Sklog X + 1; the sklogs revisited

So when i began this series i spoke as if it would actually be a series, a la star wars or lord of the rings, where
the genius creating the series follows a powerful creative vision of his own magical universe and has an alternate history all worked out and just cranks out episode after episode of material, and i thought that maybe instead of working out an entire alternate history i'd just pretend and make it up on the fly and it's been over eight months and this is installment two, which is fine if you're producing movies or books but not so impressive for 2000 word blog posts, which some people in an advanced stage of masochistic mental affliction do more than once per day! But they don't keep that up for long, and twitter has finally given those poor souls a long deserved release.

So I've given up the series idea, as a beautiful but ultimately impossible vision of the world as it should be, and in any case the whole series thing was my attempt to give some kind of unity and coherence to a blog that really doesn't deserve even the appearance of seriousness. There's just no escaping the fact that this is a silly blog and it has no real purpose except to replicate.

So i intend to cease all operations on this blog, or i should say i intend to stop worrying about why I've already ceased all operations on this blog a long time ago, and leave it as a kind of fossilised remnant of a kind that someday future anthropologists will study and wonder and speculate about like it's a dinosaur bone or the delicate impression of a leaf in an ancient rock. And those future electronic anthropologists may take a bit of this blog and put it in a virtual petri dish and mix it with some html or something vaguely analogous to whatever asinine point or comparison i was trying to make before I kind of lost track of the metaphor because I'm older now.

So check out this old sklog! I have a soft spot for this particular sklog - the picture, that is, not the words, which as usual are crap! But I remember the warm glow I felt while I was drawing this picture because at first I thought the scene, a construction site behind my friend's co-housing condo unit in Boulder, was far too hard to draw, at least for me, but I tried drawing it anyway because I was trapped in the tiny upper loft of the unit for mental health reasons, and then for a little while, about 75% through the actual drawing part, I began to notice that the composition on this picture was not too bad, it actually was beginning to look like a picture or illustration like a real artist might draw, and I felt for a few precious minutes, before I got excited and destroyed it all, that I might actually be on the point of producing professional-standard work. It was a wonderful feeling, the apeothesis, apothesis, apotheosis, that's a tough word to spell, the apotheosis of my life up to that point. Then as I said, I got excited and put the picture down and relished the feeling of professionalism and achievement and financial security and began to wonder where I would buy a nice big house and maybe vacation home and colored pants and a hat and security guards and secret archeological digs that I would finance and then mysteriously order a stop to, and spirit away all the relics and bribe the scientists to keep quiet about and then I'd hide the secret mummy cases in the basement with the skulls that I would finger while I drank scotch in my safari pants, and then I thought maybe that would make an interesting picture (I still do) and then I never finished this picture and used it for a sklog instead, meaning I wrote silly stuff in the unfinished white parts of the sketch to give myself a false sense of completion and went to bed and had nightmares about mummies walking around in the basement drinking my scotch and wearing my safari pants.

(X number of) Pictures; A Quick Jog Through Sklogs

I originally meant to just upload all the sklogs I have onto this blog so I’d have an online chronological record I could show them to friends after we’d all had a few beers but it turned out that I’ve never bothered to go through and name the files with dates that make any sense, and after looking through the long list of files in my sklog folder I lost my will and sense of purpose and so I decided to just upload a certain number of them and call this new autobiographical series after a number in the tradition of “6 Crises; Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator” and “6 Migrations…” because it is after all a continuation of my life story begun in those previous series, and I was even thinking it would be cool to call it “6 Pictures…” which would be even more in keeping with the tradition, and is a very small and manageable amount of Sklogs to upload, and furthermore, having three consecutive series titles beginning with the number 6 would be cool from a rebellious I’m-so-bad kind of way, except that I have serious family responsibilities now and can’t go around having people think I’m a devil worshipper or even worse, having people think I’m immature enough to think that pretending to be a devil worshipper makes me cool or attractive to college girls.
So with some reluctance I gave up on beginning the title with “6” and thought that maybe I’d begin it with something ambitious, like 20 or something, but that wouldn’t fit with the other titles at all and what’s more the thought of all the work associated with uploading that many Sklogs made my stomache churn and I lost my will and sense of purpose until I came up with the idea that I wouldn’t promise any number and would just see how it goes.
This Sklog happens to be the second file in the folder, which recommended itself to be uploaded, and I also happen to like the picture, which includes my beloved mother. The words are garbage, like they are in all the Sklogs, but since I’m supposed to be reviewing them I will say that most of the letters are legible and they don’t obscure the picture. I also remembered this visit to my parents’ house as particularly pleasant, if it was a visit. There is also the strong possibility that I was actually living there at the time and just described it as a “visit” because I was still single, and didn’t want any women who saw the Sklog to know that I was living with the my parents because that had caused me trouble in the past with women who were shallow enough to find my lack of direction and purpose and career prospects and financial situation to be unattractive instead of loving me for who I was and giving me happy good time in private grownup sense of the words without expecting me to pay for any dates and contribute anything to the relationship beyond a pleasant attitude, which I was prepared to provide in abundance!
Anyway, I enjoyed this picture but none of my friends seemed to think much of the Sklog. I don’t blame them, now that I read it. There’s no good joke or punchline. The graphic novel referred to, Antelope Island, was a previous Sklog series that I’d had tremendously big plans for, because I’d re-read some of my old comic books and decided to write an incredibly powerful graphic science fiction novel with strange twists and otherworldly characters and maybe some sexy scenes, and I would include three characters that I’d drawn in a previous picture and that I’d built up a whole history for these characters, as the childhood friends I never had…I did actually have childhood friends who were actually fairly normal people, but for some reason I began to like to point to the original picture of the three characters and say that they were my childhood imaginary friends even though they actually had nothing to do with any real or imaginary friends I’d had in childhood. I gave these imaginary imaginary friends names that I thought were funny and cool but in retrospect I don’t know why I thought they were funny, because I’ve never read any book where - no matter how funny the rest of the book was - the names made me laugh or even tickled my fancy in any way, but authors seem to try it all the time anyway. So I put these three characters; Gunthor, Frank, and Eddie, into the graphic novel for no good reason other than obsessiveness, and then I really didn’t know what to do with them, and the series became for me an obsessive drawing exercise, drawing horribly bad renditions of the characters from the original horribly bad drawing into the usual hurried sketches that I put in the Sklogs. It was an interesting challenge because I have no idea how to organize a drawing and make it proportional, I just kind of try to draw from one edge of the page to another, and the proportions and perspectives are all out of whack, and a person standing in front of a tree ends up far from the tree on the page, and seems to be taller than the tree, but the grass he’s standing on is still back under the tree, which leaves the person in a difficult predicament. So putting the imaginary characters into the pictures of real rooms and scenes was an interesting exercise that I never completely succeeded at, although I was fairly pleased with one of the pictures I did of the bathroom at my work, I felt the rabbit looked fairly believable on the toilet.
But since I hadn’t had any friends like Gunthor, Frank, and Eddie in real life or even in my imagination, I couldn’t think of anything for them to say that even sounded like something a real imaginary friend would say.
This new series is a continuation of my life story, begun in “6 Crises; Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator,” and continued in “6 Migrations” and “Fish Lake Oddyssey”. As Winston Churchill once said; “This constitutes my life’s work…. and I am content to rest my reputation upon it.” He wasn’t talking about the Sklogs, though. I believe he was referring to his leadership in the fight against Hitler.