
I was watching a YouTube video from 1995 featuring these late greats. Didn’t freeze the frame so it was like being a courtroom artist.

I was watching a YouTube video from 1995 featuring these late greats. Didn’t freeze the frame so it was like being a courtroom artist.
A bit shy of 17 years ago I did this portrait of Bill Campana;

Here are the words of the triple-acrostic poem:
BILL CAMP ANA
BLUFF, & stand-up comical, & full of manic Manna
It’s a wonder he’s still local — catch him if you can
Laudably SELF-AMPLIFIED: you WILL hear from this man
Las Vegas at the Palace or perhaps the Tropicana
..
I was 54 then. I am now 71, soon to become 72. Today I did this:

Here are the words of the double-acrostic poem:
FUNNIEST MAN ALIVE
Fastest wit of us & them
Undeterred by raw dilemma
Nifty beard & acid pen
Needs no compass nor antenna
If/Then/Else on even keel
Edgy as a blade of steel — I
Savor his raw P.O.V
Then scorn the morn’s abyss I see
..
Between the two portraits, Mr. Cpana has published about half a dozen books and performed his hilarious poetry about half a thousand times. Long may he astound!

Frank Sinatra is thought by some to be the Greatest Crooner of All Time. Ronnie O’Sullivan is widely regarded as the Greatest Snooker Player of All Time. Today I had the whim to put two GOATs in one pen.

Sad news: Joe Biden’s Stage IV prostate cancer condition is worsening. Comment from the White House: “I don’t feel sorry for him.”
Joe, you were there for us in our darkest hour, and you turned our wayward nation around. When we needed coolness under fire you were the coolest guy in the room. Thank you.

J and the Legal Heineken
Once upon a couple months ago I was working
And I was in a time crunch
And my co-worker Jalen
Sometimes known as J
Dropped what he was doing to help me
And I was grateful
And I asked him what his favorite beer was
And he said “Heineken”
And I told him
There was a Heineken in his future
But there’s a (completely reasonable) rule
Forbidding employees to bring alcohol
To the workplace
So I mulled it over
And got the notion
That the Heineken in J’s future
Would be in the form of a DRAWING
Of a Heineken
So I drew it
And J next to it
And it looked OK but not quite right
And the oinner voice that tells me what to do said
“Draw his hand holding up the bottle”
So I did
But the pencil’s eraser didn’t erase right
Smeared rather than erased
Being old and oxidized
So I said the hell with erasure
And that’s why the hand is a little ghostly
But J still liked the drawing
And gave me permission
To post it on social media
Like this.
..
He’s a good guy.

swollen eyelid
an eye is awry.
its lid hoods and occludes the iris
and tickles the lachrymal duct so that it weeps
and the tear-filmed pupil makes for blurrish vision
and the man who owns the eye
feels like quasimodo or someone
even more grotesque. he worries
that it may be a staph infection
or, worse, some flesh-eating parasite
chewing his head away.
..
he tries to dismiss such foolish thoughts
by reminding himself
of a lifetime of hypochondria
and the many oh-i’m-gonna-die episodes
that turned out to be laughably untrue.
..
a visit to urgent care
would be a resounding smack in the pocketbook
even if they don’t upsell him like the charming lady
doc who said “you have earwax. want me to
take care of it?” and that two-minute tune-up
cost forty additional out-of-pocket bucks.
..
he looks in the mirror and smiles
with the half of his mouth on the unaffected,
uninfected side.
tries to, anyway.
he wanted to make a comedy/tragedy mask
out of his single face but the other half of his mouth
insists on half-smiling too.
now he half-laughs at his melancholic vanity.
“That’s Life,” he murmurs,
and feels better.
A man in a flimsy T-shirt and polyester running shorts and running shoes affixed to snowshoes with circular-shaped surfaces runs
On a two-inch blanket of freshly-fallen snow on a flat two-acre field on a farm whose owners have given him permission to run for an hour on their land.
He is also wearing glasses that provide a visual readout of what the drone flying overhead is recording. The drone moves according to his voice commands. His last command was for the drone to maintain a position twenty meters over his head, focal point the surface of the snow, field of view to include the running man and a circle of ten meters’ diameter with him at the center.
The conditions are ideal. The temp is just at freezing and it is windless and the snow is doing a remarkable job of retaining the impressions of the snowshoes.
What the man is doing is drawing. He himself is the dot-drawing stylus. An inset in the views reen in his glasses shows him the entire field on which he is running, with his position on the field represented by a green dot, and with his footstrikes trailing him represented as blue dots.
He has not been running long, but he is already on the second iteration of the array of comic-book-style panels that will contain the images of real-time running that he is doing now. An hour will give him enough time to fill in the panels with line drawings with enough detail to discern his facial features.
“Bogie, I want a drink,” he says, and the drone swoops down and dangles tubing connected to the modest water supply it is carrying. Three swallows is sufficient.
“Resume position above my head.” Bogie whizzes upward.
“Play ‘Running On Empty’ by Jackson Browne, any live version with David Lindlay,” he tells his audio feed.
The music starts.
“I effing love technology, I do I do I do,” he exults as he runs, his breath making a puff-pattern of condensation.


I’ve been a fan of Anne Meara since she and Jerry Stiller were on the Ed Sullivan Show as Stiller & Meara. My favorite performance of hers was in the 1980 version of FAME. Fun fact: she won a Writers Guild award.
