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Still Life with Choppers, Burrito, and Salsa Bowl

December 16, 2025
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Still Life with Choppers, Burrito, and Salsa Bowl

Attention K-Mart Shoppers¹

The Blue-Light Special², Choppers,

Is Aisle Five–and Neat-O³

We throw in a Burrito⁴

With bowl of Salsa Rojo⁵

Très chic⁶, Tré Cool⁷, très Boho⁸

A feast of contrariety

In Southwest High Society⁹.

..

¹ Kmart was a supermarket chain popular in the 20th Century. It still has an online presence but aside from Miami and Guam the brick&mortar empire it once was is gone.

² The Blue Light Special was a Kmart flash sale that lasted as long as a rotating blue light shone and twirled.

³ When I was ten in 1964 “Neat-O” meant fun, groovy,desirable. Its etymology might owe something to the Beatnik era.–“Daddy-O” for instance.

⁴ A Burrito is a tortilla encasing anything from beans and cheese to chile-marinated meat. Spanish for “little donkey.”

⁵ The two major salsas are salsa rojo (red) and salsa verde (green).

⁶ French for “quite fashionable.”

⁷ Nom de guerre of Frank Edwin Wright III of Green Day fame.

⁸ Short for Bohemian, loosely meaning “unconventional.”

⁹ Needed a phrase to rhyme with Contrariety.

..

Endnote: the “Choppers” in the photo are a 3D-printed cast of my upper and lower left back teeth, made to enable casting of a molar crown in the upper.An oblong scanning device was manipulated around that sector of my mouth by a dental tech.

Still Life with Seven of Diamonds

February 19, 2022
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2022 0219 still life w 7 diamonds
Here is how I spent my midmorning. I had had a cup of coffee and fiddled around on the Internet some. Then for about the millionth time I realize that much of my life was going down the Shallow Fun drain. So I codified my concern with this poem, which I posted to my Facebook group Poets All Call:
****
Toxic Enjoyment

It is not cancer but
It is eating my time alive

It is fatal frippery
Terminal twiddlethumbing
Toxic Enjoyment

When I wake up I find
That the Fun God Fungus
Has given me more coins
More tickets
More lives

And so I sit on the edge of my bed
For maybe forty-five minutes
And wrestle with opponents
Or make things blow up
Or figure out a word

Finally I come to my senses
And look myself in the bathroom-vanity eye
And say (I swear) “Be Careful.”

I have Be Carefulled myself
Almost every day for years
And till now it has meant
“Be Careful whilst flossing and brushing;
Your teeth are not spring chickens”

But now
Today
It means
Be Careful
Not to leak
The rest
Of your life away
On pointless
Non
Con
Struc
Tive
Empty
Enjoyment.

Most of me nods
And thinks Whew,
Thank Goodness
The Right Track is back!

But the little I-Wanna Weasel
Chuckles and says
Smugly,
“I’ve heard that one
Before
And I will hear it
Again.”
****

Naturally, after I posted the poem the question arose: What IS the best use of my time right now? A two-hour drawing followed. It is flawed, and, despite the two hours, rushed. I hope the viewer will derive some (non-shallow, heh heh) enjoyment from the cryptic storytelling involved, and perhaps from the crude force of the draughtsmanship.

This one is atypical of my drawings in that the drawing details are in caption form at the bottom, and part of the image. I may do this more, and the images thus captioned may become postcards, or refrigerator magnets, or elements for a gallery-like montage. Time will tell.

drawing tabletop, oh one oh seven twentytwo

January 7, 2022
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This year I have resolved to take more time with my drawings. With this drawing I turned my resolve into reality. I have worked on this drawing for several days. I stopped when it seemed not to benefit from further fussing. I do suspect, though, that when I look at it later I’ll see a few things I will want to fiddle with–but I won’t; this one stands as is.

2022 0107 drawing tabletop

ICAD 2021 twofer

June 15, 2021
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20210615_183531

Friends, my eyesight is worsening. After doing these Iresolved to get my eyes checked and get a new prescription. If surgery is indicated I will probably get it. –So I’m afraid “Feast your eyes” is not the right thing to say right now. Perhaps it would be better to take a tip from the bald man’s face and “read between the lines.”

The Sins of the Younger

February 18, 2021
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The house where my mother lived out most of her latter life is being prepared for sale, and that means a lot of throwing away and some salvage. Over the years I gave Mom quite a bit of artwork in the form of drawings, prints and functional and non-functional ceramics. Now she has no more use for them, and they wouldn’t fetch much if anything at an estate sale, so back to me they come.

This drawing in particular has me shaking my head in frustration:

2021 0218 still life with glass decanter

It has a lot going for it, and a lot going against it. At first it made me want to invent a time machine and harangue the early-80s twentysomething who was saying, “Done!” and signing it without dating it. “DONE??! What the Hell? It needs another hour. In an hour you could turn an Isn’t-That-Nice into a showpiece. Not a museum piece, you dummy, because you used cheap sketchbook paper and you DREW PAST THE WIRE BINDING HOLES. Don’t you CARE? Don’t you have any respect for what little talent you possess?!”

Alas, the smart-aleck kid from 1983 or so now looks me in the mind’s eye and says, “What about YOU, Gramps? You are STILL dashing things off, on cheap paper, eager as Hell to send them out into the world, STILL making Isn’t That Nices instead of Showpieces, much less Museum Pieces. The Sins of the Younger are visited on the Elder. Hypocrite.”

I try to muster a convincing argument. I am running out of time. My heart leaps unbidden around in my chest every so often, once sending me to the ER, where they sent me to a cardiologist, who wanted to do a test the insurance wouldn’t pay for, and did another test instead, which boiled done to “normal” with a nice ECG. But Dad went at 49, Grandmother Caroline at 44, Uncle Jim at 53, Grandmother Marguerite at 67. ALL cardiac cases. And I have too many things to do in whatever time I have left.

But the Kid knows I’m full of it. “Your Time Management sucks, Pops. You can and really need to CARVE OUT the time from your vast, incessant Frittering. So do it. Do it for the Kid here. He’s still here, ya know. Just wearing older flesh.”

Can’t argue with that. We shake hands, I the left, he the Wright. 🙂

Stil Life with Clay Head

February 5, 2013
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Image

Since we can be lovely when we’re not becoming ash
Try recording graphically your Lovely Soul to cache
Insistence on an optimistic stance–a way well led–a
LIFE-LY friendliness in showing memory’s well fed

Note: I was tempted to include a comma after “well” so that it would read “Memory’s well, fed.” I left the comma out, because it would klunkify the syllable stressification; but I invite you to consider the subtle difference in meaning.

The acrostic weighs in at thirty-five words, or forty if you include the acrostic words doing double duty. And it’s a quintuple acrostic, though a little fudgy since exact characters-per-line isn’t even close to achievement.

But it’s far from the ultimate in quintuple acrostic word economy. About four years ago I did one whose first line was “The JonQuil’d KoalA.” Three lines, a total of fifteen words–and the acrostic was TEN JACK QUEEN KING ACE. It CAN be done, my friends, and one fine day I’ll blog-post the image, which is headed by an illustration that included not only the Kee-YEWTEST li’l Koala you ever did see–and Jonquil’d to boot–but also the poker hand known as the Royal Flush. I leave it as an exercise to you, O revered Reader: which twelve words followed the first line?