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Monthly Archives: February 2014

Air Getter

February 18, 2014
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This is being written during the Winter Olympics of 2014, held in Sochi, Russia. I happened to tune in last night during a ski jump event. I learned that the competitors do not use skis with the traditional edge; that they sit on a crossbar till they’re ready to slide; that their landing area is cross-striped with red and purple and guidelined with what looks like rocks; that many ski jumpers can’t give it up, and go back to the jump even after they retire from competition. Hearing that, and seeing the exhilarating jumps, led me to this drawing and acrostic:

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A floating specter seems to be from antigrav.org
Agility will keep him from the ER or the morgue
It helps to have a musculature up to the contort
It doesn’t hurt to NEED the thrill that only comes with sport
Restrictions are made moot yet new conditions are severe
Revel-lations liberate though icy wind may shear

prep work

February 17, 2014
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This image is self-referential in that it involves a screen print of the prep work I did for the blog post.

For some reason I’m thinking of the funeral expenses my mother has just incurred. One line item was the rabbi’s fee, which was $400. There is no doubt in my mind that he earned his money, and then some: my mother was comforted by his well-chosen words, which showed an astonishing familiarity with the relationship my mother and stepfather had. Yet his “face time” with my mom and all of us was less than two hours. His own Prep Work for this task, though, began well before his thirteenth birthday.

Indeed, Prep Work for truly important work takes far more time than the work itself. My Prep Work for my first marathon began July 4, 1983, and more than 1500 miles of increasingly long runs and higher mileage per week. Yet when I took my place amongst the 10,000 other runners on August 19, 1984, I felt unprepared, and this proved true: my finish time of four hours, eight minutes and change was a bitter disappointment. (Now, however, I’m proud and happy about what I did, and what I’ve done since then. Age sometimes brings at least a little wisdom.)

In the largest sense, of course, everything we’ve done in our lives so far is Prep Work for what we’re going to do next. How’s by you? [smile]

tales of the distribution: a horror story

February 15, 2014
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Once upon a time there was an unhappy engineering student who was overwhelmed by tough classes and a tumultuous relationship. He decided to step back from the Master’s Degree program in which he was enrolled till he stabilized. Thirty-five years flew by, and somewhere in there the engineering career ship set sail for parts unknown. The End–or not quite. Remnants of his studies still float in his aging brain.  The phrase “tails of the distribution,” first heard during a Probability and Statistics class, bobbed in his conscious thoughts an hour or so ago. The above page was created.

Here’s the horror: In order to tell the REAL Tales of the Distribution, I’d have to go back to school or self-study to refamiliarize myself with 1) polar coordinates 2) Payne’s theorem 3) Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss 4) Chi-squared curve smoothing 5) Use of factorials in permutations and combinations 6) the Central Limit Theorem 7) probability density function calculus 8) n-dimensional space. That prospect is horrific to me. My time is better spent communing with my friends and loved ones, composing acrostic poetry based on wordplay and subject matter I well know, enjoying the local landscape and other scenery, and making that tiny piece of the world within my jurisdiction a better place.

But some day, probably long after I’ve ceased to exist, knowledge will be downloadable directly into the human brain. No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks, just a clean upgrade. For the lucky-or-not folks enjoying such a technological advance, the sky will be the limit, and new, interdisciplinary ways of looking at reality will be made possible. Somewhere in there someone might stumble upon this blog-couched body of work of mine and feel amused contempt. What a moron! she, he or it may think…and that’s the REAL Horror of this Story.

GB + DH (True Love)

February 14, 2014
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Happy Valentine’s Day to my dear Girlfriend, Denise. Denise, I custom-created this for you while watching the very romantic movies WOMAN OF THE YEAR and PRIDE OF THE YANKEES. Hope you like it!Image

Sorry about the crappy-phone-camera photo quality, Darling. I’m Scannerless right now.

Here are the words, from me to you:

Get kisses right before we sleep: all very well and good
Great chemistry as surely as mahogany is wood
But thorough bliss is unfulfilled unless a savored wish
Be shared be sought be striven for be Had–we DO? Delish!

Love,
Gary

painttipped fingers

February 12, 2014
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they slid on the slick
of cold-pressed board
and made verdant fieldevoking whorls
and then palmheels pressed
and they looked like feet
and a clean fingertip made toes

on a clean piece of paper
one by one the fingers admitted:
“this is him” “this is also him” “here’s more him” “you got him now”
and the prisoner escorted to his cell
wiping with paper towel only some of the residue
sighed for the days of fingerpaints

FAODAG: Up Schuerman Mountain

February 8, 2014
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Today the weather was bright and lightly breezy and good for a rejuvenative, meditative hike. Up Schuerman Mountain Denise and I went in yet a Further Adventure Of Denise And Gary.

Most of the way up I asked Denise to pose, not for a picture I would post, but for a photo source for a drawing I would make and post. Further up she took a photo of me at my request. I post both the drawing and the photo to reveal the vast difference between the one degree of separation from reality of the photo and the two degrees of separation from reality of the drawing. (In my drawing’s defense, the background is a different part of the landscape than the photo.)

 

Rest In Peace, Marty Stoneman

February 5, 2014
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About an hour ago my mother called me with the news of my stepfather’s death. She is broken up but felt a beauty in the way he went. I’ll see her soon, probably early tomorrow, and we and other family will see his remains to a special place put aside for them.

Marty often talked about saving the world. He summed up his thoughts on the matter in the trilogy THE STORY OF OG AND MAN, for which I did cover illustration, and THE PAIN THAT LOST ITS MESSAGE. He developed artificial intelligence software years before its time, for which the megacorp Lego showed some interest (but ultimately, as they say in the biz, “went another direction”). The Don Quixote-cum-Jedi-knight flavor of Marty’s endeavors struck me as I ran across this image in a search for one of my drawings of Marty. This image will do; it’s a good metaphor for his struggles. Despite the last line, I am sure that Marty is now at a better address than Earth. Farewell, Marty, my friend.

Bathtub Stories

February 5, 2014
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On the last of January I made the acquaintance of a force of nature in the disguise of a little old lady. She allows me to post this blog only on the condition that I use no names nor photos, though she allowed me to take a camera-picture of her for my photo source for my drawing. She says it’s all right to use the first initial of her and her friend’s names, so she shall be A___, and her friend, G___.

A___ and her family had the good sense to leave their neighborhood two days before the Nazis hit town, which is why she is alive to tell her bathtub stories and jokes. She told me three of each. Yesterday I synopsized the bathtub stories in the following poem, using a title provided by a friend:

life in a bathtub

an electric-blue-clad 88-yr-young lady breezed into the shop
and almost immediately told three bathtub stories
which are here arranged by her age at the time

very, very young, in austria-hungary:
as the youngest, in her uncle’s house,
she was the first in the day for the family bathwater;
for some reason, though, she had to bathe
surrounded by the family.
her uncle dropped a sugar cube into the water.
“that’s for your sweetness.”

fifty-one years old, in california:
water was being rationed.
a fellow apartment dweller knocked on the door
and asked to share her bathtub
so that they would be good and proper rationers.
he was twenty-six. a neurologist, and most likely a virgin.
mayhem ensued
when his long, lanky leg knocked down the shower curtain.
years after the affair they were still in touch.

in her mid-seventies, northern arizona:
she’d had a WONDERFUL bath
and then dressed
and answered her friend’s knock at her door.
“why so smiley?” “i’ve just had the BEST bath.”
turns out her friend both didn’t have a tub
and desperately wanted a bath.
soon she was in the tub and in bliss;
soon after, though, her friend discovered
that as an old and hefty lady
she could not get out of the tub.
she, petite and elderly as she was, tried to help.
early efforts were in vain. finally
she took off her own clothes and got in,
squirmed under her friend, and chivvied and hoisted.
a hefty upper body flopped out of the tub
and one of the puppies,
triggered by the pendulous breast
dangling before her puppy eyes
began to nurse.
“OH, how we laughed!!!”

i have the lady’s number.
i will call her soon,
but not to share her bathwater.

*****

As for the jokes, I’ll just tell the shortest for now. It’s also the only non-R-rated one.

Goldstein gets pulled over by a cop. “Sir,” the cop says severely, “Are you aware that your wife fell out of your car a quarter of a mile back?” “Oh, thank God,” Goldstein replies. “I thought I’d gone deaf.”

–Well, if you heard HER tell it, you’d laugh. Here she is:

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Incomplete “Completeness”

February 3, 2014
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COMPLETENESS

Compulsions are more easily conducted through tradition
Confusion’s quelled & then resolved if we’re all on a Mission
Of quirks and failings are we all however we may pose
Obtuse investigation lets us call a guess surmise
Machismo or our “best behavior” muffles up our cries
Micromanaged sorrow tells the news feed so it goes
Put Piggy Banking off its feed–you need a lack of plinks
Put Love and Money on whatever brings the richest thinks

So I wrote in late March of 2010. Neil Armstrong was still alive and smiling, Philip Seymour Hoffman was still alive and performing, and Marty Stoneman was still alive and theorizing. Now two of them are gone, and the third is going: I saw Marty last Saturday but he was never conscious enough to converse. His breathing was a little shallow, but steady. His head was at an angle that seemed odd and uncomfortable, but his spine has been collapsing for years. His flesh was suffused with the color of jaundice, as if some chef had added saffron to the mix. My first sight of him prostrate on the bed gave me a flash of Michelangelo’s “Moses”: that heroic head, stricken with tragic necessity.

With my words came an image that revealed the triple acrostic COMP LETE NESS. Looking at the image today, I realized that it itself was incomplete. I added more words, in the form of a pseudo-haiku:

..,say, One-Small-Stepper:
did you, when you passed away,
make that Giant Leap?

This to me is the “overwhelming question” referred to by T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. And by Jackson Browne, thus, in “For a Dancer”:

I don’t know what happens when people die
Can’t seem to grasp it as hard as I try
It’s like a song I can hear playing right in my ear
That I can’t sing…

I also enhanced the image somewhat, with Ticonderoga #2 pencil, and eraser, and paper stump. But it STILL isn’t complete; so my second signature on the page has “completed” in quotation marks.

002

My mother tells me that Marty was saying “I’m done” over and over again in the last couple of weeks, and that despite a lifetime of nonchalance about the prospect of dying, he has become fearful. I weep and mourn for him. He is still fighting, but he will lose soon.

Jackson Browne finished his song this way:

“…and somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie the reason you were alive–but you’ll never know.”