41, the picture post

Edited to add the pictures I settled on.

41 hasn’t been much of anything, corporeal-form-wise. I didn’t get softer or firmer, my heart and knees complained about my minor cardio workouts, my cheeks haven’t collapsed completely into my neck yet, thanks to being held up by a mask for most of the year. My worry lines are deeper, my smile lines aren’t. That’s probably no good.

I think I got my aging crisis out of the way in my 20s. I don’t have anything to do now but raise these kids and paint until my arms fall off.

—-

And here is a picture Harris sent of us as teenagers, which got me very sad about everyone from the old Molokai gang scattering to the wind. Maybe in this decade of our middle age we should make a point of traveling a bit and getting coffee together in our various cities, okay?

This is Harris now, btw. He’s a rock star in Portugal.

Yeah, well I’m a gallery artist in Hawaii, so HA. SAME THING. 

At the cool kids’ table

The show is happening. There will be an online tour and purchase options, though thankfully I’m not the person who has to handle any of that. Imagine trying to figure out how to ship a 20lb hand-blown glass sea turtle. Yikes.

The show runs from next week to January 10th at the Downtown Art Center. Which looks like this:

The ‘Mac and Me’ episode of MST3K has gotten a lot of airtime in our house.

I’ll be there in person one day to handle sales/collar international art thieves. We had a zoom meeting last night, and I was the only person who had never been in a real show before, so they were all chatting about liability forms and label formats and I just smiled and sat very still because my questions were like, Do we hang them on... nails? 

When called on to speak I said:

“I'm a librarian.”

“I like to paint."

 

 Yeah, I'm having an adventure.

 

How’s the pandemic going?

We opened the library back up to public rummaging last week, and for the first two days I was very tense and clenched-jawed, watching them finger paint my workspace with germs. Half of them fake the hand sanitizer, the way they bump an empty fist over the donation box when taking .25 paperbacks. By Thursday none of it bothered me anymore. If my job was to let them lick me like puppies I’d probably be resigned to it in 3 days. 

Mjolnir is doing better after a couple of iffy days. I promised him the entire turkey skin if he makes it through Thanksgiving, and he's prepared to hold me to it. That's my good boy.

galleries and grenades

I've been having feelings of sadness and existential futility. The patrons are cranky, the house is full of restless people, and the cat is still dying. He's trotting around well enough right now, but looks to be on track to need a compassionate end just in time for Christmas, which will break Gavin's heart. Then I'll be making payments to have a dead cat until the vet bills are paid off. It's all no good.

Mjolnir smooching up Droopy

So this week my old bronze instructor, who is active in the downtown galleries, posted a call for 15-30 artists to do a popup gallery show, and I sent a message to say I'm in. Opt for adventure, etc. Maybe I could sell enough to pay off the vet bill. But it’s been a few days and she hasn’t replied, so I’m wondering if they’re waiting to see how many cool kids sit at the table before deciding if there’s room for me. The Honolulu art scene is dominated by pop graffiti, abstract textiles, and surf/dolphins - while my art has been described (not unkindly) as, “old stuff my nana would hang in her kitchen”. I'm not on tenterhooks, but I have mixed feelings about this stuff. 

Whatever. 

Please like me.

I went down to the studio (basement), half considering throwing all my old shit into a garbage bag, and found an egg hidden behind my still life drapery. Evidence of a chicken burglar breaking in, looking for paint to snack on. We call these old eggs "grenades", because after a month or two they fill with gas and become incredibly light and fragile. The slightest touch might cause them to pop and fill the area with rotting egg stink. The kids lob these into the gulch behind my mother's house when the wild chickens leave them around her patio, but at our house we have neighbors on all sides. I'd love to lob them at the screaming kids across the street, but there are too many security cameras on our block to get away with it. So I put the grenade carefully on the garage shelf to wait for garbage day. This morning I heard the garbage truck rumbling around the neighborhood and ran out in my pajamas to get the bin to the curb, saw the egg, and gently tried to place it on top of the garbage bags. It rolled off and exploded. Dropped the lid down and ran the bin to the curb in a cloud of rotten egg gas, where of course the garbage truck has still not picked it up. It's just sitting there, oozing stink. If anyone goes jogging by they will drop dead in front of my house. It is not good for our curb appeal.

Bonus content: here is Droopy invalidating the return policy on our new set of dishes.

Edited to add: just after posting this I got the word that I’m in. I get a gallery spot in Honolulu for a month. Take that, crippling self doubt!

books and bodies

The tension in the air is causing molecular vibrations that shimmy everyone's masks down under their fucking noses. Patrons are even more pissed than usual that the library isn’t open for rummaging, as if the pandemic has been cancelled until the election is over.

"Well, WHEN WILL THINGS BE BACK TO NORMAL?"

"I don't know, maybe when the case numbers start going down?" 

"STORES are open!"

"Stores don't share stuff people have been reading on the toilet?" Also, there are bouncers at the doors of every store, and restaurants have blocked the entrances with tables and registers, so it's not exactly a picture of normalcy out there.

I can find you a book to hide in for a while, though. And you don't even have to pull up your mask; I know how to throw a frisbee.

- - -

Driving through town, another homeless man was dead on the sidewalk outside the hardware store. Passersby were nudging him with their toes. Traffic slowed as an ambulance and a police car pulled up. Three EMTs and a police officer got out, walked around the body solemnly, and knelt down to check for a pulse. Suddenly the dead man's arm came up and started slapping them in the face like a garden hose. 

 

It was beautiful. Sorry for laughing so much as I drove by, first responders. 

Halloween 2020

We tried decorating the house, but the orange lights sparked and tried to electrocute us, and the cats ate the novelty spider webs. I know this because after disentangling two of them from the windows, they left the litter box trailing threads from their butts like the very worst kinds of spiders. Artificial webbing has officially been added to the banned decorations list, right under tinsel - and for the same reason. *

Nobody knew what was happening. The mayor didn’t cancel Halloween, but trick or treating was officially discouraged, so we arrived at my mother’s house with pie and jack o’ lantern, ready for a family dinner and spooky movie but half expecting hordes of candy-goers anyway. The neighborhood was dark and all the families with children were missing. 

My mother made a plague-safe candy delivery system out of a broom handle with a skeletal hand in a rubber glove wired to the end, and used it only three times throughout the evening to drop candy into optimistic buckets. “I’m a panda, but my costume was too hot,” said a teenager with black and white fur bunched around his waist, “So now I’m a skinned panda.” He got extra Milky Ways.

While we were watching the House with a Clock in its Walls, the next door neighbor called the fire department on our pumpkin. The fire truck pulled up, some tired-looking firemen climbed out, determined that the pumpkins were lit with batteries, asked if she was feeling okay, and then left. HA.

CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT 

The normally three-Costco-bags-of-candy neighborhood, eerily empty

Jello brains and the traditional Cat Foot Pie (pie that a cat has stepped in while we had our backs turned. That piece goes to the chickens.)

We were relieved the neighborhood played it safe, and a bit unnerved by the empty roads and dark windows. It added extra spoopiness to a strange year.

*No cats have been harmed - all decorations have been successfully pooped out with no bowel injury, and kids have been taught why it's not safe to pull on anything dangling out of an animal's bum.

Nothing in this Way of Use to Mankind

Showed up at work in full costume, and all my coworkers had forgotten it was Halloween. 

By now I have learned that it is more embarrassing being the only person wearing a sad novelty headband than it is to be the only person fully kitted out in a head-to-toe costume. I have commandeered the candy bucket, and everyone is going to have a happy Halloween or they’ll get the pointy end of my shoe.

 

Tulip

This flower kicked my butt. I wasted a lot of paint and wiped out hours of work before getting a halfway decent likeness of it. The highlights make me so mad, because I really dislike high-chroma color but it was there, and I couldn't make myself not paint it that way.

Should have asked for a different color when my mother texted me from the Safeway flower section after listening to me rant about the Dutch tulip mania over Sunday dinner. Yellow tulips wouldn't have tricked me into wasting so much $25/tube cadmium. A parrot tulip would be even better, but the pacific islands aren’t exactly a hotbed of bulb trading. Never going to be a 17th century Dutch master at this rate. 

Better stick to painting cheesecake.

stupid vital organs

In the middle of the night, a tea set and a metal food scale leaped off the fridge and smashed all over the floor, causing us to jump straight up out of bed and run into the kitchen. My heart DID NOT LIKE THIS. It took 4 tries to get back into bed and lay down, because I kept having to kneel and put my forehead on the floor to stop from fainting. It's a barfy, cold, muffle-eared feeling that I hate a lot. "If I wake up dead I'm going to be so pissed. Killed by a teacup." And whichever cat was exploring the top of the fridge at 12:30am.

 

probably this guy 

Ever since my doctor discovered my heart murmur a year ago- with the comprehensive advice to go to the ER if I start dying- I've been taking my heart-healthy vitamins and doing sad cardio workouts to defend against dropping dead when something jolts me awake in the middle of the night, and so far I WIN. Nice try, Droopy.

Still got sent to the hospital for an EKG and an echocardiogram, though.

It’s uncomfortable admitting to having an “underlying health issue”, because then if you die people act like you’re okay with being dead. Like if your brakes squeak, then nobody should feel bad when someone runs you off the road and your brakes fail and you crash into a tree and your car explodes. Ah, but she had those underlying brake issues, it was probably to be expected. Well, I do not expect to drop dead of a minor heart murmur, and I am not okay with it. I’m going to live to be 100 years old, powered by gristle and spite.

- - -

And because I don’t want that to be the last thing I talk about, here I am posing for reference pictures for an illustration I completely ruined.

Dressing up is fun but also depressing, because fancy clothes look so much better than work clothes, and you can't just walk around everywhere with steel undergarments and stage lighting. Unfair. 

Spacesuits, Ben Franklin, police reports

My spacesuit was lost in the mail, and it wasn't even coming from space. It was coming from Texas. This is why we haven't colonized Mars yet, folks.

My thumbnail for the book cover that is not to be

While browsing a replacement, I discovered I had already been outmaneuvered by a costume designer channeling Frank Frazetta. 

Moon Man

I can’t compete with that kind of romance. Accepted the refund and gave up. Sat at work feeling bummed about no longer having a shiny silver illustration prop/pandemic-appropriate workplace costume to look forward to, and then noticed that the book I was processing had a portrait of my very own face on the cover.

Damn it, Ben, not again.

A few years ago, I tried one of those popular apps that pairs you with your celebrity twin, and it gave me Benjamin Franklin.

Later, I tried the gender-swapping app to see what I would look like as a man, and it turned me into an alcoholic Ben Franklin, with bloodshot eyes and stubble.

I tried the historical painting app. BEN FRANKLIN.

Accurate, though 

So I ordered a Benjamin Franklin costume.

All the classic Ben Franklin poses: strike me, lightning; I can’t see that far without my spectacles; I forgot my cravat and knickers

(It should be said that I am not a descendant of Benjamin Franklin, whatever our foreheads and noses say. While Ben was busy doing "Nothing in this Way of Use to Mankind", my 22 year-old ancestor was sitting in a British prison cell for stealing books. 250 years and 3 generations of librarians later, we are still working off that blood debt. Thanks, Willie.)

 

Rescuer to the rescue

Driving home after work, boss called me to rescue an injured bird behind his car. Turned around and drove back to the library. There was, indeed, a bird on the ground. It was dead. Pretended to try to rescue it anyway, and hid the body in the bushes.

The next day, I rescued a puppy locked in a hot car, using the "LADY, YOU LOCKED YOUR PUPPY IN THE CAR, OPEN IT UP RIGHT NOW AND NEVER DO THAT AGAIN" rescue method. So she opened the door and left her kid in the car with the puppy. I was giving the puppy a bowl of water and talking to the kid about how not to murder his dog when the lady finished printing her restraining order paperwork and came running out of the library, just in time for her abusive husband to arrive on foot, screaming. The guy’s friend suddenly drove up and boxed her car in with his truck so she couldn’t escape, then thought better of it when he saw me calling the police. He sulkily moved his truck, she sped away with the screaming man chasing her car, and I got to spend the rest of the afternoon writing incident reports.

After all that, I went home, made dinner, heard a noise, and walked out the back door to find myself face-to-face with a stranger sneaking through the enclosed yard. The man tried to wave casually and stroll along to the exit, but I stopped him for an explanation. Turns out I am the kind of person who will confront a prowler/ax murderer armed only with a taco NOTHING. I thought I was holding a taco, but review of the security footage shows I left it in the kitchen. I had the higher ground, though, and could have leaped on him like a wolverine.

 

Sadly not dressed as Benjamin Franklin

The prowler was just a neighbor who knocked something off his chicken coop into our yard and then couldn't climb back over the fence. While I was using mom-voice on the poor guy, Mike was hiding in the basement with a beer, waiting for me to finish dealing with whatever was happening upstairs. 

“If you were in trouble, I would have run up and hit him with something." 

"Your beer?" 

"No.” (He collects nice beer glasses.) “With, like, a free weight." 

I would have enjoyed seeing that.

Next time.

Dept of Bad Ideas

Today I took a break from faces and painted a flower. I am almost certain it is a chrysanthemum. On the packet it just said “produce”. 

Chrysanthemums are my birth flower, so I have always felt sympathy for them. They're a bit weird looking and unpopular, as flowers go. They have lovely leaves, though. 

Naked Came the Chupacabra 

I am still painting romance novels on my lunch breaks. 

I enjoy these enough that I've decided to have a stab at doing a few of my own and building a portfolio. I am not particularly interested in romance, but I am interested in dramatic poses and costumes and good lighting. Maybe I could help chivvy more cryptozoological creatures into the genre, they are woefully underrepresented. Why are vampires sexier than moth men? Come on now.

This means I have an excuse to buy props. 

I browsed gowns and corsets and historic reenactment sites, but what I bought was a pair of werewolf hands and a space suit. 

The glue immediately separated from the gloves and they don't bend for shit, but I think they can still be useable.

For my new resume photo, if nothing else.

The space suit arrives tomorrow. Who thinks romance and does not immediately think space werewolves, I ask you? 

Exactly. Nobody.