Remission
an excerpt

I remember staring at minimalist paintings on school field trips to art museums as a teenager, you know, the kind with a couple of hasty squiggles or a sploot of red paint in the corner of an otherwise blank canvas. I remember staring at them and wondering even then how they could be considered creative masterpieces; it couldn’t have taken the artist more than five minutes to finish one of those. But now…I don’t know…I’m still not profoundly moved by an itty bitty smudge surrounded by a big gigantic frame, but I’ll buy that the artist may have been. A lot can happen in five minutes. I can do an assessment in five minutes, can usually tell you how most of the major systems in a person’s body are doing by then. If five is long enough for me to do that, it’s enough for a painter to make a statement. Not everybody gets nurses, either.