I started this goofy-cartoon art project with a sixteen-year-old cartoon character I drew in 2009. Applehead Andy was a stupid young boy who claimed he was only stupid because he had an apple for a head. He was initially a marionette made out of fruit by the puppet-maker Paghetto. When the Purple Fairy gave him life, he created in him a flaw where any time he needed to tell a lie, he stupidly told the truth. This resulted in Andy always having to say, “I know I am stupid, but it is because I have an apple for a head.” I drew it on white paper with pen and ink and colored pencils.
Here he is in his apple-headed glory after the last colored-pencil bit was added.
Here he is again as I have now used Picsart AI Photo Editor to add an apple-blossom background.
And then I asked AI Mirror to reinterpret him as a Manga-style character. This made him look more human and much less apple.
And then with AI Mirror again, I reimagined him as a more realistic cartoon human, though I forgot to make certain that the AI program knew he was a boy, not a girl. So, Applehead Andrea.
My first novel-length piece of writing was attempted in college. I finished it in four years. It was a pirate tale about a young man, a pirate named Graff the Changeling. You see him in this illustration I created in 1980 with his two young sons, Rene and Emery. Because their mother was a fairy, the boys have pointed ears and horns. It was an attempt at serious fantasy adventure fiction that was so awful, it became a comedy before it was through. I called it The Graff Tales, and I still have it. But I promise you, I will never, ever try to publish the horrible thing. My sisters served as my beta readers for this story. They both liked the oral stories I told, and they eagerly awaited something like they remembered from our shared childhood. They both were a bit disappointed by my first prose attempt. There was a knight called Sir Rosewall in the story. He was a hapless knighted fool who lived in poverty and swore to reclaim his honor with great deeds, but as he goes to sea as a kidnapped sailor, all he manages to do is fall down a lot and bump his large head frequently. In the first scene when he enters the story, long about chapter four, he exits a cottage and has to punt a piglet to get out without falling down. This pig-punting thing was repeated more than once with this character. My sisters joked that the “pig-in-the-doorway” motif would be my lasting contribution to literature. Fortunately for me, it was not. I am probably the only one who even remembers there was such a novel.
But my biggest failing with writing and storytelling was always that I could be too creative. The story featured a flying pirate ship that was raised from the bottom of the ocean by fairy magic. The crew were re-animated skeletons. The gorilla who lived on the island where the ship’s survivors had been marooned would also join the crew. His name was Hairy Arnold. One villain was the pirate captain Horner, a man with a silver nose-piece because he had lost his real nose to a cannon shot. Another was a red-bearded dandy named Captain Dangerous. But the biggest villain of all was the Heretic, who turned out to be a demon in human guise. It was all about escaping from pirates who wanted to kill you and hitting soldiers with fish in the fish market. There were crocodile-headed men and little child-like fairies called Peris that lived in the city where Graff was trapped and transformed into a monster by the Heretic.
My plot was too convoluted and my characters too wildly diverse and unlikely. The result was something far too bizarre to be serious fiction. The only way it could actually be interpreted was as a piece of comedy. There-in lay the solution to my identity problem as a writer. I had to stop trying to be serious. My imagination too often bent the rules of physics and reality. So I had to stop trying for realism and believability.
In the end all the main characters die. All except for young Rene who becomes a pirate hunter. Of course, I follow Graff and Emery through to heaven because, well, it was a first person narrative and the narrator died. So, I vowed to myself that I would never let this horrible piece of nonsense see the light of day. I would never try to publish it, rewrite it, or even tell anyone about it. And so to this very day I… oopsie.
You see, gooseberries aren’t made from geese. They don’t look like gooses… er, goosei… um, geese. They aren’t the favorite food of a goose, unless, maybe… Mother Goose. The name is a corrupted form of the Dutch word kruisbes , or possibly the German Krausbeere. You know, because people who speak English don’t know how to talk right. They don’t have anything to do with geese. In the same way, a person’s name doesn’t really help you understand the person that wears it. You have to dig deeper. Do you know, I have never actually tasted gooseberry pie? I have seen and even picked the gooseberries. They are danged ugly, spikey-furred snot-green berries. I am not tempted in any way to put one in my mouth. And yet, I should not judge gooseberry pie before I taste a piece. I know people who adore gooseberry pie. Maybe you are one of them.
The point is, blogs are exactly the same thing. An artist, a writer, a producer of something, or a day-dreamy noodling goober has put together a blog to display their wares, show off their creations, and share their words and wisdom. You have to look at them, warts and all, and actually take a bite. You have to try them out and test them. Follow them over time. Read, absorb, and appreciate… not merely zoom through and look at the pictures… and maybe click “like” at the bottom of the post.
Of course, I admit, I do the very thing I am advising you not to do. The first few times I visit a blog, I scan through and only focus on a few things that catch my falling stars. (oop! Shame on me… I should say “catch my fancy”. Forgive me for lapsing into Mickian brain farts for a moment there). But if I am lured into coming back, I dip deeper and read more… tasting it thoroughly, as it were… And much of what I taste there will end up in my own recipe somewhere down the line. I begin to learn who that blogger is, and their writing style… sometimes even their thinking style (though I don’t read minds… only smell brain farts and odoriferous mental cooking smells) and I picture them as people in my minds eye. Sometimes I wonder if they match in real life the person I am picturing. Of course, the answer is no. People don’t look like what you think they should look like. They don’t even look like what they think they look like either… even in photos. So let me end this goofy pie-based argument about why blogs are self portraits with a few self portraits I have created that aren’t really what I look like , even if it is a photo.
Me in the mirror, 1980
Scary pictures of the artist as a creepy old man…
The novelist me…
A wizard selfie taken at Mad Ludwig’s Castle in Bavaria.
Who I am and who I was…
Seriously grumpy me…
Gag! Enough of the gooseberries already! Or are they gross-berries? I think that I really don’t look anything like me anymore.
Yes, Mondays are blue. Specifically French blue. Every day of the week has its own color. Sunday is golden yellow, Tuesday is a yellow-ochre, Wednesday is indigo blue and sometimes changes to blue violet, Thursday is burnt orange, and Friday is solid wood brown, and of course Saturday is rich pure red while Mondays are not just any blue… they are French blue. I learned the names of these colors from being a painter and using oil paints. I experience these colors every week and they help me maintain the calendar in my stupid old head. I began to realize when I first heard about the colors of the wind in the Disney movie Pocahontas that there was something to this everyday thing, something different in the way I see the world. I have in the last few years learned that this condition has a name. It is called synesthesia.
It has been suggested to me by more than a few people that I don’t really perceive the world the same way “normal people do”. When I was growing up, and going to school, I never had trouble remembering to capitalize the first word in a sentence. I did however, have a great deal of difficulty with capital letters on nouns. Looking back on that difficulty now, I can say without a doubt that I was having trouble not because I didn’t know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns. It was because things like the word “dog” or “chair” had to begin with the right color. Dogs are blue when you are talking about the color of the letters in the word. But small “d” is blue-green, not true blue. It doesn’t fit as well as the dark blue capital “D”. And chairs are orange-red when you write them down, while the small “c” appears light green by itself.
Sundays are Sun-days, and that’s why they are golden yellow.
I am told that most synesthetes are taken by surprise when they learn that they are seeing things differently than other people do. I certainly was. I always got funny looks whenever I described Thursdays as orange, or the month of November as sky blue. My classmates in 4th grade thought I was nuts… of course, it wasn’t just for the orange Thursdays thing. I was not a normal kid in any real sense of the word. I always suspected that if I could look at the world through other people’s eyes, I would probably see the color green as what I called red, or that glowing halo that surrounded things when organ music played in the Methodist church would no longer be there. But once I learned how synesthesia works I knew it was true. The visual part of the brain can be scanned to show activity, and lights up on the scanner as if the brain is seeing bright colors when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is being played while the subject of the scan is actually blindfolded. I am told that synesthesia is more common in left-handed girls. My daughter, the Princess, tells me that she also sees color on printed numbers and letters. She is left handed and also gifted at drawing. I suspect she inherited the synesthesia from me.
Synesthesia probably explains what this nonsense is all about.
Now, I acknowledge the fact that my synesthesia is self-diagnosed and not proven by any of the methods the articles I have read about the condition talked about. But my personal experiences always seem to fall in line with descriptions of letter/number/color combinations and music/color combinations that I have read about. And if I do have it, it is not the same as any of my six incurable diseases. It is not a bad condition to have. In an artistic sense, it might actually be a good thing. I could use some good for a change. Good doesn’t usually come from weirdness… not my weirdness, anyway. (Oh, and capital “G” is lime green… as is the word Goodness).
Okay, so on the synesthesia tests I didn’t score as a synesthete on the music/color test. But I was extremely synesthetic on the tests for color/months/days of the week. I was a little over the mark on letter/number/colors synesthesia too, but it was more a problem with manipulating the color-selector device when I don’t have a mouse to use on my laptop. The test for music did not test the way I see colors with music. They wanted me to respond to what color each individual note seemed to be, and that isn’t even close to the way I experience it. For me, the perfect description of how synesthesia works for me is Bach’s Tocata and Fugue in D minor as it is depicted in Fantasia.
I was shocked when I first saw it. The colors are wrong for this piece, but the visual experience is almost exactly how I experience music, especially wordless instrumental music. The only problem with this piece is that the overall color schemes are wrong. But this comes about because every synesthete sees the colors differently. And I have no doubt that at least one of the artists who created this had synesthesia. If there were more reds, yellows, and magenta in the opening and more indigo contrasted with silver later, this interpretation would be perfect.
Music synesthetically works in two directions for me. The picture above, called The Wings of Imagination, makes me think of La Mer by Claude Debussy.
If you listen to the piece, don’t look at the YouTube illustration, look at my picture if you want to see the music the way I do. The following song, Don’t Worry, Be Happy, is a multicolored song that I can best express with the colors in the picture I call Rainbow Peacock.
The full range of primary colors together in one picture, or one song, always means completeness, fullness, and happiness to me. If there is absence of one or more of the basic colors from the color wheel, the mood and emotion present in the song or picture is altered to something other than happiness. The Firebird Suite by Igor Stravinsky goes from the indigo and navy blue of fear and confusion to instances of angry red and feverish orange. It would look something like this in the theater of my imagination;
And one of my favorite instrumental pieces of all times, Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun by Claude Debussy, is full of melancholy and sexual tension, deeply felt vibrations in the depths of my stomach, and would look like my picture Sleeping Beauty with its teal and blue melancholia juxtaposed with candle-lit yellows and wood brown mixed feelings of joy and anxiety.
Now, if you have waded through all of this goofy color-and-music analysis from a source whose sanity is questionable at best, you probably have no earthly idea what any of it has to do with anything. But if you have that aha!-moment and see it all clearly too, then I suspect you probably are a synesthete too. Poor you. It is not a treatable condition. But it is also not a burden. Learn to enjoy it. It resonates in your very soul.
Yes, that is not a real photo. It is a cartoon photoshopped onto a Picsart background. It is still me playing games with images.
Will Eisener’s Spirit is always taking time out of his busy immortal retirement to tell Moitle Schmertz’s Delicatessen about Mickey’s life problems, but only because it brings a smile to the things that crank Mickey’s irritation, gears. Everybody loves smiling irritations, right? And I do it because making humor out of foibles is cool. Especially when you get to use words like foibles, irritations, immortal, and delicatessen all in the same paragraph.
Facebook has repeatedly warned and threatened me about nudes in my illustrations. And a few days ago they suspended my account for three days and removed the Surrealism post over the naked faun. Will they get me again for the nude Ricky doll? He’s wearing a backpack or possibly a sack.
So, I am still complaining about many things and talking about flying saucers being real. That’s all I really need to do for today. Okay?
Sitting nude amidst the flowers, while being a plastic doll.
As a writer and an artist, I am basically a Surrealist. But do you know what I mean by that?
Salvador Dali was a Surrealist. As was Paul Klee, Greg Hildebrandt and his brother Tim, Larry Elmore, Boris Vallejo, every other fantasy artist, and every science fiction artist. It means being an artist who can paint or draw something extremely unreal in a way that makes it seem entirely real.
I have been that since childhood. Childhood trauma, a vivid imagination, and a need to live mostly in my own head has forced me to be that.
Radasha, my faun, whom only I can see and talk to.
Surrealism is taking things that do not go together in real life and forcing them together in Realistic Art.
If you do a realistic painting of a tiger withlagle wings, you create a surrealistic image. Al Capp’s Lil Abner newspaper cartoon strip was surrealist every day. Almost all cartoon strips were or are. Calvin and Hobbs perchance? The talking cartoon bee on the cereal box in every Honey Combs or Honey-nut Cheerios commercials? In the modern world we are increasingly surrounded by Surrealism. AI-created art is nothing but surrealistic images slammed together by a randomizimg AI mind responding to the wicked thoughts of users. A girl in a bikini with a canine chihuahua head? Or more likely, a girl without a bikini and a chihuahua’s head.
A Telleron frog-boy from outer space.
The movie, The Birds, by Alfred Hitchcock is Surrealism. Having an orange-faced criminal for a president like the current President Pumpkinhead is definitely Surrealism. As the world becomes increasingly nonsensical, it becomes more surrealistic. And hence, the need for Surrealists like me.
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is Surrealism.
Ruben was my favorite student from my first year of teaching. He was a Hispanic boy who was not very tall, but made up for it with a big heart. The only problem I had with him was the time I caught him signing another student’s report card (as their father, not as a classmate.) I had a really tough first year as a teacher. But on the last day of classes in May of 1982, Ruben told me I was his favorite teacher that year. Damn, I had been thinking of quitting and finding another job. Because of Ruben, I was a teacher for 23 years at that school, and 31 years overall.
You can see how I modified the portrait with digital and AI tools. I used the anime cartoon tricks on the eyes and nose to make it look somewhat more like manga art than a portrait of what Ruben really looked like. I also moderated the use of yellow in the picture. It’s not that I misused it in the colored pencil sketch, but as my eyes have become more colorblind over time, the overuse has become more apparent.
Randy was my pain-in-the-tuckus student for my second year as a teacher. He stole comic books from me. He wore a Batman Halloween mask to class because my blue Ford Torino had fins on the back fenders. He tried to give me the nickname Batman but ended up being called Batty Boy for at least the next year because that is how I addressed him in saying good morning every time he wore the mask. His classmates thought it was the perfect nickname. Some class clowns you really love because they are actually funny.
I was always regretful that the original portrait had owl eyes due to the whiteout I used to repair the smeared highlights. The eyes had no visible highlights before I turned them both into blazing headlights. I also did the original on graph paper, hence, the design on the shirt. I could moderate that into a more normal shirt pattern in the digital redraw.
The main takeaway from this is that digital and AI tools like AI Mirror allow me to dress up my drawings despite my increasingly shaky arthritic hands. I have had arthritis now for 50 years.
Well, our house will have to have some major repairs to retain insurance because we live in the southern part of Tornado Alley. Climate change has greatly increased our ability to have all our possessions wiped out overnight. And having to pay for the replacement of the entire house is bad for the insurance company’s ongoing ability to make huge profits off of our large monthly premiums. I am so sad for them. Especially since they are putting this pressure on to gain an excuse for canceling our insurance while retaining all previously paid premiums.
I didn’t die last night, however. And the high winds warning is set to expire in two more hours from writing this particular sentence. Big Bad Wolf hasn’t yet huffed and puffed hard enough to blow our house down. So, maybe I am good and things are generally good.
I have overcome my health problems too for the moment. The urinary tract infection I thought I had is not there anymore. I am not following the Jim Henson Road to Death… for now at least. The doctor did give me a final medication to stop the burning sensation that fooled me into thinking I was going to die. Humorously, it turns my pee blue.
I do have to pay taxes as soon as Spring Break is over. And the probability that the Trump Tax Cut, the gift that keeps on taking things away, will increase the amount of taxes the parasites known as retired teachers have to pay. I am almost at the point once again where I can’t afford to pay what more I will owe and will have to beg the government for monthly payments.
And when this week is over, my family, who left me behind on the Spring Break Trip to see Number Two Son at his Air Force base, will return so that I am no longer the only living thing left in the house (besides a handful of Norway rats and roof rats as well as at least two ghost dogs.) They didn’t leave me behind because they don’t like me very much, but because I had at least one doctor’s appointment to attend, partial dentures being made for me to chew tough foods with (like tapioca pudding,) and the fact that my arthritis prevents me from doing a car trip from Texas to Washington DC with any degree of comfort and an ability walk once we get there.
Everything is good news now. Times are at least better than they were.
Poppensparkle invited Twinklebottom to enter the upper room of Pippen’s Tower in the castle known as Cair Tellos. Poppy’s face revealed great concern as she led Twinkle to the coffee table in what her young husband constantly called Poppy’s Worry Spot.
“So, what’s on your mind today? Why did you so urgently need to see me?” Twinkle said.
“It’s the creator. He’s not been well. And that’s concerning at his advanced age.”
“You mean the Slow One who writes our story? The one our existence depends on? How old is he?”
“He says he is 568 years old, but he writes fiction, so he lies a lot. In faery years he’s 138, so I guess he is probably almost 70 in human years.”
“Goodness, Poppy! If he dies, we all disappear into nothingness.”
“Yes, that’s the way being a faery works. We depend on the fools who believe in us.”
“So, what is wrong with him?”
“In January, one of those two crowns on his molar teeth that broke off during the pandemic got seriously infected. He had both teeth yanked out by a psycho lady dentist who nearly pulled his skeleton out of his body during the extraction of the stubborn infected tooth. He had to take lots of antibiotics and was in a lot of pain. He had trouble eating.”
“That sounds horrible, but survivable. Old Slow Ones go through that sort of thing routinely. The old lady who has dementia and talks to me all the time had all her upper teeth pulled out and something called a denichurr put in its place.”
“Yes, but that wasn’t the end of his health troubles. In the middle of January, he had to pee out four small kidney stones. That hurt an awful lot, and he got seriously infected somehow. He has this weird colon problem called diverticulosis, a condition where the large intestine is full of unexpected pockets that collect extra feces that stops moving and can become infected too.”
“So, he was also full of shit.”
“Um, yes. He had to get a shot of a super-powerful antibiotic in his behind, given to him by a lady nurse. He also needed an antibacterial powder that he had to stir into water, drinking 80 ounces of water or more a day. And he had to take lots and lots of laxatives too. At least seven days worth.”
“So, he got to know the household porcelain well.”
“It makes me glad that faeries are differently made and never have to poop.”
“You and me both, Poppy. So, is he dying?”
“I don’t think so. But I wish I knew how to help. He’s a weird old guy, but likable and funny. And we need him to stay alive and tell our story.”
“I know a dark faery I can consult,” said Twinkle stupidly.”
“Oh, that’s a truly terrible idea!”
An hour later, Twinklebottom sat in Dangerheart’s underground tea room.
“…So, that’s what is wrong with Mickey the creator. Is there anything you can do to help?”
Dangerheart grinned evilly. “I was watching through my crystal ball as the old hag stuck the needle in his butt. I laughed long and hard about that.”
“It isn’t really a crystal ball. It’s a Slow One child’s shooting marble.”
“It lets me scry on foolish mortals like the creator though. And I love seeing him get embarrassed or put through pain. I’m only sorry I didn’t get to see the psycho dentist yank the infected molar out. That would’ve been a hoot.”
“Isn’t there something you can do to help?”
“Well, he already went to the emergency room on Friday and after they scanned him and poked him and took his blood, they found out the infection was gone. They couldn’t do anything more for him with their science stuff. The pee doctor gave him some expensive pills that turn your pee blue. Surely there is no evil magic that I could apply that would be any funnier than that.”
“You think we don’t need to worry about him anymore?”
“I wouldn’t say that. President Pumpkinhead Trump will probably take away his Medicare and that will probably kill him. That should be funny to watch.”
“So, you think we are all doomed? The world will not remember us after our storyteller dies, and we will all fade away into nothingness?”
“Of course, we’re doomed. And you sure use the word So a lot. Or was that sew?”
Catch a Falling Star 