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      Christopher Freeze was born rather undramatically in Phoenix, Arizona—at the time a city in transition: a sprawling, major-league-sports-franchiseless nowhere in the middle of the Sonora desert that was fifty years and who knows how many millions of gallons of illegally diverted river water away from becoming the wealthy golf and retirement Mecca it is today.
     A relatively healthy baby, Christopher endured the usual cavalcade of childhood maladies: chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough—usual with one significant exception: hospitalizations at the ages of nine and eleven for stomach ulcers, the product, it was professionally surmised, of pathological worry.

(Excerpts from the unpublished journals of Christopher Freeze)

    Back in the studio this morning. I wanted to pick up where I had left off on Untitled, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t make myself care about it—not in the right way. All I could do was sit there and stare stupidly at those first 100 strokes and wonder what it was that had gotten me started, what it was that made me think I knew where this was going. It’s probably another terrible idea and I just don’t know it yet. I’ll try to get a little distance, to rejoin it, to fix it, but I won’t be able to. I’ll slap at it and slap at it and slap at it again—who knows how many times—before I give up and scrape it down, before I say to myself at the end what I am saying to myself now: that it’s another mistake, another waste of precious time.

*

            It is a difficult thing in these early hours not to feel trivial—or, feeling trivial, to carry on.

*

    David Andres was saying if he could just get the right people to object to something of his, to insist that it be removed from wherever it had been placed, it would be the making of him. It would mean a reputation, which is money in the bank. It would mean a better bottle of wine with dinner, a car with more horsepower, a house with more square feet, a girlfriend with fewer cats.

*

    Ran into Aaron Powers at Downtown Drugs. I haven’t seen him in a couple of months—not since we showed paintings together at a charity auction for the Library. He is growing a beard. It’s probably a good idea because he has been cursed with a completely uninteresting face. I told him it looked good. He said thanks, but from the way he said it I could tell he wasn’t really comfortable with the thing, that he felt like a bit of a fraud—like a bald man wearing a hat. Anyway, I was looking for toothpaste, and Kevin was after some sort of new herbal concoction he had read about somewhere because he was afraid he was coming down with something. I hate it when you run into someone and they tell you they think they are coming down with something because when they tell you that you have to stand there, make concerned faces, and talk to them as if nothing was wrong when what you really want to do is jump back a couple of feet and say sorry about that, but whatever it is, don’t give it to me. I especially want to do that because I am one of those people who lives in terror of getting something—no matter how small—because no matter what it is, if I get it, I get a bigger, more unpleasant version of it than other people. I don’t get sick easily, but when I do get sick, I get very very sick. And it is not just my physical reaction that is extreme, but my emotional one, too. It’s a sort of double whammy—extra sick and extra depressed.

*

    Safadi’s is not a gallery—it’s a menagerie. I fit right in.

*

    I received a letter today from someone named Alan Barnes. I have never heard of him before, but from his handwriting—which is a little overly scrupulous for my taste—I imagine him to be another shifty, middle-aged Art History professor with tenure issues and a weakness for underaged blondes.  He is about to begin work on some sort of profile or monograph, and he was wondering if he could pay me a visit. I can tell from the pro-forma nature of the request that he isn’t really wondering at all—he already knows the answer. He just wants to get my rejection on the record. He probably thinks it will help him make a point.

*

    Sarah and her tan—it’s a complex relationship that a paleface like me couldn’t possibly understand.

                                    (Excerpts from various reviews)
    “A sort of on-again/off-again complex-style surrealist, Freeze works in that sparsely populated corner of the genre reserved for slumming skeptics.Temperamentally his pictures are reminiscent of Soutine’s. But the simply drawn figures, elaborately stuccoed surfaces, convoluted, idiosyncratic resolutions—these are uniquely Freeze’s.”

                                                                 Acquisitive

     We are obviously an acquisitive group here in this neighborhood and some of us are more acquisitive than others, but there is something about the nature of Boyd’s particular species of getting that is especially off-putting.  I think in part it is simply how much he has (his garage is a disgrace), but it is also what he has. It is not age-appropriate. Flabby, balding, and fifty-five if he’s a day, it’s the sort of stuff you would expect someone twenty years younger to be accumulating—skis, bicycles, baseball paraphernalia, golf clubs, a speedboat. No one has ever seen him use any of it.

 Appetizer

Karen made a pea and cauliflower salad. It is our contribution to dinner with the Snyders.
         “Just bring anything,” Amy said.
         “ How about an appetizer or some sort of a salad?” Karen asked.
         “A salad is fine.” 
         The “fine” thing about this salad is that it is easy to make, but it looks hard.

Alchemists

While I don’t sell insurance, the company I work for employs people who do. In the face of catastrophe we offer hope and salvation. We are alchemists. We turn fear into money.

                                                        Angry

Katherine Kramer has started getting angry in meetings. She has started doing this under the mistaken impression that if she acts like some of her male counterparts, she will be treated like them. This is not the case. Her anger is just annoying people she shouldn’t be annoying and suggesting to some—who she should not be suggesting anything to—that she is headed for a nervous collapse.

Assorted

The subject line of the memo I wrote read simply: Assorted Issues.

Amuse

I don’t know exactly why I wrote “Assorted Issues”—I was bored and frustrated I guess. It was a way of amusing myself, a way of avoiding the despair that sweeps over me regularly several times a day. It never occurred to me that anyone would read it.

Apologizing

Russell McGahan is a nice old man. He is my neighbor to the east. Like a lot of old men, he has a well-stocked store of regrets. One in particular that seems to come up often in conversation is the regret he feels at not having been a better father to his son. He is constantly apologizing. Russell doesn't feel he took sufficient interest in the boy when he was young. He says too often he was just tired—his work in the upper-middle echelons of the banking industry taking out most of what he had in him. I told Russell he shouldn't believe everything he reads—a father's presence in his son's life is not inevitably a blessing.

AC

It is to me what the heart-lung machine is to the surgeon: essential. Physically I can survive the summer without it; emotionally I cannot. If it breaks down, I break down.

Awkward

Most of the dreams I have are interesting only for the awkward outlandishness of their peculiarity, and most of the ones I am told—if interesting at all—are similarly interesting only for their strangeness, not for their profundity. I wish I could say I had a recurring one—I like what that would suggest about the complexity of my psyche—but I haven't yet, so I am inclined to doubt I ever will.

Awake

It’s always difficult to imagine what is keeping Karen awake. She has so many things on her mind. While I am toying with some anesthetizing fantasy, she is worrying about her mother’s health or her brothers—one of them between jobs, the other between marriages. Tonight I have the feeling it is one of her students. We were talking about him at dinner. But maybe it is about me—the way I have been acting lately.

Astonishing

         Karen, who notices everything there is to notice about me, finds it astonishing that Elizabeth (across the alley) doesn’t seem to know whether her husband is right or left-handed. “I bet there was a time when she used to know,” Karen says, shaking her head ever so slightly.

Act

I don’t really seem to know how to act anymore. When I was younger, knowing didn’t really seem to be a question—now, at some level, it always is.

Adopted

The Jenners over on Stimpson Street have just adopted their fourth underprivileged child. Like most of the neighbors, I respect them enormously—but like a few, I find myself also wondering exactly what it is they are trying to prove, and to whom.

Abnormality

        Someday the doctor is going to find one. That is the day the compromising truly begins.  

Afternoon

David May has been closed up in his office all afternoon working on the mysterious presentation he will be making tomorrow. A certifiably neurotic perfectionist, he worries about everything—so to save himself embarrassment, he prepares and prepares and prepares. He does this with an intensity the rest of us find peculiar and frightening.

Accident

Periodically I am stupefied by a sense that it is all just part of an infinitely vast, complex, ongoing accident. I can barely get up out of my chair and get myself another glass of wine.