Category Archives: foolishness

April 24, 2017 · 2:38 pm

The Ixcanixian Interstellar Bad Poetry Challenge

A while back I transmitted a weird alien poetry contest through this blog to the people of Earth.  It was a contest for bad poetry.  And obviously we only write good poetry on this planet as no entries from the native clothes-wearing primates of this planet were submitted.  If you are unclear about the contest of which I speak, here is the link;

The Interstellar Bad Poetry Challenge

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While no Earth primate entries were actually submitted (Magilla Gorilla’s entry was disqualified as he is a cartoon character and copyrighted by Hanna Barbera) we did get some entries from illegal aliens.  Their contest entries are submitted here for your perusal.  However, it is bad poetry.  By definition, if you don’t have your Galaxian bad-poetry-reading glasses handy, you should proceed with extreme caution.

This first entry is from a random Space Goon.  It is exceptionally bad poetry, and apparently the Goon who wrote it has no individual name.  He appears to be one of many dumped on this planet by interstellar authorities in order to prevent them from doing any real damage to planets that matter.

Goon Verse

Goon-goon-goon

Goon is good

Goon will come

And live in your house

Goon will come

And eat your mouse

Goon-goon-goon

Why you no like Goon?

 

The second entry I intend to inflict on you is a very weird entry I got in container that was apparently filled with radio-active foof gas.  While foof gas is apparently a deadly poison in most of the Milky Way, it is non-toxic to humans from Earth.  The perpetrator of this poem would only identify himself (or herself… or itself) as Bing-bing the Laser Guy.

I Will Kill You

Bing-bing is hiding on Earth!

How can you not understand this?

If you publish my writings,

And allow the authorities to discover my presence,

I will come to your house and evaporate your head!

 

The rhythm of that poem is very poor, and the rhyme scheme is non-existent.  But it is supposed to be bad poetry, after all.  So I suppose it has just as much chance of winning as the rest of them.

The Mookian Space Elf submitted not only a bad poem, but 8 X 10 glossies of himself.  He watches endless hours of PBS kid shows, educational cartoons, and inexplicable Boo Bahs and Teletubbies.  I think he’s convinced himself that this contest is somehow an audition for a kids’ show.  He claims to be able to sing and dance, as well as be funny, educational, and relentlessly cute.

Hire Me!!!

Ain’t I cute?

Ain’t I sweet?

I’ll give you diabetes so bad,

It will surely eat your feet!

Love me!

Dove me!

And give me so much money

That I’ll laugh so hard I pee!

 

Yes, if that is poetry, it is really bad poetry.

The final entry is from Ralph the Inexplicable.  This amazing being has been on Earth since before there were dinosaurs, so it is possible he is more of an Earthling than we are.  He is reputed to be incredibly wise, but his poetry was also hard to translate into English since it was all in ones and zeros.  And I don’t speak binary code.  So my translation may be less of a bad poem by Ralph and more of a bad poem made up by me.

Song of Slortcherill

Mee tok funni

Mee tok sloe

Leesen two mee

Ann emjoiy da show

Wheen Slortcherill sings

Da winners all brayk

Da kidoinks all screem

Anna moofins all bayk

 

I was warned that if I translated that poem with proper English spelling, it would fill your head with so much “wisdom”, your brain would melt.  So I present it here according to Ralph’s specifications.  I did read two of the lines with proper English spellings and felt my head grow distinctly hotter.  So I wouldn’t risk thinking too hard about what the proper spellings are if I were you.

None of these entries will probably win the contest.   They are all certainly bad poetry.  But I am fairly certain that given the competition from this part of the Milky Way Galaxy worse does, in fact, exist out there… somewhere.  And may you never be unfortunate enough to find it.

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April 23, 2017 · 3:17 pm

Because Rabbits Are People Too

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Today’s Paffooney paffoon cartoon is a puzzler.  I have this Rabbit People cartoon scene in my head with no punch line, no dialogue, and basically no idea.  It just popped into my head doodle fashion, and then flowed down through my pencil and pen onto paper.

What is boy bunny Benjamin asking or saying to young buck about town Bernhopper Bunny?  And what is Bernhopper’s answer?

Maybe like this;

rabbit punch1

But that’s bathroom humor.  We all know the Easter Bunny lays chocolate eggs for Easter, so bunny bathroom humor gets you wondering about about chocolate chip cookies from the Easter Bunny.  And that’s just gross.

Maybe it should be more like this;

rabbit punch2

Now that’s downright bad citizenship advice.  Surely we can do better.  And does the story have to be about the fireplug?

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Okay, gotta squelch the sexual innuendo.  When it comes to rabbits, that kind of humor leads to lots more rabbits.  I’m not really sure how this comes out.  Maybe the story should involve fat Barry Bunny who secretly prefers bananas to carrots.  Or maybe it is about beautiful Bingolette Bunny who plays the bongos and writes monumentally horrible love songs in her spare time.  I just can’t figure out rabbit humor!  It is so frustrating!  Maybe you have suggestions in the comments.  (Is that a challenge to your creativity?  Just a test to see if you really read this junk?  Or am I just too lazy to write my own cartoons?  I’ll never tell.)

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April 22, 2017 · 5:20 pm

Dramatis Personae D&D Style

One of the most fascinating things about Dungeons and Dragons, the story-telling adventure game with sword battles controlled by dice rolls, is the characters.  They are a creation by committee.  You take a blank character sheet, roll six basic numbers by complex rules on dice, and then decide who that character is; paladin, rogue, magician, archer, swordsman, etc… what that character is; human, elf, dwarf, hobbit… I mean halfling, orc, gnome, or Minotaur… and then do the complicated math that those choices entail.  But then you have to do the real work and give that character life in the form of hopes and dreams, likes and dislikes, personality quirks, and goals.  They have to become collaborative characters for a play that won’t actually be written until the players perform it.

These, you may recall if you are nutty enough to read Mickian regular features, are my children’s player characters.

Adventure1Ditty Bytcha who prefers to be called Fate is my number one son’s original character.  He is a fighter wearing magic armor who loves to make things as an artificer (one who builds devices with magic).  He eventually wants to cut his own arms off and replace them with mechanical ones.  He is also quick to leap into the fray and is fairly deadly with his chosen weapons.  He once made a crossbow that had explosive power enough to blast apart a ship and kill everyone on board, including the people he was trying to save.  He is also a good leader and is always ready with a joke that can even make the Dungeon Master laugh.

Adventure 3

And number two son’s character, Gandy Rumspot, is a food-loving halfling that also likes making ships.  No kidding, he likes being a shipwright and designing sailing vessels… and flying airships powered by captured air and fire elementals.  He likes riding pteradactyl-back and firing crossbows at the evil enemies from the air.  And he is good at making fun of other characters, even to the point of making some of them angry to the point of tantrums… especially his sister’s character.

Adventure2

And, of course, my daughter the Princess’s character, Mira Mirkestasia is a telekinetic Kalashtar who floats everywhere instead of walking.  She possesses an intelligent throwing knife that not only comes back to her hand after every throw, but seriously wants to kill Gandy for his sister-jokes.  She protects the whole group from those like the evil Dr. Zorgo who threaten to take over your mind and put your brain inside a stone golem.

And, of course, three people is probably not enough to actually survive in magic-rich and dragon-filled Eberron.  So additional characters are required to go on and actually survive dungeon-crawling adventures.  These are known as NPC’s, Non-Player Characters.  I will tell you more about them in another post, but here are the two most important ones;

Druaelia is a female wizard whose familiar is the owl Temper.  She was there for the very first level-one adventure killing rats and gnolls who were particularly weak and stupid.  She started as a magic user looking to be the fireball expert.  But her fire magic kept going astray (rolling a 2 or a 1 on a 20-sided dice is catastrophic failure and not a good thing to roll when fire is involved).  And she eventually learned she was much better with ice and snow magic.  She is naturally immune to cold and can wear bikinis in winter, a useful thing when more than half of your team is made up of adolescent boys.

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Elytharra, more commonly referred to as El, is the cleric and healer of the group.  She is much more modest and devout, being a worshipper of the blue dragon Aureon, god of wisdom and magical knowledge.  She is the one charged with learning how to heal boo-boos (and re-attach heads and raise the dead) because hunting for treasure in dragon caves is a dangerous business and dice rolls can make really bad things happen.  She was also part of the very first adventure, and the rats almost ate her.

So the main reason we have enjoyed D&D adventures so much is the fact that the characters are so surprisingly real.  We learn to care deeply what happens to them, and want them to prosper in the face of evil, no matter what comes.  And the real secret behind them is… in truth they are really us.

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April 20, 2017 · 2:57 pm

I Have No Idea

Yesterday I posted a weird picture that I haven’t used before and made myself cry gushers of tears again for the boy the picture is a portrait of.  I suppose it is a catharsis I didn’t really need.  I woke up today with a blistering headache to keep my perpetual backache company.  Could that have been caused by the crying and the blues that ensued?  Probably.

So, I have no idea for today.  My brain hurts and my heart is burned out.

I checked Facebook where I had posted this quote from Malala ;

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I wasn’t really prepared for controversy.  I should’ve been.  It is obvious from the guns versus books graphics that it would stir emotions in my liberal author and teacher friends, as well as my conservative cracker anti-Muslim friends.

My aunt, a former career teacher, responded first.  She wrote, “Like the thought.”  She was a great third grade teacher in Iowa for many years.  She loved all kids then and still does today.  I want to be like that in retirement too.

But the next response was from a former high school friend who voted for Trump and hates all the people the Republican Party orders him to hate.

“Sounds great like most sound bites. Much harder to explain and implement.”  My friend, Ali Hassenbutter (not his real name, but this will make him angry as well as protect his actual identity), likes to take jabs at me for being a liberal, and the subtext here is that, even though I was a teacher for many years, I don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to education.  So, I answered him with some heartfelt teacher-ism.

“I had Egyptian and Lebanese and Arab students in my classes at Garland ISD. They are people just like us. You help them learn English. They make American friends. Americans learn that most Muslims are not terrorists. What’s so complicated about that? Unless you start slamming doors in their faces and treating them as less valuable than you are.”   I admit to maybe being a bit snarky in that last line, but sometimes he gets my goat.  (I know I should just let him have it.  I have never liked my goat that much anyway.  It smells bad.)

A fellow ESL teacher from Garland chimed in even though she doesn’t know Ali.  “And these students added spice in our classroom…  Just like they do in the USA.”  She knows all the students I was referencing.

Then one of my other Belmond classmates who knows and probably detests us both as heathens added his words of wisdom, “The real concept here is that we are in fact ALL HUMAN.”  See there?  The Bible banger gets it.  And I really appreciate when he steps in and tries to make peace.  He’s somewhat nutty at times, but his new-found religion allows him to believe like I do that we should choose love over hate as our default response, even to terrorism.

But Ali comes back with;   “It takes both approaches to this problem. But then there is Berkley as a shining example of education gone off the rail.”  He’s at least trying to sound like he is listening to our comments, but then he pulls this old red hot chestnut out of the fireplace.  He offers it like the opinion of the crazy, racist uncle at Thanksgiving Dinner.

“Yes, because it was the teachers’ fault at Berkley. That poor young racist agitator from Breitbart was supposed to have a peaceful forum for spewing his hateful mouth garbage at young liberal college students, and the college administrators who granted him that right didn’t bend over backwards far enough to prevent a violent reaction.”  I know, sarcasm is the resort of the defeated.  I should be championing love over hate and freedom of speech over my personal revulsion to Milo.

My teacher friend had this to add;  “I understand the “right” instigated that incident.”

“Yes, but they wore masks to hide their identity. That makes them automatically liberals, doesn’t it? If I am able to follow Fox News Logic, anyway.”  Sez I.

And so, there we stand, at the very beginning of a month-long Facebook love/hate debate.  And I will lose.  You can argue with brick walls and score more debate points than you can arguing anything political with Ali.  And the frustrating thing is, he’s an ordinary decent human being and stand-up guy too.  Not just a dismiss-able deplorable because he voted for Trump.

is

I have no ideas today.  I have a headache.  If I can’t defend Malala’s heroic logic, then I can’t even argue my way out of a bowl of chicken soup.  Doomed to drown in chicken broth.  At least I will die healthy at the bottom of that mixed metaphor.  That should be worth a laugh.

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Filed under angry rant, commentary, compassion, education, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, humor, Liberal ideas, politics, strange and wonderful ideas about life

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March 16, 2017 · 3:17 pm

The Lyrical Imperative

Creativity

I am always amazed by the fact that things which are inherently silent in nature make music in your mind.  Writing is like that for me.  Drawing is like that.  And so is photography.  That is an actual musical score from Chopin in the background.  My son recognized it from a book of piano pieces I bought for him because he reads music and can turn those squiggle-bugs on the fence into the right plinkety-plunks on a keyboard.  But there is more music in that picture besides.  The nude young girl at the keyboard softly rendered in velvety colored pencil tones is also musical in nature, for more than just the fact of fingers on a silent colored pencil keyboard.  The lyrical loops of black and yellow in the wings of the tiger swallowtail butterfly also make music in my head, sprightly piano music like Chopin’s, or possibly Vivaldi’s violins.

Did you listen to the music?  I don’t mean Vivaldi’s, although if you haven’t heard it, you certainly should.  I mean the music in the words.  The music has to be there for me for the writing to be good.  That’s why I consider Ray Bradbury and Walt Whitman to be masters and Stephenie Meyer and E. L. James to be unreadable hacks.  The beat and the flow of the words need to be patterned and patient and wily.   Do you not hear it in that last sentence? The alliteration of the first two adjectives set off by the counterpoint of the stressed-unstressed beats of the third?  How can I explain this?

Iambic pentameter is the true genius of Shakespeare’s plays.  What the heck is iambic pentameter, you ask?  Well, I realize you have probably never needed to teach poetry to seventh graders, a truly impossible but infinitely rewarding task.  So let me tell you.  Units of stress called iambs consist of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.  So naturally, if iambs are put into pentameter, then there must be five of them in a line of iambic pentameter poetry.  It is a simple, rhythmic way to say something profound and interesting.  The classic example is the first line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18;

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Translating that into X’s and O’s where X=stressed and O=unstressed;

O X O X O X O X O X

It’s simple, five oxes, all in a line.  Except that last one about oxes is actually O X O X X O O O O X, a less simple pattern, yet still organized on the beat.  Two iambs, a dactyl and an anapest.  Okay, now I am talking like a poetry geek, and I have to stop it before I hurt someone.

The whole point is, words should be musical, even when they are not the words to a song.  And now I must close on the verge of starting a ten-thousand word thesis.  I shall shut up now.  Here endeth the lesson.

 

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March 11, 2017 · 5:18 pm

All the Fake News Going Around is Fake (Believe Me)

The malignant mango we have inexplicably put in charge of our country is calling everything that hits the headlines “Fake News”.  But that is basically because if he says to his true believers that anything bad that is reported is not true, they will believe it and continue to support him even though it goes against everything they have stated they believe for the  course of their entire lifetime.  So our orangutan in chief is reporting that news is “Fake News”, and that report is “Fake News”.    So the “Fake News” about “Fake News” is provably FAKE.  Damn!

trumpdump

Perhaps the Republican Overlords who now rule the Evil Empire get away with warping reality like that because we, as the news-consuming public are simply not paying attention.

Now, I can’t claim that I am hard to fool.  I believe, after all, that aliens have been visiting the Earth for millennia.  I believe that Area 51 is where the U.S.  back-engineered the crashed UFOs from Roswell, and I believe that Bob Lazar is a real human being.  I am almost like a Trumpkin in my devotion to such commonly debunked conspiracy theories.

But I can research my way out of cardboard boxes and confusing bubbles of misinformation.  I recently caught a whiff of alien uproar from a former student’s Facebook post about an article on DiscloseTV.com.  (click here for article)  It’s the kind of thing I want to know about if it turns out to be true.  I read there that a NASA spokeswoman, Trish Chamberson, had publicly admitted that the US government is in contact with at least four different alien species, and has been since the Truman administration.  This would, of course, confirm what I have feverishly believed for over half of my sixty year lifetime.

But I made the mistake of Googling Trish Chamberson.  Soap bubbles of Fake News pop easily.

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I think we should also be considering the question, “Is there intelligent life living here?” 

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Oopsie!

It turns out the conspiracy website had taken information from a site clearly marked satire and published it as fact.

 

Waterford Whispers is largely recognized as an Irish counterpart to The Onion among its primary reader base (in the UK and Ireland). However, previous items from the site have been confused for real news, including reports that the Pope commissioned J.K. Rowling to rewrite the Bible, the Muppet known as “Animal” had died, and that the Vatican decreed Jesus was not returning. Disclose.tv has passed on a decent share of fake news items, including claims a baby in the Philippines was born with Stigmata and Edward Snowden had been “reported dead by his girlfriend.”-quoted from Snopes.com

But it is also true that the pile of horse poop given to us to sift through on a daily basis by the rusty orange mouth-poop factory that dominates the nightly news is incredibly vast and mostly unsiftable.  So his tactic of saying real news is “Fake News” which is in itself “Fake News” is almost guaranteed to work.  It is FAKE after all.  Dang!
(And on a side note, the best proof we have that aliens really are visiting the Earth is now sitting in the White House.  Surely you didn’t think anything that orange and awful and full of horse poop was actually human in origin, did you?)

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March 10, 2017 · 12:05 pm

The Be-Bop Beat of Mickey’s Brain

Truthfully, when I look back at the string of posts in the picket fence of this daily blog, I fail to see the overall map of it in any semblance of pattern or order.  Honestly, I did not set out to be purposefully wacky.

I did, however, set out to be purposefully surreal.  I mean it, I consciously put bizarrely dissimilar things together in an attempt to find parallels and connections  in unlike things because, not only is it funny and surprising, but is a comic act that serves to keep the mind nimble and never numb.  I do think quite a lot.  And I try to see connections between things where others wouldn’t.  For instance, the Coppertone girl with her bare butt and Bullwinkle with his unicycle are both being threatened in a way that is both comic, and taking advantage of their inherent image of innocence.  Neither will lose anything by it.  The girl stands to brown her pale white behind in the sun, while Bullwinkle will probably land on his head and it will make a decent cushion to preserve him because of it’s empty and rubbery qualities.

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Pie makes everything better.  MMMM!  Pie!

I must also admit to a bit of the old telling of stretchers, the misrepresentation of the truth, the loquacious layer-onner of lies.  Not Trumpian lies that land on you like elephants dropped like bombs out of B-52’s.  Instead, fictions that entertain and elucidate.  It is the most likely reason I keep saying connecting words and phrases like “truthfully” and “honestly” and “I mean it”.  Those are words that liars love.

Yes fiction writers like me tell little white lies.

I have now published my novel Recipes for Gingerbread Children.  It is a novel based on real people I have known and loved and listened to.  It is about an old German woman, a survivor of WWII concentration camps, who loves to tell stories to children and bake gingerbread cookies, especially gingerbread men.  It features a pair of teenage nudist girls who believe in going completely naked whenever you are indoors, even if you are in someone else’s house.  It features Nazis, both in flashback and ghostly forms.  It also features fairies from the Hidden Kingdom of Tellosia, a fairy kingdom filled with little three-inch tall magical people living under our very noses.  And it has a werewolf in it, though admittedly a very young one.  It is a comedy with its requisite sad parts, and it is definitely an example of surrealism.  It is also full of lies… err, I mean fiction.

But the real purpose of this supposedly be-bop brain fart in blog-post form is not so much to explain my blog (because how do you explain a blog that goes from Flashbacks and Foobah to telling about Madman Trump to Another novel part… #37 to Centaurs to a book and movie review, to this eccentric and eclectic thing, which probably exists more to make alliteration jokes than anything else in the most musical beat I can bang out?) but to prove that I do often think about thinking and how things fit together and what it all means… and how to write a run-on sentence that adds to the effect rather than simply annoys.  And, yeah, I’m doing that.  And it feels like a good thing to do.

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March 5, 2017 · 4:28 pm

Midnight Monster Movies

I slept in this morning.  Spent another late night doing nothing but watching monster movies.  I recently got myself a DVD collection of Hammer Films monster movies from the sixties.  I found it in the $5 bargain bin at Walmart, a place I regularly shop for movies.

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When I was a boy, back in the 60’s, there always used to be a midnight monster movie feature called Gravesend Manor on Channel 5, WOI TV in Ames, Iowa.  It started at 11:00 pm and ran til 1:00 am.  I, of course, being a weird little monster-obsessed kid, would sneak downstairs in my PJ’s when everyone else was asleep and I would laugh at the antics of the goofy butler, possibly gay vampire duke, and the other guy who was supposedly made in the master’s laboratory.  And when the movie started, I was often scared witless by the black-and-white monster B-movie like Scream of Fear!, or Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, or Eyes of the Gorgon.  It was always the reason I could rarely get up in time for church and Sunday school the next morning without complaints and bleary-eyed stumbling through breakfast.  I never knew if my parents figured it out or not, but they probably did and were just too tired to care.

It was my source for critical monster-knowledge that would aid me greatly when I grew up to be a fireman/cowboy hero.  Because battling monsters was… you know, a hero prerequisite.  And I intended to be the greatest one there ever was.  Even better than Wyatt Earp or Sherlock Holmes or Jungle Jim.

Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, and the immortal Christopher Lee were my tutors in the ways of combating the darkness.  When I started watching a really creepy monster movie, I always had to stick it out to the end to see the monster defeated and the pretty girl saved.  And they didn’t always end in ways that allowed me to sleep soundly after Gravesend Manor had signed off the airways for the night.  Some movies were tragedies.  Sometimes the hero didn’t win.  Sometimes it was really more of a romance than a monster movie, and the monster was the one you were rooting for by the end.  I remember how the original Mighty Joe Young made me cry.  And sometimes you had to contemplate more than tragedy.  You had to face the facts of death… sometimes grisly, painful, and filled with fear.  You had to walk in the shoes of that luckless victim who never looked over his shoulder at the right moment, or walked down the wrong dark alley, or opened the wrong door.  The future was filled with terrifying possibilities.

Now, at the end of a long life, when I am supposed to be more mature and sensible, I find myself watching midnight monster movies again.  What’s wrong with me?  Am in my second childhood already?  Am I just a goofy old coot with limited decision-making capabilities?  Of course I am.  And I intend to enjoy every horrifying moment of it.

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February 24, 2017 · 12:02 pm

The Doofy Doll Collector

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I suppose it is a rather girly thing… or maybe even a creepy thing, that a sixty year old man like me collects and plays with dolls.  This post, a lazy-writer short post, is intended just to show you some of my newest dolls and newest collections.  I am not going to waste time justifying why I like dolls.  That would probably require an advanced degree in abnormal psychology.  So I will just show you and gloat about what I have achieved in my own weird little way.

This Monster High doll is Frankie Stein, the daughter of Frankenstein’s monster.  I scored two of these at Walmart’s pre-Christmas clearance sale for three dollars apiece.  This is the one I pose and play with.  The other I am keeping as a mint in box.

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These are the three lovely girls I bought with Christmas money from relatives back in Iowa.  I went almost to the limit buying Starfire at a pricey $19.88.  The collection rules clearly state, “Never buy a single doll worth more than $20.”

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I bought Starfire to keep Harley Quinn, my other $19.88 doll company as part of my DC Heroines collection.  That collection as it now stands follows.

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You can see I still need Batgirl and Poison Ivy.

So there is my lazy-writer post about me playing with dolls, poorly rationalized and barely explained.

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February 6, 2017 · 4:21 pm

All the Naked People…

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I don’t know if you have seen the news about the unauthorized portrait statue of The Great Orange Face and the excitement it generated.  The statue is totally naked.  And, as you can see, people reacted by taking pictures of the statue, taking pictures of themselves with the statue, and taking for themselves a good, long look-see.  This person naked is somehow inherently more interesting than he is with all his clothes on, and his big red tie too.  And I am mystified by that.  I mean, we don’t have to actually see him naked to know what he looks like naked.  And it is not a pretty sight.

And you know full well that the orangutan we elected did not pose for this statue.  It could only come into being because the artist knows enough about anatomy to create it just from what he already knows about the man.  The man is naked enough in his daily life that we all know almost everything about his naked character, even though he never seems to be without his business suit.  He’s a naked racist.  He’s a naked misogynist.  He has a naked affection for his eldest daughter and thinly concealed dissatisfaction with his other kids.  We see far more of him than we really want to see.

sweet-karla

If you are, perhaps, wondering where I am going with this, what today’s theme is, then here it is.  All people are naked all the time.  (Well, maybe not Iron Man in his suit or soldiers in bullet-proof combat armor, but we are talking metaphorical here, not literal.)

The girl who posed for this portrait, whose name I will not reveal, doesn’t really quite look like this.  It is titled Her #2 because it was actually drawn in pen and ink while looking at the original pencil sketch.  And she was actually another man’s girlfriend and became another man’s wife.  She posed for me out of respect for my art skills and from the urging of others rather than anything I ever said or did.  As an artist you never really capture the nakedness of your subject.  You can really only capture what is in your own head, your response to the subject, and so, the nakedness becomes your own.  This picture shows the awkwardness I felt since I really haven’t drawn a nude model more than a handful of times in my entire life.  I made her look younger, thinner, and more child-like than she actually was.  She liked the result, at least the version I gave to her, which was different as well.  But the nakedness here is really mine.

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The girl in the second nude portrait I am sharing is done from more than one photograph, and the red panda was even a picture from a magazine.  So again, the picture tells you nothing about the model herself.  It tells you about me.  The happiness and warmth the picture conveys comes from the colors and the composition.  A certain freeness of spirit and joy of life.  It probably also helps you interpret this to know that my wife is from the Philippines, and hence, is the actual island girl who inspired this particular piece even though she did not pose for it herself.  The nakedness in the picture is not about sex or desire.  Rather, it is about innocence and happiness and love, warm sunshine on your naked body while at the nude beach (an experience I have only actually witnessed myself, never taken part in.)

So I am claiming in this essay that everybody is naked when you look at them with eyes of understanding.  People reveal their own naked selves by their every action, word, and deed.  As a blogger, I am probably more naked than most.  I have written a bit about literally everything that touches my life and experience.  I am a novelist too, which makes me more naked still.  But as I show you my most recent nude self-portrait and contemplate me in my utter nakedness I hope you will agree that I am not a pornographer, and I am not as ugly on the inside as I am on the outside.  Be prepared for a slight shock;

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Surely you are not surprised that the picture is in cartoon form, and not the picture of a naked sixty-year-old fat man.  It is my naked, shy self.  On the inside Mickey has always been twelve years old.  And keep this in mind.  According to my silly art-philosophy bull-puckie, you are naked too.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, colored pencil, foolishness, humor, imagination, metaphor, nudes, strange and wonderful ideas about life