Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

I feel like I’m withering. I need a creative project to set my mind or my body to. One I’ve been thinking about is that I have all these wine corks I’ve been saving up for six or more years. An entire silverware drawer jam packed with them, even though the kind of wine I usually buy comes in a cardboard container, sans cork. My idea is to make a wine bottle shape out of the corks, then put rocks all around it inside a picture frame. It’s not a very original idea, which is probably why those corks aren’t getting out of that drawer.

I used to make things out of stones. Once, at an art show, I was selling wine stoppers, bottle openers, wine racks, and some other trinkets I’d made. A lady told me she had no need for a wine stopper because once the bottle is opened, there’s no stopping it. I can relate. Once I open a bottle of wine, I have no intention of stopping it up. The cork, removed and set aside as though it might be reused, is the cork of delusion. 

Sometimes I wonder whether if a river of cabernet suddenly appeared in front of my home I would enter its deep red waters and float away to whatever magical land of plush and comfort awaits, even if that land was at the bottom of the Cabernet River, where I might look through coke bottle glasses as the dappled light from above irrevocably dimmed. Anyway, I feel like a drawer full of old wine corks as a symbol of my aspirations, art or otherwise, can’t be a good sign. But then, I’ve never been an artist, just a person with what might be called artistically adjacent tendencies.

Lately I’ve been working on making a walking stick. It’s an easy task, because all you have to do is find a stick, dress it up a little, and you’re basically done. That’s my kind of project, my kind of art. 

I found this stick on the beach in California, water logged and gnarled in the sand, tossed it in the back of my truck where it could dry out as I carried it across the land back to Minnesota. I think it’s a tree root, dark red and a little flexible, but springy. Who knows where it came from. Japan maybe. I’d like to think it’s a root from a redwood, but then, shouldn’t it be bigger? The whole thing looks like maybe someone tried to make a cane out of clay but became frustrated and bent it and gripped it in different places and pushed their thumbs into it like half-formed dough, then left it to bake in the sun. Maybe nature has artistic tendencies, too. 

I tried sprucing it up with some copper wire, but it looked cheap, like someone didn’t know what they were doing. So recently I got a new idea and ordered a smelter so affordable that it’s doomed to break soon. I gathered dozens of lead sinkers from my tackle box, then melted the lead into shimmering liquid (like in Terminator 2) and dripped it into a few of the walking stick’s dimpled depressions that alternate with its knobby lumps. I should have worn safety glasses. 

In the end it looked pretty cool, but since lead won’t stick to wood, I varnished it to seal the lead in. Then it looked even cooler. But then I left it outside to dry and it rained and the varnish hadn’t fully cured and it turned white and bubbly and it’s worse than if I had just left it alone. It could be on a beach somewhere in California.

I should probably give up, but if I gave up every time I fucked up I’d never get anything done, so I’m going to start over. I’ll strip it back down and in the end I will probably have $150 into a stick I found on a beach, and it will make a nice gift for someone, but it sure won’t be worth $150.

So, I guess I’ve got that stick thing going for me for now. 

Lately I’ve been thinking of writing fictional notes to specific people and framing them, like they are important pieces of art or some sort of keepsake, but they aren’t. Or I might frame some short poems I’ve written over the years, or some stupid Jack Handey-like quotes. If I keep at it, once I get about 30-40 frames together, I can get a booth at some second-tier suburban art show and have a few wine stoppers and bottle openers around, too, in case no one wants a framed letter to/from someone they don’t know.