* * * * * *

New project. What would keep me sane, otherwise?

I started a few ideas, and I was pretty sure that their failure was that I wasn’t restricting myself to paint. There were too many obstructions in other media. Paint fell under your control very quickly, and I felt pleased by my progress. I worked quickly through the weekend, taking breaks periodically at the Bishop to let the thing dry a bit while working feverishly on my alcoholism. I finally went to bed shortly before six Tuesday morning.

The rest of the day almost never happened. I woke shortly before eleven in the evening, confessed, and went into the studio. There was a short delay in my clarity as I fumbled the keys on the lock. I cursed my headache and finally got the door open. Neil’s shoes were on the floor. It hadn’t rained in three weeks, but I noticed that he had covered them in mud. Fuck, I thought. I had forgotten to get money for him and Jodie.

“So I rounded up the shit you left around.” Neil walked casually into the front hallway, where I was stumbling to get myself together. He was eating from a tub of ice cream, and seemed to be enjoying the fact that he didn’t plan on offering any of it.

“Neil, I’ll admit right now I can’t pay you guys until tomorrow. There was a burst of activity that kept me here, and I didn’t get to the bank.”

“It’s ok. I saw your piece. It’s cool. Your reds are fantastic.” He wiped something from his hands onto his apron.

“I can’t remember much except the face, which is blue. Ok, if you think that it works.”

“I don’t see anything figurative there. Changing schools a bit? That’s cool.”

“I dunno. Things are pretty clear to me right now, and I think portraits without people being depicted immediately there is what I want, you know. I’m sick of looking at people.” I took off my glasses and wiped my face. I had spent the weekend in a bar, and now I was expected to hold a conversation. “Listen, I’m going to work on a few more, like for a set or something. Can I just come over to your place tomorrow and pay you. Maybe we can go out with Jodie for a coffee or something.”

I pushed past him and went into the workspace.

“Whatever, I’ll get out of here in a minute.” Apparently I had stretched more canvas than I remembered, so that saved me a night’s work. Neil was coming in and out of the workspace. I saw him grab a few of his pieces and put them into a basket. He said goodnight, then left in his truck.

* * * * * *

It took me only a few days to finish two more pieces. It was cool that I finished them in the first week of the month, because that meant that I could still do some real work for the rest and not lose too much cash when the bills hit. I had a few backlogged to July, so we could finish those up and get paid again. The work was pedestrian, but it paid well enough that I didn’t really have to worry about anything from thanksgiving until the end of the year. Then Sarah called. She wished me happy holidays, and told me that she had breast cancer.

* * * * * *

We cried together for a few minutes, and then she told me which hospital was looking after her. I didn’t sleep at all that night, and finally they let me into the hospital in the morning. Sarah wasn’t sleeping either.

“You look well,” she said as she tried to sit up. Her breathing was forced. There was a cross around her neck. I wasn’t sure, but I think it belonged to her mother.

“So do you.” Already it was a sinking ship, and we both knew that we could always find the joys of firing canons at each other. I sat beside her bed.

“Thanks for coming over. You were an ass to me, but I wanted you to be here.” She smiled as much as she could. I tried to laugh, but couldn’t find the breath to do it properly.

“You were never any good at being anywhere, and here you are.”

“Well, I really did want it to work, Sarah.”

She laughed quietly for a second, then turned. “Nothing works anymore, Jordan.”

“Sarah...”

“No I mean it. Nothing. Everything’s malignant. My bones are weak, my lungs are dying. I don’t really eat anything.” I had nothing to say, so I just held her hand and looked out the window. Flames from the industrial part of town made the early morning sky radiant in red and blue.

“I love you”

“You know there’s no way I can talk about that now.”

“Jordan...” Her voice grew course, and she started coughing. “They told me that no matter what, I won’t be able to have kids anymore.”

I started to cry. I knew then that I would be with her always.

* * * * * *

Money extra than my bills never really appealed to me, so I took time off work and concentrated on my paintings. I quickly learned that it didn’t take that much longer to work on five paintings at once as it did fifteen, so I decided to take the whole workspace to myself and work as quickly as possible. Neil and Jodie came into the studio to work, but were usually unable to find space. We talked sometimes, but for the most part I could ignore them. Then they stopped coming altogether.

It was late December. Susan's funeral had passed, and the snows had come.

I finished almost three hundred paintings before the sudden disappearance of wasps from my apartment left me naked and confused.

* * * * * *

There was no other way to deal with the situation. I took all three hundred of my paintings and chaotically piled them in the middle of the workspace. They stacked almost all the way to the roof. Fifteen feet of canvas, oil, random objects, and wood was enough to demonstrate my intentions. The weight of it all tore into the canvas on the pieces near the bottom. One of the frames broke and pulled the torn canvas with it.

You really couldn’t see much except the randomness of it all, so I walked over to the front of the space and wrote Erasure in black marker over the inside of the doorway and Portraits over the outside.

I called Neil and told him to come over with a bunch of friends. “We’re having an opening,” I said.

Then I sat on the floor in silence outside of the workspace, and looked in. Sarah was sitting cross-legged and in thought on the pile of paintings, as beautiful and gossamer as always. It was exactly the way we met, smiling and ready for each other.