This is an art exercise, making a drawing imitating the manga style of Rumiko Takahashi, the greatest female comics artist of all time.
Yes, I need to exercise. I have six incurable diseases and I am a cancer survivor since 1983. But exercise may soon kill me deader than the proverbial door nail. Does that make sense? Can you be any more dead than a thing that was never alive? I think you can. It comes when death is achieved through extreme pain and suffering.
If you hadn’t figured it out already, my family joined a gym on a trial-membership basis. But, of course, we can’t afford a personal trainer, so the only way was to get me in and exercising without consulting the professionals about my health challenges. Diabetes and arthritis and COPD? They would instantly be worrying about sudden death on the gym floor and the lovely attendant lawsuits that would probably go with that. And my wife probably will try to sue them when the exercise machines kill me. She is a smart woman when it comes to making money out of the cracks in the system.
The gym has personal trainers and professionals to deal with problems like mine, and they were around and visible while I was there exercising for the first time. Signs on all the machines admonish the user to take a break if they become light-headed or feel faint. They are at least aware that I might be killing myself. But while I did the twenty-five-minute trudge on the treadmill all tomato-faced and gasping for breath, no one bothered to even check on me to make sure I wasn’t idiot enough to torture myself to death on the cruel march-to-oblivion machines that are all lined up there in neat little rows facing television sets blaring Fox News Channel. You might know that the last voice I will ever hear is Bill O’Reilly declaring what an idiot-communist-threat-to-democracy Bernie Sanders is. What a way to die!
But my wife is determined to exercise me enough to make me healthy and more like Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson than it is possible for me to be. Or kill me. I think she might be looking forward to that too. She told me when we went in that we only had to stay as long as I wanted to. But that was a lie. The gym has a pool. She and the Princess made a bee-line there and I didn’t see them again until closing time. To be fair, they had a free class to attend with pool exercises led by a trainer. But still, as I suffered and dried myself out on the walkways of death, they were splashing happily. In a pool! In winter! …But it was indoors.
So, I didn’t die. And I have done this sort of thing before enough to know how far I can push myself on arthritic knees with impaired lungs. I didn’t really come out of there with any more aches and pains than I went in with. And, though I really hate to admit it, the day after leaves me feeling somewhat… better.
I have given you a picture Paffooney today of the tapestry created by the town of Rowan, Iowa for its centennial in 2002. I consider Rowan my home town. I was not born there, but it is the scene of most of my childhood. It shaped most of who I am and how I am and what I am. It is the scene of most of my fiction because that’s where the most valuable treasures of Truth are hidden, near the wishing wells of our youth. I keep it on my bedroom wall because, not only do Pooh and Fozzie like it to be there, it is a beautiful thing to look at and reflect upon. It keeps what is most important in my life in focus. I have a lot of physical pain from my six incurable diseases, and pain makes the focus blur at times. But pain is also the source of what wit and wisdom I have to offer. I will continue to contemplate and write and think and create… and draw. I will continue to post at least a portion of the results here. I do desire to make some money with my writing, but that is only a secondary concern. I am not really writing for the people who know me in real life. They already know me and made up their minds about me long ago. They might read this and that and recognize something of themselves, but they are not the ones I am speaking to at this moment. I am talking in prose to those who see my ideas for the very first time with new eyes, no preconceived notions about me. It is for them, the readers I do not personally know, that my magic spells are cast in words.
Catch a Falling Star 