1942. Lots happened that year. Nighthawks. Paul left that year, and he was gone for a while; wasn’t painting me or my town, back then when he was gone. Or maybe he was, somewhere. These sorts of things it’s hard to know in the same way I know lots of other things.
Paul put the oranges up that year, the ones up at the post office. The orange painting got made somewhere and then they took it and put it up in the post office, and it was a real funny shape so it could go fitting around all the doorframes and the other stuff. I like stuff like that. Sometimes, it feels like I can feel my town change to fit around some things. It’s only natural I suppose. Things wrap up and warp and then maybe they rip. Holes in things are useful. I like my holes and I like how they keep me in place. Three of them, usually. Two rounded, one stretched, they go onto the pegs and then everyone else has the same holes and we all go onto the pegs, two stretched and one round. Like this.
I’ll bet you didn’t know that I could show you things. Well, I can. Would you like to see the room up there? And the guy? Of course you would. Maybe later.There are lots of things up there, and some of them I have in my town too. Walls and corridors and floors and shadows and corners and holes. Sometimes they get fuzzy; only down here though, not up there. “To penetrate the animated cartoon, one must learn to navigate the corridors of images made labyrinthine by their low resolution and to look past the dense fog of film emulsion. Through this obscurity the world comes into view.” Hannah Frank, she’ll say that, and she won’t know it when she does but she’ll be talking about my town.
