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.

Drawing of the Three; part 1

There haven't been any sklogs lately or even updates to this ancillary author's notes kind of half-arsed blog because the hagenart staff has been in a kind of mid-life crisis which consists of being overcome with angst about the inevitability of death and the decline of American values. I've also come to recognize that all effort is futile and that all those people that maintain real blogs with all those posts and research and blogosphere concerns are almost certainly mentally ill and should qualify for state assistance. It's just too much work, and seriously, for what? I myself only read comic books now. So I've decided that from this entry on this blog will be dedicated to a serious purpose, not just random nonsense. The serious purpose will either be a daily log of my experiences as a parent or a kind of home fixer upper type journal of my planned renovation/development of my backyard and crawlspace.
Another idea just hit me: the world's longest novel! I'll have to find out what the current record holder is..Since all three ideas are very good ones, I've decided to alternate the entries between the three themes until one wins out by popular vote or if I get tired of the other ideas.

Fish Lake III: End of the Journey

Randall met Kit Prug in the Fish Lake lodge, coming out of the bathroom where he'd accomplished his natural thing despite having the door of his stall kicked and rattled by some rotten little kid with muddy socks and no shoes who's father kept opening the lavatory door and asking him if he'd finished yet, loudly so as make Randall feel bad for using the stall for such an extended period of time. The little kid with muddy socks had kept saying no to his father and knocking on the door of the stall and shaking it and peeking underneath to make sure there was really someone in there, and Randall had enjoyed taking an abnormally long time.

He came out and smiled at the father with the fish lake lodge baseball cap and the weaselly eyes who didn't even look at him and walked through the big empty dining room and wondered if they were still waiting for him on the boat moared secretly in the weeds where the people on the dock couldn't see it because the Cap'n preferred secrecy and not paying fees for anything or if they'd given up and cast off and gone back out on the lake, leaving him to drink in the lodge all alone the rest of the day. As Randall enjoyed this daydream he passed the little store in the lodge and saw the Cap'n purchasing more cheap beer, and he sighed and sat down on a bench cut out of logs like everything else in the lodge so as to give visitors that old-timey camping feel when they came to purchase their candy and bait and beer and post-cards and plastic mounted singing fish, and the other person sitting on the bench was Kit Prug, who turned to Randall and said hello.

"Nice day, isn't it?" Kit Prug said to Randall. "If you like it a little rainy."
"Most people don't," Randall replied, trying to be funny because he felt threatened. He noticed that Kit Prug had a fairly large nose and cheap sherlock holmes-type hat.
"Yes indeed, they don't. Mostly they don't," replied Kit Prug, staring off into space. Randall tried not to keep looking at the sixties-style illustration on Kit Prug's t-shirt, a blonde pinup holding a coca cola. He usually avoided men who wore t-shirts or had tattoos of beautiful women. Did they want other men to look at them? "I have a theory," Kit Prug finally continued, "that people who like rain like it out of dread of outdoor events."
"Like agorophobia," Randall said.
"No," Kit Prug said. "Because they fear having to participate in any kind of sports or social events where they may be tested, and the rain causes postponements."
"I like outdoor events," Randall lied.
"You say that because you like rain?" He suddenly seemed eager, eyes sharp and glinty with excitement. "I thought so. I can read people. It's my gift." He said the word, 'gift', with a shiny far away look in his eyes. Randall's stomach, the seat of his consciousness, roiled with alarm. It looked as if the stranger in the silly hat might continue for some time.
"Looks like my friend is ready to go," Randall said, standing and pointing at the store with an apologetic smile. The Cap'n was examining the singing carp toy with a thoughtful, discerning frown. He appeared to be looking it over for a price tag.
Kit Prug looked back at him without speaking, somewhat sheepishly, as Randall hurried into the store and was immediately confronted by the short but powerfully built woman behind the till.
"Was Kit bothering you?" she asked sharply.
"Oh, no, not at all, I enjoyed our talk," Randall stuttered. She appeared very capable of embarassing confrontation and violence, and Randall feared both and had always found rain to be a blessed relief, especially in the summertime, on school days, and felt the urgent need to do his natural thing again.

On the way out of the lodge with the Cap'n clutching his new carp and cursing the overcast sky, Kit Prug accosted them and handed Randall a business card that would not change his life except for a few awkward social encounters where it provided a slightly amusing story.

Fish Lake Strikes Back; Fish Lake Oddysey Part II

Randall decided not to immediately tell the Capn or the others about having to do his natural thing. He knew that eventually he would have to tell them about it, because nature is relentless and the need for the natural thing would only get worse, and the only way he could avoid having to eventually tell them would be if they all suddenly decided to give up on the fishing and tear off back to shore before he was compelled to tell them about it, or perhaps if one of them suddenly felt the need to do their natural thing, and would not be reticent about it, would be a sort of champion of the natural thing for Randall's sake, without ever knowing that they were doing it for Randall's sake, but thinking they were only doing it for their own sake...so that Randall would not have to tell everyone about his need and would also not have to feel beholden to any possible natural thing champion.

And of course that would not happen, because it had never happened, in any of the many instances where Randall as a member of a group in a situation where restrooms were inaccessible except by concerted group exertion and unhappiness and where as a result Randall's need for his natural thing had manifested its amazingly inconvenient self like a secret baby that cried and cried to Randall and that he kept trying to shush, and never in all those circumstances had any champion of the natural thing declared themselves and always the baby had cried and cried louder and louder and shrieked and howled and finally Randall had been forced to clear his throat and mention that he would probably have to do his natural thing at some point in time not too distant from the present.

Didn't anyone else ever have to do their natural thing? Was everyone else in the world clanging around with innards of steel? There had to be others in the group, Randall decided, who had their own babies to quiet, their own imperative need to do their natural thing but who maybe had their own reasons to keep quiet. Maybe they were congenitally unable to inconvenience a group of people with their own biological situation, like the famous astronomer who died of ruptured bowels rather than tell the king he had to use the bathroom. Perhaps all this time that he'd been suffering humiliation and guilt for the intrusions of his natural thing, there'd been others in the groups, suffering irreparable internal damage, slowly but quietly, and to whom his announcement of his natural thing had been a blessed miracle, an unbelievable deliverance from unfathomable levels of self-induced mortification and discomfort. Why, they might secretly worship him as their champion of the natural thing, who feared no level of mockery and scoffed at the cruel jibes of the bowelless, willing to go to any level of debasement, to be the butt of a million tasteless jokes, in order that some quiet sufferers might get unearned relief.

Randall felt a burst of glowing pride, tears started in his eyes, the internal weeping grew faint, and he began to rise proudly to his feet. He had a declaration to make.

"Sit down, what are you doing? You're rocking the boat!" said the other Passenger sharply.

"You need another beer?" said the Capn. "Take it easy, I'll get it."

"I have to go to the bathroom," said the First Mate.

Fish Lake Oddyssey; Un Novellette

Whenever Randall thought of Fish Lake, he thought of the trees, lots of them, crowding against the shore as if they were about to jump in, like pilgrims at the banks of the Ganges, or Ganghes, or however it's spelled. But they didn't jump in - they were trees, and were hardly about to start moving around, why did he have such thoughts?

The trees also reminded him of the time that he'd been out on the lake with his father and had to go do his natural thing, and when he told his father his father couldn't believe it, and sighed and looked up at the sky for some kind of sign, maybe for an angel to descend out of the sky and hover over their boat and tell him that it was all right if he wanted to hold his son over the edge of the boat and let him do his natural thing into the lake, nobody was watching... But no angel came down and his father grumped and told his older brother Rick to pull in his line, and his older brother Rick cried "What? Why?" and when he heard why he lunged across the boat to slug Randall in the arm and their father squawked and tried to karate chop Rick's arm and missed and stumbled and hurt his shin on one of the planks they had to sit on and he made a sound like a tire hissing and then he took off his hat to smite Rick and missed and caught his thumb in one of the little hooks in his fisherman's hat just like the TV show dads.

"Ga-Ah-Ah!...Rick!" he hissed between his teeth. "Just pull in the line!"

They pulled in their lines and then their father picked some things up and put them down in other places, and moved his tackle box, and manuevered their fishing poles around and shook his head and grumbled and picked up one of the fishing poles and put it down somewhere else and he told Rick to sit back down and he told Randall to move a little left and Randall looked at him and he told him to move again and Randall moved right and their father told him to move back and he leaned backward and their father made a sound like a tire hissing and told him to just stay where the hell he was and then he told Rick to sit back down and he made Rick move the cooler down below his seat and then he told Randall to hold on and he crouched by the motor and unhooked something and pulled something down lower out a little and then he pulled on the cord and the motor didn't start so he did it a few more times, and his hat fell off and his hair stood up in a manner undignified for a man with receding hair and Randall tried very hard to stifle a laugh and Rick hit him and the motor started for just a second and then it stopped and Rick stood up again and told their father that he had to choke it and their father suggested something else he could choke and told him to sit back down. But he did apparently choke it because then the motor started and he revved it up and checked something and told Rick to sit down and told Randall to hold on and the boat started off with the motor revving and roaring like they were going 100 miles and hour but they were doing about 15 but Randall found it thrilling and enjoyed the spray of water but only too soon their father let the motor die down and they drifted.

Randall could see the trees of the East shore only twenty yards away, slowly drifting closer and closer. Their father had a paddle out and was sweating and huffing and splashing and the boat moved very slowly toward the trees.

As they approached the trees and the shore, Rick let fly a remark suggesting the possibility that there might be bears in the trees, and suggested Randall carry a couple rocks in with him.
"There's no bears," their father said, gasping and panting. The approaching trees took on a looming, darkening aspect as Randall considered the possibility of the bears. They were a few yards from the shore when Randall suggested that he'd rather go use the bathrooms in the lodge. Their father responded by swatting Rick with his own baseball hat, an impressive maneuver that caught both boys by surprise by its misdirection.

"Rick! Go with him!"

Their father clambered up to the front of the boat and hopped into the shallow water and held the boat by a rope and told Rick to climb onto a nearby rock and Rick clambered onto the rock and Randall asked if he could move the boat around the rock so that he could hop onto the shore and his father assured him that they couldn't and told him to climb out and Rick shouted for Randall to hurry and Randall asked if they could move around to the other side and his voice took on a higher pitch that signified panic and his father spoke soothingly and held out his free hand to give him a boost and Randall ended up clambering onto his father's back and putting a shoe into his kidney and scrabbled onto the rock and up the slope to where Rick had already turned and started into the bushes and told Randall to go over to the other bushes and no he couldn't use the same bush and Randall found a bush and began to do his natural thing and looked up and could see another fishing boat clearly through a gap in the trees about twenty yards away.

Now adult, Randall smiled and sighed at the memory and shook his head when Captain Lance asked him what was so funny and tugged on his pole a little and looked out over the lake and dug on the natural beauty all around him and reflected on the bittersweetness of memory and the past and time and smiled at the First Mate and the other Passenger tossed back another big gulp of his Cold One and realized that now all of the sudden he had to do his natural thing.

Dream 1: Mickey Mouse is Real (from Hagenart's Five Favorite Dreams)

This dream occurred during a family party at my parents' home. I believe I was living at home at the time, in 1991. I had to use the bathroom, and went downstairs to use the restroom in the basement. My nephews were watching TV and trying to pull the arms off a stuffed gorilla which I'd given to my mother for Christmas a few years previously. I went into the bathroom, and discovered that whichever nephew had previously used it had not flushed the toilet. Sharply annoyed, I flushed the toilet and imagined dropping the nephew head-first into the bowl. As I used the bathroom, a plastic sword emerged from under the bathroom door.
"Who's that?" I said. Then I heard a thud like someone's forehead hitting the door, and the sword slid free, a foot or so forward from the door. A moment later, a tiny hand reached under the door jamb, trying to reach the sword, unsuccessfully. I flushed the toilet and grabbed the sword, gently poking at the tiny hand with its tip. The hand retracted with a squawk.

When I emerged from the bathroom with the sword in hand, no nephew was in sight. I walked down the hall to the family room, where all three nephews were watching TV. "Whose sword is this?" I asked. None of them replied. I put the sword on the table at the end of the room and walked back down the hall to my bedroom. It occurred to me as I walked down the hall that the sword belonged to Mickey Mouse. I laid down on my bed and realized that it had been a long time since I had taken a moment to sit or lay down and do nothing. It had been days, maybe weeks, maybe months. It felt good to lay on the bed and do nothing and not think about what I should be doing. At that moment it occurred to me that Mickey Mouse had given the sword to me. It was getting dark outside, but I did not turn out the light. The room became dim, and at that moment I realized that Mickey Mouse was as real as I myself was. I realized that all the characters in all the cartoons were real. I felt that I myself was a cartoon. This realization gave me profound peace.

I eventually walked back down the hall and saw the nephews running up the stairs. My sister was calling for them get in the car. I looked for the sword on the table but someone had taken it. I assumed one of my nephews had grabbed it, but when I went upstairs and asked my sister about the plastic sword she furrowed her brow and looked confused. "I don't think so," she said. "I don't know."

That night I dreamt that had an enormously long right leg and that my right foot had giant wheels like a tractor and I skated everywhere on it. The tall witch on the tricycle could not prevail upon me and everything I touched turned to plastic.

Interpretation:
The nephews symbolize family fertility, nature, and also filth and bugs. The plastic sword represents the sterile beauty of commercialism. I claimed the sword as a mission to protect the world from all monsters that can be killed or scared off by dull-edged weapons. The bathroom indicates my tower, my refuge of strength and security. The toilet was not flushed because nature is unreliable and has terrible manners. Mickey Mouse is real. My intense vision-like moment of crystal realization symbolizes what a great idea might feel like to a genius like Einstein or Archimedes. The plastic sword's disappearance indicates that I have sneaky nephews. The giant right foot in my dream symbolizes cool ideas that may someday be possible with advances in prosthetic technology.