I'm painting a mural in the branch office of an asset management firm called A.G.Edwards and Sons Inc. No black people work at A.G. Edwards and Sons Inc. At least six women are named Kathy. One such woman named Kathy, an upper management person of considerable self-confidence, has allotted $1,250 to transform the lunchroom of A.G. Edwards and Sons Inc. into an Italian bistro. Impossible. I suspect that Kathy once saw a Salvador Dali calendar in Borders that read, "painting makes the impossible possible." Presently I am being careful not to drip any paint on the microwave as I dapple acrylic sunlight across the Mediterranean Sea. Inside the microwave someone's Lean Cuisine is being radiated by electromagnetic energy.

Less than a year ago I was studying Carravaggio in Rome. I was sitting in smoky chapels, feeding Euro cents into vending machines that gently lit the Carravaggios on a timer. I was traveling through Northern Europe to inspect the surfaces of the Flemish masters, squatting and ducking to see how reflections of light revealed flaws and tensions in the paint film. Now I am using pastel craft paint to bastardize an American notion of Italy onto cheap drywall at the Dunkin' Donuts of asset management. This is how I paid for college.

Since the age of fourteen I have painted murals in homes, schools, and businesses. I have painted Michael Jordan to scale next to a blonde nine-year-old boy. I have painted $2,400 worth of cartoon wizards and castles in the playroom of an unborn baby. I have scumbled 4,388 clouds onto ceilings, all with the same ultramarine and titanium mixture for sky tone, and I have lacquered over 80 sports logos in the rumpus rooms of wealthy teenage brats. I have painted faeries, faries, and fluttering butterflies in a lifeless stasis. I have painted Tiger Woods, Elvis, Astronauts, and Tiger Woods again. I have told my employers, "I'm going to use a high-gloss Windsor and Newton UVmax acrylic at a slightly higher cost" and then used forty cent craft paint from a hobby store. I have hidden porno inside the houses where I was working to keep myself entertained. I have hustled awful paintings to people who knew nothing about art.

The lunchroom of A.G. Edwards and Sons Inc. doubles as the coffee room, and I am blessed with a constantly rotating audience. Many of the employees have taken to calling me "Picasso." "Yo Picasso!" Gary said as he opened a plastic container of eggrolls, "Wow, that is just awesome. I can't even draw a stick figure! Fan-tas-tic." Surely Picasso himself must have struggled at coming up with humble responses to, "I can't even draw a stick figure." Gary is probably unaware that, aside from studying how to draw stick figures, I have also studied artists who rub ketchup on their naked bodies and stick their penises in this or that. Gary wears a tucked in golf shirt printed with the A.G. Edwards logo. "Do you need anything?" he always asks.

Joining Gary is a female observer whom I know only by the cinnamon tone of her panty hose. Every five minutes she offers me coffee or pizza. She is kind to me in the way that a middle-class mother would be kind to a Romanian exchange student. She peers at me over her coffee mug as I brush golden sunlight into the fountain, muttering "incredible" under her breath. The world seems to make sense to her, and I envy her for that. She often gossips with another Kathy. Apparently Gary has a squirrel in his attic that he can't get out.

The walls of A.G. Edwards and Sons Inc. display paintings of Paris and Rome. The paintings are tarp like canvases thickly knifed with frosting. They are probably lithographs with acrylic textures added on inhumane assembly lines in Mexico. I imagine that Kathy purchased these paintings in bulk from an art dealer at a hotel art convention. Her business VISA was probably swiped into a terminal at the art dealer's table. The plants were selected to coordinate with the frosting, the frosting was selected to coordinate with each fleck in the carpet, and all of these well matched surfaces mingle with their reflections, discussing the White Sox and the Cubs all day. Every surface of this building is reflective. Everywhere I look I see my face. My body splits in half when the elevator doors open.

Some of the offices are totally empty except for a desk and phone. The desks may or may not be wood. I want to stay here at night and see how quiet it gets. I want to sit here alone with the silent phones until the office feels like home. I could live here secretly, hiding from the janitor like they do in the movies, sleeping under the empty desks and stealing leftovers from the fridge and never paying rent again. I could paint my own secret mural on the undersides of the ceiling tiles, a chapel visible only when the squares are flipped over. I could carry a synthetic plant onto the roof of the building and set it on fire. I could watch the flames curling away and reflecting in the dark glass.

Today I ate my lunch on the exterior grounds of the kingdom, seated on a bench that overlooked a waterfall from a mini-golf course. Someone had photoshopped white clumps of goose poop onto the pristine hills from Teletubbies. In the middle of a sandwich bite I noticed that an official looking vehicle was pulling up near the waterfall's syrupy crest. The vehicle released two German Shepherds who ignored the scent of my lunch completely and went to work on some kind of search-and-destroy operation around the perimeter of the pond. The black SUV displayed a vinyl logo that read "GEESE POLICE."

Curious about the logo, I struck up a conversation with the trainer of the dogs and discovered that his geese policing company, "West Suburban Geese Police," is hired by various landscaping and facilities management companies in the area to take control of the mounting geese nuisance in today's office parks and ponds. Employees complain about the goose poop on their shoes. Sometimes entire flocks of geese block entrances to parking lots. So the Geese Police come to this pond twice a day with two German Shepherds and a milk jug on a rope. The milk jug, as the police officer demonstrated, is for throwing at the geese in case they attempt to escape into the center of the pond.

The tidy maintenance of the landscape has long been a symbol of power, and American executives in suburban Illinois want tidy looking scenes outside of their windows just like the kings of France before them. These executives maintain their landscapes with a facilities management company, who in turn employs an army of latino workers. The result is an ecosystem so lush and tempting that many of the geese don't even bother flying south for the winter anymore. The office park becomes a convenient spa resort right in the middle of Illinois. The solution that the executives come up with is not to change their management of the ecosystem, but to create yet another corporation that can police the geese. The maintenance of corporate American life is so elaborate and superficial and counter intuitive that it is almost artful.

I rolled up my lunch bag decided to take a stroll around the pond to check if all the geese had successfully been given the bum's rush. Most of the geese had simply escaped to a pond at the foot of a different building. I opened my camera bag and took some photos of the building, paying attention to the way the glass ark flattened itself with it's own reflection. Some of the policed geese were still in flight. When I removed the camera from my eyes, a white "SECURITY" van had already pulled up next to me, awaiting my response.

The driver looked like Jim Belushi. The other driver also looked like Jim Belushi. They had a pair of tasers holstered to the dashboard, and remained seated in the van while I stared at them. Eventually the first officer asked, "Sir do you mind explaining what you're doing out here with the camera? Security has some surveillance of you taking photos around this area." I looked up at the top of the building and noticed some faint white antennae dangling over the fiberglass logo, a camera that had probably seen every detail of my sandwich. I wondered if the surveillance equipment was for tracking the movements of the geese, and if the Geese Police were called on a big red phone if their movements were suspicious.

"I'm painting a mural at A.G. Edwards," I told them, "and I was just eating my lunch out here. I had my camera with me so I decided to take some pictures." I actually wanted to yell something more like, "THE JIHAD MUST LAY WASTE TO CRAPPY BUILDING IN MIDDLE OF NOWHERE WITH CAREFUL SURVEILLANCE AND WE BLOW UP POND AND RICH AMERICAN GEESE SUFFER." But I didn't want to get tasered. The cops looked at each other. Then the driver said, "OK... Its just these days... you know..." and they drove off.

The words of the security guard stayed with me as I re-entered A.G. Edwards as Picasso. Picasso rode up in his shiny elevator, hiked up his baggy paint pants, picked up his plastic paint brush and began stroking again towards the satisfaction of his employers. Picasso stroked at a centuries old subject with craft paint bought from Hobby Lobby, quickly rendering an affordable ornamentation for his employers. Picasso was a part of the same surface maintenance of corporate America as the Geese Police. His passionate use of light and color soothed the employees from their worries like a rooftop surveillance system. He was paid $1,250 for six days of work, a middleman hired to deliver a product, and he never painted anything ever again.