I was born in the middle of the 1950’s. So, I am a Boomer. (Born as part of the World War II baby boom.)
I am philosophically a pessimist. So, I am a Gloomer. (Someone who believes that what is most likely to happen is the worst thing that can happen, therefore I always prepare for the worst.)
I like to investigate and play around with conspiracy theories. So, I am a Rumor-Lover. (Though I don’t declare anything absolutely true without absolute proof. Unlike Alex Jones, I am still in pursuit of whether Oswald acted alone and whether 9-11 wasn’t an inside job.)
And I have no faith that the monkey-flinging billionaires will give up polluting with fossil fuels to make short-term profits long enough to save life on Planet Earth from global warming. So, I am a Doomer. (Yes, we really are on a path to extinguish life on Earth even though we have the technology to mitigate and reform it.)
If I sing it,
“I’m a Boomer!”
“I’m a Gloomer!””
“I’m a Rumor-Loving Doomer!”
“We are dying… everyone!”
I have confidence that the human race will survive what’s coming. But it won’t be a fair thing. Those most likely to survive in their Mars colony or underground and undersea cities are the wealthy monkey flingers who caused the problem. Billions are going to die. The world population will be greatly reduced and forced to evolve biologically… probably with the aid of science. I know the clean energy technology is available to solve the world’s problems. But I also know that vast piles of wealth in billionaire tax havens corrupt the wealthy sons and daughters of fat money hogs. It makes them incompetent. Something their servants will kill them for when the small groups of survivors will have secured their existence.
So, I sing my Doomer song. You guessed it. To the tune of “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band.
Do I think what I think is inevitable?
No. But I will be living out my life doing everything in my power to grow trees, clean trash out of everywhere but the proper receptacles, and curse the bones of those dead old billionaires who did this to us. I hope the Devil puts some extra hot coals under John D Rockefeller in the seventh circle of Hell.
I will be writing and drawing as much as I can until the end of me. It will probably come long before the rest of you face that final chess game with the Reaper. And I don’t expect my work is going to save any of you. But it will help me make meaning out of my life.
I hope I am wrong about everything for the sake of the children.
But this old pessimist is rarely shown by life to be wrong.
Here I am making progress with the new picture project. I have had to rethink details on the fly as my arthritic hands make flubs in ink. Unlike on the computer, I had to fudge a new crook to the elbow and push a flower’s edge under the nearby flub instead of over the top.
This fast and furious edit for possibilities to redirect the problem was created with the AI Mirror that suggested possible changes to the finished project.
Here is my finished colored-pencil drawing. This is the best I can do with my hands and my color blind eyes. It’s not that bad. Still, I can now use the AI program that will obviously one day become a Terminator android murder-bot to sort out the crappy stuff and make it better.
Still not perfect. It tried to turn my black-eyed susans into sunflowers. But I like the highlights and the back lighting on the hair.
Here is the pen and ink drawing that is my latest work in progress. I drew it first in pencil as a structural sketch with details penciled on top of it. I then inked the best lines and then took the excess pencil marks away with an eraser. I haven’t scanned it yet. What you see here is a photo of the drawing with my phone camera, hence the gray color rather than white. I will put the colored pencil on it next and show you the result when done. I will then turn it into something digital by putting the scan into my phone to use the digital art app and the AI editor.
This is some playing around with the photo of the pen and ink copy messed on with the digital art tools and the AI editor (which tends to give my drawing an even more Manga look than it had originally.)
This is the photo of Sally Field I used for the previous practice.
This is the result of loading it into my digital art app and tracing over it with my electronic stylus on my touchscreen phone. I know it doesn’t look like her. I couldn’t get the eyes to look right, and I settled for the smiling eyes that my AI editor gave me.
Yes, I published the book that has all my closet skeletons in it. I kept the secret of being a victim of a sexual assault from the age of ten to the age of thirty before finally sharing my pain with a girlfriend as described in the book. I tell about my entire transformation of someone totally shamed by my body to someone who embraced being a nudist. So, I have reasons for publishing this book.
I needed to get the worst of the secrets that chewed on my innards for over fifty years out of the closet to do their informative skeleton dance for any who might need to hear it. My mother and father both died without ever knowing what happened to me as a child. In 2020 and 2021 And not because I hadn’t revealed it to anyone. My sisters both knew. But they didn’t read my books and they really didn’t need to face that sadness since I had dealt with it myself years before.
2. I have collected many artworks that I have done over the years with my fascination with the nude human form revealed in it. I needed to air out some of that art. I got the added benefit of digital art coming along to help me translate my pictures into more realistic and dynamic art, unaffected by my arthritis.
3. I needed a place to put more of my truly terrible poetry. This book is a place to put some of what I have learned about blank verse by my fascination and obsession with Walt Whitman.
I talk about Walt Whitman, other artists and writers, and my personal philosophy of education here.
4. This book was also a place to experiment with AI tools and digital art in ways I had never done before. This picture above is created with a photo of a boy with clothes on, some drawing on top of it to change the face and alter the details necessary to make him a nude figure. Of course, my arthritis left numerous flubs and smirches all over it, so I used the AI Mirror program to turn the whole thing into a much better version with the colors better blended and the awkward lines smoothed out. I have to admit, though, the correctable lines and color swatches go down more easily than colored pencil lines. See the differences in quality in the arthritic version below, uncorrected by the AI editor?
5. And the most important reason of all is that this book purges my soul and gives me peace to face the last years of my life with. I am old enough to seriously think about how I want to face the end of everything for me. And what I really wanted to do is go into the coming night bare of all secrets and mental baggage. Just like any good nudist, I am hiding nothing at all as I stride to the end of the story..
I am tempting fate and trying to publish this, my personal nudist’s guide to repairing your soul through naked meditation and transcendental experiences. It is filled with lots of bad poetry, secrets that are actually quite painful for me to reveal, and almost all of the naked pictures that I have been drawing for years and was able to spruce up with an AI program.
Nudes like this one were created from photos where the model actually wore clothing, then I painted all over it with my electronic stylus on my touch-screen phone and then cleaned it all up with an AI photo editor. I gave credit to the AI, the digital art tools, and the masterpieces of art I imitated and learned from.
It still has to be approved by the small gods of Amazon KDP. It is possible it will get rejected and my Amazon account will be dropped. That would be catastrophic. For me, at any rate. But I have reviewed much worse on Amazon Kindle. And my novels have survived some severe complaints.
Time will tell. It will be available through a link on this blog if I get lucky.
Turns out it was already approved as I published this post. That’s the fastest I have ever had a book approved by Amazon.
I had to illustrate this post with pictures of a pretty brown-eyed girl to take your mind off the fact that this is a complainer post. Yes, the Republican Party has ticked me off. In other words, they have become a huge blood-sucking tick that I need to get off my chest and away from my heart.
Complaint number one; Those monkey-flingers have probably killed us. Climate change is slated to kill all life on Earth in fifty years. And they are busy protecting their profit-making by polluting more than ever while they still have fossil fuels to make money with. And they are going to shut the government down if huge cuts aren’t made to programs that help people like me, my family, all the people in my neighborhood, and all the people in the middle class and below while protecting the trillions of dollars in tax cuts that have a majority of all wealth flowing into the bottomless pockets of the ultra-greedy one-percenters.
We really only have until 2032 to solve the climate crisis. And the stupid MAGA minions refuse to believe in the fact of human-created climate change as reported, checked, updated, and verified by the international scientific community nearly every year since the 1970s. NASA, British and French climate studies, the US military resources, and independent scientific studies and data collectors throughout the globe, though peer-reviewed constantly, are all not believable because somebody on Fox News or Mark Levin or Tucker Carlson says all their studies and charts and tables and books are all lies. They have obviously done their own research by accepting fish food from the usual fishermen. Never mind the fatal fishhooks.
And if we are going to survive the climate crisis, we need to build hurricane-proof domed cities, de-acidify the oceans of the world, and relocate people forced out of the tropical climates that have become too hot for trees, animals, and people to stay alive. We not only have to stop putting more carbon dioxide and methane gas into the atmosphere, but we also have to take much of what’s up there in the air out again, sequestering carbon in forests, jungles, and back underground. And we have the technology to do all of these things, but we do not have time to squander.
And the Republicans will kill all of us by continuing to waste government time with impeachments of Biden that have no evidence of anything improper or illegal, and spending cuts that will derail the climate mitigation strategies I pointed out we are already behind on building. They have fired their Speaker of the House, dissolved into arguing groups of monkey-flingers, refused to fund the government which will lead to a shutdown, and they are still determined to foist the spoiled-mango ex-president criminal with the corn-tassel wig back into the White House. We are all going to die.
Complaint number two; Those mangy firetruckers without the “iretr” are also doing the one thing that most alienates me in all the world. They are banning books.
The thing is, those MAGA-minded Republicans, the low-information ones especially, are thoroughly convinced that they are better than the people they hate. And they think they have the right to tell others what rules they must obey and thoughts they must think even those imperial edicts don’t apply to them… because they don’t know what “edict” means.
What they do know the meaning of are the words “black,” “Jew,” and “gay,” and they associate all those words with a special fear and hatred. They also DON’T know the meanings of “woke,” “cultural elite,” and “gender.” Loud and sometimes violent parent groups go to special school board protest meetings to get books banned from the school libraries like the works of James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and Walter Dean Myers because they are black, Biographies of Roberto Clemente and Rosa Parks for the same reason, books about the Holocaust and the origins of Hollywood because they tell the truth about Jews in America and the wider world, and true stories about gay penguin pairs raising a chick or young boys who like to wear skirts. The loud and sometimes violent parents who want to shield their children from any such scary truths are also depriving children of access to books like that even if I like them and, as a teacher, think those books are good for kids. To Kill a Mockingbird, The Roberto Clemente Story, Beloved by Toni Morrison, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and the Biography of Harvey Milk have all been banned in Florida and Texas.
What right do people who most likely don’t even read books have to tell anyone else or anyone else’s children what they can and can’t read? Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Ben Shapiro, Dennis Praeger, and Jordan Petersen certainly shouldn’t have any say in the matter. The Nazis in Germany burned books in the city squares of most German cities as Adolf Hitler came to power. Are we on the verge of burning books and red States and welcoming the new Fuhrer Donald Adolf Trumpkin Twitler back to the greatest seat of power on this planet again?
I apologize for ranting. But I am old enough now that my old and angry coot-brain comes to a boil easily and MAGA incompetence, corruption, and evil have raised the heat level of the entire world.
There are more emotional tells in the face of this character than you can put into words to describe. You know it’s true. You just have to look. She lost her father when she was eleven. He committed suicide with a gun. She saw him before the police cleaned up the scene of his final act. But everyone tells her that she’s the most beautiful girl that ever lived in her little town. And she doesn’t believe them. But no other kid in town does a better job of taking care of everyone in times of crisis. She can bring people together. And she probably knows more about love than anyone you ever met. You see it in her eyes. You know that it is true.
Maybe I can capture it in a drawing. Maybe I cannot. Not even with digital art tools and help from the AI Mirror app. But doubting my skills is one of the tells that I really am an artist. What I can draw in spite of arthritis in my hands and loss of some percent of my color vision also proves that I am an artist. I do it even with the painful obstacles that must be overcome.
And I can certainly overdo it and make big mistakes. But I know from the Bob Ross Bible that there are no mistakes. Only happy little accidents.
Catch a Falling Star 