As I lay here ill with another in an endless series of viral infections, I am reminded of the real reason I have been thinking so much lately about Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. (Of course the fact that I am re-reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles has something to do with it). It’s all about character. That’s what Victorian writers were all about. No one ever handled characters as masterfully as those two novelists. And, being ill and in pain, subject to problems with debt and credit cards and bankers, I began thinking about villains. Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist is one of the scariest villains in literature. Murdstone from David Copperfield and Daniel Quilp from The Old Curiosity Shop are relentless predators. Uriah Heep from David Copperfield is smarmy as they come. In Tess young Master D’Urberville-Stokes has stolen the family name, and he steals Tess’s innocence in a manner that would make him a rapist in our day. He gets away with his horrible crime and later destroys the innocent woman, one of the best and most worthy characters in literature, because a corrupt and disintegrating culture allows him to do so. These characters are so carefully drawn and gloriously illustrated in the prose of these books, that I can see them in my artist’s mind’s eye. So I was inspired to draw a villain today. Since I am forced to think about bankers now, I drew a pirate. Yes, I know there’s no transition between Victorian novels and this picture, but I am not well, okay?
This particular pirate has a red face, red hair, red mustache, and wears red clothes, so naturally his name is Black Timothy. He is a credit card banker for Bank of America, the foulest kind of pirate to ever sail an international bank on the high seas. His friend is named Scruffy Bill. Now, when pirates get an arm or leg or other limb blown off by cannon fire or cut off in a saber fight, they replace that part with a wooden prosthesis. Bill has lost every limb he has, including his head. Now that his head is replaced with a wooden prosthesis, he can only repeat what Black Timothy says… but that works out well, because no one really understands Tim when he speaks, and Bill uses simpler words to say the same thing (primarily because he doesn’t remember all the bad words Black Timothy knows). So Bill takes the place of a parrot, and he serves as a translator for Tim allowing all of us to be truly disgusted by what he says.
Now, I am aware that my villain in no way matches any of the wonderful characters in Victorian novels, but I wanted to make a Paffooney with pen and ink and colored markers, and I have a lot of red markers. Forgive me for random acts of Paffoonery.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Story Continues…
I find myself caught up in the story once again. Netflix put a new monster-movie series out there with eight episodes starring a Dungeons & Dragons-playing group of middle school kids, a psychically powerful girl-experiment named Eleven, an assortment of dysfunctional adults, star-crossed teen romantics to use as potential monster food, and a creepy mouth-headed monster from the “upside down” to eat them all. How could I not binge-watch such a thing?
This binge-watching addiction comes at a time when I have other things on my mind. My aging parents are in poor health and have a critical doctor’s visit coming up this week. Bank of America has decided to experiment on me to see what happens if they sue me for the total amount of my debt, plus court costs, plus additional fees for betraying them by going to Wells Fargo, plus additional additional fees just because they don’t like me and think I’m ugly. I am awaiting a call from a potential lawyer-advocate to help me even as I am writing this. I am also planning how to live without money until the total is payed off in garnished pension, seized property and bank accounts, and whatever other way they can squeeze more money out of me. Some monsters are all mouth. This of course comes after I completed a program of debt resolution and paid off all my other creditors. When I called Bank of America, they didn’t seem to know what happened to the debt, so they did not participate in that. Were they plotting evil, or just that stupid? Such questions go into the making of a monster. Perhaps a monster movie television series on Netflix was precisely what I needed.
The only episode I haven’t watched yet is the last installment. Potentially the monster gets its comeuppance. That’s what the lawyer, a consumer rights attorney, promised me in his letter. It also is what the kids in Stranger Things are promising as they prepare to enter the monster’s lair.
Why do I need to see the ending of the story so badly? Because when we reach the end of our life course, the happy ending, in real life, does not overcome death and endings. We live our time on Earth, reach the end, and then we are no more. Only the story continues. New lives and new adventures begin, only to proceed relentlessly to their ending. Even when the human race’s story comes to end and there is no more life on Earth, the story continues. You have to be caught up in that. There is no other choice. The things you dread stalk you and eventually catch you, and the happy ending is bound up in how you handle it along the way.
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Filed under angry rant, autobiography, commentary, ghost stories, horror movie, humor, monsters, review of television, science fiction
Tagged as bankers and other villains, humor, monster movies, movie review, Netflix binging, Stranger Things, televison shows