What I really do.

I noticed while re-reading my CV that I don't show any work any more, and I noticed while not making any art, that I don't make any art any more. Here is a brief list of things that I do while not making art.

• living with my wife Christa and our kids in my painting studio


• overhauling swamp coolers when Christa says they're making a wee'-eeink, wee'-eeink sound


• pretending to put out fires in fire school


• pretending to run the town as a member of the town council


• google-searching trivial topics like St. Florian (see below)


• learning more about the Lusitania disaster from my six-year-old than I ever learned in AP European History


• looking for things in the garage


• drinking ice water (the hot season has started)


• stirring heaps of lush compost

The quality of the compost is a result of all the fruit and coffee grounds we churn through at the Bed and Breakfast. This is the primary entry for the what-I-do-instead-of-making-art list. Since moving in in 2004, we've trimmed, caulked, painted, plumbed, or otherwise torn through five bathrooms, two kitchens, two kids' rooms; refinished floors, painted fascia while hanging from a climbing rope, and run three miles of irrigation tubing. I've also killed four adolescent cottonwood trees, nine black locusts, ruined a lawn, and forklifted a wild bee colony away in the hollow core of an enormous tree trunk. They moved back after a couple of months.

Rumor has it that Bluff honey tastes extra good because of the tamarisk pollen. If you come to town, buy some honey from Comb Ridge Coffee and have a Mocha Dugway (my favorite local pun).

Give us cool heads, stout hearts, strong muscles

St. Florian was a Roman General who rose up the military ranks as a firefighter (denoted by his trick green kilt).

He was exposed as a Christian, half-flayed while alive, and then dumped into a river with a millstone tied around his neck.

Before he was put to death he reportedly saved a town from burning to the ground by extinguishing the flames with fluid obtained at the town brewery. He is thus the patron saint of both firefighters and beer-makers.

I ran across the following prayer to St. Florian:

St. Florian, Heaven’s patron of firefighters,who once was dedicated to the servicesof your fellowmen as an official in theArmy of Rome, look with kindly and professional eye upon your earthly force, desirous of the preserving of our fellow men from the dangers to life and property. Give us cool heads, stout hearts, strong muscles an instinct for prudent investigation and wise judgment.

Make us the terror of arsonists, the friends of law-abiding citizens, kind to the frightened, polite to the bores, strict with lawbreakers, and obstinate to temptations.

In troubles give us strength to be efficient, in times of great danger, give us the ability to be calm and enable us to impart assurance to those who verge on panic.

You know, beloved St. Florian, from the sacrifice of your own life for the sake of your faith, that the fireman’s lot on earth is not always a pleasant one, but your sense of duty that so pleased God, your courageous strength that so over-whelmed the devil and your saintly self-control, give us inspiration.

Make us as fearless in practicing the laws of God as we are brave in protecting the lives and property of our fellowmen, and when we answer our final alarm, enroll us in your Heavenly force, where we will be as proud to protect the throne of God as we have been to protect the city.
Amen

What caught my attention was the part about being polite to the bores. Somehow, I feel far more moved by this suggestion of being patient to the dull than by the more flashy self-sacrifices attributed to firefighting and to St. Florian. In the end, isn't this more difficult? Does it take more inner strength to don a helmet with lights and sirens running or to listen...really listen when the grocer timelines his sciatica for you? Which would provide more cumulative benefit to mankind?

St. Florian protect us.

Goatsilk

A few weeks ago I heard from an old friend from grad school thanks to the miracles of Facebook. Being able to watch video from an organization known as Goatsilk has validated the social-networking revolution for me. For beginners, try the Turn-of-the-Century Watering Pail below. For more advanced viewers, I recommend Lawnmower Curling.

It gives me a lot of pleasure that someone has found a reason to combine words the way Ben and Caroline do.

Click for Silkblog.

Click for Lawnmower Curling.

You haven't lived until you've buried your neighbor with your own hands.

My wife and I moved to Bluff, Utah (pop 250?) five years ago.
It's an inconvenience.

I discovered, when we moved to the area, that people frequently describe large distances in terms of hours required to reach a Wal-Mart. Cortez, Colorado is an hour-and-a-half away. Cortez has a Wal-Mart.


Bluff seems to be a good haven for eccentrics or hermits of many stripes, and it requires a certain willingness to be inconvenienced to thrive in a little village in the desert. This self-reliance perhaps leads to the particularly volatile political climate, but it also provides a chance for a more direct relationship with one's community. When I lived in larger cities, it was a pretty anonymous process when the garbage was taken away, or when the toilet would flush, or when a siren passed the neighborhood. Here, the recycling program is a man named Keith who collects, sorts, and sends away countless pounds of material from the town's businesses and homes. He accepts some money for gasoline, but for the most part does it only because it should be done. When we hear a siren it means that the ambulance has people from town in it. If it isn't a patient in the back, then it's the crew in front... perhaps my kid's kindergarten teacher, or his best friend's mom, or his principal. If something catches fire, we go put water on it. The best argument I can make for pulling over when you see a fire engine, is that it might be someone like me behind the wheel. I tend to weave erratically when I drive the engine.

Perhaps the most inconvenienced family in town runs the Recapture Lodge, where the phone ringing might be someone calling for a room, or for directions to a trailhead, or for a river shuttle from Mexican Hat. They might be calling because a house is on fire, or because someone crashed their car miles from town. The four kids are the sort that you'd hope your own children will tag along with in hopes of beneficial peer-pressure--that whatever they've got, your kids will catch. Jim's the Fire Chief, LuAnn often runs the radio or calls us out of bed if something has happened; I've even heard Lacy, their oldest daughter, running radio traffic from their home within the maze of the lodge.

Last January, when a tour bus rolled in the darkness between Bluff and Mexican Hat, I got a call from Lu. Jim got to be in charge of the whole scene: three town's fire and rescue crews, ambulance crews running back and forth to four states, fifty patients and another busload of skiers who stopped to help them in the cold night.

Five months later the burden of that authority still seems very fresh on Jim. Feeling responsible for people's lives, for people's hours spent in pain, is an inconvenience of the highest order. He put it into perspecitve for me by reminding me that in a town as small as Bluff, there is no insulation from what needs to be done. The lodging, the teaching, the rescue, and the burial, is done by those who live here. As he says, "you haven't lived until you've buried your neighbor with your own hands." There is a certain luxury, in a city, in being insulated from these experiences which are so deeply human. There is something fundamental, something beneficial, about a self-reliance that embraces both the opportunity to do what one wishes, and the duty to do what one must.

Doctor Doctor

An old friend of mine we used to call "Cherno" (actually we still call him Cherno), is a Professor of Creative Writing at Wichita State. There are a number of reasons to read this short piece of writing. It alternates wildly between skeevy and funny. If you have children it resonates with your fears of mold, lead, germs, and the mundane rituals of tending to kids' welfare.

Also see his first novel, The Salt Palace, particularly if you lived for any amount of time in Salt Lake.

Click here for Darren Defrain's Doctor Doctor.

First Run

Welcome to my blog and to an opportunity to validate my wildest self-absorption dreams. This first post is just to see if I've arranged the technology correctly.

I teach a college class in Mass Communication, but I'm only now investing the time in such Information Age tools as a blog and a web page. See my work at AnthonyLott.com if you haven't arrived here via that site.