once pristine . texts . dreams

we were making paintings, i finished one painting and it was good except there was one area that i had worked too much and regretted it and was trying to re-work it and worried that i was making it bad, but when i stepped back to look at it, it was still good, my wife was there and watching and she agreed that it was good, although she had cautioned me when i over worked it . there were other people working on paintings which weren't as finished as mine, and one of them, a young man, was hating his and really worried that he couldn't do it . but after mine was ready i reassured him that his was good and i looked at all the paintings we had in the room, they were all a similar style, red and black lines, raw and abstract, and the canvases had raised sections, which made them three dimensional and very thick . i think there were five in total, the one i had been working on, the young man's, which was the least finished and three others, all were at different stages of completion, but all were very unified in style, mine was most finished and the others were variously completed . i surveyed the paintings and confidently declared that they were good, again reassuring the young man and further specifiying that three of them were finsihed and two, including his, we would be able to finish later, and that we should go now to the exhibition . we all got on our bicycles and began to ride toward the exhibition . i was connected to my wife as we rode, by a chord or something we were carrying or dragging, and during the ride we were alternately riding or walking or running, she was my wife but she was also angelina jolie . we decided we needed to take off our coats, we didn't need them now but we needed to hold onto them as we rode . together we went off the main road leading up to the exhibition, on to some side streets, we became a bit lost in some small streets and alleys, and we wanted to get back to the others who were on the direct main road . we stopped and found a place to cut through to the main road, it was a open lot of nothing but sand . she took off her shoes to go through and i did the same and followed her . we lost our coats, i was worried about it but she was not, we were not cold now, it was nice weather . we were at the main road, and running to catch the others, but we came upon a magnificent classical facade, in which i was very interested but she was less so, we were at the top of a wide staircase descending from the entrance of the classical building down to the main road . we were still barefoot, and she ran diagonally down the wide staircase toward the road, i wanted to linger at the building and said, 'do you know how old these stairs must be', they were made from beautiful light brown or pinkish stone, possibly granite, but she was uninterested and kept running down the steps, and i realized, or someone told me, that the building actually wasn't old, it was neo-classical and only about nineteenth century or so . she was gone, she had run on toward the exhibition and toward the others, but i stayed inside the classical building . there was a show going on and it was very fancy and there were flowers and ornaments and rich people, it was like a fancy fundraiser and a banker with good hair was in charge, i was walking and talking with the banker while the show was going on, it was a show where the audience moves with the performers and it was unclear who was who, there were fancy cars driving through the building, i had some idea of what to do and was suggesting it to the banker (i can't remember what it was) and he was saying 'no, i tried everything and it can't be done' . the fancy cars were in a procession driving in a pattern through the building and around it and finally straight into it to stay, it was as though they were in a procession and needed to stay together but they were also in traffic when they were outside the building and some really junky cars got mixed in, a large SUV cut in between two of the fancy cars in the procession and i was embarassed for the driver, but i realized he didn't care and was just cutting through the intersection on his way to another street, this happened again with an old mangled large seventies sedan and i realized it wasn't a big deal that they broke the procession and cut through and that the fancy cars were coming into the classical building to stay but those cars were just passing through . as i was sitting watching this procession with the banker, we were on a large stepped display with other fancy people and flowers and ornaments, and i noticed my dirty socks were on his lap and i was embarassed and i also knew my breath stank, i apoplogized to the banker about my dirty socks being there and i was ashamed, but he told me, 'don't apologize, your dirty socks have been paying for this whole thing here for a long time'