Long ago I did some purchasing for a software engineering concern. One vendor offered a cut-rate screaming deal on a ONE GIGABYTE HARD DRIVE. It could be mine for a mere two hundred and ninety dollars.
Now I have something that holds thirtyfold what that dinosaur would, and it set me back ten bucks. I should use it more often in case things go Kablooie.
Saturday morning our Village of Oak Creek was fabricked with the satin of joined snowflakes. I have not seen snow falling all that many times in my life–spending most of my life in the Valley of the Sun, I was 21 years old the first time I saw snow falling–so it is new enough to me to seem miraculous.
I owe my knowledge of the word (or words) Uffda (or Uff Da) to my sweet former wife, a small-town gal from Minnesota. During our 23 years of marriage, which ended a year ago last December, I also learned to say “come here once” instead of “come here, please” and “well, you’re welcome” instead of “you’re welcome.” Uffda usually follows some kind of accident (like dropping the fried egg on the floor) or burdensomeness (like working a double shift)–at least that was my inference. I am not bilingual in Minnesotan; but I often say “Uffda” just after getting my old bones off the couch after sitting there for more than an hour. Comes in handy, and trips off the tongue!,
It was one of those days John Lennon sang about when he sang “Nobody Told Me There’d Be Days Like These/Strange days inDEED…” Suddenly I found myself again at Urban Beans in Phoenix, Arizona with the smallest of time windows. It was 5:35pm. Caffeine Corridor would start at 7:00PM, and I had to talk to at least two people beforehand about at least two different things. After the event I had to dinner&drive back to my home and my love, with an image to post befor midnight. And I hadn’t ordered my large plain-drip coffee yet.
At 6:17pm I was finished with the image. Necessity is the mother of inspiration: I knew I had to keep it minimal–MINIMAL? A theme tailor-made…
Enigmatic & quite a show
Entertaining & awesome glow
As we lessers contract catarrh
Rheumatismatical Epstein-Barre
There’s our Life-Grantor SUN so fair
Heaps of Energy with a flare
George Carlin, pointed tongue in cheek, on Sun Worship: “I’ve begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It’s there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, and a lovely day. There’s no mystery, no one asks for money, I don’t have to dress up, and there’s no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to “God” are all answered at about the same 50% rate.”
To cover all the bases, though, Carlin prayed to Joe Pesci: “You know who I pray to? Joe Pesci. Two reasons: First of all, I think he’s a good actor, okay? To me, that counts. Second, he looks like a guy who can get things done.”
George Carlin and the Sun have two things in common. Both have radiated enormous energy; and both are not on Earth, but some other Where.
Every day billions of us doom billions of us to death via kinetic energy. Most of the death-dealers don’t give it much thought, even when they’re squeegeeing off the mortal remains of their fellow creatures from their windshields.
We are killers, yet the ghosts of what we smash (or eat, or consign to starvation through eviction, or exterminate) don’t tend to haunt us. Our factory farms make a mockery of “reverence for life.” The havoc we have wreaked (or “reeked” as above) is all the more horrific for being commonplace.
And we name some of our children Alexander, and some others David. One dealt death wholesale, one retail (not Goliath; Uriah). It is no coincidence that Anthony Burgess named the berserker of his A Clockwork Orange Alex.
Socrates is said to have said “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
NOTE: Berni Wrightson and Mike Ploog are illustrators. Wrightson has worked with Stephen King, on Creepshow and The Stand and The Song of Susannah of the Dark Tower series. Ploog did some comic-book continuity in the horror genre as well; some of his panels from Werewolf by Night have been stuck in my memory for more than thirty years.
Today’s post gets a little personal. My father’s mother, whose maiden name was either Cora or Marguerite Price, and whose Uncle Arthur co-founded the city of Chandler, Arizona, left this earth in the first part of January, 1979. It wasn’t till I started this page, based on a framed photograph of her probably taken in the early 1930s, that I discovered how dark the dark side of my memory of her could get. I suppose she did the best she could, and I owe her my life, my circumstance, and a lot of my DNA; but my poor Uncle Jim (birth name: Brian Aylesworth Bowers) and my poor father (he could have signed a contract with the Chicago Cubs, and would have if he’d followed his dreams)! There is a Latin phrase, “de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est,” that I am defying here. She ruled with an iron fist in a satin glove.
“Ars longa, vita brevis.” That’s Latin for “Art long, life short.” But sometimes in our short life, we have to wait a seeming forever for something we want. Sometimes we have to get in a line to get it. Sometimes we have to get OURSELVES in line to get it. And some heartbreaking times we find that what we waited for, and what we behaved ourselves so pristinely for, was not quite what we wanted, or even at all what we wanted. So the next time you’re in a line, with a lot of time to kill, ask yourself: Is THIS what I REALLY want?
Once upon a time, a man named Lyon Sprague de Camp summed up the Propheteering game by opining, “It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.” Many years later, a charismatic charlatan named John Edward McGee Jr. truncated his name and hung his Psychic Medium shingle on the airwaves, fooling millions with “I’m seeing a J. He’s VERY important…” and similar claptrap. If you’d like to become a Psychic Medium yourself, there’s plenty of How To material on the Internet; just do a search on “Cold Reading.”
Ever since the summer of 2012 I have lived in the charming subsection of Sedona, Arizona known as the Village of Oak Creek (also known as the VOC). In this beautiful rock-formationed land there is much belief in the supernormal. Last December a fellow went up Bell Rock with the publicized claim that a “space portal” was going to open up and he was going to jump in. Alas, no such portal materialized for him. It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.
The last line in the acrostic refers to Kurt Vonnegut, who was my favorite writer in the 70’s, and continued to be so in the 80’s, the 90’s, and the Aughts. In his Slaughterhouse-Five he followed every mention of death with “So it goes.” It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.
Finally, for those unfamiliar with American alphabet soup, an ATV is an All-Terrain Vehicle. I can be specific about that, since I’m no prophet.
Tycho Brahe, that great Danish astronomer, dueled and lost a chunk of his nose. The duel, according to Wikipedia, was “over the legitimacy of a mathematic formula.” After that he wore a prosthetic nose, thought to be silver or gold, but which exhumation proved to be brass. More than four hundred years later, Kim Kardashian had a nose job. Thus the two were fated to meet on one of my journal pages.
I never would have dreamed of giving Kim a gold nose, but the necessities of making a triple acrostic in Sonnet format demanded it. I also had to slop three lines over into the next line to preserve the rhyme scheme.
This is not my first foray into a discussion of enhancement for the sake of beauty. There was this, done in October of 2008:
Much more recently I did a portrait of a woman whose only enhancement, far as I knew, was staying alive for a century. Her beauty stunned me. My drawing is but a rough echo:
Friends, when it comes to Work Done, the best place for it is on the pages of our lives.
Here is the text:
Prehensile tales of yore and more compel to take a sip
Recalcitrant curmudgeons oft complain thus get a grippe
Olfaction may be chancy on the way to Life Fornever
Suspiciousness will keep some eyes on toggle switch & levers
Perception’s doors undirtied kept that Blake bloke in the loop
Especialities for Little Deuce include a Coupe
Conveyances of sympathy enhance the Story’s arc
Then lilies and an aftershave — we’ll gleefully infarct
Investitures of efffort help to slide skate surf or ski
Vermilion may redden due to falsely hued TV
Existence–essence–let us add ENJOYMENT–let it be
Fans of William Blake–and I know there’s at least one such reading, and you should see her Lynda-Barry-esque graphicizing of Master William–are familiar with his notion: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” Aldous Huxley did a book about his attempt to cleanse his own doors. Jim Morrison’s Doors took their name from the quotation. Alas, Perception is only ten letters long, or this would probably have been a triple acrostic…
One with Clay, Image and Text 