I’m a sculptor. Almost.
I’ve been creating a sculpture out of marble, of two lovers embracing, and it embodies the deepest my mind can go into a concept, it’s a creation I’ve been thinking about for years. I almost married a woman in college, in fact it was through our relationship this idea spawned- but I never had time to plan the wedding because I was coordinating the procurement of travertine from a basin in Italy. I took this job as a facilities manager of a hotel because when I’m not fixing a broken ice machine, I’m looking through sculpture catalogues to decide what we should put in the rooms and by the pool. The hours are great so that I can come early and leave early, stay up late sculpting, and finish my sculpture in two months. That was the idea, anyway.
My friends invite me out to the bar and I go, because I figure that every person’s got to have friends. Then some dude’s gotta ask what I do, and I say, “I’m a sculptor,” and they say, “What have you sculpted?” and then I say, “Well I’m working on my first sculpture now,” and then they ask, “What’s your sculpture of?” and then I start describing it, like it’s right in front of me and I can see every little detail. More and more details have been filled in over the last twelve years, down to the man’s toenail and the woman’s sixth lash. So I can’t answer their question with one sentence, because then it sounds like it’s just a sculpture of a couple, but it’s more than that, so I end up describing the twists and the magical elements and then I’ve described all of it. I’m out of breath after a couple of sentences and there’s still more, but they say, “Ah cool,” and I feel completely naked. All the guys turn their attention to the screen with football and then one of them says, “I can’t wait to see it when it’s done.” I say, “Me too,” and we nurse our foamy beers.
Every explanation I have for complexities in human relationships points back to my sculpture. I think the world needs it, like diabetics need insulin, like surfers need surfboards. Whenever I go outside I keep itching, every little interaction I see between people reminds me of my sculpture. “That’s why I’m going to make the woman’s shape slightly circular,” or “This is what the subtle gap between their torsos represents.” Sometimes when I’m on an airplane I think, “If this plane crashes I hope someone finds my notes and finishes my sculpture.” I stay awake dreaming about my statue, but when I wake up it’s only a block of marble, beside my bed, still rough and barely chiseled, collecting dust.
On Monday I’d said yes to a foster a pointer dog that had puppies in the shelter, because empathy was one of the themes of my sculpture and I was no hypocrite. On Tuesday, I also agreed to dog sit a goldendoodle, because somehow I figured having the cute fluffy guy around would help me focus on my sculpture. On Wednesday I said yes to the Mexican girls who wanted to stay in my apartment. I figured that the extra money I’d make by simply sleeping at my new girlfriend’s place would help me buy more tools and get my sculpture done sooner. On Thursday I checked emails haphazardly every thirty seconds, looking for any news from the hotel even though my shift was over, because I heard they were thinking to send me to the sculpture convention in March that would make it easier for me to meet the right agents to get my sculpture sold, once it was done.
On Friday, I came home from work, ate a frozen dinner, and forced myself to sit and work on the marble, made a few chisels, even though my head was about to implode, and then I finally went to the gym to lift a few. It eased the feeling of nuclear fission in my head, and I also figured that more muscle would help me sculpt better. On Saturday I ate all the leftover chocolates my girlfriend had brought home from her sister’s wedding. I figured that the easy, free food would save me time from grocery shopping- time I could otherwise be sculpting. I swiffered the floor around the marble three times, and I looked up houses that I’d be able to buy once my sculpture was sold, until I realized that I was like a shopper who forgot to bring his wallet.
I always thought that “losing my mind” would look differently. If I were losing my mind, I thought I’d look like a man with wild frizzy hair coming off his head like he was electrocuted, bald patches had been burned off, and literally, his thoughts lost, a blank expression on his face. He would be dazed and confused as he stumbles down the sterile corridor, bumping into carts, and kicking over canisters. He’d laugh loudly at inappropriate moments, like when someone finds out they’ve got two days to live, and he breaks out into tears when people are in the waiting room.
But instead, this is what it looks like: Saturday afternoon there I was, in the car, not in a hospital, in the middle of the street, in the middle of the intersection. The white car ahead of me had slowed down, and I thought, “Shit I’m going to hit it.” I dropped the phone, with Waze on it or maybe the search for “Urine carpet cleaner” because the dogs peed on my girlfriend’s rugs, and I hit my brakes, my foot pulling down on what felt like a mound of honey. “I’m not going to hit the white car after all,” I thought, when the rubber tires of the car behind me skidded, making a nice fat boom sound into my car’s rear. I jerked forward, the fluffy dog came forward and fluff splattered on the dashboard, and the pointer mama dog slammed into the back of my seat.
I got myself out of the intersection, moving over to the right- that’s what they say to do, pull over after an accident, that’s what I’m thinking like there’s a flight attendant in my head repeating the emergency drill. The dogs were okay. I was okay. I pulled over, but the guy in the red Lincoln who slammed into me from behind wasn’t pulling over too, he was just pointing forward and shrugging like, “There’s no way I can pull over there,” and that’s when I saw that there was a fork in the road, he had no choice but to go forward, or maybe he did, but I felt like it was my fault anyways, because I wasn’t done with my sculpture. He was gone, and I rolled forward a few more blocks to a blinking green street meter. I felt like everyone was watching me, the construction worker in the orange vest was saying, “I saw you, you were looking at your phone,” with his eyes, behind the sunglasses.
I had many thoughts in my head. There were a lot of them. My thoughts were practical, the most practical and logical there could be, like many staircases of next steps, I had a lot of options. In court I could say it was his fault. Is it always the rear person’s fault? I wouldn’t say anything if the red Lincoln came around, I wouldn’t incriminate myself. He wasn’t showing up. I didn’t want to see him anyway. I could have driven around the block to search for the red Lincoln, or we would sit there an hour, I could have gone into “doesn’t matter what it costs must be ultra-prudent,” calling an Uber to take the dog a mile down to the adoption event, I could have continued making calls to find a urine carpet cleaner that would come out same-day. Or I could have called a friend to report on my psyche, tell them, “Man you won’t believe what’s happening to me, oh man.”
My face was stern as can be, my jaw gritting, and that’s when I realized, with the next breath, this is what it means to lose your mind. No frizzy hair, no hospital. Not that I’ve lost my thoughts somewhere outside my head, no, instead there are so many thoughts inside my head that are useless. I imagined myself tripping, stumbling, making mistakes and I was falling into traps I could see in advance. Like the trap of doing all this, instead of sculpting. My body was limp, every idea I had made me more vulnerable- to the street, to dogs running out, more pee, friends rejections.
I made it one more mile, and dropped off the pointer mama dog in the backseat. The rescue organization asked me five times if I was sure I couldn’t take her home again after the event. In the middle of the parking lot, I sat in shame, my empathy had failed, I was a hypocritical sculptor, and my girlfriend called me from Tahoe. I confessed that instead of working on my sculpture, I’d spent the morning cleaning up the dog pee and scratches all over her house. She started philosophizing about how I felt stuck in a phase of my life I didn’t want to be in, and was bringing on these distractions, when I laughed, “Obviously,” agreeing too loudly. I told her my battery was dying, because it was. When we hung up I could barely eek out a “bye,” the tears had finally broken through the stern glaze of my face, they’d found their way out my eyes. The tears went out, evaporated, and were lost in the air- but not all the thoughts.
As I drove home- very slowly, and carefully, although, oops, I veered over the divider. I looked at the street lights extra carefully, slowing down well in advance for the yellow lights, except, oops, I ended up in the middle of the crosswalk.
I heard a cop siren. They were out to get me. I looked in my rearview mirror. The cop, on his gold BMW motorbike would pull me over, stand over me with hands on his hips, and say, “Excuse me sir, but you’re illegally out of your mind. It’s unsafe to drive with two unrestrained canines, while touching your phone, while thinking about urine in carpet and saying ‘no’ to more people. Besides, you’re not working on your sculpture, if you consider yourself of sculptor. You’re even considering calling college friends you haven’t talked to for ages and you’ve practically moved in with a girl you met two weeks ago, because you’ve plain old lost your mind.”
I saw the cop in my rearview mirror coming closer. I panicked, my face went red, but then I saw he was pulling over some old Indian man in a van with a handicapped placard. The hot temple-pumping panic went away. That was the panic I should have had, when I had the car accident, but like I said, I was losing my mind.
Finally at home, after flooding the pee stains with vinegar and water, putting an iron on a cloth on top of the leather couch (and burning myself, I saw that one coming), I finally sat in the silence on this 2-week girlfriend’s big blue exercise ball and remembered that I had cried while she was talking. Oh yes, I cried. The man cried. Why did I cry?
“You feel stuck in a phase of life you don’t want to be in.”
How the hell did that relate to dogs and car accidents?
If I was stuck, then the dogs, the car accident, the email-checking, the chocolates, they were all distractions I’d added to my cage. Instead of getting out, I was filling the cage with teddy bears, toys, work, conversations about the cage.
So now I’d figured out the deeper meaning, the root of all this. I knew what it meant to lose my mind, it was no longer a vague concept- I lost it in the car, and I was still recouping. I knew what the phenomenon of all the petty tasks and extraneous responsibilities, that it was me adding distractions to my cage. Metaphorically speaking, finding the key to unlock the cage, unlocking the cage- finishing the damn sculpture- should have been easier than making the cage claustrophobic. But humans don’t always do what’s easy.
An unfinished project like this can eat away at you, like a disease. It’s an underlying obsession that makes all other undertakings distractions, that raises the opportunity cost of all petty activities I engage in. Instead of driving this dog to the adoption event, I should have been chiseling the woman’s hair. Instead of relocating to my girlfriend’s apartment, I should have been feeling for cracks due to the shifting of the weight of my stone.
The disease, called “having an unfinished masterpiece,” is like cataracts, clouding your eyes. Or it’s like a permanent backpack, weighing on you, getting wet and soggy in the rain. You can drive with it for a while, or run with it for a few weeks, and then there’s bound to be that moment you’re dragged down, stuck, in a puddle or a trap or a cage, with everything inside of it except your finished sculpture. That finished statue is somewhere out there, not yet fully formed, invisible to the rest of the world, and that’s where my mind is.
I’ve been creating a sculpture out of marble, of two lovers embracing, and it embodies the deepest my mind can go into a concept, it’s a creation I’ve been thinking about for years. I almost married a woman in college, in fact it was through our relationship this idea spawned- but I never had time to plan the wedding because I was coordinating the procurement of travertine from a basin in Italy. I took this job as a facilities manager of a hotel because when I’m not fixing a broken ice machine, I’m looking through sculpture catalogues to decide what we should put in the rooms and by the pool. The hours are great so that I can come early and leave early, stay up late sculpting, and finish my sculpture in two months. That was the idea, anyway.
My friends invite me out to the bar and I go, because I figure that every person’s got to have friends. Then some dude’s gotta ask what I do, and I say, “I’m a sculptor,” and they say, “What have you sculpted?” and then I say, “Well I’m working on my first sculpture now,” and then they ask, “What’s your sculpture of?” and then I start describing it, like it’s right in front of me and I can see every little detail. More and more details have been filled in over the last twelve years, down to the man’s toenail and the woman’s sixth lash. So I can’t answer their question with one sentence, because then it sounds like it’s just a sculpture of a couple, but it’s more than that, so I end up describing the twists and the magical elements and then I’ve described all of it. I’m out of breath after a couple of sentences and there’s still more, but they say, “Ah cool,” and I feel completely naked. All the guys turn their attention to the screen with football and then one of them says, “I can’t wait to see it when it’s done.” I say, “Me too,” and we nurse our foamy beers.
Every explanation I have for complexities in human relationships points back to my sculpture. I think the world needs it, like diabetics need insulin, like surfers need surfboards. Whenever I go outside I keep itching, every little interaction I see between people reminds me of my sculpture. “That’s why I’m going to make the woman’s shape slightly circular,” or “This is what the subtle gap between their torsos represents.” Sometimes when I’m on an airplane I think, “If this plane crashes I hope someone finds my notes and finishes my sculpture.” I stay awake dreaming about my statue, but when I wake up it’s only a block of marble, beside my bed, still rough and barely chiseled, collecting dust.
On Monday I’d said yes to a foster a pointer dog that had puppies in the shelter, because empathy was one of the themes of my sculpture and I was no hypocrite. On Tuesday, I also agreed to dog sit a goldendoodle, because somehow I figured having the cute fluffy guy around would help me focus on my sculpture. On Wednesday I said yes to the Mexican girls who wanted to stay in my apartment. I figured that the extra money I’d make by simply sleeping at my new girlfriend’s place would help me buy more tools and get my sculpture done sooner. On Thursday I checked emails haphazardly every thirty seconds, looking for any news from the hotel even though my shift was over, because I heard they were thinking to send me to the sculpture convention in March that would make it easier for me to meet the right agents to get my sculpture sold, once it was done.
On Friday, I came home from work, ate a frozen dinner, and forced myself to sit and work on the marble, made a few chisels, even though my head was about to implode, and then I finally went to the gym to lift a few. It eased the feeling of nuclear fission in my head, and I also figured that more muscle would help me sculpt better. On Saturday I ate all the leftover chocolates my girlfriend had brought home from her sister’s wedding. I figured that the easy, free food would save me time from grocery shopping- time I could otherwise be sculpting. I swiffered the floor around the marble three times, and I looked up houses that I’d be able to buy once my sculpture was sold, until I realized that I was like a shopper who forgot to bring his wallet.
I always thought that “losing my mind” would look differently. If I were losing my mind, I thought I’d look like a man with wild frizzy hair coming off his head like he was electrocuted, bald patches had been burned off, and literally, his thoughts lost, a blank expression on his face. He would be dazed and confused as he stumbles down the sterile corridor, bumping into carts, and kicking over canisters. He’d laugh loudly at inappropriate moments, like when someone finds out they’ve got two days to live, and he breaks out into tears when people are in the waiting room.
But instead, this is what it looks like: Saturday afternoon there I was, in the car, not in a hospital, in the middle of the street, in the middle of the intersection. The white car ahead of me had slowed down, and I thought, “Shit I’m going to hit it.” I dropped the phone, with Waze on it or maybe the search for “Urine carpet cleaner” because the dogs peed on my girlfriend’s rugs, and I hit my brakes, my foot pulling down on what felt like a mound of honey. “I’m not going to hit the white car after all,” I thought, when the rubber tires of the car behind me skidded, making a nice fat boom sound into my car’s rear. I jerked forward, the fluffy dog came forward and fluff splattered on the dashboard, and the pointer mama dog slammed into the back of my seat.
I got myself out of the intersection, moving over to the right- that’s what they say to do, pull over after an accident, that’s what I’m thinking like there’s a flight attendant in my head repeating the emergency drill. The dogs were okay. I was okay. I pulled over, but the guy in the red Lincoln who slammed into me from behind wasn’t pulling over too, he was just pointing forward and shrugging like, “There’s no way I can pull over there,” and that’s when I saw that there was a fork in the road, he had no choice but to go forward, or maybe he did, but I felt like it was my fault anyways, because I wasn’t done with my sculpture. He was gone, and I rolled forward a few more blocks to a blinking green street meter. I felt like everyone was watching me, the construction worker in the orange vest was saying, “I saw you, you were looking at your phone,” with his eyes, behind the sunglasses.
I had many thoughts in my head. There were a lot of them. My thoughts were practical, the most practical and logical there could be, like many staircases of next steps, I had a lot of options. In court I could say it was his fault. Is it always the rear person’s fault? I wouldn’t say anything if the red Lincoln came around, I wouldn’t incriminate myself. He wasn’t showing up. I didn’t want to see him anyway. I could have driven around the block to search for the red Lincoln, or we would sit there an hour, I could have gone into “doesn’t matter what it costs must be ultra-prudent,” calling an Uber to take the dog a mile down to the adoption event, I could have continued making calls to find a urine carpet cleaner that would come out same-day. Or I could have called a friend to report on my psyche, tell them, “Man you won’t believe what’s happening to me, oh man.”
My face was stern as can be, my jaw gritting, and that’s when I realized, with the next breath, this is what it means to lose your mind. No frizzy hair, no hospital. Not that I’ve lost my thoughts somewhere outside my head, no, instead there are so many thoughts inside my head that are useless. I imagined myself tripping, stumbling, making mistakes and I was falling into traps I could see in advance. Like the trap of doing all this, instead of sculpting. My body was limp, every idea I had made me more vulnerable- to the street, to dogs running out, more pee, friends rejections.
I made it one more mile, and dropped off the pointer mama dog in the backseat. The rescue organization asked me five times if I was sure I couldn’t take her home again after the event. In the middle of the parking lot, I sat in shame, my empathy had failed, I was a hypocritical sculptor, and my girlfriend called me from Tahoe. I confessed that instead of working on my sculpture, I’d spent the morning cleaning up the dog pee and scratches all over her house. She started philosophizing about how I felt stuck in a phase of my life I didn’t want to be in, and was bringing on these distractions, when I laughed, “Obviously,” agreeing too loudly. I told her my battery was dying, because it was. When we hung up I could barely eek out a “bye,” the tears had finally broken through the stern glaze of my face, they’d found their way out my eyes. The tears went out, evaporated, and were lost in the air- but not all the thoughts.
As I drove home- very slowly, and carefully, although, oops, I veered over the divider. I looked at the street lights extra carefully, slowing down well in advance for the yellow lights, except, oops, I ended up in the middle of the crosswalk.
I heard a cop siren. They were out to get me. I looked in my rearview mirror. The cop, on his gold BMW motorbike would pull me over, stand over me with hands on his hips, and say, “Excuse me sir, but you’re illegally out of your mind. It’s unsafe to drive with two unrestrained canines, while touching your phone, while thinking about urine in carpet and saying ‘no’ to more people. Besides, you’re not working on your sculpture, if you consider yourself of sculptor. You’re even considering calling college friends you haven’t talked to for ages and you’ve practically moved in with a girl you met two weeks ago, because you’ve plain old lost your mind.”
I saw the cop in my rearview mirror coming closer. I panicked, my face went red, but then I saw he was pulling over some old Indian man in a van with a handicapped placard. The hot temple-pumping panic went away. That was the panic I should have had, when I had the car accident, but like I said, I was losing my mind.
Finally at home, after flooding the pee stains with vinegar and water, putting an iron on a cloth on top of the leather couch (and burning myself, I saw that one coming), I finally sat in the silence on this 2-week girlfriend’s big blue exercise ball and remembered that I had cried while she was talking. Oh yes, I cried. The man cried. Why did I cry?
“You feel stuck in a phase of life you don’t want to be in.”
How the hell did that relate to dogs and car accidents?
If I was stuck, then the dogs, the car accident, the email-checking, the chocolates, they were all distractions I’d added to my cage. Instead of getting out, I was filling the cage with teddy bears, toys, work, conversations about the cage.
So now I’d figured out the deeper meaning, the root of all this. I knew what it meant to lose my mind, it was no longer a vague concept- I lost it in the car, and I was still recouping. I knew what the phenomenon of all the petty tasks and extraneous responsibilities, that it was me adding distractions to my cage. Metaphorically speaking, finding the key to unlock the cage, unlocking the cage- finishing the damn sculpture- should have been easier than making the cage claustrophobic. But humans don’t always do what’s easy.
An unfinished project like this can eat away at you, like a disease. It’s an underlying obsession that makes all other undertakings distractions, that raises the opportunity cost of all petty activities I engage in. Instead of driving this dog to the adoption event, I should have been chiseling the woman’s hair. Instead of relocating to my girlfriend’s apartment, I should have been feeling for cracks due to the shifting of the weight of my stone.
The disease, called “having an unfinished masterpiece,” is like cataracts, clouding your eyes. Or it’s like a permanent backpack, weighing on you, getting wet and soggy in the rain. You can drive with it for a while, or run with it for a few weeks, and then there’s bound to be that moment you’re dragged down, stuck, in a puddle or a trap or a cage, with everything inside of it except your finished sculpture. That finished statue is somewhere out there, not yet fully formed, invisible to the rest of the world, and that’s where my mind is.
