words fail me

i left the house angry this morning. in tears, actually, from my own petty anxieties out into the relatively warm (okay, cold with warmish undertones) sunshine. i looked at the gigundous open wound that is the former site of two houses across the street from ours, which the January demolition crew re-sculpted into a remarkable replica of 1993-4 Sarajevo, complete with piles of twisted metal, 10-foot deep holes partially filled with watery muck, stacks of bricks that look like they've been shot at, and other occasionally identifiable gack.
anyway, they left the 4-foot high wrought-iron perimeter fence up, for some reason. Maybe they figured it would render the evidence of their scorched-earth redevelopment tactics invisible? I've been holding my breath waiting for the first report of a five-year-old drowning or getting tetanus or something awful at that site, but now it is apparently on someone's radar, since today there is orange plastic mesh covering each of the 40-foot holes in the wrought iron fence. Thank God.
what i meant to talk about though, was the workshop i attended today on Writing An Artist's Statement. I had high hopes. The impenetrable calculus of how to succinctly and with devastating skill transpose all of your best creative ideas into language was about to be cracked, or so i thought. Instead I sat down, somebody said "There's chocolate, you know," and passed me a broken-off half of what looked like one of those fund-raising candy bars (good stuff, i'm not complaining), and our dear, sweet, slightly nervous, fidgety hostess asked us to pair off and tell each other in 2 minutes what our artwork is all about, so that we could each introduce our partner and talk about her work to the whole group. AGH!