It's such a simple, stupid lesson. Life is not about me. It's not that I'm an egomaniac--my brain is an egomaniac. To my brain, my body is just a flabby appendage, an avatar, acting out various amateurish parts on a second-rate stage while the real action is happening up here in this skull-delimited parthenon. How wrong-headed. How upside down. The smarter I think I am, the farther away I am from reality. I'm just a guy walking down a sidewalk, one of four billion such people. How can the psychotic little Kim Jong-il up in here accept that? Or that he himself is just an illusion?

You know how sometimes things dawn on you in stages? This morning I stepped out of the shower onto my bathmat, and something didn't feel right. My left foot felt warmer than my right foot. Warmer and softer. Kind of a squishy softness. Up in between my toes, even. It was a feeling I had never gotten from my bathmat before. I looked down, raised my foot, and saw the source of my confusion. And then I saw Bernice sitting in the doorway, looking at my foot with an expression that said "Dude! That's vomit! Why would you want to plant your foot right in the middle of it? Man, I thought I was strange!"

When John McCain opens his mouth, why does he only use his bottom lip? That's the kind of question I hope comes up in the Presidential debates. The Democratic debates have been full of questions that have some distant connection to national issues, however tenuous and trivial. What's the point of that?

Is it any wonder that my meteoric rise up the corporate ladder into the cecum of materialist hog heaven has never, um, materialized? My notes always seem to come up short in the getting-things-done department. What's the matter here? It's not as if the lame brains who make it to the Top have cornered the market on gray matter, to judge from the idiotic self-help books they write for even lamer brains farther down the ladder, books full of "duh" & "ya think?" potentiators, not that I read the damn things, I'm just going by the small glimpses I get of these guys on talk shows as I leap for the remote. The poor saps who swallow this stuff are about as likely to join the lame brains as the brand new Amway distributors are to gain a seat amid the plastic palms in the latest look-upon-me-and-quake-you-scum infomercial. And what is it all in aid of? We yearn, we hunger, we salivate, we tumesce, we want, we want, we want, we want. Ah, that felt good.

I'll bet I haven't thought about shorthand in twenty years. My mother learned it in high school, in preparation for secretarial work (she was the smartest kid in school, you see.) All through our childhood, we kids would see these cryptic notes written in shorthand, and imagined that they were (a) lists of christmas presents for the kids or (b) reports of misbehavior to relate to Dad when he got home from work. If we were sure it was (b) we could, of course, conveniently "misplace" the note, but just on the chance it was an (a), we couldn't take the risk. I remember one day I rummaged through her entire desk looking for a manual or code-breaker table, something that would unlock her secrets, but without luck. I did, however, find a copy of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", which shocked me deeply, and got me to wondering about other topics that might be encoded in those mysterious shorthand notes.

For decades I've passed these and wondered what they were doing there and how you could get to them. They sit all by themselves in the middle of highway ramps and metal buildings. They always looked kind of surreal to me. So last night I decided to hunt them down, and by god damn I did. It took a while and several dead ends and being chased off by a dog and a security guard. But as soon as I found them, I had to leave, because I felt a poop coming on and it was a half hour's walk home. I made it in twenty minutes. I looked like a freakin power walker.

This morning I submitted my 52nd weekly installment of my Virginian-Pilot sketchbook. Hard to read, huh? Here it is at a different size.

When I got up this morning, I looked in the mirror and discovered I had the hairdo of a diabolical fiend. I think this is a look that could work for me.

If you're a suburbanite, you'll likely look at this picture and say, "Yeah? So?" You don't see any horror here. No soullessness. Suburbanites have comfortably redefined the notion of "soul", they've landscaped it, with a pretty white picket fence around it to give it boundaries: stay in your own yard and avoid angst. Suburbanites are, after all, by definition those who have fled the urbs. I know, here I go again. Think I'm dealing in unfair stereotypes? More than once I've heard, and I paraphrase, which is my God-given right as a blogger, "Thank God we have Town Center, so now we don't have to go into Norfolk," and if you don't know what that means, look up the reason Virginia Beach became a city in the first place.

but after a pose or two, I got kinda bored, and when you get bored in Painter, odd things ensue. There's just so much silliness at your fingertips. That's what she said^©.

Our regular model didn't show up on time, so a couple of sketchers jumped right in. When the real guy showed up, he was kind of dull compared to these two. It was also fun drawing clothes. I like clothes. I wear them almost every day.

It's pitiful, I know. When anything proves to be less than popular, I keep coming back to it. The psychology behind it all is too banal, too depressing. But so is all psychology. No, I kid psychology, but I love psychology, dammit. Psychology is why we do stuff, after all, and mostly don't do stuff. It's wonderful to know. But it just doesn't do a damn bit of good. It's like if I had one of those prints of my own DNA, like they had on the O.J. Simpson Show. It's really cool and stuff, but like what do you do with it? Larger version here. Link to a picture of Bart Morris, but not the real Bart Morris here.

This is one of the few times I wish I had real photography skills. The quality of the fluffy lime green leaves was really striking in person. I suppose I could pay Dr. Research a retainer to be on call and come shoot stuff that I point out to him. But that would greatly increase my chances of being the victim of a traffic accident. Ideally, of course, I would just eliminate the middleman--given photography's decontextualizing tendencies--and drive you all around in a bus, silently pointing at stuff. A side benefit of this scenario would be the opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream of threatening to stop the bus and come back and slap those of you who were getting too rowdy.

Don't let the cute hummelesque rendering fool you--the doc is a bitter man who clings to guns and religion and whatnot, and who claimed to have landed last month at Boston's Logan Airport amid heavy sniper fire, which I'm 80% sure is not true. Plus, as I have documented in great detail on this blog, yet the major newswires have inexplicably failed to pick it up, he has on at least two occasions tried to run me down with one of his luxury automobiles. Not that others don't routinely try it, but he has come the closest, nicking me on the left buttock, causing it to swell to the size of a grapefruit that's larger than any grapefruit you've ever seen, to my great embarrassment. It was like my left buttock were just offering my wallet to all passersby. Thank god I have nothing in it but a VIC card from Harris Teeter. That means "very important customer", and it permits me to sample produce and crackers and stuff while I'm shopping. At least I pretend that's what it means.