Time & Perspective Quote by Guy Clark

Restlessness is doing the talking here, but it shows up in the most Guy Clark way possible: measured, practical, and quietly tender toward the materials of a life. He starts with the grind of travel - the unseen cost of going out to play the songs. “By the time you get there and you get home” flattens romance into mileage, loading in and loading out, the hours that don’t make it into the show. That plainspoken arithmetic is the point: the work has been eating the time that’s supposed to justify the work.

Then the turn: “the itch to build.” For Clark, building isn’t a hobby bolted onto the music persona; it’s the same creative impulse, just routed through hands instead of a guitar. The phrasing matters. An “itch” is bodily and insistent, not an aesthetic choice. It suggests that the antidote to being constantly in motion is making something that stays put.

The real subtext is control. Touring is other people’s schedules, other people’s rooms, applause that evaporates by morning. Wood is stubborn but honest. “My stacks of wood” is an image of stored potential - raw material waiting, patient and mute, unlike the demands of the road. He’s not fantasizing about a masterpiece; he’s scanning “what I can do with it,” a craftsman’s mindset that prizes utility, fit, and finish. In that glance at lumber you can hear a whole ethic: art as making, not branding; home as a workshop; permanence as a kind of relief.