-- Sunday, February 13, 2000 --

2:54 a.m. Behind every creation, there is a creator. And let me tell you, there is a lot of fun in being a creature who creates. Take this wonderful outside collage that you see in the photo. It's yet another nifty piece in the yard of the folks who have the chair of heavy time, the machine of joyful noise, the cactus of ill repute, and a few other things I've photographed but haven't posted yet.

A thoroughly wonderful wall improvement this is. It's constructed of all those little flappy fliers you get in the mail each week with the supermarket pamphlets -- the "Have you seen me?" bump in your day that makes you feel guilty because you just don't make the effort. The faces can't register and the children have gone missing.

And so this particular artist collected the bits of minutia from the everyday mailbox and he made something out of it. You can be sure that as he pasted the photos in, one by one by one, that he thought and thought and thought about all those faces he was running his fingers over.

Then, many layers of clear poly-(you-know) varnish. Ethylene, vinyl, chloride ... the name escapes me ... the slick shellac that waterproofs and withstands the elements. Covers the faces and removes them from time.

This is a technique I have used successfully in the past. When I tell you what I have pasted on various walls in my life and then shellacked over, you will gasp. People who have purchased houses I have moved out of have probably never stopped talking about what they found on the cellar stairwell, the kitchen walls, the bathroom walls.

Trapped forever in an amber glaze in a Pennsylvania basement are ancient photos of Native Americans with severed-digit necklaces. World War II Ends in 120-point Helvetica on Witherspoon Street in Princeton. Bruno fries in the electric chair in Flemington, New Jersey. If memory serves.

I certainly didn't feel like an artist while I was shellacking ephemera to knobby surfaces. In fact, I never felt like an artist until I began these pages. I might have done artistic things, but it was always a fluke, or a craft, or yet another fluke. I really wonder what it is that makes you step up to your work and stand before it and smile beside it.

Some kids are lucky and they never wonder about such things. From their first hand-turkey on the refrigerator, they just know. Some people go to their graves never once getting their picture taken with one of their creations. They never figured it out.

One clue is how you feel when you're working. If you're dropping through the canvas, your ego in shreds, you're probably also smiling ... and there's a good chance you're in the sweet spot of that particular racket.

Another clue is the phenomenon of missing time. If you select an Exacto one minute and then look up from your carving and wonder what happened to the afternoon, you're probably making something to stand up for. In scientific circles, it's called "flow" and even as I type this, I'm soaking in it. It's now 4:20. I had to look at the clock to make sure.

I only started typing seconds ago, honest. I'm looking at the photo I just inserted next to this text, and I'm grinning right back at it. I guess that makes me an artist. That, and the shellac.