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Five-Year Man

November 23, 2020
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Today is my fifth anniversary of working for Select Service Professionals, “The Food Travel Experts.” All previous anniversaries have been memorialized with a commemorative pin with the number of years on display. This year I have been told by my manager at Four Peaks that the pin policy has not been canceled, but that the pandemic threw a wrench onto the practice. I will wait patiently.

Meanwhile, I’m proud of having shown up for work at the airport more than a thousand times, proving my dependability (question during the job interview: “What’s the one word that describes you?” My answer, which I think got me the job: “Dependable.”) and my work ethic.

I also feel lucky to be working during these troubled times. Many of my fellow restaurant workers are still at home, waiting.

I’m not the young pup I used to be when I first entered the workforce 50 years ago, in the summer of 1970. But I think I’m good for another five years of doing what I do now. Time will tell.

confessions of a waterfetching grocery-bag-snob

November 21, 2020
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The above photo, taken on my Samsung Galaxy J2 from the spot in my dining area where I eat, watch DVDs on my laptop, meditate, and make most of my drawings (though I own a drawing table, visible in the background of the photo), has all the elements of the Confessions promised by the title of this blog entry. The Backstory comes from the past few years. The Story happened today.

I am a Water-Fetcher. Water is only twenty cents a gallon at the Glacier dispenser near 29th Street and Indian School Road. Merchants at establishments such as Circle K and Fry’s will shamelessly charge five times as much and more for their water. (Tap water is free, but I suspect the water supply in my neighborhood is unhealthy, and it does not taste good.) I do not own a car, so when I need water I take a walk, bottle(s) in tow.

A long time ago I was involved with a woman who suggested I purchase a personal grocery cart. Today I did so, because for a long time i’d wanted a case of San Pellegrino Sparkling Water in glass bottles–a case too heavy to carry. At Ace Hardware they had a grocery cart that required some assembly. I made about eighteen mistakes putting it together, but I prevailed and it works, and its maiden voyage was to the Smart & Final about a qiarter mile west of Sprouts. I got the case of San Pell and other groceries too, well within the 53-pound advised limit, but far far more than I would be able to easily carry.

On the trip home from Smart & Final, a distance of about two-thirds of a mile, I derided myself for the snobbishness that compelled me to think of myself as old and unsuccessful, merely by virtue of the fact that I was using a grocery cart, and it contained bags with the Smart & Final logo on it. Further reflection revealed that I was proud when my groceries were in Sprouts bags, indifferent with Fry’s bags, oddly prideful with Food City bags, since my ethnicity takes me out of my comfort zone when I shop there (it also blows my mind that there is an entire aisle devoted to Lard), and deeply ashamed when I sport Wal-Mart bags. It would appear that i am not the egalitarian that I purport to be. And that is humbling, but humility is a healthy thing, and so is laughing at my own foibles. 🙂

self-portrait/mask down

November 19, 2020
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Not everyone knows that there is more than one version of Edvard Munch’s famous painting “The Scream.” In some near future, there may well end up being more than one version of this self-portrait of mine. I am not happy with the execution of this version, but there is something in the complexity of the expression on this face I’ve done that is not easy to capture. If I do recapture it, and do a better job with the presentation, this drawing will no longer be necessary and I may destroy it. Time will tell.

2020 1119 mask down

mask down

meandering along this aimful road
a man may get his To mixt with his Fro
some soldier on & eddy others flow
kept secrets guarantee so much unknown

There may be a word change or two in version next-if-any: “endless” for “aimful” and/or “ebb” for “eddy.” Rhyme will tell, though Reason may not.

n.e.s. #165 of 480

November 17, 2020
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Friends, it’s November 17, 2020, and Phoenix, Arizona has recorded a temperature of at least 90 degrees Fahrenheit. In all Arizona’s recorded history, there has never been a day this hot this late in the year.

The lady of indeterminate age and race in the image below advises us that some truth may be had for those who do a search on “radiative forcing equation.” It is scary. Many more of us need to be scared now, or we are headed for an Inferno.

DVD Drawing Exercise

November 12, 2020
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Pencil drawing sometimes reminds me of playing the guitar. You can learn a few tricks, and a few fundamentals, fairly quickly. But if you really want to grow and stretch in the use of your pencil, or your guitar, you have to dig in and do things not just for fun.

With this drawing exercise, to keep the images random, I froze the frame a little after I decided to freeze the frame. It was random, but with veto power: if the frozen image was totally uninteresting, I didn’t attempt a drawing.

I’ve done this exercise many times since DVDs became available to the video consumer. I rarely get an image that isn’t either too busy or unfinished-looking. But I almost always get something that makes the image a keeper. In this case, I have a believable wheelbarrow and a stitched baseball that feels like it is occupying three-dimensional space. I also like that the text on the page has both descriptions and a scrap of dialogue from the movie.

2020 1112 drawing exercise

whimsical tribute

November 7, 2020
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My friend Niccolea M. Nance and I recently celebrated our eleventh-year “Friendaversary” on Facebook. Facebook generated a montage, mostly of photos Ms. Nance had taken, and wished us well. And this morning I had been working on an index-card drawing I started a couple of days ago, an out-of-scale “two-shot,” and it needed something…the two talking to each other would make word balloons that would be visual elements…but the balloons wouldn’t allow much to be said…hey wait! Niccolea back in the day called herself Miouo, and pronounced it “Me/You.” And that is how this odd tribute came to be.