The Sands of Time...

The Sands of Time
a bit more than a doodle...

This image was done for a totally sweet lass who works at my favorite diner.  She said she wanted a surrealism, something with drooping clocks and funny shaped peoples.  I said it had been done, the drooping clocks thing and all, but said I'd take a different tack with the idea.  Anyhow, this is what became of the thought, thought I'd share it here as well.  I'll not name her, not here, but I'm sure she'll recognize her picture if she ever visits. 

You see, I've felt for some months like there was a crack, a hole, in the bottom of that hourglass that measures my life.  More and more often I've felt like it wouldn't matter how often I turned it over there wouldn't be much sand left to run back down, that I'd end up flipping that glass hour by hour then minute by minute and then second for second and that soon enough the last grain would be gone and I'd spend however much time remained to me staring at the hole in an empty glass.  But not so much now. 

The Queen is Coming...the Queen is coming... again!!!

They call it the Victorian era these days, the lady is now an icon of history.  She sat the throne of England longer than any other monarch, sat that throne longer than any Queen of modern history sat any throne.  Her reign saw the opening of what is called modern history.  Given the times and events of her long life it seems to me quite a puzzlement that her name has become  almost synonymous with attitude of sexual repression, sexual hypocrisy as part and parcel of civilized behavior.  One man loved almost beyond enduring his loss, nine children,  and yet her name is remembered as a marker for pathological repression?  Nine children, and the story is she had something against sex?  A strange quirk of history.  Or is it?

The Picture has Nothing to do with it...

No, the picture doesn't have anything to do with what I have to offer today, not really.  It's just a "diner doodle" that took thirty minutes for the pencil drawing, and a couple of hours wasted in Photopaint to attempt to refine the portrait a bit closer to what came to mind from the song, the way she's described in the first verse.  Close, almost, but still not quite,  I'll try again.   I've returned to the pencil drawing, it's better. She had to be quite a woman to be remembered so many centuries later.  Anyhow, the song is a favorite thought I'd share, and the picture just because it gets close, and what I really want to say isn't going to take that long to say.  Takes a lot less time to say it than the amount of time needed to think about it, that's for sure.

Have you ever noticed how the academic world, the smart folks, are always facing the same way in their thoughts?  How they always assume whatever it might be they're presenting to the world is something smaller, simpler, less complicated than they, and presumably their students, are?  How they always take the stance that humanity is the peak achievement of evolution's effort?  The fools.  When they're always looking at things older and lower on evolution's list of accomplishments how would they ever know any different?  No wonder they turn pale, stammer and change the subject when I try and bring up the idea of the collective entities evolving into life right under their noses.  If you're always looking down your nose at your world of course you won't have anything to say about the creatures and creations who just might be looking down on you.

Naked...

To be a writer is a strange thing.  I've said it more than once, to Alex, to Leia, that in many ways they have more modesty left to them than I do.  I'd seen them nude so many times I could cast a glance and know where they were in their month, if they'd had sex recently, how their moods were likely to run, it wasn't a big thing, they're women, such things were simply part of their womanhood.  They were friends first and foremost and such things as that were just part of my friend.  And yet for all of that I still felt they had a modesty I lack.  You see, they entertained with the outside of their life, their body, the skill of their motion, the nuances of their expressions.  But a writer?  A writer does not entertain nude, a writer must entertain naked with things he draws from the inside of his life, the things that touched his heart and soul to shape the things he gives form and shape to in a work of fiction.  For those with eyes to see the writer has less modesty left than any other.

We weren't created to fight each other...

The title of this post is my underlying strategy in this game thing I've gotten into.  Things have progressed, time has passed, many things have been revealed.  Among the things revealed is that it's only been six years since the apocalyptic rain of bombs that broke the old society, only six years to restore a society far to stable for only six years, six years that finds the federales, the establishment, already living in functional cities each apparently surrounded by working rural areas dedicated to each city... and each city the target of a loose alliance of rebel groups who operate against their much, much larger foes with a working knowledge of magic their only real advantage.  Hmmmm...  no.  The foe has magic as well, some carried by various individuals, other forms worked by the most advanced forms of technology, no.  The rebels' magic can't be so powerful it is the only thing maintaining the balance, maintaining the conflict.  Someone is going to a great deal of trouble to maintain the fight, working in subtle manners behind the scenes to keep it all going.  They're spending a lot of energy, they have to be, their energy expenditure has to be equal to the difference between the federales abilities and the rebels.  The question is of course why?  In the game I'm playing a mutant super-soldier (*chuckle* of course, this is child's play displaced a decade and a half later into life by the idiots of the education system who usurped the children's play to serve their own agenda), and I am a product of the federales.  They engineered us, can maintain direct synaptic I/O functionality on us, apparently mutated us to enable our access to magic, so how in the name of Noah's pet whale are there so many of us anchoring the abilities of the various rebel groups?  We had to have been created to fight whoever or whatever unleashed that rain of bombs, the federales had less than no motive to create us... just so we could fight each other. 

Do you see as I do an entire demographic among the youth reclaiming their freedom of mind from the insanity of the American experiment in having public education rear the children to be society's slaves?  I sure do.  I'm grinning on the inside, and working the game master for what he's worth.  It is his imagination creating this world we're in, and somehow I have the feeling he's already penetrated more than one level of the establishment's lies, both worl and in the game he's hosting.  Like the Aussies say about football, once the injured are being removed from the far side of the field:  Play on!