The Monastic Trashcan, by Michael Lynch

I'll get to the floridly painted trashcan, I promise; but first, a formalist aside.

I have been writing every day for a very long time, far longer than has existed an internet or (God forbid) a blogosphere. And, to the dismay of readers and skimmers everywhere, I am drawn to long and complicated stories. Which makes a blog an odd form, for me.

Blog posts pop up at the top, so a long story accumulates backwards. To make the most of this formal anamoly, I'll write my long, complicated report on the inagugural New Monastic Workshop backwards.

I'll start at the end, and amuse myself by imagining some future Wifi-enabled insomniac who clicks his or her way onto "Confluence City" and elects to read the whole dang workshop report, from start to finish.

For those already with me as of [whenever Google gets this posted for me] on July 21, 2008, here we go, from finish to start.

You know it's over when the artist wants his trashcan back.

The artist is Brother Michael Lynch. He is an airbrush ace, among many other vocations. He has long airbrushed images and colors - onto his trash can and a chair and a table and lots of pieces of paper.

Brother John Eiler and I curated a show of this stuff for the workshop. It was almost overpowering to all the monks who saw the show.

But sometimes a trashcan is just a trashcan. "I need my damn trashcan back," Michael called John today to say.

So the Michael Lynch show at the New Monastic Workshop begins to come down - or go back - simply because the artist has started to accumulate garbage.