FROM NOW ON 15 - primary colors
by Susan Weber
The painters have a song on that sounds like Arabic or Hindi rap. It fills me with pleasure to witness white dudes digging music of the far and wide. Our sons adored hip hop in the day. Gone is my old inclination to ask what group it is — maybe just hipsters out of Brooklyn — because who cares about factual accuracy? I reside in the fiction world. Outsiders are scraping the house for the first time since we moved in, self-sufficient having been our middle name. I’m inside free associating with my pen. Start with the soundtrack of my life. Liberal pundits can be insufferable. Right wing blowhards border on the comical and sometimes sad. Both know how to side step truth that messes up their universe. You gotta say they’re all on a mission and in a weird way love worthy too. Do not ask me to explain this. My painters play a song with robotic vocals that mesh well with scraping, scuffing, sluffing, lifting latex scabs from a thin skinned house. Yesterday on upswung ladders they talked non-stop about the kids they went to school with. They blasted past employers who got to work at noon and stiffed the painters royally but this crew starts at eight and power-vacs the paint scraps up by four. Cussing punctuates the valor. They must have set their ladders too far apart today to shoot the breeze. My writing desk looks out the untouched front of the house. Maybe tomorrow they’ll tromp around the porch roof removing shutters and dispersing grooves to the neighborhood. I like them because my boys once frequented this porch, these rooms, the sidewalk that set them out marauding. I like the boisterous take on the void I plan to fill with stories. I love their proud ego, their smooth id, their lunch hour leaving me to ponder.
Photo by Luca Nebuloni CC BY 2.0