I have only fragments of moments to write anything. I am so busy with painting the interior of the house here, compiling a body of work for an exhibition sponsored by the Ultimate Akademie Köln and the Goethe Institute in Thailand. The project is called One Day of My Life in a Box and, well, I was a bit stumped on what to do for it. As well, I was invited to contribute an edition of work for the next BLAST edition. Here I am on the millionth kilometer of travel in the last 18 months, a small suitcase to live from, and no real studio to work in, not the greatest conditions to have unfettered creativity. Actually, it is all I can do to survive. So I decide to use the 1000 Buddhas database, somehow. Making small photocopies with 25 on each page, and then cutting them down, making stacks of 50 sheets, a Buddha on each side, drilling a hole through the top edge of the stack and tying them together — a Book of 100 Buddhas. Or so. Kinda lame. And the people at Kinkos (the local copy store) totally screwed up cutting the second set of 300 pages of photocopies which took me three hours to produce. They won’t let me run the paper cutting machine myself, either, for insurance reasons … Really irritating. And the manager obviously is not interested in having this “weird” kind of work that is bothersome and particular to do. It is too bad — I have produced a lot of work at different Kinkos before, and mostly have gotten great service from other managers. One in particular, in Boulder, Colorado, invited me to come run their big machines myself to produce exactly what I wanted in the off-hours, and gave me a huge discount to boot! But, this seems to be yet another example of the paranoia that seems to be so, what, popular, these days. Afraid of anything that does not fit the proscribed formula. Maybe this is a result of too many people learning their behavioral morality system from TV — they can bear no deviation from the slick and packaged norm. Or something. I dunno. I wish it were elsewise. That there is a more open attitude, a bit of embracing of fresh new things, new insights. (Bloody foolish idealist I am, eh?) But still worried as hell about what is happening to me.