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I've hardly written in the past few weeks. An interview, yes. But nothing straight out of my life and thought. Time to get something on paper again. Today was a day for visual art. Thankfully, one can write about anything, so tonight can be the night for writing about a day of visual art.

I began my morning late. I was late. The morning was late. Last night, I had set the alarm for ten after eight—good and early for a Sunday—but then had reset to ten after nine because of a latenight phone call from a friend. She was distraught, like everyone I know right now, so I was glad to listen and help. Nine-ten isn't bad for a Sunday.

The alarm sounds. I give myself a moment to find daylight, then rise, eat breakfast, take care of the cats' food and litter, and lay out on the drafting table the heavy sheet of cotton paper whose gessoed fibres hold my current painting. Nine forty-four. Tock. Nine forty-five. How is it possible that thirty-five minutes have passed? How could my early Sunday be starting so close to ten o'clock? Maybe I lose time in these very details.

So I begin. It is laborious work but mostly straightforward. Today, paint the squares of the horizontal-vertical grid manganese blue. Blue square...blue square...blue square...blue square...and so on. Then the realization: No diagonal grid. There are no diagonal lines painted. Horizontal, vertical, period. A new disaster. Yes, it's funny, I am constructive and optimistic in my worldview. But I do feel tempted to count the daily disasters in which, so to speak, I pour a glass of water but forget the glass. The diagonals are an essential element in this series of paintings, a series with some forty exemplars already outstanding. How could I forget? Then the save. Last week I had contemplated solidifying the visual integrity of the squares in some of the paintings by breaking the diagonals behind the squares, stopping the lines at the squares' borders and then continuing them on the other side, as if the squares were blocking part of the diagonal grid from view. This sheet before me, absent of diagonals, is readymade for the new blocked-view style. I resume. Blue square...blue square...blue square, until finished. An overnight dry and the painting will be ready for another session. The missing diagonals scared me, all the same. I immediately draw, with paint stick (which is like a big crayon but made of oilpaint) the full complement of lines—horizontal, vertical, diagonal descending left-to-right, diagonal ascending left-to-right—across two newly gessoed sheets of paper. If full of determination tomorrow, I can pick up working on all three paintings.

After lunch.... Can I say "after lunch", as if lunch isn't worth talking about? It has been said of me, by a friend who knows me well, that my days are defined by meals and coffee. It's true. And it's true that I'm as skinny as an eighteen-year-old boy from the corn towns of the American Midwest. The from part is still true. The eighteen part was true a long time ago. As for the food, it's not the quantity that counts. It's the flavor. And the event, which is inherently social. Today I walked the eight blocks to Life Cafe Nine 83, on Flushing Avenue here in Brooklyn; to enjoy the eggs, rice and beans, five or seven or more grain toast, and coffee, and to see who was there. It was ostensibly the same breakfast served at Life Cafe's Manhattan restaurant, but more flavorful. Maybe it's all in the cooking. Or maybe they shop for food at a different wholesaler. The rice seemed heartier. And the toast was dense, like a grainmade pound cake. The cafe was lively. At the table by the window, there was a young mother with a new baby and the mother was glowing, and I bet she was glowing before she ever had a baby because she was beautiful. I had almost expected an empty restaurant, to match the empty industrial street it inhabits.

(I'm at Life again as I'm writing this, ten till eleven at night, half listening to words wafting between the lady bartender and the guy at the end of the bar. I have just discovered, maybe rediscovered, that I belong in this City. She is leaving town because the rush of things happening here is too much to take in and because the first question people ask when they meet is: What do you do? Those are the reasons I'm here.)

Now I can say: after lunch, arriving back home at the loft, I cross the big open living space and walk within a foot of a plastic crate of asphalt, as I've done for months, and upstairs to my room. Back down the stairs, within a foot again. I've thought about this. About pulling those two blocks of Boston pavement—both transformed into artworks once, but now looking like the dusty rubble I first heaved into my arms and carried down those historic streets—about pulling them from the crate and plunking them into the shower stall and turning on the steaming spray. So in they go; one, then the other. The rest of my afternoon is accounted for. I dry off the first block of asphalt and painstakingly re-tie the thirteen steel wire strands that round the block, top to bottom; their twenty-six ends standing straight up in the air. Straight up when straight, but careless storage has left them bent and tangled. Now in the afternoon light I straighten them, again and again, bringing them each time nearer the ideal. This sculpture requires regular grooming anyway, about once a month. Today's grooming is a year overdue and ridiculously arduous because of the added work of tightening the strands. I grimace and yell as I tie the thirteenth wire, fighting to keep it from entangling any of the other twelve. Done. It's a strange relief to stand here looking at it. This always was one of my best artworks, and now it lives again. I strip the cloth strings and plastic foam from the second block of asphalt—it's getting steel wire strings too. Not today. But someday soon.

© 2003 John Clay