Life is never quite like the way it is in your head. Things you don’t believe are true will constantly surprise you with the reality they belt you over the head with at the most inopportune of times.
Today’s colored-pencil Paffooney masterpiece is a case in point. I never believed it was possible to take this good of a picture of it. It is a horror movie to try to light this picture so I can snap it with a camera and get a result with no fades or reflected glare. It was created in 1992, when I was really at the height of my colored-pencil cartoonist super-powers. The subtle lighting is so much better than I can convey with the arthritic turkey-claw hands I now use for such artwork. Torchlight in a pyramid is a hard thing to convey. And over time, this picture’s colored-pencil patina has become glossy and difficult to photograph without glare. It has subtle waves in the paper that photograph as shadowy valleys and reveal the two-dimensionality of the piece. You can still see them if you look closely. But it is far better than any previous photo. Go back and check my archives if you don’t believe me… or you wish to be bored to death with old posts that you have somehow managed to dodge before now.
But like Tanis in the Tomb, things always turn out to be surprisingly different in their reality than they were in your little mind’s eye when you went into that dark hole in the ground.
We were discussing this at lunch, my kids and I. We were talking about how Sims 3 portrays reality and how really surprising it can be when you realize that the game has got it right. When I walked all the way to the bottom of the stairs this morning before realizing that I had forgotten my shoes upstairs, I had to turn around and go all the way back upstairs. This, I am told, is exactly how it works in Sims 3. A character in the game cannot turn around on the stairs. If you change your mind halfway down, the character. or avatar I think they like to call them, must go all the way to the bottom to turn around and go back up. So obviously this morning, God was playing Sims 3 and using me as an avatar.
Now, I don’t really like to believe God plays video games with reality… but my son Henry brought up the Rolling Stones as proof. It is common knowledge that Keith Richards is an undead creature, having so completely altered the biochemical make-up of his entire body with drugs that he died in 1988 and still goes on tour because his brain has not yet fully registered the fact that he is dead. My son pointed out that in Sims 3 you can make your avatar all gray or green and zombie-looking and then play the game with your avatar walking around and doing all sorts of stuff without realizing he or she is dead. So, not only Keith Richards, but the entirety of the Rolling Stones, who are all skeletal old druggies who should’ve passed half a century ago, goes to prove that God is playing Sims 3 with the universe. My gasted is totally flabbered! And I hope this glimpse into the unholy truth has not ruined your day.
Catch a Falling Star 
Fascination
I am falling apart. My health is poor and continuing to fail. My memory is suffering from an inability to remember the names of things. I find myself in the kitchen having gone in for a specific purpose, and not being able to remember what that purpose was. That is not to say I am not coping. I have quite a lot of adaptability and significant problem-solving skills. But that will eventually become a losing battle. Especially if I get the virus… any virus. So, what am I going to talk about with a dissolving brain and an hourglass of lifeforce swiftly running out? Fascination. I am fascinated by the details of the process. Like Mr. Spock, I find practically everything, “Fascinating!”
Birds and butterflies
My childhood fascinations turned into obsession first around natural things. When my mother would go to Vey Osier’s Beauty Salon, Vey had this fascinating parrot that was probably a hundred years old and knew how to swear really, really foully. I remember that being the only reason I was willing to go there and wait for Mom to get her hair fussed up (What my Grandpa Aldrich, her father, used to call it.)
I remember waiting for hours to hear that bird say the magic F-word or the horrible S-word. Or even the zillion other bad words I didn’t know anything about when I was seven. And, of course, I never did. The bird was mute the whole time during who-knows-how-many visits. But I did get to look endlessly at that green parrot’s amazing nutcracker bill that Vey always assured us would snap our fingers off like biting a salted pretzel if we got them anywhere close to the bill.
And when I was nine I was given as a present a plastic model kit of a Golden-Crowned Kinglet (the bird in that first picture). My relatives knew I was a burgeoning artist since my teachers constantly complained about all the skeletons, crocodiles, and monsters I drew in the margins of my school workbooks. So, I had a plastic bird to paint with all the necessary paints, but no idea what the bird looked like. We had to go all the way to Mason City to Grandma Beyer’s house because we called up there and checked, and, sure enough, there was a colored picture in the K volume of her Collier’s Encyclopedia. I painted it so accurately, the danged thing looked almost alive.
And if you have ever seen any of my butterfly posts, you know I became a butterfly hunter before ever entering junior high school, where Miss Rubelmacher, the rabid seventh-grade science teacher, made that obsession a hundred times worse. (She didn’t actually have rabies, just a reputation of requiring excessively hard-to-find life-science specimens like a nasturtium that bloomed in October in Iowa, or a Mourning Cloak butterfly.
I was able to find for her numerous Red-Spotted Purples like the one in the picture. I got them off the grill of Dad’s Ford, as well as in Grandpa Aldrich’s grove. And I eventually caught a pair of Mourning Cloaks as well on Grandpa Aldrich’s apple trees, though not until summer after seventh grade was over for me. I could tell you about my quest to catch a Tiger Swallowtail, too. But that’s an entirely different essay, written for an entirely different thematic reason.
Needless to say, my bird fascination led me to become an amateur bird-watcher with a great deal of useless naturalist information crammed into my juvenile bird-brain about birds. Especially Cardinals. And my fascination with butterflies opened my eyes to a previously invisible world of fascinating and ornately-decorated bugs. (Of course, I should’ve said “insects” instead of “bugs” since I absolutely did learn the difference.) And I still to this day know what a Hairstreak Butterfly looks like, what a Luna Moth is (Think Lunesta Commercials,) and how you have to look at the underside of the lower wings to correctly identify a Moonglow Fritillary Butterfly.
During my lifetime, my fascinations have become legion. I became obsessed with the comic books done by artist Wally Wood, especially Daredevil. I became obsessed with Disney movies, especially the animated ones like The Rescuers, The Jungle Book, Pinocchio, and Fantasia. I rode the bucking bronco of a fascination with the Roswell Crash (and the actual alien space ships I am almost certain the U.S. Army recovered there.) And so many other things that it would make this essay too long, and would probably bore you into a death-like coma. So, here’s what I have learned by being fascinated with my own fascinations;
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Tagged as birding, birds, butterflies, nature, photography