What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people’s faces as unfinished as their minds.
Eric Hoffer
Image, Meet Quotation
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Tag Archives: Gary Bowers
Snowball in Nonhell
Here in Phoenix, Arizona, snow is exceedingly rare. Today we saw that rarity.
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.
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.
Conclusion: Magic is a rarity, and vice versa.
p a u s e
I found with this meanderer that the “play” button could work as a motif–if I Played with it. 🙂
5 Joneses
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.
Eric (nevr) Idle
Eric (nevr) Idle
ENTER, hobnobbing with Knights Who Say Ni
Righteous Irreverence thought word & deed
If Nudge and Wink don’t divine Holy Grail
Caper the UNIVERSE–you’ll make a sale
n.e.s. #171 of 480
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
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:
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
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?
plumeria n shawna
This morning I basked in the presence of LaShawna Douglas-Muhammad, whom I had not seen for at least a year. We’d arranged to meet and I’d asked Shawna what her favorite flower was. It is the Plumeria, which I had never drawn nor painted. For the last couple of days I’ve gone about remedying that, and the drawing I made included this acrostic poem:
plumeria & lashawna
plain yoghurt & UNawful falafel
LOL so fine & so ciao bella
umbrella tree & blossom oasis
miraculous & sweet floral mesh
entice & fill with euphoria
relieve & cure Sorrow
in a thous&fold refrain
a flower & you, dear Shawna
In close to an hour that seemed like about five minutes we talked over Starbucks coffee about co-workers past and present; baseball, especially the Dodgers; managers and management styles; certain health issues; California, where we are both from; our fathers and other family members; and the tough last few months, with their tragic losses and with the loss of friendships consequent to the Capitol insurrection of January 6. One fascinating bit of trivia I learned is that her grandson Cairo does not like his Grandma’s lipstick.
It was, to understate it, a WONDERFUL visit, Shawna being both a good talker and a good listener. We hope to see each other again in a couple of weeks or so.
the romance puppy
here he is again / mister clumsybutt meanswell the romance puppy / and as usual he has made his entrance / right between really interested and fullblown smitten
on the plus side he is playful and joyous / and it’s fun to watch him caper about / and the longing look in his big eyes / which are exactly the color of mine / gives him sleeves to put his heart on
on the minus side he IS clumsy / and often unheeding of signals / and way too overeager / and he tends to chew on the shoes of a comfort zone / and crap on the carpet of possibility
mister meanswell has that look in his eyes again / and his friskiness is unbecoming to a man of mature years / and his pathetic speedfreak little tail is going blur-crazy
calm down pooch / you are going to get me in trouble
One with Clay, Image and Text 