Okay, this is another filler piece to allow me to post every day of 2015. But it does give me a chance to write down a few things I have been thinking about… And I do realize allowing me to think nowadays is a completely risky proposition. But when you talk about Nuts and Bolts, you are talking about how things are put together. The nut keeps the attachment from sliding apart and failing to do its job, but the real work of bonding things together is done by the bolt. So, to keep mangling the metaphor until it is either as tightly bolted as it will go, or it bursts from the torque and stress, let me talk about some bolts in my cartooning endeavors.
This most recent pen and ink Paffooney is a cartoon panel about Pirates from the imaginary dream world of Fantastica. In the cartoon environment I am working on now, Pirates take your gold and valuables basically by being bankers and compounding your interest… mostly by compounding really, really hard… like with hammers and heavy swords. So here is one of the bolts holding my posts together. I am financially troubled right now (right now meaning the last twenty years) by trouble with credit card debt and banks. I fight that kind of trouble with swords of satire. You find me complaining a lot about this particular topic by mostly metaphorical means.
And that leads to another bolt that is a common rivet in the girders of my purple paisley prose. I use metaphors and drawings in a way that can be characterized by the artistic term (or is that autistic term?) surrealism. Yes, I am an out-of-the-closet surrealist like Salvador Dali, Juan Miro, and Rene Magritte. I would like to argue that I am also a surrealist in the manner of Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, Charles Schultz, creator of Peanuts, and Dan Piraro, creator of Bizzaro, but cartoonists in general don’t tend to be out of the closet, willing to admit that they juxtapose disjointed images with realist elements in them to make a comic point or raise an emotional response. That is something most cartoonists are unwilling to let their parents understand about them… that, or they simply don’t know what big words like juxtapose mean… because cartoonist are generally unwilling to look things up in the dictionary. I hope this paragraph doesn’t make your brain hurt. But if it does… well, that’s why most of us surrealists try really hard to keep it secret and end up living a double life.
I think you can also tell by today’s post that I need to revisit this idea of examining bolts. I am swiftly coming to the end of today’s 500 words, and I have only covered two working bolts. What kind of structure can stand up to high winds with only two bolts in the entire thing? But hopefully it won’t all suddenly collapse before I have a chance to come back and place a few more bolts. And on that note, I am at 514.
Catch a Falling Star 