comfort zone

Well, they say you have to paint your way through a whole pile of shitty paintings to get to the good ones. My painting on Monday was terrible. But to be fair, that was mostly because I was too stupid to realize I was painting on paper disguised as canvas, and it was not a surface that liked oil paint.

Fuck you, paper, I thought.

Then I hurried to apologize, because paper is my first true love.

There's a statue of St. Michael at my kid's school that I like a lot. He's really pretty, with a wild helmet, a swirly skin-tight super suit, and alarming nipples. Most statues of St. Michael have him stomping on a monster's face, but this guy is just taking his time, walking over and listing all the reasons he's about to kick your ass.

 

  He'd make a nice painting. IF I KNEW HOW TO PAINT.

The wolves have been out in force this winter, devouring my friends and their children. I haven't been able to attend the funerals, or administer angry hugs, or pour coffee straight down their throats. All I'm good for are cutting remarks to insensitive jerks online and signatures on office 'get well' cards and blips of text in the inbox. So I ordered a couple packs of blank postcards. A piece of mail is like an amulet or a talisman that can keep the wolves back for just a few more minutes.

I hope.

And maybe they'll also remove their teeth from my pant leg.

stylish and hot

The other day I was doing some research for a painting and found this:

This fits my style aesthetic.

But since I can't wear a sexy monk robe to work, I finished knitting the Victorian blouse that has been on the needles for a few months. This is supposed to be a painting prop, but I have already rolled it into a log and put it in a drawer to forget about.

It kept my hands busy and the thought zombies away for a while, anyway.

And leftover yarn means MAKE MORE DOILES. Turns out I don't actually have to worry about becoming a weird doily lady, because the ones that don't get used as frisbies or chicken blankets end up under potted plants until they rot to pieces. Demand > supply. Who knew.

  

So the last few weeks have not been great. The news has been grim, the kids were stuck home with me while it rained torrentially for days on end (see: aggressively knitting doilies), and I handed over all my workshop-travel money to the mechanics who failed my truck's inspection just because the hood was smoking when I pulled up. And because the emergency brake wasn't working. And the wheels were about to fall off.

FINE.

Today the man finally took the kids out so I could paint, because I was stress-baking and stress-cleaning and stress-shopping-for-cabins-in-the-Yukon.

It's too bad I poured all my money into the truck's leaking oil pan, because it is becoming apparent that my next workshop should have been with someone who knows how to paint flowers. Or tree bark.

 Did you know trees can just sprout flowers out of their trunks if they want to? 

They can in the haunted gulch.

It looks okay from a distance, though. Will hang it somewhere difficult to get close to. Like over the washing machine.

Going to try some landscape painting next, and then it's straight back to butts and portraiture.

disappoint

* Went to first-ever eye exam for prescription glasses, due to increasing blindness. Optometrist smiled and said, "Well! You actually still have 20/20 vision, your eyeballs are just too tired and old to focus, due to middle age." 

So now I have reading glasses, and can see very slightly better. Underwhelmed. I expected to be able to see a crystalline world of razor-sharp threads and hairs and distant leaves. I can read the fine print on my boxes of tea again, at least.

* WE CAUGHT THE GODDAMN ROOSTER. All week, I had a big collapsible dog kennel in the trunk of my car, which I figured could be turned into a goddamn rooster trap just by pretending it actually was one. We waited for the weekend to set it up, because I was afraid that if we rigged & baited it and went to work, we would return to discover it completely filled with cats, and maybe parts of a rooster. Or filled with roosters and parts of a cat. In the end, Gavin tricked him into the chicken coop, we chased him into the kennel, and then he went for a one-way drive into the nearest forested area. Which was by the NSA headquarters. For a secrety-type security network, they are not very alert to people ditching wild chickens right outside their offices. Unless they’ve already apprehended Stu the Rooster. Or they SENT HIM. Very clever. We played right into their hands.

At this point, almost all the pictures on my phone are gifs, sorry

* Remember that comic I was making last year? I have finally put my self-doubt in a choke-hold long enough to post the darn thing. Link to the Wilds of Wahiawa tumblr page is on the left. Maybe I'll keep going with it.

* I painted a bug - which someone actually wants to buy. It's a weird feeling. Thinking I might have to put up a shop or something, to get these things out of my basement.

* Gave the Duralar another try, and discovered that I like painting elbows. Also I like the transparency of the mylar in the shadows, making it glow a bit.

* It is choke-your-children-with-coin-studded-pancakes day! And Lent starts tomorrow, to save us all from Valentine's Day. Rejoice. Here is the ridiculously easy butterscotch sauce recipe I use for these occasions, go make some.

finished painting, unfinished business

My watch buzzed while I was at work on Saturday and announced that I had an incoming image text. I ran to my phone, thinking, Oh boy! They caught the goddamn rooster and it's a picture of the rooster tied up in a sack like a cartoon villain! But then I opened it and was disappointed because it was just a picture of our niece competing live on ESPN for some championship college running thing. File under: I'm a Terrible Person.

At the moment of this posting, the rooster is out there cockadoodling like an asshole on top of the chicken coop. Since we can't catch him by ambush or stealth or ingenuity, we have decided to play the long game; we will feed him, and befriend him, and lure him into our arms, and then probably kiss him and love him and keep him instead of chucking him over a bridge.

If anyone has any tips for non-lethal rooster removal, please advise.

GO AWAY STU

Anyway, I finished the latest painting. I can see a dozen things I would fix, but I need to mooove on.

Shook all those little problem details out of my brain with a sketch of one of the decorative statues I have all over the house.

I have been feeling aware of my mortality this week, and it makes me want to paint everything - my family, the house, the town, the hobos, the plants at the botanical gardens, best-loved articles of clothing or jewelry or motorcycle gear. If I had time, I would pack up the plein air easel and revisit important landscapes, sit down with old faces. Leave a body of work that shows a whole picture of a life lived.

Well, no reason not to just get started on all that anyway. At the outside, we have three or four good adult decades to get everything done before the limbs start trembling and the eyesight fails and everything starts snapping off at the joints. GET TO WORK, EVERYONE.

I'm going to go see if Stu the Goddamn Rooster will accept a model fee and come sit for me.

Hourly comics day 2018

This is a participation-ribbon kind of post. I didn't have the good grace to get really sick and spend the day drawing at home this year, so I just scribbled notes every hour and then put it all together at the end of the day. It was kind of a dull, grey day, which is good because it was easy to record, and bad because - damn - this is my LIFE. 

Oh, well.

the goddamn marauding rooster

Every chicken owner will tell you that if you post anything about a problematic bird, you must be prepared to pop open your umbrella and endure a deluge of HAR HAR KILL IT AND EAT IT jokes. It is the "shave and a haircut" of animal discussions, people can't not finish the thought. And that's ok. But also, stop it.

Recently, a rogue rooster went traveling in search of his spirit and decided that the flow of the universe was leading him to the place he was truly meant to be - parked in front of our chicken coop. Our girls are normally free-range, and spend their afternoons napping in the lychee tree, but nobody has explained the tea metaphor to this guy, so we've had to lock them up while we chase this asshole around in circles. We have shooed him, sprayed him with a hose, rigged stick-in-a-box traps, ambushed him with towels and sheets and blankets. The humane society wants a $200 deposit to borrow a chicken trap, and oh yeah, they don't have any anyway. The man actually bagged the rooster, using one of my good quilts, and drove him around town in circles before chucking him over the fence into the gulch by the botanical gardens, a quarter of a mile away. He ran straight back, covered in mud and lured by the seductive honking of Sirius the Lovelorn Hen. She is pretty sure he can change, that she can tame his wild love, and that we just don't understand her LIFE. She is wrong. Sorry, Sirius.

This has been going on for two weeks now. We have had to explain to all the neighbors that it is NOT our goddamn rooster, and that they are free to trap and remove him, too, when he's crapping in their yards. Twitter wants me to eat him. Leave aside the fact that I have never killed an animal in my life and I would cry my damn face off trying to rip his little guts out on my front lawn - the whole problem is that I CAN'T CATCH THE ROOSTER. His drumsticks run faster than mine, and he can fucking FLY. If I had to survive on a homestead, I would have a neat little garden and fat farm animals that would be easy to murder, not wild lusty gulch roosters.

I told the boys to apply all their robotics ingenuity to solving this problem, and they became very involved with watching roomba gifs.

I am getting ready to hand over all our Most Dangerous Game credentials and feed myself to a lion; we are clearly unfit to survive in the wild.

Lurid flowers

My new paintbrushes arrived, and they are beautiful. The kids spent a solid 10 minutes gently bushing them down each other's noses and fingers. These are the brushes all the famous folks use, and I bought the Kate Stone set, so I expected some results. Good ones, even. And so far, I have not been disappointed.

The background is just blocked in; stupid-elaborate background pattern still to come

Garish fake flowers are very fun to paint. Art historians of the future can study them and marvel over how we used to glue fabric and plastic together to make flowers instead of just printing some. Or marvel about how we wasted fabric and plastic on something as stupid as flowers, as they're using the paintings for kindling in the wasteland. Either way, you're WELCOME, future.

"So," I said to the man, "If it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, how long is it going to take me to be a master painter?"
"8 hours at a time? 2.5 years."
"NICE."
"But you only paint on Mondays - 24 years."
"Oh, okay, cool."

Every third Sunday is Free Family Fun Day at the Honolulu Art Museum, so we went down and had a nice long visit with the dead artists. The security guard bounced on his toes and chased my face away from Van Gogh's haystacks when I got up close to look at the paint blobs, even though there was glass over it because of hungry fingers. Said hi to Sargent, and then ran past the walls of volcanoes and Gauguin to visit my very favorite Hawaiian painting; the Lei Maker.

The Lei Maker, Theodore Wores, 1902

She's luminous in real life, with transparent shadows and soft layers of light. Just look at those petals, and that woven mat. I bought a big print at the gift shop, to replace the one I used to have hanging in my room as a teenager, and carried the roll around for the rest of the trip, ready to thump security guards.

What else would I want to do for the next 24 years, anyway? I'll take it.

back to normal

So the sirens did go off in some parts of the island, we were just in a lucky spot. (A lucky spot with a malfunctioning nuclear siren. GREAT.) People sent out last messages to their loved ones, poured last drinks, said sorry to the pets that wouldn't fit in the bathroom with them. Someone had a heart attack. A mother climbed down into a gutter with her children. An old man with dementia ran away and got lost; the police came to look for him at the library. Walmart is in some shit for throwing all their customers out to face annihilation in the parking lot. The old sugar mill next to the library - made of solid concrete - locked everyone from the farmer's market outside. People are displeased.

Immediately after the event, everyone laughed weakly and went about their business. Storytime was crowded with parents who just wanted to sit with each other while their children were occupied with a normal activity. I read a bit manically, and people laughed with just a touch of hysteria. It was okay.

Got home, and found the man's missile defense system on the stove.

After the relief, the horror set in. People started needing to talk. Strangers asked each other, "Where were you when it happened?" Buying a newspaper. At the market with my 80 year old mother. Nursing my baby. Wherever you were, that was where you died. This was the sound of 2 million people collectively shaking off a sudden and upsetting experience.

Then people stopped wanting to talk about it, and plans began to form - selling and moving, renewing passports, reinforcing sheds, stocking 2 weeks of food and water. Suddenly everyone has a reason to buy all the cool survival gear we've always eyeballed in catalogs. Water purifying straws! Gas masks! Freeze dried stroganoff! Hand-crank phone charging radios! Yes, an actual nuclear attack is unlikely (until it is suddenly happening) but hurricanes roll by every year, it only makes sense to build radiation-proof heat-insulated bunkers with enough food and water to last a fallout period of 2 weeks. For, you know, the hurricanes.

These would have been the last pictures on my phone (I have been abusing/forgetting to turn off live photos):

kids eating garbage after shopping at Savers 

Pan laying like a corpse on my arm, looking like he has too many limbs

This would have been the last dumb picture I texted to a friend:

This was the song playing distantly in the back of my head while it went down (the chorus, mostly):

It's been a weird week.


(This is just a processing dump, I'm not moving and I'm not going full-Prepper - sorry, Arizona relatives.)

Missiles in the Morning

I was sitting at my desk, pulling up storytime craft ideas, when my student helpers walked up, pointing their phones at me.

"Um, there's a missile incoming? We have to take shelter?"
"What?"

There was nothing on the news, the sirens weren't blaring. Checking my phone, I saw I had missed a call from my mother.

I am a goddamn wordsmith

My boss called the staff together and everyone compared phone alerts.

Seeing them all together like that, my stomach and limbs suddenly went very cold. I suggested we move away from the windows, and we shuffled as a mob into the media closet, which is just large enough to hold the 6 of us standing close together. I wondered if I should have peed first, but decided that maybe dying on the toilet wouldn't be the way I'd want to go. Did a quick mental inventory: Incoming missiles take about 8-12 minutes. About 5 minutes have passed since the first alerts. Gavin is in Honolulu, at a robotics meet. Schools are pretty well built, and the buildings are up on the mountain a bit, so if Honolulu got nuked he might survive. Zenny and Leif are at home with their dad. The basement has windows, but at least if the house fell in, they might be safer down there with the concrete walls. My mother is trying to find a place to shelter in her house. 

I texted the boy to make sure he was in the gym and away from windows. I texted the man and told him to get in the basement. I texted my mother with an update on where everyone was. How many minutes was that?

We all stood very still while my boss talked soothingly about the missile defense system and sturdy library structure, refreshing the news station website on his phone. Should I send a last message? How? Twitter, probably - that's fastest. We listened and waited. It seemed like more than 12 minutes had passed. I hadn't checked the time when we went in. What would I even say? If I post something and then don't die, that would be embarrassing. I'll wait until I hear a blast. If it's quick, then it's out of my hands. Gavin texted. I tried to reassure him, saying that a missile is hard to aim and that Japan gets warnings like this every time there's a test. There still weren't any sirens. I wasn't going to tip into terror until there were sirens. Something should have happened by now.

One by one, the alerts binged on the screens. False alarm. We all shuddered and laughed and went to have a nice sit-down.

So now that the nerves have settled, I'm noting what I did and did not do in the face of mortal fear. I made sure I knew where my kids and my mother were, and did not think of any other family members at all. I remembered my aunt after it was all over. I didn't think of friends on Maui for hours. My pets would have been toast. The sphere of concern shrank the world down to my kids, my mother, and a parting thought for someone I love.

It's going to be beer and cake for dinner tonight, folks.

work in progress

The axis of the week is back in place, with all days rotating around Painting Mondays. It is such a relief. So of course the kids are all off school for a holiday next Monday, but TOO BAD. I'll put bowls of food out and they can fend for themselves. I've got some garish metallic gold flowers to paint.

this is just blocked in, don't hold me to those feet and hands

In still-insisting-this-is-art-related news, I have been lifting weights regularly again. Also I have replaced food with a 5-lb bucket of organic vegan protein powder that my mother foisted on me in a desperate act of self-preservation. So far I look exactly the same, but angrier.