Drawing with increasingly painful arthritic hands is still worth it. I suppose I should feel a little embarrassed about drawing so many young girls. Especially when I draw them naked.
But drawing someone who is naked, yet totally confident in their own skin and unafraid of the world they have bared themselves to, captures a feeling I have aspired to my whole life.
That is the purpose of art. To show the deepest insights life has forced upon the artist.
Not all the nudes I draw are female.
Sometimes it is the top of the head that is naked. That makes it easier to show what you are thinking. No hairy stuff between the viewer and the mind of the man.
Mere shapes and lines can make you feel something deeply.
There is a joy that can come from drawing something that begins with a spark from your secret heart.
But people will know at first sight what things you used to keep secret and to yourself.
And some people will hate you for it. They detect a little nudism or a little bit of gayness (and I am definitely not gay) and immediately default to hating your drawings, and, beyond that, hating you.
But I don’t accept hate. Because I don’t know hate. It is a stranger to me, from a country I have never been to. And I don’t recognize that stranger. But I don’t hate him. Because I don’t know hate.
Bobby had always been amazed at the calm, easy-going way that Grandpa Butch handled a crisis. He had examined Horatio himself when he had first learned of the eating of a part of Whitewhiskers Billy’s poisoned corpse.
He had then called the vet in Belle City. They put a couple of soft but old blankets in the back of the red pickup and then driven Horatio to see his doggy-doctor while Bobby and Shane rode in the back to keep Horatio calm and safe.
The doctor had checked him over carefully, determining that the dog probably had not eaten enough of the poisoned rat to get any of the poison in his own system. So, they gave Horatio some precautionary anti-coagulant injections, induced some vomiting, forced a bit of activated charcoal into him, and then, knowing Horatio would be better tended back home at the Niland farm than he ever would be in the Belle City animal hospital, sent him home.
“So, they’re sure that Horatio’s not gonna die?” Shane asked on the ride back home.
“Pretty sure, yeah. It’ll be our job to make sure he doesn’t eat any more poisoned rats. And we have to tell Grandpa if he vomits again, or shows any more symptoms.”
“Yeah, that makin’ the dog vomit thing was sure icky.”
“But it got rid of any poison still in his stomach, Shane.”
Bobby put one hand on Shane’s shoulder as he continued to stroke the fur on Horatio’s neck with the other hand. Shane had both hands deeply buried in Horatio’s brown-and-white fur coat.
“So, did Professor Rattiarty win this round?” Shane asked.
“No, he didn’t,” said Horatio confidently. “He meant to kill me with this poison-eating ploy. And we made him fail.”
“Horatio said he didn’t because Horatio is still alive.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
*****
Rattiarty glared at Darktail Ralph.
“Don’t look at me. It isn’t my fault the damned dog didn’t eat enough of Billy to do the job!”
“Well, we just have to try again.”
“Not that way. There has to be some other plan. Something that works better.”
“This plan will work if you eat more of the poison. Saturate your system with toxins to make the dosage more lethal!”
“But there are only two of us left! Why should I be the one to sacrifice myself? Why don’t you let Horatio eat you? You have a lot more poison in you than I have in me.”
“It may come to that if you fail too.”
Ralph snarled at the Professor. “I won’t even try. You can’t make me do it!”
“We shall see about that.”
Rattiarty made the first lunge, going for Ralph’s throat.
Ralph was a veteran rat-warrior, however, and still very quick to dodge. He had the advantage of youth over Rattiarty, as the Professor was quite old for a rat.
As Rattiarty’s attempt at grabbing Ralph with teeth in his throat, the old rat’s superior strategy came into play. The lunge having missed, the Professor snagged the right nostril of Ralph’s nose with one claw. He ripped the skin all the way up to the Darktail’s right eye.
Blood half-blinded Ralph.
Rattiarty built on that advantage to swing his thin body up onto Darktail Ralph’s back. Stabbing rat teeth descended on Ralph’s neck, gouging into his spinal cord and effectively paralysing him. In mere moments more, the head was off, and Rattiarty was alone, but ready to drag the poison-filled body to some place where Horatio T. Dogg would see it and eat it.
When I was a boy in Iowa, living in a boring little farm town where nothing really ever happened, I made a bunch of stuff up in my stupid little head and had great fun pretending it was all real.
I loved stories about Flash Gordon, Tarzan, and Jungle Jim on the Saturday afternoon TV ;matinee on Channel 3 from Mason City.
So, naturally, I told my friends at school that I was secretly a boy from outer space pretending to be Mike Beyer as part of a super-secret mission from a Star Empire that nobody but me knew existed. I got really embarrassed one night at 4-H Fun Night in Eagle Grove when the girl I had a secret crush on confronted me about telling my friends that she was a Martian Princess trapped on Earth by agents from outer space. She wasn’t mad. She thought it was funny. But I turned shades of red and purple in the face that no one knew was humanly possible. I got both joy and agony out of being the sort of juvenile liar who is destined to grow up to be a story-teller.
But lies are not always harmless amusement. I am not saying I never told an evil, black lie. But I don’t think I ever did. At least, if I ever did, it was forgettable enough to be forgotten by me.
And the lie about the sexual assault I endured at ten was not really a lie. I didn’t tell anybody because he threatened to hurt me worse if I did. That scared me enough that it would be years before I even allowed myself to remember that it happened. And lies of omission are not regular lies. You are not telling somebody to believe something that isn’t true. You are simply not telling anyone about something you don’t want to be known.
To be honest with both you and myself, I never really ever got into trouble by telling a lie and getting caught for it. Most of the problems I ever had with girlfriends and eventually wife were created by telling the truth. That happens when you have two girlfriends at the same time and they really don’t like each other. It also happens when you decide things for yourself because you think it is the most sensible decision you can make, and when you tell your wife about it, you find out it is, in fact, the stupidest, most-wrongest idea any stupid person ever had… simply because husbands are always wrong. Funny, though, the decisions and ideas I carry out without telling her first always seem to work out fine. So, I must only be the world’s stupidest man if I tell her about it.
It almost seems like it is better to lie by omission than to tell the actual truth.
I am aware, however, that lies can be told in hurtful ways, fundamentally immoral and evil ways. It seems my email is full of scams and cons and lies daily. Not just African princes with money that desperately needs to pass through my bank account for some obscure reason, but Amazon gift cards for a thousand dollars that you just need to supply some information to have delivered to your bank account, and Norton security subscriptions that need to be renewed by credit card even though I stopped using Norton for that ten years ago.
And then there was an orange man who told us from before the first vote was cast that the 2020 election would be stolen by voter fraud. He whipped up an angry mob who took weapons and flags and anger into the US Capitol building so they could poop on stuff and kill some capitol policemen and try to get their hands on AOC because apparently they think she is a communist or something. That was an election lie that caused an insurrection. It caused people to get killed (on both sides, some battered policemen to commit suicide later, and Congress-people to tell more lies about terrorists merely being tourists. ‘
That’s a truly evil lie.
One of the things I appreciate most about nudists is the fact that naked people are not hiding anything.
So, I am able to identify being a liar as essentially a bad thing.
Of course, that is not going to prevent me from being the liar I have always been. Though, from now on I will be calling it being a fiction writer or a storyteller.
It began in childhood with the Red Skelton Show. Every Wednesday night it a was a refuge for me. And refuge was a critical idea for me. I was a child hiding a terrible secret from the entire world. At times I hated myself. Twice as a teen I came very close to choosing suicide over life. The person I most needed to hide from was myself. And humor helped. Red Skelton’s gentle humor helped me to not only escape from myself for a while, it taught me to laugh at my own foibles and not take things quite so seriously.
media.npr.org
In my college years I discovered humor in written form. Mark Twain swiftly earned my utter devotion as I read not only Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but Roughing It, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Mysterious Stranger, and The Autobiography of Mark Twain. You know, there are a large number of things in Mark Twain’s humorous books that make you cry, that make you angry, and make you think deep thoughts. I basically discovered that humor is a way that smart people choose to think of things which helps to keep you sane and basically un-suicided.
A beautiful portrait by artist Emily Stepp
It is obvious that some people become very skilled at humor because they have used it all their lives to fight the darkness . Robin Williams is only few years older than I am. In many ways his life has paralleled my own (obviously minus the wealth and fame in my case… but what would’ve happened if Robin had become a school teacher?) I have depended on Robin Williams’ movies to keep me going, giving me insights in how to talk to kids, how to be a parent, and how to empathize with others. Of course, I haven’t yet taken some of his movie advice. I never put on a mask and a dress to deceive my own children. But only time will tell.
I obsess about humor and how you create it. I gorge on things like the works of Dave Barry. Do you know who he is? Florida newspaper columnist who writes books about everyday life and the fools who live it? I have to do a post on Dave Barry, because he makes me laugh so hard that milk shoots out of my nose, sometimes when I am not even drinking milk… believe me, I don’t know how that works either.
A bust of Herman Munster
Doofy Fuddbugg here is an example of what a “Nolt” is.
I love to laugh. It makes the world right again. I have laughed an awful lot for almost an entire lifetime now. I treasure all the funny people I have known. And I need to continue to try to make people laugh up until the very end. Because the world is too often not a funny place. It can be full of badness and sadness and suffering. And as Mark Twain so aptly pointed out, “Against the assault of laughter… nothing can stand.”
I drew this picture back in my college days, the middle 1970’s. If you look at it closely, you will see my shorthand in action. The rose on the trellis is one. I have drawn a thousand roses since I did this one. It is the formalized set of lines, colors, and shading that I always put together whenever the thing I mean is “a ro se.”
You can see it in the orange bricks of the goldfish pond. Compare those to the gray foundation bricks. The same shorthand patterns. The brick grid in the background as well.
The shadow patterns of wrinkles in the boy’s clothing are also shorthand I almost always do when drawing from my imagination. The faces in profile, too.
There is a language here spoken silently in colored pencil. Complex ideas pictured in a simple colored-pencil picture-language.
I recently got criticism for the unprofessional ugliness of one of my novel covers. Of course, that was only a part of the review that generally hated everything about my book. Some people feel certain works of art have no right to even exist. So, for art day today, I will inflict my recent crimes against the world of novel art on all the regretful followers of this blog, and probably ward off future followers as well.
This novella is already published. The first one I showed you represents only a novel idea. No writing yet exists for The Necromancer’s Apprentice outside of my stupid head.
This one is a part of my endless AeroQuest rewrite. The ending of the book and a handful of existing chapters that need to be expanded exist already. It is still a project planned for the part of the future in which I am most likely already dead. The character of Spaceheart featured on this cover has not been written at all yet.
This book is only a few chapters along. It is a currently stalled work in progress.
This one was written as a Tuesday novel-writing project and presented chapter by chapter on this blog. This is an updated cover that came about once I learned how to better create a cover, a thing I am still learning about.
This last one is the cover for a novella I am currently presenting on Tuesdays. It is nearing completion.
So, here now for your consideration are the most recent cover efforts I have made. Be disgusted and horrified at your leisure. I can take criticism. And I know it is useful to be open to criticism. It does indeed make you reflect on what you are doing.
I actually saw an event happening in my little mind’s eye before it happened. And then it came true. My daughter and I went to Whataburger’s drive-thru last night to get a burger for her and a strawberry milkshake for me. I was driving as I have a license and my daughter does not. At one of the three red stoplights on the way there, I had a sudden vision of my milkshake being crushed and covering my shirt. In the vision I was tearing up from disaster recovery when I said, “I really wanted to drink that.”
So, I vowed to be a careful driver and not have a car accident anywhere along the drive, especially after I had purchased my milkshake.
I didn’t have the car accident. So, I thought it was just a nervous thought and not a prophecy. Then, walking from the car to the house, we walked through the shadowy back yard. Suddenly my right leg found a protruding part of the old bicycle sidecar that was sitting in the darkness. L landed on the milkshake I was carrying in my right hand. And, of course, tearing up from arthritis pain, I said, “I really wanted to drink that.”
Now, I can’t prove any of that, except showing you the crushed styrofoam milkshake cup, and by experience I know you are rolling your eyes and thinking about what a goofy man I really am.
But I have had an unignorably large number of these experiences in my life. There is no way to avoid these little experiences of the bizarre. But there is also no way to make use of them either.
The picture is the Wizard of Tellosia called Eli Tragedy and his two apprentices, Bob and Mickey the Wererat. It is a start of a cover illustration for a planned novella called The Necromancer’s Apprentice. Oh, and Eli is NOT the Necromancer in the title. He has premonitions too. But he can’t use them for anything either.
What’s the real reason behind the choices I make as an artist? For instance, why didn’t I do this photo of the artwork over again when the wind warped the bottom left corner. That answer is simple. I was taking this picture with natural sunlight. And once the wind started messing up my pictures, it only got worse. This was the first and best of five attempts. And, while it doesn’t show up here, I did several photo-shop manipulations of this picture, including shrinking the girl’s head. The original was done from a couple of models I got consent from when I worked at a daycare center in Iowa City where I went to college. The boy was eight years old in the summer of 1980. The girl was six, but I used a photo of a girl I went to second grade with, so the head was also eight. They represent David Copperfield and Emily, Pegotty’s niece from the Dickens novel. I had to read the book for my Master’s Exam which I took instead of writing a thesis. The picture is about how I saw myself and my world in that timeless novel.
This picture won a blue ribbon in the art competition at the Wright County Fair in 1979. It is a colored-pencil cartoon situation right out of a Jay Ward, Dudley Do-Right cartoon. I used a picture from a Canadian travel ad for the Mountie. The Indian sidekick is a modified version of Little Beaver, Red Ryder’s sidekick. The villain and the girl were basically Snidely Whiplash and Nell from the Dudley Do-Right cartoons, but made to look slightly more realistic… but only very slightly.
Actually, I lied a bit about the blue ribbon. I got the purple Grand Champion ribbon for this picture. I had entered it solely because two years before I saw how easy it would be to win a purple ribbon looking at the pictures that won it, and I wanted to win the purple ribbon. Sorry I lied, but the real reason for this picture is that I wanted to win that ribbon.
This painting, from the 1990s, was an attempt to make sofa art to sell in my sister-in-law’s home décor store. So, the real reason for this painting’s existence is greed. But since I ended up putting so many hours into it that I couldn’t justify selling it for twenty dollars in a store that went out of business because nobody ever shopped there, I got far more value out of it by keeping it and enjoying it myself. It was inspired by numerous paintings of Native Americans done by white people on display in Love’s Travel Stops across Texas in the 1990s.
This picture, “That Night in Saqqara,” is about youth versus age, thinking about death, immortality, and being afraid of any or all of it. The model for the Mummy is Boris Karloff who was so nice to pose for a production still from his movie that I could draw him long after he was actually dead. The boy was a seventh-grader in 1983 who did not actually pose for this without a shirt on or with an actual Ankh life-symbol around his neck. The Pharaoh in the tomb-mural in the background was from National Geographic Magazine, and I think was supposed to be Tutankhamun, but I could be wrong. I am old and I mix up lots of things I once clearly knew. That’s what mummified brains have to be like, apparently.
The reason I had to create this artwork was because I was increasingly falling victim to illness, especially arthritis, and I was constantly thinking about what it would be like to die alone, entombed in a two-bedroom apartment on North Stewart Street in Cotulla, Texas. This was well before I met and married my wife, who is now my wife of 25 years.
I began this little seven-part essay quest a week ago when I was feeling my mortality. My mother is in hospice care, being kept comfortable as both her heart and her kidneys are failing. My marriage is dissolving. I am entering the fifth and final year of my Chapter 13 Bankruptcy, and even though I’ve paid off 80% of my debt, the odds are still against me. Even my ten-year-old dog is in poor health. I felt the need to make my peace with the world. So I addressed five questions with a mostly un-serious tone but some real philosophical underpinnings.
Here are the key questions.
Have I lived a life that makes me worthy?
Is the world going to survive long after my life is over?
Does anyone really deserve love?
What is destiny? And what does luck have to do with it?
What is true?
Putting the puzzle pieces together naked in front of a haunted house in Winter.
So, I will now give you a cheat sheet to show the answers so that you don’t have to go back to those other six essays and… you know, read and think.
I am worthy. But only because everyone is born worthy and I, unlike Hitler, didn’t do anything during my lifetime to negate that worthiness. I was not a serial killer, not a child molester, not a major polluter like Exxon, not a politician like Ted Cruz, not a lawyer, not a nihilist, not a Nazi, and not a lot of other bad things either… including not a talking-during-the-movie audience member… an unforgiveable thing to become. I am also not Ted Nugent, Bill Cosby, or Harvey Weinstein. But maybe I am a little too judgemental.
The world might survive, by which I mean biological life-forms will still exist after corporate greed and wicked billionaire Bond villains wipe out human life. But the cockroach people who arise after us will have to face these same puzzle-questions in their lifetimes. Individually. And with humble clarity of self-reflection.
Everyone who is worthy deserves love. Even Hitler had love. And there is a lot of love in my life beyond mere romantic love which is fleeting and fickle.’
Destiny is a human idea caused by certain religions with demanding and punitive gods. The real world does not work that way, as near as I can logically figure it out.
There is no absolute truth. There is only a number of truths that we can pursue and refine our understanding of with the scientific method to be as close to the truth as is humanly possible. Which, on a universal scale, is not very possible.
The laughing blue faun in my pictures represents satire and parody.
So, what’s the point of all this? Well, that’s a good question. It is a series of self-reflective essays filled with lies, deceptions, misperceptions, and dumb jokes. It is all about self-soothing and messing around with pictures and ideas. But thinking about who you are, what you are, and why is an important function of a self-reflective life. I can’t imagine living an unexamined life. For me that would be Hell. And I don’t believe Hell exists. Even stupid people think about stuff. And I am not suggesting I am the proof of that last sentence.
One thing that I am pretty sure of is that Mickey has no idea what is really, fundamentally true. Is it possible that nothing actually is?
Of course, I have to acknowledge this weird old foofy guy. It is true that I am thinking right now, in spite of what my critics may tell you. And as I am aware that there is thinking going on, then I can be fairly certain that I do, in fact, exist.
So, since I exist, this is probably not a soap-bubble universe that could go “Pop!” at any second. But I can’t be sure. My eyes repeatedly lie to me. That has to be what my repeated sightings of the ghost dog in our house is all about. All of my senses lie to me in various ways. The world could all be a dream that I am having as some kind of Olympic-level super-sleeper. Apparently I am such a talented sleeper I can even dream about sleeping.
Of course, since I am willing to pretend that reality is real, there are some things I can do to help myself detect what is most probably true.
Any statement presented as truth needs to be backed up by evidence in the form of verifiable facts, reported and repeatable experimental results, reliable corroborating testimony from verifiable experts, or other scientifically significant correlations with proven facts. For example, “Mickey knows a lot of big words.” This is proven by the first sentence in this foofy paragraph.
But even science doesn’t yield perfect truth. In fact, science operates completely through distrust of the facts and trying to the extreme-est degree to disprove everything it already knows. Back when gravity was understood to be a process where demons invisibly flit around sticking people’s feet to the ground, an angry little antisocial pervert named Isaac was sitting under the apple tree. An apple fell and nearly hit the dyspeptic little caffeine addict on the head. He grumbled a bit about future generations probably defaming him by retelling the story with the apple bouncing off his large-brained nerd-head. So, he determined that if they were going to tell it that way anyway, he would link it with his discovery of a mathematical description of gravity. He sat down at his work table and invented calculus so that he could describe in mathematical precision how the moon was constantly falling towards the earth at the same rate as it moved around the globe of the Earth thus keeping it in orbit. And he proved as well that the apple falling to the earth and missing his head was subject to the very same equations.
But Newtonian mechanics and gravity were only theories. That means that it accounted for the visible effects of gravity, but did not completely answer every associated anomaly. So, then there was this goofy little Germanic guy named Albert who fled the Nazis and had extremely bad hair days and liked to stick out his tongue when photographers pointed their cameras at him. He was well-known for having lots of thought experiments involving fast-moving street cars and their headlights, associated somehow with shrinking rulers and mismatching alarm clocks. And he designed an Astronomy experiment that proved the planet Earth could bend starlight. And then he showed the world how his slowing clocks and speed-of-light street cars actually gave a more thorough description of how the theory of gravity works and called it Relativity.
So, scientific truth is always changing. In fact, it is always moving upward as one scientist stands on the shoulders of the previous scientist, and then another scientist climbs up on his shoulders to reach even higher. Stephen Hawking even climbed up on Albert’s shoulders in his wheelchair.
So, what is actually true in the puzzle of life? Nothing at all that the little liar named Mickey can tell you. You really need to decide what is true for yourself,
Catch a Falling Star 