Assembling Weak Sketches

Potentilla simplex. Cinquifoil. Common lawn and landscape weed that spreads by seed and stolen.

What follows are my "notes" from this morning. It is a practice in what I believe I am rightly calling "weak theory." Weak theory only looks to explain and describe what is most local and available by adding together what is immediate so as to make sense of things. I think a little more weak theory is needed as we all seem to get gobbled up into large stream narratives of what is happening - things get outside ourselves.  ​

1. I was just hired to do a small paver sidewalk, a project we won't begin until the middle of July probably. The first steps of the process were a little difficult to negotiate as the client kept responding to all my questions, "Yes. OK. Great. Yeah. Give me a quote for that." Getting a quote was what the client expected from me. I had to stop the conversation and say, "Listen. I am not here to give you quotes. You are a friend of a friend. I am here to help figure out what is the best thing for you to do. Find out what you want, what you need, help establish a sensible budget, answer questions." I think we saved him several thousand dollars. He explained to me a week later "We are hiring you because you told us what you thought was best to do. No one else would make a recommendation, they just handed us a catalog and told us to pick out what we like."
2. I fear, oftentimes, it sounds as if much of my writing is ideological critiques. But I don't think it is. Speculation, maybe. But generally the question I am trying to get to is "where is and what makes the value in works." If to say "more well directed and efficient work performed makes for more value" then my critiques are more speculative measurements of how much work is behind something claiming to be a value. 
3. "The Emperor Has No Clothes." An old professor friend of mine used to always bring up this short tale of Hans Christian Anderson and it took me 20 years to get around to reading it last winter. I recalled it this morning. If I could paraphrase the poetic sentiments I gather from it, I would write this as: "Do the men who make the emporor's invisible clothes do anything at all? Anderson writes the story telling of the tailors busily working to make no clothes at all.  And when the child calls out at the end of the story "The emperor's not wearing any clothes" is what the child really doing is saying "There is no value in the emperor."
4. From my morning's reading: "In the end, the critique of ideology stands before the opposing consciousness like one of those modern, highly specialized pathologists who can, of course, say precisely what kind of pathological disturbance the patient is suffering from but knows nothing about appropriate therapies because that is not his specialty. Such critics, like some medicos corrupted by their profession, are interested in the diseases, not the patients." Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 2015. p19
5. "On Value." I always critique the florist, horticulturist, or "co-hort" identity and ideological/belief system. So much sense of self and imagination of difference based on "the plants" and what is believed to be "the right way." But, the work can never be about you unless you are tending to your own personal garden. Horticultural and landscape gardening work only finds its place of value when it is applied to helping another person who wants or needs it.