Happy Halloween, Friends.
Mask Raid
My incognito’s fine so far
As long as I eschew Ankara
So if I walk and do not ride, I
Keep my laces double-tied
“Mask Raid” is euphonically similar to “Masquerade.” Perhaps Mask Raid is Masquerade’s Masquerade.
My Handiwork is the hand I work. And sometimes some of the work goes down the drain, seemingly. Notice beneath the sketchbook there is an earlier version of today’s offering. I overworked that page, and the unforgiving medium of Ink marked my sins.
But, Friends, It’s been my experience over many years that second attempts at a drawing or painting are almost always superior to the first. So it is with this one.
hand i work
here’s your digits on a plow
arduous in keeping Tao
nor will mishaps oft occur
darting flashlights in the murk
An alternate third line is “nor will mishaps not occur.” If ever I am commissioned to do a third version of this page for a wealthy and discriminating collector of rarities, I will use the alternate third line. 🙂
I have been seriously pursuing excellence in acrostic poetry for more than eleven years. The most excellent, the Holy Grail, of acrostic poetry is an array of words with a flawless meter and rhyme scheme, with something important to say, well said, in the content of the poetry, and with the acrostic words providing the ideally meaningful title of the poem.
This may seem like an odd pursuit to be throwing over a decade’s effort toward its furtherance. But if you want to be not merely a poet, nor even a Capital-P Poet, but the absolute best P*O*E*T it is in you to be, writing acrostic poetry makes sense. You are challenged to find words to fit the array, and the words you find may be new to you. They then become part of your arsenal. And it is even possible, as has happened today on my page, that you are compelled to bring into being words that did not yet exist. That may seem like cheating, but did you know that the name Wendy did not exist until J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, invented it?
Notice, though, how few words there are in the dual array above. How there are always three letters between acrostic elements. This is as minimal as I can possibly get with double and triple acrostic. Â Let us unfold and enhance the array:
Photon Refractor
1: Photon
Prest/Helio/Onion
2: Refractor
Resurrect/Ecstatico/Felicitor
A photon is an infinitesimal thing that may or may not be visible light, depending on its frequency. PHO is something to eat. TON is a measure of heaviness. A photon has a rest mass of zero.
Prest? It’s a variant of Pressed, just as Blest is a variant of Blessed. Helio? Relates to the Sun, to mythology, and to the flower Heliotrope. Onion? It may remind people of getting to the truth, as a typical onion has many peelable layers.
A refractor is something that alters the path of a…particle? wave? Wavicle. REF is short for Referee. RAC is a versatile acronym. Here is a partial list, courtesy of The Free Dictionary:
| RAC | Recovery Audit Contractors (CMS, Medicare program) |
| RAC | Religious Action Center |
| RAC | Rent-A-Center |
| RAC | Real Application Cluster |
| RAC | Royal Automobile Club (UK) |
| RAC | Railway Association of Canada |
| RAC | Rural Assistance Center |
| RAC | Royal Agricultural College (Cirencester, UK) |
| RAC | Rent-A-Coder (freelancer matching service) |
| RAC | Refrigeration and Air Conditioning |
| RAC | Regional Advisory Council (Canada) |
| RAC | Recombinant-DNA Advisory Committee |
| RAC | Rotaract |
| RAC | Research Advisory Committee |
| RAC | Ratchet and Clank (gaming) |
| RAC | Recent Average Credit (distributive computing) |
| RAC | Royal Armoured Corps |
| RAC | Room Air Conditioner |
| RAC | Retirement Annuity Contract (UK) |
| RAC | Reliability Analysis Center |
| RAC | Rubber Association of Canada |
It also may be pronounced “rack” which may be defined as an organizational substrate for an array of things. Above this paragraph is a RAC rack.
It is also “car” backwards.
As for Tor, it is “a hill or rocky peak” according to any number of sources. It is also a paperback book publisher specialing in the otherworldly.
Resurrection is coming back to life. Ecstatico is kind-of Spanglish for “being in a joyously energized place.” Felicitor has Happiness as its root and “one who brings about” as a suffix.
When you get this minimal, some of the heavy meaning-lift will be done by the reader. An analogous creation that comes to my mind is “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” a painting by Pablo Picasso. The first time I saw the painting I was repelled. It seemed ugly. Ugly colors, variably attentive anatomy, weird color and composition choices. But it has historical significance, and has been called “the first truly Cubist painting.” And the more you live with it visually, the more a word emerges from the mist: Extraordinary.
Some men who are either insecure or haven’t got much of a life obsess and fiddle with their looks and their grooming. But in extreme cases, their grooming obsesses right back. Such is the case with my moustache. It has declared its wish to die by my hand.
I have not shaved it off yet. Time will tell.
suicidal mustache
some facial hair portends a doom
u never learn until u groom. u
inch the scissors toward the mess
could be a trim would suit it best.
it SPEAKS. “why, you condensate flea
don’t TRIM me–SHAVE me. A B C
And DO ME IN.” that plaintive screech
leaves Mary weeping in her niche.
I was an Art Major in the mid-70s. Then I was graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Arizona. Then I became an Engineering student, in a special program for non-tech undergrads. It was fun at first, and I got all Bs in my three semesters of Calculus, and an odd A here and there, but my horrible study habits caught up with me and the fall semester of 1977 saw me taking Incompletes and Withdrawals from my classes. I wrote a letter to Dear Abby, an internationally-acclaimed advice columnist, about my misery, signing myself “Round Peg in a Chi-Square Hole.” I doubt if she got the Prob&Stat reference; she may not even have gotten the letter, since she never answered it publicly or privately, though I think I included a self-addressed stamped envelope.
Then I went rogue, sort of. I entered a drawing I made on an Etch-A-Sketch and signed “Johnny Incredible” in the 1977 U of A Winter Show of Student Art. (My Etch-A-Sketch tied for third place among more than 80 entries.) And for the Spring 1978 semester I took advantage of a loophole in matriculation to take, not engineering classes, but Poetry, Special Problems in Drawing, and Lithography. Somewhere in there I got a letter from then-Dean Robert Svob telling me that Professor Ferrell (Russ Ferrell, smart, great guy, taught ergonomics, published in the IEEE Transactions with his “Models of Man-Computer Interaction”) had expressed concern about me. I answered cryptically and included a five-minute line drawing of a plump man falling off a tightrope at the circus.
Long story short: Got A in Poetry, A in Lithography, and B in SpecProbDrwg. Decided to take a semester off from the stress of the U of A. That “semester off” is now 41 years, 5 months, 13 days, and counting.
Today’s images are an atypical diptych. The title might be “Art and Engineering.”
Yesterday on Central Avenue about a half-dozen enthusiastic young people were holding signs promoting Proposition 127 and solar power, and denouncing State Attorney General Brnovich, who they claim is in the pocket of Big Power, also known as Arizona Public Service, or APS.
APS has been running a scare ad saying that when California enacted a similar law it COST, not SAVED, consumers money on utilities. But Arizona is not California. And the cost is for compliance, which A PS would bear, and they don’t want to. For decades they’ve been gouging their customers, applying for rate hikes as if they were going broke, then using some of their ungodly profits for various investments, some only peripherally linked to providing consumers with safe, affordable electricity. A great deal of their petty cash goes to putting people like Brnovich in office to rubber-stamp their policies. And the number bandied about for what they’ve spent fighting Prop 127 is $29 million.
So the beck with their corporate greed. Go Solar!!
YES 127
YAY to solar. Get ‘er dun! 1
Energy for me and you. 2
Sunshine from Heaven! 7
NO Brnovich
Nix the corporate boob. Nada the darkmoney goober. Â Negative the bought Baboon. Never more to this zoo.
Omit from our TV odd toadies who say sĂ sĂ, outing palm for Big Electric. O for a corp-creep dispelling Heimlich!
So tempted to use SIKH as the right acrostic bookend, but went for Simple, because me. Perhaps another time. These things–for every one I end up with, I leave a few variants undone. This one is its own variant: it can be either “Find and ye shall seek” or “Find and Yes Hall seek.” I kind of like the notion of Yes Hall.
Find & Ye Shall Seek
Folk are tanned with sunshine’s rays
Inventory then appraise
Needle haystacks lift and poke
Days pass and befuddle folk
PS: This page was inspired by an increasingly panicky search for my mother’s vehicle registration renewal form. I excavated a megapile of paper where it wasn’t, then looked to the left of the card table and saw a corner of it peeking out from where it had no business being. Relief! But a second later I realized I didn’t know where emissions testing was being done lately. Another search must ensue. Find and ye shall seek.
Ă€ long time ago Plato the Ancient Greek compared the way we try to make sense of things with observers of shadows on a cave wall trying to figure out what’s going on. (If you do an Internet search on “Parable of the Cave” you will get a MUCH more detailed and lucid, though less concise, explanation.)
Here is an assortment of items on a card table my ex-wife gave me a week or so back. I propped up my latest diptych drawing on top of a drawing of my High School sweetheart on top of my laptop, but otherwise left the table as is. Chaotic as it looks, you can tell much more about me and my life than you could watching shadows of my antics on a cave wall, but much less than there is to know. I submit this for study by anthropologists and sociologists, amateur or otherwise, who happen to be reading this: What kind of person am I? What are my prospects for the future? Do I deserve to live?
Yesterday my daughter Kate and I enjoyed the carnival atmosphere of the Arizona State Fair. Kate made me laugh and mistyeye at the same time: When we were threading our way through the crowd, she grabbed the back of my T-shirt, just like she did when she was a little kid. (She is now 28 years old.) We had a blast, riding two different Ferris wheels, bumper cars, the over-the-fairgrounds ski lift, and had ourselves whirled and lifted and spun by various other rides. We also saw a barnful of amazing animals and two halls full of superb arts and crafts.
Deal & Wheel
Daring are the crew
Eeyore says to Pooh
An unpebbled shoe
Lets a sole be whole
& achieve a goal
Well over 50 years ago science fiction grandmaster Alfred Bester invented the earworm in his novel THE DEMOLISHED MAN. The quotation I’ve calligraphed in one such. In a society of telepathy, this odd and resonant ditty was intended to baffle mind-probers who wanted secrets.
Bester’s jingle is well stuck in my head. Often when I am walking it pops up and matches the rhythm of my steps. When I am tired it helps–kind of pulls me along.
Nowadays, though, “tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun” takes on a more ominous, even apocalyptic, imbuement. These are interesting times indeed.
One with Clay, Image and Text 