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2019 1004 freeze

Here is a terrible pun on “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and also an implied bad pun in that the way Santa Claus gets out of his fix is via the T’ao–literally a Way out. The bad guy is an hommage to Snidely Whiplash, endangerer of Nell and wannabe nemesis of Dudley Do-Right of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

FREEZE a Jolly Gooood Fellow

Frost Bites! and Santa’s got a tricky Standoff
Rock-hard, Jinxed, rigor-mortissed, stone as Shale
Elves cannot help, nor lotion, nor felafel
EXISTlessness would make Ms. Santa wail
Zen-tangled, he’ll evoke a thawing T’ao
Ew, Snidely–dastardly’s no Cat’s Meow

2019 1004 freeze tao

Previous Inktober pages of mine have involved a List approach: I thought of different ways to “solve” the prompt, i.e. different Rings, Mindlessnesses, and Bait. The Bait page had more coherence because the image sort of tied them together metaphorically.

This time I wanted one image to focus on. The prompt is Freeze. What would suit, and really demonstrate Freezing, and tell a story…Then an awful pun occurred to me. Instead of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” FREEZE a Jolly Good Fellow. And who is the jolliest of the Jolly Good Fellows? Santa Claus, that’s who. And who would be evil enough to freeze Jolly Saint Nick? That quintessential Cartoon Bad Guy, SNIDELY WHIPLASH, wannabe nemesis of Dudley Do-Right of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. (I hope the owners of the cartoon regard this page as hommage and not copyright infringement!)

How am I going to get Santa out of this terrible fix, AND produce a coherent Quadruple Acrostic with a consistent rhyme and meter? Well, Santa is Magic. And he travels the world, so he’s worldly. So Zen and the Tao to the rescue–what cynical critics of “Deus ex Machina” solutions to science-fiction cliffhangers once called a “pocket frammistan.” SOMEHOW Santa finds a way, and indeed, the Tao is The Way. (Another bad pun. Someday I’ll get jail time.)

FREEZE a Jolly Gooood Fellow

Frost Bites! and Santa’s got a tricky Standoff
Rock-hard, Jinxed, rigor-mortissed, stone as Shale
Elves cannot help, nor lotion, nor felafel
EXISTlessness would make Miz Santa wail
Zen-tangled, he’ll evoke a thawing Tao
Ew, Snidely–dastardly’s no cat’s meow

2019 1003 bait

Bait is everywhere: headlines, food, mousetraps, speeches. I am glad it showed up as an Inktober prompt. Four types of Bait showed up almost instantly.

Live Bait

Lefty worked for the KGB
Instant reel-in out at Sea
Vuitton purse is SO chi-chi
Eat that Junk. Bon appetit!

2019 1002 mindless

First I wrote the acrostic, then I tried to illustrate each line. The first line equates Mindlessness with mob reflex. The second line equates Mindlessness with Single-Mindedness–Ahab on the good ship Pequod. The third line is the action of a protective nictitating eyelid, which I suspect requires no conscious thought at all. The last line pins Mindlessness on random incarceration.

mindless

make a Fist & say All Hail
in a ship that seeks a whale
nictitating eyelid shuts
dogs are caged by mangy mutts

20191001_120653

Years ago Robert Mitchum said something I never forgot, though I cannot quote him word for word. He said that he didn’t understand why there was such a thing as acting school. “It’s like trying to learn to be tall,” is close to what he said.

About a week ago I watched his performance in a late 70s version of The Big Sleep that also featured Candy Clark, Sarah Miles, and an ancient James Stewart. There was a lot of cavalier killing in the movie, and a silliness to it that I don’t remember from my reading of the book, but Mitchum made a superb Marlowe, and his face was aptly set in sleepy worldliness and knowledge of darkness. His acting was tall indeed.

Robt MITchum

Roguish slick as MIT

Oh so a.d. h.o.c

Battered flesh

that makes gals hum

Take a fee & fi fo fum

 

20191001 change

Recently the United Nations General Assembly had visitors, youngsters bringing ancient wisdom and youthful defiance. They challenged the status-quoed representatives of countries who were continuing to despoil the Earth. It was magnificent. Mesdemoiselles Peltier and Thunberg were particularly fine.

coming change

catch & sync
out of reach
monomania
intubation
nesting
gusto time
wings climb

weather epic
idiots skeptical
nodes of spaghetti
gleaming maelstrom
strike or succumb

I hope the wisdom turns into action. It is as “almost too late” as can be.

2019 0929 cathartiku

cathartiku

i do not now weep
but i Draw me doing so
because LOSS. age. Woe.

When I was a boy a boy who cried was a Crybaby. There was a huge stigma attached to it. I have not quite shed that skin, but my rational mind tells me that catharsis is good for the soul.

Today I was thinking about sadnesses great and small. Two lovely houses I once called Home are now Home to others, and I am not even Unwelcome to the current residents: I am Unknown. I am superstitious enough to wonder if the houses still remember me.

The World seems in sad shape, despite good news here and there. It is truly fine to hear truly young people try to talk sense into rapacious oldsters at the United Nations, but a long record of lip service lends skepticism to speculation about possible change.

Here in the US, an impeachment inquiry is under way, which is just and a long time coming. But a headline says “Market predicts impeachment but not removal,” and, propaganda or not, it’s bad news.

And I’m 65 years old, and my teeth are going bad, and last year I lost my younger brother, and I look at my creations, including the one above freshly completed, and despair at my simple-mindedness and slipshod execution, and feel that I’m nowhere near where I need to be as an artist or a poet.

But my eyes are dry. But a good cathartic cry would probably help. So I did the next best thing, which was a drawing of myself crying, with the background one of my timeslips, which well represents a lifetime of grinding away day after week after month after year, and I do feel a little better.

I also feel like toddling down to the neighborhood dive bar to have a drink or few, and that too is cathartic.

The Power of Suggestion might help someone out there who needs a cry but cannot cry. If you stare at my drawing with the big goobery tears coming down, that may be the little boost you need. If it works for you, no thanks are necessary, but a Virtual Hug awaits you if you want one here. ❤

20190928_000106

Some time ago I was thinking about the versatility of metal foil. If you do an Internet search on “uses for foil” you quickly find that aluminum (aluminium elsewhere than the US) foil alone has at least 15 household uses. And foil may be used for balloons, lightsails, artwork, mirrors, and…

Semiconductor circuits. Gold foil is of particular interest to this discussion because gold is “biologically non-reactive.” When (NOT If; it is starting to happen already) semiconducting implants for human beings catches on, an ultra-thin gold-foil substrate for molecule-width semiconducting silicon will be standard.

Molecule-width–mind-blowing what they’re doing nowadays. There is a photo somewhere of an array of INDIVIDUAL ATOMS spelling out “IBM.” I’m too time-strapped (lazy?) to find and reproduce it here, but I invite you to find it. You see not the atoms themselves but the relativistic effect of their presence, which effect produces a sphere shape. (Sidebar: Ever wonder why “all the colors of the rainbow” don’t include gold, silver or copper? Relativistic effects of metals, that’s why. Which doesn’t tell you much, I know–sorry!)

Speaking of quantum physics (we were?! well, we were and we weren’t. Welcome to Quantum Physics, where things ARE AND ARE NOT what they seem!), my acrostic partakes of the there-and-not-there aspect of the Quantum Multiverse. It is both Foil Safe and Foil Saee. The top bar of the bottom E becomes the bottom bar of the E-wannabe F, which needs to be an E so the endwords will rhyme, but also needs to be an F because “saee” is not a word, and also “Foil Safe” is an ultra-apt, double-meaning phrase. (I have just written what is probably the weirdest sentence I have ever written.)

Foil Safe/Foil Saee

Flexible metals

Oven wrap, petals–

AI gets a pulse

Let’s Anti-Convulse

The last line hearkens back to pre-Jurassic Michael Crichton’s early novel THE TERMINAL MAN, one of the first What-If? fictionals about implantation tech. Seizuring subject was implanted with a device that would sense a seizure coming on and divert said seizure with a tickle to the pleasure center of the brain. (Spoiler alert: it works all too well.)

Someday I’ll dig out my manuscript “The Implant,” which was form-rejected by PLAYBOY and involved a cuckold’s implanting of an apparatus wrapped around the genitalia of the guy who had sex with his wife, set to trigger when the ejaculatory reflex happened. But not today; I’m too lazy (time-strapped?).

2019 0925 wounders

This is a time of wounds, and wounding, and wounders. It is a time of betrayals and deception. Thank Goodness it is also a time when 16-year-old Greta Thunberg addresses the United Nations General Assembly with a voice of reason and challenge, a clear and direct message to the wounders of the world that the savaging must stop.

The White House just released a transcript of a conversation between Donald Trump and a representative of the Ukrainian government. Trump was soliciting that country’s help in digging up dirt on the son of Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden. Trump offered help from his own resources to backstop the efforts he wanted the Ukrainians to make.

This is all part of the tapestry of wrongdoing that Donald Trump and his administration have woven. They wanted dirt on Hillary Clinton, and they met with Russians–in TRUMP TOWER–to discuss it. Previously, Trump publicly asked Russian hackers to find dirt on Ms. Clinton via her e-mails. And his tweets since before the 2016 to the present day have included wounding swipes at hundreds (this is not hyperbole) of the persons, organizations, and other entities that Trump perceives as either rivals or enemies, including the intelligence community, members of his own political party, and the entire Democratic Party. Donald Trump is the Wounder-In-Chief.

Viewers will notice that this page has a slapdash, hurry-up-and-finish quality to it. I wanted to publish this page so that it would be contemporaneous with this week’s events, and so the last lines of the acrostic are so UNcalligraphic they look practically scribbled. But Thornton Wilder wrote, in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, my favorite book by anyone ever, “Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.” So my page will not be redone…today…

Will Wounders Never Cease?

Wicked-clever weapon-making may use PVC
Wicked-evil felons have gone on a killing spree
Item that is made unsafe may lead to broken tibia
It goes international with rockets fired at Libya
Leave it undecided if Evolving is amiss
Lemon-freshened lab retrievers lend themselves to Bliss
Leprechauns and ne’er-do-wells have tickets on the barge
Low men on the Totem Poles prefer to live it large