I had from 4:42 to 5:15 this morning to do this page, plus the knowledge that the words Every, Seven and Years are all five letters long. If more time–say three hours or so–becomes available today, I might do a more polished version.
Every Seven Years
Eat the sweet stuff happily
Victories come out to here
Enter venture out to sea
Riffed events become so clear
Y E A R N with widely scattered tears
Every day is an opportunity to wallow in the depressive miasma of guaranteed mortality. Some people seek such opportunities, some flee from them in such denial as “50 is the new 30,” and some get an unignorable knocking at the door.
DOOM METE MOOD
Doubt is such a Microcosm
Onus an Embarcadero
Otherwise a Tarantino
Might send messages Encrypted
mood meet doom
metabolism maladjusted
obsolescence wrecks a bed. o
one2three the dire days come. o
detriment is zero-sum
On the other hand, says the Mortality Denier, EVERY DAY is also an opportunity to experience the Joy of a Lifetime. Please, Friends, use kindness to seek such joy.
INF might be short for Infinite or Influence. LUX is Light.
So here’s to the late, great Philip José Farmer, he of the wild imagination and penchant for punning (e.g. calling a device that stimulated the fornix area of the brain a “fornixator”). INF is for his Influence on me; LUX is for his odd and tasty book NIGHT OF LIGHT.
Mash them up, Friends, and you get Influx. You and I are now inextricably bound, because the influx of this blog post has ever-so-slightly altered your brain’s electrochemistry. And you are free to add your Influx via comments.
May we always be gentle with each other.
Here’s some whimsical fun. Grinning unicorn and guy with eyepatch. Nuff said?
The whimsical words to the acrostic:
O don’t fuss don’t bother if it’s bee ay ess eye cee
Rigmarole and rigidness can soon uncalm a sea
Dice are tossed with some decisions darers then go far
Explanations pale before the red meat flipped and charred
Roasted flesh attenuates extenuated swards
Corita Kent demonstrated long ago that text is a useful visual element, and there’s nothing illegitimate about using it in a composition. I have gone her one worse, here, though: my text is hard to read. The viewer will soon surmise that all the text does is label/describe what is near–but “LUNA” is so hard to read that, absent me telling you that that is what it says, you probably wouldn’t know.
Index Card A Day, day 3, yields this unconventional result, with a hat-tip to Bobbie Gentry for those in the know.
I can never resist a Bad Pun. ICAD stands for Index Card A Day, and for the last several years has been conducted from June 1st through July 31st. But “I, Cad” might also be the title of my autobiography, Cad meaning Scoundrel.
Here is my jumpstart of ICAD. The leftmost is a cover page of sorts, the center is a quick study of the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the rightmost says “I found to my astonishment that I do not exist.” It is an oblique reference to the prophetic novel 1984. Winston Smith was told he did not exist.
Oddly, depending on when you the reader read these words, I, like Schrödinger’s Cat, do or do not exist. Some of my dead friends may still be found on Facebook.
If I do not exist, I have ceased being a cad, and I no longer suffer. Just about everything has an Up side.
I was in the middle of a much, much longer version of the poem I’ve done here, typing directly into my timeline on Facebook–when all that I had written just winked out of existence. I tried to get it back but no dice, and probably no big loss. It went into detail about the Vegan restaurant, and its cuisine, and the foam-heart on the mocha’s surface that I destroyed with spoonful after spoonful of sugar; and it had a couple of word-choice startles and an Indiana Jones metaphor, but I was taking forever to get to the point.
apple oat barnacle muffin
my teeth–
two in particular–
were endangered by the
barnacle crust of the
“apple oat muffin.”
but the spongy interior was my
s a l v a t i o n .
I think I owe some of how this turned out to Fernand Léger. I wasn’t thinking of his stuff when I did it but the light-to-dark value transitions sure look familiar. I gratefully acknowledge whatever influence he has had.
Forces! Innumerable photonic wavicles either strike us or go through us constantly. Alter our sensoria and our view of our personal space is much more dazzling, and confusing. Concentrate on certain wavelengths and we learn more. Let them all register at once and Chaos reigns.
Here is a loose interpretation of a photo I took of myself earlier this morning. I drew this to distract myself from the injured knee that is keeping me home from work today. It worked so well I forgot to take my pain medication.
As with most of my drawings, I end up feeling that this drawing is not an end in itself but a stepping-stone to the next drawing. “The next one will be better” has been my mantra for many years.
