Lunch and Bingewatch with Kate

January 26, 2021
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Today my daughter and I finished watching “Queen’s Gambit” while eating Hawaiian Barbecue. It was a thrilling story with a deeply satisfying ending, a joy to watch. But it’s not why I am posting this. I have Kate’s kind permission to post our text exchange from when she asked me if lunch were a go to just before I arrived where she lives. This holographic blog would not be complete without a record of the way my daughter and I interact. And Hallelujah that we do, the way that we do. She truly is the child I always wanted. (Note: text was copied from a Gmail message to myself and for some reason it stapled the thumbnail of years-ago myself and a little ancillary text to the dialog. Please ignore.)

****

text for blog postInbox

Kate: Lunchtime okay?
Dad: Woo hoo!!! Better than OK! You want Hawaiian?

Kate: Hawaiian sounds great!
Dad: Lovely. What would the ideal time be for deliviies?

NOTE: In 1998 there was a family reunion in Lakewood, California. Joni, Kate and I stayed at a hotel. Visible from our window was a sign on a restaurant that proudly proclaimed “WE MAKE DELIVIIES!” So “deliviies” is an inside joke.

Kate: Noonish?
Dad: Good! Appreciate the Ish. Vagaries of PubTrans, yknow…

Kate: I expect lunch at 12:03:51, not a jiffy sooner or later.
Dad: Fuck!!
Dad: I am so Effed

[Kate sends a GIF of Captain America scoldingly saying “Language!”]
Dad: But OK, Cap. Love ya. Would Joni want some?

Kate: I don’t fucking know, I’ll ask. 😛
Dad: Chuckle out loud.
Dad: Please rext your household’s order by 11:30.
Dad: Text it, too.

Kate: She says no, she doesn’t really care for it. I like the #4.
Dad: Okey dokey.

Kate: See you noonish. 🙂
[Exchange of Thumbs Ups]

Kate: At least I think it’s still #4. The Hawaiian BBQ mix if numbers fail me.
Dad: BBQ mix it is. Love you, Daughter

Kate: Love you too, Father.
Kate: I suggest you bundle up before you leave. Heat is pretty nonexistent in the house.
Dad: Will do, thanks. Leaving now.

[Thumbs Up from Kate]
Dad: Got hailed on with the vitest little hail. Just got on the bus.
Dad: *cutest

Kate: Aww. Door will be unlocked when you get here.
Dad: Thank you, mija.
Dad: Just missed the train, gosh darn heck gee whizzers. I will be latish.
Kate: Glad you are sufficiently bundled, then.

Snowball in Nonhell

January 25, 2021
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Here in Phoenix, Arizona, snow is exceedingly rare. Today we saw that rarity.

20210125_143200

For the first time in a long lifetime, mostly in the Valley of the Sun, I was able to make a snowball with Phoenix snow. I put this one in my freezer.

20210125_143607

I posted it on Facebook, and a friend asked me if I could make a Snow Angel. I told him I could make a tiny one with my fingers, Then I did this.

20210125_145740

Conclusion: Magic is a rarity, and vice versa.

5 Joneses

January 24, 2021
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

20210124_222600

The five Joneses, in no particular order, are Tommy Lee Jones, John Paul Jones, Davy Jones, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, and Davy Jones. By far the most fascinating life of the Joneses goes to Jeffrey Catherine. She was not wearing a monocle in the photo i used as source, but I needed an eye-magnifier to catch her arresting gaze.

How this came to be: Yesterday I wrote a poem whose protagonist, receiving bad employment news, got a bit sloshed and decided to spend the four idle days making five amazing portraits and falling out of love. Though I am not myself the poem’s protagonist, I will own that I did get a little sloshed yesterday in the interest of the poem’s verisimilitude. 🙂 How amazing these portraits are is your call, not mine, dear Reader. To my eye they all miss the Amazing mark, some more widely than others. (I will give the Davy Jones Monkee sketch an honorable mention for sheer economy. Zoom in on it and you will see that the illusion of detail disappears snd it becomes lines and blobs, and not many at that. Placement of features turned that trick. It took about thirty seconds to draw.) But the poem’s protagonist did say it was an intention and not a promise.

n.e.s. #171 of 480

January 24, 2021
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

2021 0124 nes171

What this quasi-fable is really about is the way we magnify things. I plowed a little of this ground in one of my earliest blog posts, but another peek through the magnifying glass couldn’t hurt.

Did a fly affect the 2020 United States Presidential election? Is it really a good idea to put a marriage proposal on the Jumbotron? Is Bernie Sanders still the same guy he was before his seated mittened image got ubiquitized? What does all this say about us?

Once Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman were having dinner, and Hoffman asked Sir Larry what lit him up as far as acting goes, and (if memory serves; I’ve been trying to find the Hoffman interview and so far no dice) Olivier said, “My dear boy, it’s like this…” and he gently grabs Hoffman by the back of the neck and pulls him till they’re eyeball to eyeball and continues, “Look at me, look at me, look at me.“

Scrutiny has gotten screwier and screwier lately. I don’t envy people in the spotlight. Skilled editors would be able to take all the raw video footage of my life and make two intensely entertaining movies, one that would make me look like a Hero, the other like Hellspawn. Dear reader, how about you?

MAKE (over easy over easy) MARK

January 22, 2021
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Some time ago I wrote the three-stanzaed double acrostic that is featured on this page. It needed some visual enhancement, but what? So I put it aside. Then today I was looking for a blank page in my sketchbook and here it was, and it was remindful of the Monty Python “nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more” routine in which Eric Idle was so incredibly smarmy. I ink-sketched my mind’s-eye Eric Idle, but since I wasn’t using a photo source, it looks only vaguely like him. That’s OK. I will do a good job on him some day, and the double acrostic will be ERIC IDLE, because happy Fate has decreed that his first and last names both are four letters long. Meanwhile:

2021 0122 make mark

MAKE (over easy over easy) MARK

Mahalo holiday Yom Tov — O
Arthur Clarke & Asimov
Kaput kerfuffle Truth or Dare
Envision Bliss & climb a stair

Omnipotence purports to be
Vociferous as raging sea
Engage an engine in a chassis
Rev up peel out fast-fury classy

Embarrassments may Stunt & Jam
And keep a ❤ behind a dam. A
Sasparilla soda jerk or
Yarrowstalks may do the work

You can seek meaning in these verses if you want, and you will find some, but I wrote it and now enjoy it as if it were a video game with little obstacles and challenges and bad guys to leap over and meet and obliterate. The acrostic is a suggestion to make your mark. That doesn’t and shouldn’t mean to cast a shadow of OMG that the world will never forget. When you make ONE person you love feel a little better for your being here, you have made your Over Easy mark, and bless you.

quotidian lifecycle

January 21, 2021
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

quotidian lifecycle

awakening is a form of birth
taskdoing growth
drowse senescence
death bed

so you were reborn mere hours ago
and into this new life
you may see to it that love is there
and hatred recognized and removed
you may graduate with honors
at scrubbing university
you may keep your troops provisioned
with your grocery requisition
or moldcast and bisquefire
another brick for your cathedral
ste bernardette the hardworker

or you may mope and sit
you may burn out that you not fade
you may build a spectral enemy
and stab and stab at mist

it is your day
it is your microlifetime

where to?

20210121_092459

from Z to shining Z

January 20, 2021
Uncategorized
5 Comments

Here’s some sillitude that started before the inauguration of the Biden/Harris dynamic duo with a serious, nerves-calming sketch of a zinnia. I was jumpy about how things would go. Then they went splendidly, and the giddiness and pride I felt on seeing my country take a good first step back on the path of Health translated into drawing that got gloriously messy. It’s all good. This one won’t win any prizes, but it’s a good Date/Time stamp on a deliciously hostoric day.

20210120_205040