Life is never quite like the way it is in your head. Things you don’t believe are true will constantly surprise you with the reality they belt you over the head with at the most inopportune of times.
Today’s colored-pencil Paffooney masterpiece is a case in point. I never believed it was possible to take this good of a picture of it. It is a horror movie to try to light this picture so I can snap it with a camera and get a result with no fades or reflected glare. It was created in 1992, when I was really at the height of my colored-pencil cartoonist super-powers. The subtle lighting is so much better than I can convey with the arthritic turkey-claw hands I now use for such artwork. Torchlight in a pyramid is a hard thing to convey. And over time, this picture’s colored-pencil patina has become glossy and difficult to photograph without glare. It has subtle waves in the paper that photograph as shadowy valleys and reveal the two-dimensionality of the piece. You can still see them if you look closely. But it is far better than any previous photo. Go back and check my archives if you don’t believe me… or you wish to be bored to death with old posts that you have somehow managed to dodge before now.
But like Tanis in the Tomb, things always turn out to be surprisingly different in their reality than they were in your little mind’s eye when you went into that dark hole in the ground.
We were discussing this at lunch, my kids and I. We were talking about how Sims 3 portrays reality and how really surprising it can be when you realize that the game has got it right. When I walked all the way to the bottom of the stairs this morning before realizing that I had forgotten my shoes upstairs, I had to turn around and go all the way back upstairs. This, I am told, is exactly how it works in Sims 3. A character in the game cannot turn around on the stairs. If you change your mind half way down, the character. or avatar I think they like to call them, must go all the way to the bottom to turn around and go back up. So obviously this morning, God was playing Sims 3 and using me as an avatar.
Now, I don’t really like to believe God plays video games with reality… but my son Henry brought up the Rolling Stones as proof. It is common knowledge that Keith Richards is an un-dead creature, having so completely altered the bio-chemical make-up of his entire body with drugs that he died in 1988 and still goes on tour because his brain has not yet fully registered the fact that he is dead. My son pointed out that in Sims 3 you can make your avatar all gray or green and zombie-looking and then play the game with your avatar walking around and doing all sorts of stuff without realizing he or she is dead. So, not only Keith Richards, but the entirety of the Rolling Stones who are all skeletal old druggies who should’ve passed half a century ago, goes to prove that God is playing Sims 3 with the universe. My gasted is totally flabbered! And I hope this glimpse into the unholy truth has not ruined your day.
Catch a Falling Star 