“Most people didn’t understand,” she said. “The audience seemed to think it was a game, some kind of S&M nonsense. They missed the point.”

I didn’t miss the point. As someone who has tried myriad ways to diminish and avert his own pain, I felt like I understood on an intuitive level what October had been attempting to do. It seemed similar to the reason I had liked working in construction. The physical struggle distracted from the emotional one.

The Living Exhibit I’d been hired to work on, 365 Selfies, was October’s fourth in the series, and despite its timely nature, she claimed it was, deep down, a tribute to one of her favorite artists, Frida Kahlo.

“Frida was the original selfie queen,” October explained to me during my first day on the job. She pulled down one of the big art books from her shelf and showed me dozens of Frida’s paintings, stopping to make sure I got a good look at each image. “Her portraits tell stories, see? Sometimes they tell true stories and sometimes they tell fictional stories. She shows us her dreams and her nightmares. Her joys and her sorrows. Her birth, her life, and her death. That’s what I’m trying to do with 365 Selfies, only I’m using video and photography instead of paint and canvas.”

We typically filmed two to four days a week, depending on how involved her ideas were. Once a clip was edited, I cataloged it and uploaded it to the website. However, the website wouldn’t go live until an entire year’s worth of clips were ready, at which point October would post one selfie a day for 365 days; then they would live on the internet in perpetuity.

Some of the clips were simple: October would tell a story, share a dream, or talk about an experience she’d had. But often the selfies were weirder, like the time she dressed up in a giant pink bunny costume and tried to hitchhike on US 101 in the rain, screaming the word “flux” at passing cars. Or the time she dug a grave in her backyard, had me film her in the grave, and then had me film her covering the grave with dirt and flowers so that once it was cut together it looked like she was burying her own body. Occasionally she would say one word and tell me we were done for the day. Once she sat and stared into the camera for three hours without saying anything at all. One day she washed the dog. One day she shaved her legs with a straight razor. One day she had a phlebotomist come to the studio and take blood from her arm, and then she painted a self-portrait with the blood. Another day she spent twenty minutes making and eating a piece of toast, and trust me when I say it was the most compelling video of toast making and eating you could ever imagine.

I never knew what I was going to get with her, and in spite of how strange it sometimes seemed, I looked forward to going to work.