Blog Post #500

It is a day like many others. Denise and I went to pick up her Bountiful Basket order and then we went to the gym nearby and then we went to restaurant nearby and then we went home. She took the recycling to the recycling bins on Camino Real and I worked on five-minute portraiture. Ultimately we went to our respective caves to work on art and Art. She has published her latest post, “Mandalas,” and I am working on mine, “Blog Post #500.” The software is taking forever to upload my image, though it is a mere 150K or so.

So I’ll save this in draft after finishing the text, which includes this transcription of the post’s eponymous triple acrostic:

Bedeviled by the Telescum–perhaps they have my number
But here’s a fine true path to keep to boast a most high number
Loose fingers take me to a parlor shopping for a new five
Let’s do licentiousness 4 times–God knows you cannot do five
O do not look for Rhyme nor Rules: for you will find here zero
Got Truth? Got lots, good friend, but Hitting Home I put near zero

Later: opened the saved draft; used “Add Media” to upload the image, which seems a bit blurred but that’s OK; added tags that included “truth,” “rhyme,” “creative process,” and “blog posting,” but not “Telescum,” for that is a word I made up, though it may already have been created unbeknownst to me. Will now post this historic piece, Share it on Twitter and Facebook, and then invite my dear Denise to celebrate life and love.

They Happened Last Night

Here’s a meld of two sketches I made last night, doing my Night Clerk duty of staying awake and alert, routine tasks to that point finished. There’s a symbol that seems a bit derivative of the new Superman chest adornment and there’s a nine-minute flash portraiture foray that seems a bit off, Wallace-Shawn-wise. Try, try again!

Snowden, Francis, Mandela

The Portraiture Practice continues. Meanwhile, my Glendale High School classmate Vicki has commissioned a $5, 5-minute portrait, which I’m guessing will be a present for her devoted husband Ric. She says “no rush” so I’ll get a lot more practice in before I do hers!

Pet Ownership/Owned Pettership

The great majority of pet owners are owned by their pets. This is usually a satisfactory arrangement.

For a change and for the sake of a less busy composition, I excluded most of the text of my two acrostic poems from the image, but the complete poems are here:

Pet Ownership

Pooches, kitties, even ferrets make a home ho-ho
Periwinkle dusks are calmed with Spot or Puff in tow
Presents are less tense and savor comes with what is sown

Easy does a daily stroll that helps two hearts cohere
Equanimity and trust–a modicum of cheer
Elegance of passing time and quell of mortal fears

There’s a wordless closeness that’s surprising in its depth
Tantalizing glimpses of a heaven’s stair to step–I
Thank the Cosmos for these beasties of contagious pep

Owned Pettership

Owlish eyes of impish cat watch for a treat to drop
Oven-baked or rawly sliced or purchased in a Shoppe

Wistful calf-rub, raucous meow but dignity intact
Waitlessness will yield a softie’s morsel–that’s a fact

Now it’s time for dinner and perhaps some scraps to share
Nighttime brings a shed of clothing down to underwear

Early morning wants a meal that need not be foie gras
Ecstasy is wet food but the dry is strictly blah

Dressiness is optional: Milady goes capri
Dare she sit? Mifurry wants her Lap–L-E-A-P

Tensile Voltage in the Graphite Continuum

Here are two scrap-paper sketches and the very top of a third, done last night as “what can this pencil do?” exercises.

Portraiture Prep School

There’s a distinct possibility that I’ll be setting up a table at the Village Gallery for $5 5-minute portraits. It was discussed at the Management Committee meeting last week, and it will probably come up at the general meeting this evening. So I’m prepping; and lucky for me, a recent TIME Magazine featured “100 Influential People.” Last night I spent an hour doing this page. I averaged fairly close to five minutes per subject. (I did better with some than with others, but I’ll keep practicing…)

So–if you are in the near vicinity of the Village of Oak Creek on the evening of Friday, June 6, and you have five bucks to spare, and you want a souvenir of a five-minute visit with yours truly…come on over to the Village Gallery! [smiles]

Thrice Retold Untold Golden Secret

“It was meant not to convince but to confound.” –Rex Stout

The new druggist needs
His two atenolol w/juice
Roger settled w/Vic
In his goodbye letter
Clay is illegally sane
Earth’s oddness its gift

b. longstreet vs. the evil whisper (Flash Fiction)

A few weeks ago my friend Robbie created a flash fiction group in Facebook and invited me to join it. I did, but have made only one contribution so far. This will be my second. It may help to know that Sydney Greenstreet was the actor in THE MALTESE FALCON that Sam Spade, Humphrey Bogart’s character, referred to as “Fat Man,” and that John F. Long was a builder of affordable homes in the Valley of the Sun, and was at least partially responsible for the Valley’s explosive growth.

b. longstreet vs. the evil whisper

once upon never b. for bee longstreet, the hermaphroditic child of sidney greenstreet and john f. long via whimsical genetic misadventure, found his&herself on cave creek road, on that long long stretch with the commodious sidewalk.

the evil whisper “you can do nothing” bounced around in that gender-blended head. “that’s not true,” b. kept answering it. “i can walk, i can walk, i can walk. and i shall ouija walk.” (b. called walks where b. allowed herhis feet to go where they will “ouija walks” because it was as if b. were the pointer of a ouija board seeking through the subether vorticular places/events.)

82 minutes of ouijawalking led b. to a storefront window of a pet grooming parlor, behind which was a laundry-lint-gray kitten with an expression of perpetual mild confusion. “that is a nice-looking thing,” said the evil whisper. “but you can do nothing.”

“that’s not true,” b. replied. “i note the address. i shall pet the kitten to-morrow.” b. then bade herforthemoment’s feet continue. in another nine minutes b. stood before a burning automobile, with no one inside and no one around.

“life is random, and so are you,” rasped the evil whisper. “NOT SO,” replied himthen immediately. “i may be misbegotten, but i was deliberately made. and as a creature brought to be, i have the power of…” b. was stuck. this is what its whole life had led to. the right word of power would work; the wrong one would betoken doom and failure.

as in a ouija message, the correct word burst forth with spontaneous combustion:

“DELIBERATION!!!”

and with that perfect word, the evil whisper vanished, never to be heard again, and B. Longstreet, Representative At Large for Humanity, was freed.

Blast from the Past of a Blast from the Past

Here’s one from my very early art-journaling days, more than seven years ago. I was using a Sharpie Ultrafine (or was it Microfine?) on a notebook my sweet daughter Kate gave me for Christmas. Note the smiley-face shield in the middle.

Here are the words to the single acrostic:

The ship and crew were viking
A stiff wind stretched the sail
The weather to their liking
The gleam of shield and mail.
Eyes squinting, tearing, blinking red,
Rows blister hands, moans tell of dread,
Still gladly wayward, and not dead.

TO Index Cards, ON an Index Card

I just love Index Cards, so much so that I think of them as friends, as benevolent messengers, as the Type O Blood of information conveyance. They go in pockets, on refrigerators, in those nifty little metal boxes with the cute dividers. They are big enough to contain the hugest ideas. Write small enough and you can put a decent-sized short story on one. They’re great for five-minute portraiture, ten-minute dream capture, fifteen-minute landscapes, sixty-minute meeting minutes. For reminders, Valentines, plot outlines, and affirmations they are hard to beat. So here’s to ’em:

It’s RED WHITE & BLUE on one side–the other blanc
N is for NOTES or NOTIONS or NOSTALGIA
Dreams need not fade if this & a pencil serve as recorder
Edifying, talking points, & love may be conveyed
Xylophone music written & drawn with gravitic graphitic pyrotechnics

Special thanks and manifold gratitude to my Sweetheart, Denise, for not only introducing me to the Index Card Project but also for giving me a pack of 100 cards, one of which I used for this post. Sweetheart, special as they are, the entire pack of cards could not thoroughly describe your wonderfulness!