I’m sitting here looking at this blue square on my monitor—it’s for the Farmers & Merchants Bank down on Main, the one next to the old feed store that closed in '94 because the highway moved—and I honestly feel like I’m disappearing into the white space. I’ve been doing this for fifty years, longer if you count the hand-lettered signs I did for my uncle’s pharmacy (he used to give me lemon drops for every 'S' I didn't mess up), and yet here I am at seventy-six, trying to find the right kerning for a word that means absolutely nothing to me. I suppose it’s a form of OCCUPATIONAL ALIENATION, or maybe just a deep-seated melancholia that comes from knowing you have a gift for something beautiful but you’re using it to sell interest rates to people who can’t even afford their tractors anymore. It’s 2:14 in the morning and the crickets are so loud out here in the holler that I can barely hear my own thoughts, which is probably a good thing because my thoughts are mostly just echoes of things I should have said forty years ago.