Foresight

Tomorrow is not promised…

…In fact, I have not yet survived today…

But before I fold my wings and die…

I promise I will have my say.

Look into the future and you will plainly see….

A time when planet Earth will tend to be so hot

That fire will bloom in every field, and death hangs from a tree,

With stupid people all around soon to feel the knot.

There was a former President with a pumpkin for a head.

He tried to wreck the government for profit and for pride.

And damage done may turn our world to a place where most are dead.

Those who kill our fragile world will take their gold and hide.

Pain and chaos confront us now and badness lies ahead.

And yet we’re standing in the queue not ready to avoid this ride.

Foresight’s the thing most useful to us now to keep ourselves alive

But Nostradamus I am not. I know not how to thrive.

Editor’s Note***

A Sonnet, like those masterfully written by whoever Shakespeare really was, is a fourteen-line poem, each line written in iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme often symbolized as ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.  If you look closely at this evil poem, it is clearly not a Sonnet.  At least, not a correctly written one.  And it is more of a gloom and doom poem like the quatrains of Nostradamus rather than a courtly love poem or celebration as written by Shakespeare or Petrarch.  More evidence of evil incompetence, then.

For teenaged girls who probably should not be reading evil poetry, you can look Sonnets up on Google and find out how to write one.  I know that this would be the only reason you are reading here.

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Naked Innocence

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To be clear, I will have to write a post called Naked Experience to go with this post.  It is a William Blake style of thing.  You know, that English Romantic Poet guy who was into drawing naked people even more than me?  The writer of Songs of Innocence and Experience?  You know, this stuff;

Well, maybe you don’t know.  But Blake gave the world the metaphor of the innocent lamb and the tyger of experience (tyger is his spelling, not mine, and it didn’t blow up the spell checker, even though it made the thing unhappy with me again).  There is a certain something I have learned about nakedness that I mean to innocently convey.  I learned it from anatomy drawing class and spending time with nudists.  Naked is not evil.  Naked is not pornography.  Nakedness, itself, is a very good thing.

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At this point the avid clothing-wearers among you are probably saying to yourself, “This guy is nuts!  If God had wanted us to be nude, then we wouldn’t have been born with clothes on.”  And I must admit, I cannot argue with logic like that.

But on a more serious note, I believe nudity is a fundamentally essential part of the nature of art.  After all, pictures of naked people are a central part of what people have been drawing since they first started etching them with charcoal on cavern walls.  And all art, including this blog, is about the human experience.  What it means to be human.  What it feels like to be alive on this Earth and able to feel.

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And there is nothing sinister and immoral in drawing nudes to portray that fact.  I am trying to show metaphorically the music of existence, the pace, the symmetry, the musical score…  It isn’t focused on the private bits, what some call the naughty parts, even when those things are present in the picture.  “How dare that naughty Mickey show the naked back end of that butterfly!  It ought to have pants on at least!”  Yes, I am making a mockery of that outrage itself.  I am not a pornographer.  These pictures were not created to engender any prurient interests.  These pictures are part of Blake’s lamb.  They will not bite you.  Though blue-nosed people who wish to control what others think may very well bite me for daring to say so.

I have posted a lot of writing and artwork on this blog that I held for the longest time to be completely private and personal.   I hardly ever showed any of it to anybody before I posted it here.  But I am old.  I no longer have secrets.  I am capable of telling you everything even though I have never met most of you in real life.  And I have no shame.  I have become comfortable with emotional and intellectual nudity.  And when I am dead, the body I have kept hidden from the world for so long will be no more.  It’s just a thought.  It’s a naked thought.  And it is completely innocent.

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Homely People

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I prefer to write about, think about, and draw pictures of homely people. But don’t mistake me.  I am not talking about ugly people.    Our former President, the giant blood sausage with a bird’s nest on top that we have put in charge of making us all feel sick to our stomachs every day, demonstrates what ugly means.  Ugly is not just weird and interesting to look at, it is also repellent behavior that makes physical flaws take a back seat… no, a rumble seat in the trailer behind by comparison.

I am talking about the ordinary people back home.  The ones that may be sitting by your own fireplace on a cold day trying to warm their hands after throwing snowballs outside.  And, of course, that snowball that hit Maggie Doozman in the side of the face and knocked her glasses off, made you laugh for an instant, until you realized she was crying, and Kirk Longhatter didn’t even apologize for throwing so hard, so you went over and picked her glasses up for her and handed them to her, and she smiled at you through the tears.  That is the kind of homely I mean.

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There is a lot that is beautiful in homely people. Sure, maybe not a classically beautiful Elizabeth Taylor face or a Gregory Peck lantern jaw.  Maybe not even a shapely behind or a graceful step when walking across the street.  But ordinary beauty.  Kindness.  Humility.  Determination in the face of long odds.  Good-natured jokery.  A touch of childish silliness.  A moon face that actually shines when a smile lights it up.  That is beauty that can be found in homely people.

You’ve probably figured out by now that this post is just an excuse to show off some goofy old off-kilter portraits I did.  But that doesn’t change the fact.  I do love homely people.

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Empty Theater Poem #1

The clown stumbled to the center of the stage,

Into the spotlight for a tinker’s age,

“I’m guessing that I now must talk,

Since I am no longer allowed to walk,

And I cannot claim I am a mime,

So, now I have to deal in rhyme.”

The seats were empty, so no one cheered,

But that also meant that no one jeered.

The Silent Orchestra of the Universe

“Poetry is Music,” the clown said, “And there is music in the stars,

Silent music, of course, made of light and novas, asteroids. and comets,

Dancing through the cosmos, and not stopping in at bars.”

Then he burped the alcohol inside him with a face portending vomits.

“Words are music, rhythm, rhyme, and melody.

We make our way from day to day upon the primrose path they lay.

I speak now, fulfill my part, and so, I speak my soliloquy…

As my very instrument, in the universal orchestra, I play.”

A ghostly moan in the empty seats was nearly really heard

And the clown, he gawked and stared about in every spin-necked way.

“I do not believe I find relief in this absent throng… with words

That come from no one nowhere… so, I’ll be on my way.”

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The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

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Some books come along telling a story that has to be taken seriously in ways that don’t make sense in any normal way.  The Alchemist is one of those books.

What is an alchemist, after all?

An alchemist uses the medieval forms of the art of chemistry to transmute things, one thing becoming another thing.

Coelho in this book is himself an alchemist of ideas.  He uses this book to transmute one idea into another until he digs deep enough into the pile of ideas to finally transmute words into wisdom.

There is a great deal of wisdom in this book, and I can actually share some of it here without spoiling the story.

Here are a few gemstones of wisdom from the Alchemist’s treasure chest;

“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting…” (p.13)

“It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary; only wise men are able to understand them.” (p.17)

“All things are one.  And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”  (p.24)

“And when he had gone only a short distance, he realized that, while they were erecting the stall, one of them had spoken Arabic and the other Spanish.    And they had understood each other perfectly well.  There must be a language that doesn’t depend on words, the boy thought.” (p.45)

All of these quotes from the book, as you can see, come from the first third of the book.  There are many more treasures to be found in this book.  I should not share them with you here.  Just as the main character of the story learns, you have to do the work for yourself.  But this book is not only an enjoyable read, but a map for how you can execute your own journey towards your “Personal Legend”.  In fact, you may find that the book tells you not only how to go about making a dream come true, but, if you are already on that journey successfully, it tells you what things you are already doing right.

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To Be Proud Of…

I am a writer. Even if I never sell another book, I am that. But the last three months have been really kind to me. I have sold multiple Kindle books in three straight months now. I have had multiple readers reading numerous pages from Kindle Unlimited. The Naked Thinking book’s publication seemed to be the start of the cascade. I am guessing that it is unique enough to be the book everyone was hungry for. It does have full-color illustrated nudes in it. But it has good content too.

I have been able to draw more than I have in years of late due to the ease of using digital art tools for drawing, so much easier than struggling with pencils and pens and arthritis.

So, I am happy now.

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Representing Star Wars RPG People

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Traditionally, D&D-type role playing games are played with miniature figures to represent characters and npc’s on the battlefield.  But when the kids were small and we started playing Star Wars RPG I didn’t have the proper figures.  So. to visualize characters, we used what I did have plenty of, dolls… err, action figures.

I told you who the player characters were a couple of Saturdays ago, but let me remind you.

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Princess Moreno, represented by the Barbie dressed in Emperor Palpatine’s robe was the leader of the adventuring group, and the player character of my niece, who was available back then because they lived in the Dallas area too.

Juba Jubajai, Jedi Guardian, was the muscle-brained power of the group.  He was my oldest son’s player character.

 

 

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The sidekicks and NPC’s that rounded out the group were Hrowwuhrr, the Princess’s loyal Wookie companion, and Keebo Kloohorn, the Rodian minstrel, quick of wit and poor at shooting.

 

 

 

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Of course, there were numerous other people you run into in an adventure, like Jedi-trainer Master Link Conn (played by an Abraham Lincoln Presidential action figure) and Barrabas the space pirate.  I customized some.  Luke Skywalker and Han Solo played a lot of them.  And others were only present in our imaginations.  For a brief little while, it was a quaint and happy gaming experience to play Star Wars with dolls and dice.

 

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Leftovers in January

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You reach a point after a hard month has lingered long where you have to eat the leftovers and accept what is.  I face challenges in the new year at least as large as the challenges of 2017.  When faced with such a situation, I need pie.

So here are some of the things left in my January file for use in this blog.  The only reason they are here is because I haven’t used them yet and the ideas have not been knitted together for any rational purpose.

This will be a crazy quilt blog post.  But crazy quilts keep you just as warm in winter as any other kind.

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My newest Facebook friend is the daughter of my wife’s cousin.   I have only known her as the sweet-faced little smiler at Filipino-American family gatherings who sometimes gets my attention by squirting me in the ear with a water gun.  Her father is from Greece and teaches Math in San Antonio.  Her mother, like my wife, is from the Philippines.  I won’t tell you her real name, but we used to call her “Sweetie” because she resembled the little pink Tweety-bird character from Tiny Toons Adventures.

I have also spent considerable time writing to and for nudists I have connected with through their various websites and on Twitter.  These two lovely works of nude art were shared with me on Twitter.  I have collected a number of nude pictures from Twitter nudists that I can’t use on WordPress because I am still entirely too modest to be the unrestrained naked person that some nudists are.  I can’t really claim to be a complete nudist myself.  But I do have stories to tell about naked people, and I have been working on them diligently.

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Of course, I still miss being a teacher.  I was a teacher of English for 31 years.  I taught reading and writing in English to over 2,000 kids.  I also learned how to stare in Klingon.  It is a useful skill for keeping students in line and keeping them from becoming a disappointment to the empire.  I miss teaching kids, especially talkative kids.  Far fewer people talk to me during a day of retirement than used to talk to me in a single class at school.  Those interactions were precious.

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And several things are just too confusing for my old brain to explain.

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But I do like this picture I found on Facebook of Tom Baker, the 4th Doctor, playing with multiple kittens.  I don’t know why, but it makes me happier.

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New Pictures Finished Today

Yes, I used the AI Mirror program as a digital art editor to put my original drawing over a photo background. I still have to put black on the birch trees, but otherwise, I finished this today in half an hour.

I finished the finger-crossing picture from yesterday, finally getting the hand right despite the complications of the white halo effect (needed to separate the white highlights and dark lines from the background house of brown and mostly white. It’s a comic book thing.

My favorite thirty-minute drawing of the day, “The Haunting Stare of Jenna Ortega.” Yes, I know it doesn’t look like her. No dimples and blue eyes instead of brown. But honestly, I did it from a photo of her.

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Where Do We Go From Here, My Dear?

Where do we go from here, my dear?

Where do we go from here?

Whisper it now in my queer little ear,

Is it someplace near?

My fingers are crossed in the rear, my dear.

I’m hoping the world has beer,

And Ideas are all quite clear, my dear,

Cause the future may cause great fear.

This is what you must hear, my dear,

My plan is to be more of a man this year,

I’ll play the game better than all of my peers,

And that’s where we’re going from here.

***Note*** There is lots of repetition here in this poem, internal rhyme, and echoing phrases, I even used the same basic picture, and changed it with digital art tools into three slightly different pictures. Economy of words, spare use of actual ideas, and extreme economy of actual effort… It is truly terrible poetry.

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