Ecuador

Roberto and I were seriously considering visiting our friend, Mike Glier, in Ecuador until I got an email from Mike this morning from his new digs, which he described as “camp…with tarantulas,” and suggested we read his latest blog post before rushing off to buy plane tickets. I wanted to support Mike in the second phase of his venture in plein air painting along the longitude on which he lives (the first was the Arctic) but can say I have sufficiently chickened out and will continue, instead, to commune with the bats on my back porch instead of those in the wild, and paint palm trees from photographs rather than life. To mark my decision (Roberto, who may be more intrepid than I, can make his own) I polished off a good part of a bar of Ecuadorian chocolate. I admire Mike for sticking it out, although I’d also admire him if he just said fuck it, and finished off his project in the Bahamas. But while there’s something to be said for being flexible and knowing one’s limits, no doubt there’s more to be learned from stretching them. It’s probably all my fault for encouraging Mike to start a blog, without which we’d be none the wiser. You can read about his adventures here: http://alongalongline.blogspot.com/

Insex

Just in case you were curious, it turns out that the mystery poop embellishing our back porch (see Shit, below) was the work of bats after all--and since they're more effective than our new electronic Mosquito Magnet, we're glad to have them. Continuing the zoological theme, Jeff sent me this, which he shot the other morning:


Copyright 2007 Jeff Rubin

http://www.jeffreyrubin.com/

http://artistroster.artsdel.org/portfolio.cfm?id=192

Shit

This morning I reminded Madeline, my neighbor, to “take turds to work” and then wondered if this was the first time anyone ever said that. I speculate about these things sometimes, like if I’m grilling lamb heart for lunch, I think about how far I might have to go to find someone else engaged in that activity at that very moment. Surely out of my village, but out of my state? Don’t know. Anyway, I liked thinking that the phrase was completely original and, of course, Mady understood what I was talking about because I’ve been bugging her about this for a couple of days now—asking her to take the droppings from the floor of the back porch to the vet where she works so they can identify the animal for us and we can figure out a way to get it/them to go elsewhere. The droppings are black and oval—too big for mice, and it doesn’t look like bat doo-doo to me, but then what would I know about bat doo-doo? Stanley, our handyman, says rats, but he’ll say anything to get us going. Marjorie, Mady’s mom, suggested it could be chipmunks, however they’d have to be crawling on the porch ceiling to make this kind of mess and we don’t know if chipmunks do that (this was after my dream). Mady, however, is so into animals she doesn’t even think it’s gross that this stuff everywhere.

Now if I were an enterprising art student, I’d be busy figuring out ways to incorporate this copious material from my everyday life into paintings or sculpture. Fortunately, I’m not.