I’ll begin this dispatch by listing a few fantastic things about Provincetown:
1. It’s a pedestrian town—the entire population gets out for an afternoon amble, and cars simply have to wait. Sometimes there are more people in the street than there are on the sidewalk, and this combines with the smell of burning sage at the local head shop to give Commercial Street a vaguely third-world feel;
2. However, a great number of the pedestrians appear to be really large old women, until, upon closer inspection, they turn out to be large men dressed up as old women.
3. It always smells salty.
4. There are whales in them thar waters. I seen ‘em.
Things that are somewhat less fantastic:
1. I bought a tomato today for $2.50. A small, misshapen one.
2. My cell phone service is so spotty that I had to email my boyfriend to call my Mom after the following conversation: Hi, Mom. Where are you? In Provincetown. You’re in trouble? No, Mom, I’m in Provincetown. The reception is terrible. You’re terrible? You sound terrible! What’s happened? No (laughing) I’m fine. Okay, Mandy. Stop crying for a minute and tell me if you’re all right! Mom, I’m--BEEP BEEP BEEP. CALL LOST.
3. I’ve heard that it will get really cold and dark and I’ll go crazy.
But, as far as I can tell, I haven’t lost it yet. I have, however, spent hours and hours revising individual sentences. I’ve allowed a single scene to baffle me for an entire day, right through meals, right through sunset. I’ve found myself standing before the pantry with a handful of chocolates, mumbling about narrative arc. And this morning I called three separate people in the hours before dawn (forgot about time zones) to ask how long it would take to dig a pond. Eat a prawn? Get something pawned? No, I shouted, leaning into the window, where sometimes I can get a clear signal. Dig a freaking pond!
As though that made any more sense.
And of course, I’ve been observing the behavior of the far-more-interesting visual artists. Yesterday, I encountered one sitting in the common room with something that looked like a small pane of glass balanced on her palm, with something that looked like chocolate smeared on it. When I got closer, I saw that the brown stuff was smeared in an intentional way, in a pattern that suggested wind, and waves on the ocean, and was actually quite nice.
“Don’t touch it,” she said.
I assured her I wouldn’t. Then she explained, in a way that I will never be able to reproduce, all about printmaking, and what this piece of glass had to do with it. She was a little crestfallen because she feared she’d made a mistake, and she wanted to start the whole thing over again, but was making herself finish it anyway. I swallowed--I’ve been starting and abandoning projects at the rate of three per day. Then she said that she often made mistakes, and sometimes they turned out to be the most interesting aspects of the work—not mistakes at all, just the unexpected. And of course, you can’t tell the difference until you finish the print.
So here’s to not (immediately) squashing the unexpected. And to finishing the print.
-AR
