It ain't bragging if it's true

So I had this amazing dream. It was called the last four days of my life. I was back in Oberlin, and the town had tricked itself out even more fantasy camp than usj, streets snowy and silent and holiday lights bedecking the downtown corridor, my daily responsibilities limited to cooking and eating and storytelling and snuggling. On our way in on Weds. eve the roads were slick like whoa and we skidded off the highway into a ditch, Deb and I, but in an injury-free, laugh-about-it-hysterically-for-ten-minutes-afterwards way rather than a dead-in-a-midwestern-cornfield way. We also continued our tradition of getting blazingly lost in major Ohio cities and then somehow showing up on time at our destination anyway.

The Allen has a show up right now that is, in my opinion, gonzo bizonkers Snickers bar fantastic. Even better than Jim Dine splashing Diet Coke on his canvases. The entire gallery hummed with sound. When I went in there was a metronome ticking on an old upright piano with a computer screen inlaid at its heart, and on it you could watch digital video of the artist schlepping around her home kitchen, toddler on hip, getting things out of her refrigerator and putting them back again. Next to the piano was a sealed glass cabinet full of kids' shoes spray painted red, and on a little stumpy table nearby there rested fingernail clippings and baby teeth next to a display of about 30 brass alarm clocks. Most of the humming, though, was coming from a two-story treehouse installation. A staircase wound around the side and up to a thickly curtained room housing throw pillows and a birdhouse emitting chirps and whistles of alternately human and avian varieties.

When I came down out of the treehouse the metronome had stopped ticking. This was mad jarring, since I had spent the last 15 mins. subconsciously attuning my breaths & movements, as if on some deep-ass Wrinkle In Time tip, to its pulse, and with the beat gone my equilibrium was suddenly six flavors of shaken. So I was thinking, is this some kind of strategic fait accompli? Did the artist put the metronome on a timer to deliberately shake us up, to draw attention to the unreliability of time in the face of all attempts to record its passage? Or did the thing just happen to, like, break while I was there?

Regardless, I love me some 'stlation art.