There's a hook by my door, rusted, bent slightly, that I hung the first day I got this space in 1998. I don't remember what it originally held. A coat, maybe. Now it holds a coil of baling wire I've never used and a small brass bell that came off a dead elevator. The bell rings sometimes when I open the door too fast. I keep both because I've decided they're essential and I refuse to examine that decision.

The rest of the wall is worse. A strip of masking tape from a show I did in Brno in 2011 that I peeled off a gallery floor and stuck there meaning to throw it away. A key to a building I no longer have access to. A plastic bag of screws sorted by length, which is the only order in this studio.

I've been in this room twenty-seven years this month. I know where everything is, which is not the same as knowing why everything is there. That's the part nobody warns you about. The objects accumulate their own logic and after a while you're just maintaining a small civilization of meaningless things, and it becomes the work, or it becomes the reason the work doesn't happen, and most days you can't tell which.

Anyway. The heating in here died on Tuesday, so I'm wearing two jackets and drinking coffee that went cold an hour ago. Starting a new piece tomorrow, if the wire ever finds a use.