Conversation on a train

Conversation on a train,

By A. Hagen

Authors note: I will eventually convert this drawing into a webcomic and after that a web serial, with an expanded script and emphasis on the inner turmoil that you don’t see when you read a webcomic except in those clever subtle ways that they taught me about in school that I’ve never really understood all the way. 

If the web serial takes off, who knows? Because I can definitely see the potential for a video game even if those jerks at EA don’t or won’t (even after I removed a whole portion of the game comprising seven or eight levels that completely stumped even the hardcore gamers in my extended family, and I did it just to make one junior flunky art director happy, a low level stooge who probably went to some fancy east coast art school who’s probably green lighted all kinds of satanic gore fest first person shooters with fancy 3D effects but who all of the sudden can’t handle a few poo jokes spoken by lovingly crafted but highly pixilated characters with incredibly deep emotional layers that he will never be able to fathom), and if the game makes a splash, why not think big?  I’ll just say it; serial podcast, PBS masters edition, Ken Burns visuals, Ira Glass narrates. 

I’m getting carried away, the script actually needs some work. 

Dramatis personae 

Kid 1, younger

Kid 2, older

Scene 1

Kid 1: what are you looking at?

(No response)

Kid 1: hey kid 2, what are you looking at?

Kid 1: KID 2!

Kid 2: WHAT?

Kid 1: you shouted at me...KID 2!

Kid 2: What do you want?

Kid 1: you shouted at me, that wasn’t nice...

Kid 2: I shouted because I’m reading and you keep talking when I’m trying to read. 

Kid 1: You weren’t reading, you were looking out the window. 

Kid 2: then why did you ask me?

Kid 1: ask you what?

Kid 2: aaaarregghh

Author edit: And right there I’ve already identified a problem, ie the names Kid 1 and Kid 2.  They just don’t ring true, in a conversational flow kind of way. We’ll try it again with names: 

Conversation on a train,

By A. Hagen

Dramatis personae 

Psycho-Babel (Kid 1, younger)

Babel (Kid 2, older)

Scene 1

Psycho-Babel : what are you looking at?

(No response)

Psycho-Babel: hey Babel, what are you looking at?

Psycho-Babel: Babel!

Babel: WHAT?

Psycho-Babel: you shouted at me...Babel!

Babel: What do you want?

Psycho-Babel: you shouted at me, that wasn’t nice...

Babel: I shouted because I’m reading and you keep talking when I’m trying to read. 

Psycho-Babel: You weren’t reading, you were looking out the window. 

Babel: then why did you ask me?

Psycho-Babel: ask you what?

Babel: aaaarregghh

Und so. I don’t want to give away too much of the comic except to admit that there’s really not much more to it, just more of the same for a few frames, and it ends with Psycho Babel hitting Babel. It’s about something something American politics, mumble capitalism mumble free press. 

Addendum to above:

I wrote this material for the drawing that I included in my last post, which probably had nothing to do with that drawing and it’s a sign of how low the quality of content that I’ve grown content to publish for this blog that I couldn’t be bothered to go in and change the picture to whatever I had in mind when I wrote the last post which was so meandering that I could not fathom what drawing I had in mind, and it’s a sign of how disconnected my written content has become from the visual content that I myself can’t figure out which picture the written content belongs to. And that I’m so content with this level of content and that I’ll even describe my contentedness for the content within the content itself, well, that’s really really a sign that I really do not have the willpower or the wherewithal to make some kind of webcomic out of something 

Conservation on a Train in Merry Oulde Anglande, part 2:

Kid 1 plays Clarence

Kid 2 plays Jimmy Stewart

Clarence: ask you what?

Clarence: ASK You What?!

Jimmy Stewart: Why did you ask me what I was doing if you already knew what I was doing?

Clarence: I didn’t ask you that!

Clarence: Jimmy Stewart, I didn’t ask you that!

Jimmy Stewart: Okay, fine!

Clarence: Jimmy Stewart!

Clarence: you have to answer my question because it’s not nice to ignore a person’s question. 

Clarence: you have to answer my question!

Jimmy Stewart: What is the question?

Clarence: I don’t remember now!  (Weeps)

Jimmy Stewart: aaaaarrrrrggghh

Clarence: I remember now.

Jimmy Stewart: What? What is it?

Clarence: I remember now! What are you doing?

Jimmy Stewart: trying to read!

Clarence: No, you were looking out the window at something! 

Jimmy Stewart: if you already know what I was doing then why did you ask me?

Clarence: because I was asking what you were looking at!

Jimmy Stewart: I wasn’t looking at anything!

Clarence:  No! No no no, you were looking at something! (Weeps and hits Jimmy Stewart

Blog in need of fifth wheel

I had hoped to come up with a new storyline for the continuing saga of our vacation but I suddenly realized that I’ve begun a large percentage of the posts in this blog with a whiny prologue about what I had actually wanted to do, followed by my reasons for failing to do it along with a kind of meandering description of whatever inner turmoil had induced me to do what I actually did, which was nothing. I won’t do it this time, by which I mean I won’t whine about what I meant to do, anymore than I already have, and I will stop trying to describe my inner turmoil, and I will most certainly not do nothing in this particular post. I will do something. Which I have already done. 

The other thing I intended to do, the big idea I had for the future direction of the story of our trip, is a comic strip based on the pictures, something I’ve talked about doing many many times before but haven’t because it involved a lot of work. But now I will do it, and by now I mean I will begin to think about how to prepare to do it now, I will not do it by actually doing it during this blog post, other than to post the first picture of the series, which I intend to alter using the magic of iPhone drawing apps to be a comic strip of two kids talking on a train, something like this picture but more alive:

Then after I alter the picture I will add the word bubbles which will depict some of those darn things kids say to each other while their parents smile at each other and nod. As I get older and see all the neat digital art people do I have come to see myself as less of an artist and more of an art critic who draws to help with his criticism of really good artists, and as I read more and more and write less and less I have come to think of myself as more of a critic of literature than a writer per se, and in order to critic literature I see myself more and more as a cartoonist who has opinions about literature that I like to think about while I draw, than as an actual critic of literature. 

If I give up in the comic strip idea, which now that I’ve given myself permission to give up is all but definitely as good as given up on, I plan to veer this blog onto a literary criticism course, and away from any artistic pretensions completely. 

Which now that I have actually explicitly stated that I will do I might as well do, because if I even try to do anything else I will know at the back of my mind that I am just killing time before I start the literary criticism. And now that I have decided to do the literary criticism right now, I find myself looking back fondly at my artistic days, my lonely nights toiling away at my cherished dreams of being a webcomic creator. 

And voila, those good old days are back!  Maybes . Or maybe not. 

The mace of authority

The mace of authority 

I said some pretty harsh things about the readers of this blog in my last post, which in TV shows and book series is a pretty sure harbinger of doom for the production, a sign that the crucial relationship between the readers and the auteur, the business and its customers, has degenerated so badly that the business has given up on customer service and will just start ripping out huge bogus fees and resentful passive aggressive advertising just to unleash all their pent up frustrations, much like Comcast or the US healthcare system, or in the case of this week's presentation; the British House of Commons. That's right, I just did last week's complaining about my beloved and intelligent readers in order to thematically introduce this week's episode of the magical family visiting the house of non-magical "frumpity grumps", which is how we in the magical community of less popular writers have to refer to nonmagical people without being sued. 

I had worked up a fair amount of excitement for the opportunity to render the seat of power for a country as we entered the chamber, but as we sat and angrily berated our offspring for noise they hadn't made yet, in the hissing snake language that magical parents use to shout in places where they can't shout, and sat down with a scattering handful of other bored spectators, and intoned "Renderanis!" in as unobtrusive a manner as possible while I waved my elf spine wand, I was overcome with a feeling that I was being bamboozled. We sat overlooking a chamber where the representatives of the country, an entire island and a half of millions of people, met to debate and vote with total authority on the disposition of oceans of money, large armies, millions of lives, and it felt exactly as interesting and vital to my existence as a Sunday school lesson. Meanwhile, earlier in the day, we had happened to walk by an enormous beautiful palace, gated and closed to the surrounding multitudes who gazed raptly through the gates like stray dogs staring through a pastry shop window, where a royal family stripped - according to all reputable accounts - of any real power a hundred years before occasionally resided. At one point while we stood at the fence staring at suffering guards in the silly hats, there was a commotion, a flurry of excitement, as an honest to God horse drawn carriage rolled up to the gates from nowhere and a bunch of very real looking cops with guns shooed people out of its way. The people shuffled aside by this outmoded vehicle loved it. They clamored for a view of the superior beings inside the carriage (who, seriously, could not possibly have had any serious business to conduct) and stared in awe as the carriage pulled inside the gates. 

Remembering this inexplicably exciting event, and surveying the intense boredom with which the purported center of power conducted business, I could not help but hypothesize that some kind of vast scam had been implemented upon the populace of this country and of the international community in general, and that the bored functionaries welcomed people to freely enter the viewing gallery and stare down at their somnambulant performance in order to camouflage the true workings, conducted in secret behind the massive gates by people so contemptuous of the modern world that they are able to ignore its existence, preferring to play pretend with ancient animal powered devices that are lovingly protected and made way for by the armed constabulary. 

And so I present my sad depiction of the camouflage, a prey animal rendering the tiger’s stripes from the safety of the shrubbery, wondering at their movement - surely that isn’t foliage there, what could it be?

I blame the readers of this blog for everything wrong

We've had to halt the beloved Dr Hagenstein series for a while, due to some fairly severe and possibly deranged reviews that have frankly cut me to the quick, at an emotional level that I don't know if I will ever get over. This series meant a lot to me and you people have killed it, and even if you beg and plead for an encore I don't think it will ever be the same as that first time in the full bloom of summer and everyone was young and beautiful and full of that nauseatingly egotistical hope for the future that older people think they've lost because no one likes them as much as they thought everyone would. 

So I need a new backstory for the set of illustrations that I created whilst traveling, and I feel compelled to explain again why I don't want to just describe the trip as it occurred, and just record the events as accurately as I can, to strain with words to hold a mirror to nature as Shakespeare himself said, and let the truth create its own art, and with that art to find truth, and let the truth come back to art again, in this ecstatic embrace of mirror images flipping back and forth at each other and sending we mortals into a delirium of experience-ness and awe with nature and the universe.  I just read what I just wrote, and in the spirit of total honesty that has not characterized any of my previous writing on this blog I now feel compelled to admit that I have changed my mind completely and I will now strain with words to do exactly all that. 

So chapter 1: the adventures of the true to life Hagen magical wizard family in Angle-Stan, or Angle-Reich as they would say over the water. Let the truth flow! I drew this picture with aid of a draw-spell. Renderanis! I shouted, waving my elf-spine wand in devious retrograde motion. The tiny witch coven in the picture had gathered in a little group on the floor of the magically moving painting museum in London. The paintings moved so vigorously that I didn't get a good render of any of them, and my wizard offspring kept grabbing at my wizard cloak and demanding treats and water and bathroom breaks so I never even had a moment to think! And every time I found a really beautiful painting with amazing masterful brushstrokes that I wanted to copy by painstaking hand to appreciate and learn from and I would whip out my elf-spine wand that had been fermented in virgin troll tears and sprinkled with finely ground fairie by a dimuitive master wizard of indeterminate age and sex and ethnicity who told me they preferred to kill the adolescent griffins by hand in the back of the magicke shop to verify perfect freshness of the feathers, then tiny hands would pull insistently at my wizard jacket and even grab at the magic wand as I tried to wave it and whiny voices would ask if they could have it and then in the spirit of demented competition both of my wizard offspring would demand to get to wave the wand while I tried to swat them away and say very loudly in the middle of the museum that it was my elf-spine wand and only I get to use it and my wife would berate me with her disgusted eyes that would shoot magical flames at me and singe my feelings and I would pull away from them and try to aim at the closest masterpiece and shout Renderanis! but I'm also swatting at my kids with the elf spine wand which emits sparkling dust and misses the masterpiece and humorously renders a group of kids with their parents who are gathered on the floor like it's a park or something and a grown woman in silly clothes is telling a pointless fairy tail in the exaggerated voice you make to morons in the seriously mistaken belief that old times storytelling is so neat that it can convince kids that paintings done to impress grown ups are more interesting than video games, as if by magic

The Last Drag Show at the Globe; from Dr Hagenstein, the U.K. Files

The Last Drag Show at the Globe; from Dr Hagenstein, the U.K. Files

Dr Hagenstein scanned the crowd nervously, his super sensitive secret agent nerves, honed and crafted by years of death match level mental combat with Russians and Atheists, spasming alarms all over his nervous system at the sight of any suspicious character, the majority of the London population of which apparently swarmed to this very spot every evening for the outrageous yet strangely antiseptic performances at this pseudohistoric place.  He sat in the upper upper deck, about forty vertical feet above the stage of the new rebuilt exactly as before Globe Theatre, the neo-Globe, the focal point of that gigantic theme park called London, where all the historically violent impulses of the Anglo Saxon peoples have been sublimated into tame homoerotic deconstruction of the most mind numbingly overperformed plays in western culture. 

Dr Hagenstein actually loved Shakespeare, some of it. The plays with daggers, anyway. Not so much the comedies, because of some childhood stuff that confusing speech and loud laughter tended to trigger. 

The enemy agent had tried to offer him a beer before the play, but he'd refused. "Our seats are high enough to kill," he said cryptically. She knew his secret weakness; his massive skull size, it's heft and mass, the catch 22 for any highly intelligent person, his body was basically a big shuttlecock. All it would take was a nudge, and the thought machine that had generated some of the most incredible secret assassination plans and code break ideas in dark web history would plummet the two stories to the stage like a cannon ball, dragging his hapless body with it. He didn't dare lean even a little forward, even during the most hilarious onstage hijinks, where the big drag queen with the beard was singing to the tiny lesbian trapped in the clothes rack and the audience roared with appreciation, relieved that it didn't matter if they understood the words or not. 

At some point he realized that everyone in the upper deck reserved seating was American, while the locals were all standing in the plebe seating below. Did they know something? The English resentments of Americans were well known. Had they chosen now, at the height of summer, when half the population of the US was wandering drunk and stoned through London, Paris, and Edinburgh, and the other half was trapped in Disneyland, to spring their trap? Wait, who was running the ship back home? Of course it wasn't the English. They hadn't been able to muster a real plot for more than 150 years - it was the White Ward all along! Drones filling the sky! They swarm the stage, playing the Battle Hymn of the Republic on their tiny speakers, chasing the screaming actors through the sophisticated series of stage doors and secret passages that Shakespeare had once used to weave his magic. The laughing audience does not understand. Drones? Hymns? Outrageous, what next?  The drones focus high intensity strobe lights on the audience, transmitting signal bursts at a blink rate syncopated with the refresh screen rate of the human nervous system, a technique proven by years of research to send the human brain into a semi trance state similar to REM stage sleep. The crowd stops laughing and begin to hum the Battle Hymn in a horrible chorus while Dr Hagenstein in one incredibly fluid motion draws his secret pen weapon and fires a burst of micro toner particles into the nearest drone's forward flight controller module. The drone careens into the standing room section, awakening several screaming audience members with a fiery crash. The other drones orient quickly on the threat, but their strobes do not seem to affect Dr Hagenstein, why?

Flashback to a rustic cabin in a secluded wood where the unnamed master of uncomfortable motions used a blinking flashlight to insert a destroy light source program in Dr Hagenstein's subconscious and set it to activate upon trance inducement, losing several flashlights to Dr Hagenstein's trip wire reflexes and nodding his ancient grey haired head in satisfaction as the final flashlight exited his grip in several pieces, impelled by a lightning fast karate kick launched by his subject. End of flashback, Dr Hagenstein firing his secret pen weapon at drones...

Dr Hagenstein started awake just as his gigantic head swayed perilously forward, giving him a brief view of a man in a leather jacket waving a fish onstage. It had been close. He peered closely at the delicious candied almonds that the other agents had suspiciously offered to him. Sedatives? Or had he lost track of the plot again

The Pigeons on the Thames, a Dr Hagenstein Story

Pigeons are hard to draw, they move around a lot, reflected Dr Hagenstein as he leaned back thoughtfully on the park bench or whatever they call them in England, land of Shakespeare and relentless cultural decline. His taut muscles rippled like steel cables as he scratched his beard and looked around for enemy agents while his diminutive partners fed the pigeons crumbs of organic hand molted bread that seemed to be the only food he would be consuming on this mission thanks to the machinations of his enemy from the White Ward. Unbeknownst to the others, Dr Hagenstein, utilizing his vast knowledge of chemical and nuclear reactions, had installed tiny microbot particulates in the crumbs, which would activate in the pigeons' digestive tract and transmit live video feed from the pigeon's ocular nerve to an incredibly tiny flat screen TV monitor disguised as a bookmark in Dr Hagenstein's copy of Rick Steves Does England Again, a limited edition in which Agent Steves had hidden all sorts of secret messages for fellow agents to decipher.  Most of the secret messages involved hiking around charming English landscape like the Cotswolds and taking in the greenery and placid English sheep and staying at unbelievably picturesque B&Bs, but their mission itinerary would be taking them up the other side of the country, and the only chance he had of seeing any Cotswolds scenery would be through the tiny eyes of these idiotic birds, once his microbots had taken over their grain of sand sized brains and ceded total control of their musculoskeletal systems to the incredibly intricate joystick installed in his lower left second molar. Through this device he could make the pigeon do whatever he wanted by subtle maneuvers of his jawbone. 

A treacherous ambush, in the form of a tasteless organic cookie shoved with cunning swiftness in his famished mouth, malevolently timed at the moment the Alpha pigeon succumbed to microbot control and Dr Hagenstein's molar controller activated, completely undid this operation in the spate of a few seconds of unbelievably energetic and fatally reckless pigeon hops, forcing Dr Hagenstein to perform the embarrassingly exaggerated disconnect motions with his index finger, while the startled and grieving pigeon pack chose a new Alpha. 

The enemy agent from the White Ward had struck again!  Dr Hagenstein gagged on organic cookie and spluttered with rage simultaneously, an indescribably difficult physical feat achievable by only a select few super agents heavily trained by an unnamed master of ancient and uncomfortable physical motions who accepted no pay and spoke inscrutably all the time and lived in a secret monastery on a secluded hilltop in a dense wood on the border of Wyoming and Idaho.

Continuing Adventures of Dr Hagenstein in Olde England

Continuing Adventures of Dr Hagenstein in Olde England

I suppose last week's cliffhanger may have upset a few readers who couldn't tell what happened from the picture or the text, so let me reassure everyone that of course Dr Hagenstein got out of that sticky situation, whatever it was. 

Speaking of sticky situations, this week's depicted episode takes place in Covent garden, taking a dinner in a very fancy restaurant with Germanic wait staff and French hostess who forgot half of Dr Hagenstein's order as he cased the place for assassins and snipers and noticed his miniature partner had been administered a narcotic of some time and had fallen asleep in her plate, getting the uneaten portion of her lunch all over her face. Who had done it?  Dr Hagenstein pulls out his hand held rocket launcher which is disguised as a pen and pretends to draw a picture with it while actually preparing to use it on a mysterious chick who suddenly lunges across his table and seizes the butter knife like she knows exactly how to use it. It's the woman from the plane! The enemy agent who attempted to kill him by hassling him over one little drink and expected him to sit sober through an eleven hour flight!  Not this time, Dr Hagenstein laughs and makes a quip and then orders a beer to piss her off without even needing to fire the rocket launcher. His miniature partner sleeps through all the excitement like one of those beloved characters who keep needing Harrison Ford's help to get away from the nazis. The French hostess never brings the rolls or the dessert and Dr Hagenstein suspects her of being in pay of the White Ward or maybe the enemy agent iced her with the butter knife to shut her up, but if so she certainly seems legitimately upset about the dessert. 

Dr Hagenstein; Ye Olde Very British Christmas Sanction

Dr Hagenstein; Ye Olde Very British Christmas 

Sanction

Today's post is part 1 of a blog series, a sort of online graphic novel, which I've created in order to tell the story of our recent trip to the U.K. in a somewhat novel fashion, by not telling the story of our trip at all, because it wouldn't be that interesting, and by telling instead the story of a master superhero on a secret mission to the U.K., and using the graphics I created for our trip to make a cool graphic novel and thereby entertaining the reader without telling all about private family activities that are none of their business anyway. 

The master superhero's name is Doctor Hagenstein. He's a medical doctor who's been outlawed by the AMA because he breaks the rules in very cool ways and is not above icing a scumbag criminal who has it coming and has strange specimens in his secret basement laboratory. He is a member of the Orange  Ward, one of the hidden wards in the Mormon church that'a part of a transhumanist group within the church that believes that if humans want to live forever and become gods their going to have to do it themselves because god doesn't help lazy people. So the bishop of the Orange Ward looks like James Earl Jones and has super mental powers and he assigns Dr Hagenstein on secret missions all the time, like this one to the U.K., where he warns the Doctor that their enemies the White Ward might send an agent to mess up his mission and try to ice him. 

So this week's picture depicts scene 1 of the graphic novel, where the doctor is chilling on the plane with his favorite drink, a gin and tonic, and notices this woman with the eye covers pulled up on her forehead across the aisle from him on the plane, acting suspiciously. The doctor has developed total recall mind techniques, and he can rewind a scene in his head to catch interesting details, and when he rewinds a little he notices that when she had the eye covers over her eyes, and appeared to be sleeping earlier, that she had been turned toward him, so that if she didn't have eye covers she would have staring at him the whole time. Almost as if those weren't normal eye covers, but were actually secret superglasses with magnifying lenses, and she was an enemy agent monitoring his activities and was watching to see how much money the doctor was spending on drinks during the flight!  And it was a nine hour flight for criminey sakes

Security monitor

Security monitor

I feel that I've finally returned to my roots with this week's graphic, at least I've returned to a major branch, back to the heady time of my mid-life crisis, when I was in the full bloom of hypochondriac health, energetic enough to feel relentless anxiety, worrying that I might end up as what I eventually ended up as. I had some sleepless nights let me tell you, pondering weighty questions that I now find completely uninteresting. 

Back in the days when I would spend a lot of time furtively drawing strangers in public places, existing on as much adrenaline as I hope to ever experience, I would have refused to post a drawing this bad, or I would have felt compelled to apologize for the shaky pen strokes and lazy execution and unrecognizable shapes. I had some pride in those days, some standards, but I drew this picture merely to re-live the excitement of secrecy, to feel alive with the possibility that the strangers would notice me drawing them, the terrifying chance that they would approach me and ask to see the drawing, then go glassy eyed and overpolite with disappointment when they saw the pathetic little scrawl that I'd reduced them to.  I had a few moments of this fantasy, then noticed the security camera monitor, displaying my hunched back and crouching shoulders, and the sketchbook in my lap, prominently displayed to the bald man, who seemed to have no interest and no recognition that I was drawing his group at all. Or maybe he could see the picture I was drawing and had already passed through all the stages of realization and disappointment already. I could barely continue the picture after seeing the monitor. I felt that I should have drawn the image of myself in it, and that I'd missed the only meaningful picture that I would get to draw today, and felt a slight glimmer of my old anxiety.  A part of me hoped the restless anxiety and obsessive preoccupation will keep me up tonight, but the other parts of me will drag that part to sleep with the rest of us. 

Smart paper

No picture this week, or rather, a word picture, a design of a picture, a master plan for the ultimate picture. Picture in your mind a graphic novel that is all one picture, that is a huge map folded up like a pop up book origami that you have to unfold to decipher the incredibly complicated story of myself inventing a time machine and going back in time to meet Winston Churchill to help him beat the nazis, except that I'll offer to help him beat the nazis before the war even starts, before they kill anyone. How will I accomplish that? He'll ask. We'll be sitting in a secret English office with a couple of his closest advisers, this office will actually be in that huge house from Downtown abbey, and we'll be eating scones and tea in the earl's library after the prime minister's afternoon nap, and looking out at that huge fantastic lawn with all the intricately trimmed shrubbery. I'll tell Churchill that I'm an inventor who has invented a time machine and a lot of secret weapons and I want to take him back to World War I to kill hitler and help England win the war before they lost millions of soldiers because even though they eventually won anyway they used up a whole generation in senseless trench warfare and had to give up their world empire after WWII. He is astonished to hear about the world empire so I tell him I read all about it and that England experienced a decline due to socialism and I tell him about Harry Potter and he's depressed and about ready to surrender to the Nazis, and he weeps and calls me a dirty liar and spills my teacup on purpose I'm pretty sure so I demonstrate my futuristic technology to him, showing him that my incredibly posh James Bond suit that he told me was cool when we met and wanted one for himself but now I rip a sleeve and show him it's made of paper. You wore a paper suit in England? He says. Are you insane?  Then I demonstrate that my foot is also made of paper by taking it off and folding it into a paper airplane and sending it flying across the earl's library. He is speechless, and I explain that I can only travel in time by sending my consciousness back to occupy a body made entirely of smartpaper, which I invented when I realized that whenever I told anyone my fantastic ideas that they said it would only work on paper and I thought they were being negative but really they were giving me practical advice, so I invented smart paper which you can make anything out of and sent my consciousness back in time. I tell him that I want to take his consciousness back in time to the Dardanelles in 1915, where he will animate a paper Winston Churchill and advise himself in 1915 how to defeat the Turks and the Germans just like he wrote about in his famous books and he asks me about these and I tell him that after every political failure he wrote all these books demonstrating how right he was about everything that nobody else in the government agreed with and made them all go down in history as fools and cowards while he looked good and he got the nobel prize and lived to almost a hundred rich as a king. He thinks about this and says he can't decide which path to take and kicks me out of his office and I go to Austria in 1911 and show hitler comic books and he writes the first graphic novel ever about the Jews and how much he hates Vienna and how wrong everyone but him is and he establishes comic cons everywhere and dies rich at the age of a hundred and beloved by the world. At the end of the graphic novel after you fold out the last hidden corner of the origami you see a secret code that you can use to make your own time machine

The Naked Grid

The Naked Grid

I have chosen to include this piece online, to "publish" it, as the blog app so ingenuously describes it, as self therapy, to expose the failure of my artistic endeavors to the world, and position myself to embrace my reality in a healthy way, without the drugs this time. 

I am naked in this picture. Spiritually naked of course, I would never inflict a physically naked picture of myself on the world, unless I decided to blackmail my family. 

This picture actually exposes self delusion on many levels. First, the viewer finds their eyes drawn to the sloppy grid lines on the book, as the human is drawn to complexity and darkness. But at that point, when they attempt to evaluate the grid lines, they experience a visual revulsion, as their vision recoils from the unpleasantly unaesthetic messiness of the grid lines on the book. Why? They cry out, brows furrowed, body tensed. Why did he do that? And then they take in the pen-holding hand, which at first glance, to the unpracticed viewer seems to look somewhat handlike. They see the level of detail, all the wrinkles in the knuckles, the arrangement of the knuckles, and they realize that this is the only part of the picture actually drawn from life, and that it probably took the "artist" more time to draw this hand than it took him to draw the rest of the picture - even the terrible grid lines on the book. And they look closer and start to see some strange things about this hand. The thumb appears to be completely flat, as if the "woman" in the picture has a paper prosthetic. And the pinky appears to be missing some definition, and the hand might be holding a small baseball where the artist may have intended to depict a palm or something. And then the real problems begin, as the viewer tries to figure out which arm the hand is attached to. The orientation of the hand seems to indicate a very short arm coming from begin the book, but the rudimentary elbow on the other side, attached to a line that might be a shoulder and humerus, suggests a separate route, an arm with a second elbow?  The viewer looks carefully and finally, unwillingly, at the unfinished book, and sees lines that are without a doubt attached to the hand. Is this the missing second arm?  Could it be that the artist has placed a book here to cover this arm? The arm certainly looks to need something, either cover or maybe with a little more effort, repair. Perhaps the artist should use erase able pencils to begin their future pieces, just for the hard stuff, like arms. But maybe the artist tells himself that pens are more honest and immediate, that he's creating something beyond just a perfect mundane illustration, something evocative and meta...ha ha, the viewer laughs and laughs. Honest! Meta! Really? What else does he tell himself? 

Failure Releases us to Dream II

Failure Releases us to Dream II

Why would I give this picture of a smiling old man such a title?  Think of this man, this IT guy, sitting at his cubicle in the basement office as he has sat in many cubicles in many basement offices, for many years, decades. Outside, the sun shines, but here in his ancient space he is in darkness. Why does he smile?  Once he was a young IT guy, healthy and strongly odiferous, full of life, playing dungeon quest at his workstation and repeatedly advising many a computer illiterate prole from the upstairs offices to reboot, reboot, reboot. He joined many dungeon gaming groups and attended many pc hobbyist conventions, and at one of these he encountered his enemy; a tall, good looking, glib and uninspired programmer, a mediocre engineer with a gift for working people, and a mean tendency for sarcasm, everything the IT guy was not. This man mocks him at meetings, mocked his homemade computer in front of his fellow hobbyists, manages to pass himself off as the bigger expert, with his fellow pc hobbyists, fooling them all with his charm. Back then the IT guy smiled and laughed inwardly, mentally preparing himself for a revenge of waiting, of patient forbearance, awaiting the inevitable end to such stories; the parvenu crashes and burns, his walk can't match his talk, he is exposed for his lack of deep knowledge, for the slenderness of his understanding, and they will meet again, at an electronics shop perhaps, where the parvenu works as a salesman, and the IT guy is a famous hacker, regarded with awe at the conventions for his deep understanding of software engineering, of robotics, of Artificial Intelligence. The parvenu cannot meet his eyes, he is embarrassed, hoping the IT guy won't remember his earlier remarks...This vision has sustained him through many years of cubicles in basements, even after it became apparent that the parvenu, now quite rich and well known, would not ever be working in an electronics shop. But the IT guy has held out hope for the basic idea of their reunion in his mind, taking care to never apply for work with the company the parvenu owns, warming himself with the talk of his friends at hobbyist meetings nowadays, who laugh and remember the parvenu back then, and reflect on the sad ignorance of the public and the lies behind all idols. But today he has seen a news item, of a celebrity death. He links, gripped by a compulsion, to the obituary, and reads; "Steven Jobs, Inventor..." the phrase works through his mind, there in the darkness, with the queasy blue light from the monitors playing upon his unkempt beard, and the smell from the young IT guy in the next cubicle beating powerfully into his nostrils, and he decides that this day, today, will be his last day working in this basement. At the moment of this picture, that thought has filled him with an ecstatic joy. He will go now and drive away, into the sunlit mountains, and he will not return. 

Failure Releases us to Dream

I've long longed to move this blog from text and occasional pictures from the sketchbooks into a full web comic, because I have given up on ever creating great or even mediocre art, and I don't like putting descriptive details in my creative writing, which you absolutely have to do to write a compelling story. I personally find descriptive details boring and I think everyone does, but even as I skim the paragraphs describing a room and the person sleeping in the room and the colors and the cat and the shadows on the wall, the half-read paragraph has convinced another more primitive part of my mind to believe in the story. So you have to do it and I don't do it because angry ashamed mumble. 

So I logically decided that if I did comics, I could still draw and wouldn't have to draw well, and I could write and wouldn't have to write the details, and I wouldn't have to write the quotation marks and come up with different ways to say "he said."  Which I find maddening to do even though as a reader I don't even see them or care. 

I have not made the full move to web comic mainly because when I try to draw a few comic panels I begin to over obsess about the memory available on my phone because I don't like to ever delete work in progress because I think I could find a use later and so I horde the half finished pictures and obsess about disk space and so I don't want to start a new picture and run out of space.  And I like to draw pictures by hand with ballpoint pens that take weeks and I prefer to write without using quotation marks or descriptive details. So it will never happen. I am inspired to do a comic:

wandering the wasteland in a cozy bathrobe

Disappointed with this one, seems to need more

The Unfinished Piece with the Long Title to Make up for some of the 1000 words that seem to be Missing

The artist gazed pensively at his work, while a shadow of self doubt clouded the usual rush of childlike satisfaction he felt from finishing a picture. "Maybe," he thought, carefully appraising the awkward lines and jarring clash of randomly chosen inks, "the ballpoint pens are the problem. Perhaps if I used watercolor, people would recognize my genius..."  Reassured, he continued his favorite artistic daydream, where he moved to New York and made friends with woody Allen. And the supernatural turtle continued its ominous approach to the helpless Lego village, under the blessing of the heartless Rainbow Bird, god of painkillers and obsessive bedtime rituals. 

Yes, I chose a fairly long title for this piece,

which I have not finished and may never finish because I'm a little discouraged because I looked on the internet and saw art by someone much much better than me. I would counsel anyone dreaming of life as a famous artist to avoid looking at online art, because unless you are one of the hateful toads who produced the art that I just looked at on line, you will either have to give up your dreams at once or you will have to summon all the vast powers of cognitive dissonance that have fueled your dreams in the first place and pretend the art you just looked at wasn't better than anything you've ever had the remotest chance of producing. Which is possible, totally possible to do because most artists and people in general are much better at disassociating than they are at art. 

So this unfinished piece with the long title, which I will not be repeating within this post, will remain unfinished so that I can pretend that if I did finish it it would be every bit as good as some other people's fancy stuff, a pretentious artist technique invented by the ancient Greeks and perfected by Leonardo da Vinci. With his inventions, not his art. His art that he finished was totally awesome!  But his helicopter would never work, please give up on that. 

So I've decided for like the fiftieth time to give up on my dreams of being a famous artist and to work on becoming a famous writer instead. I've already written a few books worth of funny text messages and monologues about knife safety not to mention all these pointless blog posts, so I'm thinking I'll just stitch them all together and add a meandering plot about a loser who becomes famous for his ball point pen drawings and invents a new martial arts style based on juggling and founds an academy that produces warriors and secret operatives and eventually becomes such an incredible and masterful artist that his drawings of the planar pentoidals come to life and conquer every flat surface on earth. It would begin with the loser sitting in the bathroom writing about his failure as an artist who suddenly gets an incredible idea for a book that he turns into an incredible picture instead because writing is hard and he becomes a famous artist after all and doesn't have to go to work anymore and spends his time at home in his undies and his cozy bathrobe playing triple town and avoiding his email and slowly and patiently acquiring heart disease which he will thwart with magic and jugglitsu judo in single combat in the snowfields Mano a Mano. Good god, I've found a better title!

We've experienced a hiatus in the blog

We've experienced a hiatus in the blog as I've been sorting some personal feelings and frustrations and I'm thinking now that I gave up on the novel way too easily. I gave up on the novel because I didn't like the first few chapters as a reader, and I didn't find them very convincing, even though I already subscribed to the political views they purported to advocate. As a matter of fact, I found myself beginning to lean the other way on the issues, and if your book is so unpersuasive that you convince yourself that you are wrong while you proofread, you should do the parties you're trying to advocate for a favor and say nothing. 

So I gave up on the novel, which was really not a novel at all, but a polemic. And a bad one, as discussed previously. If I began the novel over again, I would leave out the chapter about homosexual socialism and just stick to the story of the cat's health issues and their impact on the main protagonist, named after myself of course. I think, also, that I would omit the love scene with the movie star, as it does not seem to further the plot at all and I just added it to upset my wife after we had an argument. I was hoping she would fly into a jealous rage, but she fell asleep in the middle of my reading, at lunchtime, while we waited in line at the food truck. With those deletions I've gone from 24000 words to 5300, and I've already resolved the protagonist's main conflict, with his mother, over money, by getting him elected President of Mars. I've got nothing more to write about but the puppet show, which I had originally intended to be a kind of demented interlude between each chapter, with scenes of frenzied symbolic violence alternating with the gentle descriptions of late nights working in the stationary shop at the mall. 

It appears as though I was writing about the writings of Paul Theroux in my previous blog posts. I find this focus encouraging.  It means I've been getting enough sleep. Most people don't like writing about writing, finding it too abstract and academic. But I upon reviewing my own blog posts, I find that most of my writing is about what I would rather be writing or about what I previously wrote, so I feel I have made some progress

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