Taking A Break...

Gather 'Round And Sit A Spell

Sittin' and talkin'. Chairs are wonderful contrivances. They allow a measure of relaxation that stops short of unconsciousness and provide relief from the awkward act of shifting from foot to foot (or the urge to lean on things that might tip over). Plus, there is no greater place for the imagination to roam. Folks have told stories and listened to them from chairs long before the days of high technology made communication easier and faster and almost completely void of character.

Back in the day, being invited to "sit a spell" around the General Store potbellied stove was a sign of respect, belonging and acceptance; an invitation made not to prompt the shoveling of hype down people's throats nor to subject listeners to boast after boast. Folks who insisted on doing so were politely thanked and subsequently ignored... or quietly asked to move along. Long silences were common and to be expected; where everyone just stared into the distance watching pipe smoke drift into the rafters and listened to flies buzzing at the windowpanes. Trade was conducted almost as an afterthought and people would come and go as news was shared about families or poly-tishuns. Problems were solved and help was pledged through the dusty light without the need for contracts or handshakes. And as the afternoon pushed on stories were told of days gone by... sometimes time and time again. Either there was a point to the story or there wasn't. Everyone listened just the same. Results were never measured by the number of reposts, shares or likes but with the nod of the head, a simple "Ayuh" or a chuckle and a "reminded-me-of" story of their own.

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The time-out chair. As a kid in grade school I had a teacher called Mr. Pickles. He was a cool guy but one day I yelped loudly after he asked the class to feel the end of a Jack Pine needle in a science lesson, and for some reason he had me sit in a chair in the corner as punishment. This was only the second time I was made to sit facing the corner in my life, seeing as how my parents either didn't believe in "time outs" or didn't have an empty corner that I would fit into. The first time happened years earlier when, as a small fry, I was visiting the elderly neighbors next door. The Simpsons (no, not those Simpsons) had a swinging door between their kitchen and dining room – a remarkable invention to a young, red-blooded tyke and, I was told, one that came with a do-not-swing order that defied the logic of having a swinging door in the first place. After all, why else would it exist? I don't think they were accustomed to having young, energetic children around. As I remember I was never invited back. Perhaps they learned their lesson. They can have their dumb ol' swinging door anyhow.

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Chairs in a circle. I began my career working for an animation company as part of a large crew (large because at that time everything was all hand-drawn and painted on acetate cells, which were laid over watercolor backgrounds and shot one frame at a time). The final production crunch involved extra shifts and hastily assembled desks in a previously empty basement next door for extra painters. One night the power went out during a storm and while everyone waited for it to be restored they gathered their chairs around the light of a single flashlight – found in someone's car. Ultimately, the ghost stories began. Lee, friend and the son of the owner, told the story of waking up one night when he was a kid and seeing the image of a woman from the waist up, dressed in what he could tell was a flowing gown, hovering over the foot of his younger brother's bed. She wasn't doing anything, just floating there quietly gazing down at his brother. This appearance was repeated on subsequent nights. Always the same woman, always the same benevolent gaze. After a period of very little sleep and not sure whether to be scared or not, Lee finally shared the experience with his family who, being a family who was quite open about these things, decided that this woman was his brother's guardian angel – watching over him. Reassured, Lee lost little sleep after that. It freaked out his little brother for a while though.

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Gather 'round. Storytelling is an ancient craft, used for passing along tales, history, culture and information from generation to generation long before the written word existed. It is said that the craft is the most powerful communication tool still today. A story engages us, increases our ability to remember facts and makes it easier to think things through. Plus, it's great fun watching people sit on the edge of their chairs waiting for the story to unfold.

Find yourself politely thanked and subsequently ignored? Perhaps if we're looking for ways of being more effective when we take our chairs around the potbellied stove of the modern world, it might be an idea to take some pointers from days gone by.

How's Your Battery?

Yes – my modelling days are not over.

Doing these made me wonder: what if technology allowed all these messages to be incorporated onto just one shirt that read your energy level and changed as you gained or lost energy during the day? (Sorta like how mood rings worked.) You'd be going along a bit drowsy, showing the "runnin' low" message and then you'd launch into a double espresso or start getting excited about something and your shirt would change to the "soakin' up the juice" message, and so on. It would provide people fair warning of things like when to let you have a nap.

As far as I know the science doesn't exist. A good thing, I suppose, for people who don't consider themselves ruled by either fashion or technology. Although I hear on the news that the Japanese have invented robot dogs that can smell your feet and tell you if you have foot odor. So maybe the know-how to express personal energy levels dynamically on t-shirts is not that far away.

And I got to thinking about how we have grown up in a pop culture where moveable billboards on our chest reveal a bit about who we are, how we think, how we want to think, how with it we are, what team we're rooting for, what beer we drink, what band we'd die for and in some instances how weird we want to be.

It's somewhat remarkable that we human beings would allow our tastes and desires to be defined by what's on our chests. A personal statement born of the "me" generation, I suppose. Perhaps it's an apt form of expression in a world where we sometimes feel we have to hide what's underneath; in our hearts.

Have to go change my socks. Cheers.

Made You Look

Insight is a funny thing. I'm talking about life's truths. Like how to broach the subject of your white shirt tail poking out through your undone pant zipper. Or how you also have a booger hanging down from your left nostril. You can't just come out and say stuff like that. Even in private. That would be... so gauche.

Like how the pattern of your Spider Man pajama top shows through your artistically wrinkled dress shirt; the one with the strategically placed armpit stains. There's your possible feelings of embarrassment over having really bad fish breath to consider. One never knows. Maybe it's not rotten fish at all but you may have a very serious disease. That would explain the green bits in your teeth, wouldn't it? It's not yesterday's spinach after all! And maybe you intended for those cowlicks to stand up like that just on the right side your head. After all, maybe it's none of my business if you're trailing toilet paper out the back of your pants.

Personally I think it's extremely clever how you arranged for half your breakfast to be left in your beard. You're obviously saving it in case you get peckish mid-morning. How very frugal of you! Something to be enlivened with the condiments splattered on your tie (a great collection of ketchup, mustard and hot sauce BTW). I have to remind myself that maybe your wife was up all night with a sick child and was grabbing a much needed few minutes of sleep when you got up this morning and you had to get dressed in the dark so that would explain your mismatched socks; one of which is inside out.

You might assume that because I've already mentioned a few things to you in the past, (like maybe how the wet spot in your pants might be solved with the insertion of a simple adult diaper) that I should speak out again. But then again, maybe you won't take it as well this time. Maybe you'll be shattered. Maybe you'll fall to pieces, your family will disown you and you'll end up in the gutter with a friendly chap named Slime sitting beside you, gazing lovingly at the leftover cheese-flavored doodle snacks in your pant cuffs with his one good eye.

But if I do mention something that leads to me saving you, should you need to be saved, maybe I will have finally found a purpose in life. And I'd have you to thank for that. And you can have a new purpose too, if you want. A rejuvenation. People will go, "Wow, you look great! Here's a bunch of money." And then you'll save the world and win the Pulitzer Peace Prize. And I'll be stuck here wondering about the rightfulness of my actions because you've now become an INSUFFERABLE, POMPOUS GIT.

No, I can't do that to you. I like you too much as you are now.

Ode To A Hippie, Butt Cheek Pocket

"...I got a freaky old lady
Named Cocaine Katy
Who embroiders all my jeans..."
~ Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show

I don't know why I do things sometimes. Nearly forty years ago I threw out an old pair of jeans but before I did I cut off the right butt cheek pocket and I have carted that damned thing around with me ever since. I don't tell you this to infer that when your jeans are dead it's only proper that you should remove its pocket and hold a memorial service where you bow your head and say somber stuff like "It was a good pair of jeans" and sing a hymn or two. I do so as a testament to the fact that I was once as close to being a hippie as you can get without actually being one.

You see, hand embroidery of a butterfly done by a woman on the butt of your jeans is a very hippie-like thing to have happen to you and means you might be very close to actual hippiedom. And back then everyone wanted to be a hippie. 'Cause it was cool. And you got to put two fingers in the air and say "Peace, man" and grow your hair long and get discriminated against because you had long hair and you could sing "Alice's Restaurant" in four part harmony on a city bus without getting busted and scribble peace signs on your jean jacket and stuff like that. And if you were in the right place at the right time there was a period where you got free love. Before that evidently you had to pay for it and after that it became kinda dangerous.

You had your city hippies and you had your country hippies. The city kind went to coffee houses had pictures of Che Guevara on their walls, wore bell bottoms, sandals and tie dye shirts with love beads and patchouli oil, maybe worked at record stores where they were cooler than their customers and said "far out" a lot. And the country hippies maybe were originally from the city but left and went to the country in their VW vans where they joined communes, played Dylan songs around wood stoves, did farming, talked to animals, wrote poetry about deep and meaningful things like the evils of society, made tea out of strange plants and maps for the county where they left off their location so others couldn't find them. But that's another story.

I don't mean to make fun of the hippie culture. Well, okay, I do. But in fact; it introduced a lot of good things to a lot of good people. People who still get a pang when they hear Scott McKenzie's "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair..." or the Beatles' "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band..." If you look past the heavily hyped psychedelic, drug-taking, foul-languaged surface that the media would have you see, you'll find the basic precepts of love, peace and brotherhood. The questioning of traditional middle-class values and the embracing of aspects of eastern philosophies prompted a different way of looking at life. One that said it was okay to be the you that you were meant to be and it was okay to be poor and not have a two car garage and it was also okay to love who you love and one that, I'm sure, would be tickled day-glo pink to have a little fun poked at it.

Fate had it that I was too young for Woodstock and too far away from the whole Haight-Ashbury thing so I missed being a real hippie. But this pocket and the fact that a nice woman did it for me says that maybe there was a little hippie thing in that moment. The good kind.

Sometimes The Muse Shows Up

“There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse.”
~ Sappho

This pic, taken at a summer concert (year unknown but most likely sometime in the mid-70's and probably at Camp Fortune) that I hand tinted in the old fashioned way, is of Jesse Winchester, a song writer and singer and conscientious objector back in the days when people found it necessary to come up to Canada from the States to avoid conscription into the U.S. military. Memphis born and raised, Jimmy Carter gave him a pass in the late seventies and sometime later he moved back home. He's an amazingly modest, plain-spoken man. And during an interview when asked about whether he had any success collaborating on songwriting, he said he spends most of his time writing mistakes before anything good happens and it's hard to share that process with others. His workday begins and sometimes the Muse shows up and sometimes it doesn't.

Which, of course, got me started thinking about Muses. Wikipedia gives this information regarding the phenomenon: The Muses are nine goddesses in Greek mythology who control and symbolize nine types of art known to Ancient Greece, and are associated with artistic inspiration. This is not to be confused with other meanings for MUSE (one of which is an English rock band and another is a brand name for Prostaglandin E1, an erectile dysfunction treatment... which I suppose is yet another incarnation of inspiration).

Ray Bradbury once wrote, “To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.” Which sort of puts the kibosh on the assortment of "How to Summon Your Inner Muse" coaching sites out there. The writers and artists who have an inkling of what creative inspiration is all about, all seem to agree that you can't summon a Muse. You just have to be there when it decides to show up. And she is a fickle character who will grace one person and then leave without warning to favor another. Author John Updike once wrote, “I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.” 

If you recognize the role or the influence of the Muse in creative work, or if you've ever been lucky enough to have the magic happen to you... after hours, even years... for no special rhyme or reason – you're apt to give the creative Muse her due. There is no formula, no spell to recite to elicit the adornment of her powers. But once she arrives the effect is remarkable. And the memory of her grace is electric. It's a moment that makes time stand still. Where those who witness the inspiration will forget to breathe for a split second. Or a minute. Or more.

Mother's Day

Give a guy a digital version of old home movies, access to iMovie and some time to play and this is what happens... my apologies to Capra, Kazan, Scorsese, Coppola and Lucas. (And yes, the little guy getting his new slippers put on is yours truly.)

My Feet Were Here

I shouldn't read people's reasons about why other people shouldn't bother to write blogs. Because it can be disheartening. Some call it narcissistic clap trap. They say the only reason people have a blog is because they love themselves so much that even their crap is gold. Or they say people write blogs just for self aggrandizing purposes. To prove their superiority. Or they write just to bitch and vent at an unfair world. Or to prove their astounding leadership capabilities.

And some people do that. They repeat stuff they hear from other sources, reinforce their importance through recognizing the words of others as their own. These are people who figure they should be greater than they really are. But like everything in life, these would be the minority.

Then there are people who write blogs to keep the wheels turning, to push themselves to learn, to explore, to share something they feel of worth (and not necessarily of monetary value). These are the blogs that don't have advertising, whose content doesn't try to promote their services or those of others, who don't set out to prove how great they are. It isn't their intent to impress. These are the ones you find that try to make a little sense, to share a small thought. These people tell stories, make you laugh, attempt to find some reason in what can be a very unreasonable world at times. Or to poke some fun at the stupid stuff around us.

Google Analytics - Rand's Place visits to date for the year 2013

If we figure our net worth by how much of an impression we make on the world around us, our true imprint (when we're standing anyway) is the area the bottom of our shoes block from the sun. But in this day of internet communications, to a guy that grew up with dinky toys and a sandbox, it's amazing that something that I do or draw or think can be shared with people in every continent in the world. From Beirut to Kuala Lumpur. Copenhagen and London to San Antonio to Sao Paulo. Syndey. Cape Town. Aukland. Ho Chi Minh City. Some places I've never heard of (where the heck is Toronto?) and people I would never hope to share anything with in pre-internet times. How wild is that?

So thanks for visiting. And rest assured, the posts here are not meant to prove I'm anything other than what I am, warts and all. I try to throw around no more weight than can be stuffed into my size tens. Know of other sites that do the same? Feel free to share!

Everything Is Tragic, And Nothing Is.

It was the most important date in Pam's entire life. John was supposed to pick up Pam for their date at seven, but it was going on seven-fifteen and he wasn't there yet. He was never late, she thought. This proved he was secretly seeing Jessica, Pam thought, otherwise why else would he be so late? She paced the floor of her bedroom in her nicest flowered dress, the one with the lace. The one he liked. They had been going to the malt shop and then to the Lakeview Drive-In to see the new Elvis movie, Girls Girls Girls.

Every time she heard a car she raced to her window to see if his red car, the one he loved so much, was coming down Apple Blossom Avenue. The way he always came....

Unbeknownst to Pam, John had been was on his way to Pam's house but nineteen minutes ago, at six-fifty-three, he swerved to avoid hitting a kitten owned by the widow Mrs. Abernathy, who ran the local Welcome Wagon and sang in the church choir beside the hunchbacked Julie Forsythe, whom she'd been secretly in love with since grade school. John's '57 Chevy had left the road, smashed through a wooden barrier and dove over a cliff.

Pam, thinking of John in Jessica's arms, threw herself on her bed and sobbed into her pillow. She was sure her life was over.

Meanwhile, the cold river water at the bottom of the cliff swirled into the car's interior through the broken windshield, rousing John from his unconsciousness. Still in a stupor, he fumbled with the door latch, but the door was jammed. The water rose quickly to his chin and as he took what might be his last breath, he thought of Pam's smile, her warm embrace and of the engagement ring from Liecherstein Jewelers in the pocket of his jacket.

The fins of his beloved Chevy disappeared below the dark, inky waves.

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About the visuals: Glass slide mounts provide frames for small, hand-drawn retro romance comic art. Pins glued to the back make them wearable... an old project.