18:53:50 - 2000-10-12
room
I'm renovating this house in East LA, and the people who lived there before were either drug addicts or depressives or just didn't give a damn- because the place is suffering from a definite lack of routine maintenance. But that said, there's this one little room where their baby slept, and that room was beautiful. I mean, the carpet was manky and gross, and there was water damage to the walls, and the window frames were rotting, and the list goes on and on...but it was covered with these beautifully executed Dr. Seuss murals. They were hand-painted and perfect and they triggered in me an epiphany regarding the fact that, even though I don't much care for the company of children, they do have this amazing ability to bring out the best in adults... So I stood there in that room, the harbinger of change, the executor of stripped wood and brushed steel and aircraft-cable bookshelves and all that yuppie homeowners and architectural digest hold dear, and I was humbled by the loving genius of the artist who painted these. I just stood there alone, with my putty knife slack, and I smelled the rain (!) and took all this in like I was at the fucking Louvre.
Then of course I began to paint over it.
