As for me very very delightful I am. So it is; director's which is not me; You must sit down, a kind of artist; The chair of which of all next door judges, concerning that work means life, and uses kind of people and the food which often go to these places which try the fact that discount and that kind of ones are obtained everything is assembled and inhales and the raw materials. If you do not like the stick candy which is fried.

I see "Major League" is on cable this afternoon. I don't think there's been a day in the last ten years that "Major League" hasn't played on one station or another. Thank God Corbin Bernson is such a fine actor, or I might get bored with it. And who would ever tire of seeing guys get hit in the crotch with bats and balls? That's classic humor.

I think cars today look like giant bloated toys. Puffed up and hardened. But that's cause I'm an aging crank. A bitter, dyspeptic, leaking bile reservoir. Well, at least I have my self-esteem.

There are other establishments in the area which could with equal justification take the name "Aroma House", but probably for PR reasons refrain from doing so. If you come within 100 feet of the loading dock at the Harris Teeter on Colonial Avenue, for example, your body will experience a reaction similar to receiving general anesthesia. The best you can hope for is to make it to the little picnic table where employees smoke before you lose all muscle tone. The aroma that hangs around that venue tends to counteract the garbagey one at the loading dock, and after a few minutes you're capable of swaying into the store itself, where the aroma of bananas, then rotisserie chicken, then raw fish, will keep you careening down the appropriate aisles. If you make it to the checkout line and the big guy in front of you in the puffy coat farts, you end up back at square one.

Thank god for those among us who feel compelled to transform the places they live into bizarre works of art. You can drive for miles and miles through bland soul-draining craphouses and condoslums in Virginia Beach, but when you come upon one of these gems, it's like seeing the flag planted at Iwo Jima. I'm here, it says, and I'm like nobody you've ever met.

Glen McClure's downtown Norfolk photo studio.

If you want to know more about this bizarre oddity, you'll have to don your North Face and hike down to the newspaper dispenser on Sunday and read my sketchbook. It's only $1.25, you deadbeats, and it'll make me look good. Okay, Sparky, you ask, what if I don't have the pleasure of residing in that earthly paradise known as Hampton Roads? Jeez, do I have to do all your thinking for you? If you live in a great metropolis such as your Brooklyns or Torontos or Azeitaos or whatnot, just go to an international magazine and newspaper stand like they have at every corner, and tell the alcoholic degenerate ex-con behind the counter that you'll hold your breath until he delivers a Virginian-Pilot. What could be easier? At the very worst, you will have fainted and been given mouth-to-mouth by said alcoholic, thus earning yourself a little tongue action. Huh. I just realized how close the words "degenerate" and "DeGeneris" are. Kinda ironic, huh? I remember the first time I looked up the word "lesbian" in a dictionary. My parents used to have a worn old paperback copy of "Rally 'Round The Flag, Boys" by Max Shulman, author of "The Many Lives of Dobie Gillis", and because it featured on its cover a cartoon illustration of wolf-eyed men chasing buxom redheads in circles, my parents kept it buried in the bowels of a massive piece of furniture they insisted on calling a "hutch", behind the martini glasses and swizzle sticks and all the other cocktail-party accessories, because cocktail parties were all the rage back then. And in this book were words like "lascivious", which propelled me to the dictionary, and inevitably to disappointment, since when you advance to the dictionary level, the titillation factor drops precipitously. But at least it supplied you with information that was valuable in clinical discussions with your peers. "You don't have the slightest idea what a vulva is, dickhead!" "Yes I do, shit-for-brains, it's the colored area around the nipple!" Our science teachers should have been proud of our intense scholarship in the discipline of female anatomy. We couldn't understand why our intellectual curiosity wasn't reciprocated. "Don't you even want to know what a scrotum is?" I asked Gwen Miller. "Oh, I know exactly what one is," she answered with a piercing, relentless gaze which let me know that, in her eyes, I was the embodiment of the word in question. So that's why you should go out and buy Sunday's paper.

I'm really tired of buying crappy "fresh" food. I mean, if you wanted to buy prepared food, you know what you're getting, but fresh food hasn't lived up to my expectations for a long time now. Today I bought some nice-looking peaches from Harris Teeter, and they taste like wooden peach replicas. And I know they've been engineered that way for efficient transporting. Which I wouldn't mind if I thought it meant that hungry Bangladeshi children were now eating American peaches. But you know that's not happening. It's all about internal American marketing logic. We're told that we have more choices than at any time in the past, but the choices are all packaging and what's inside the packaging sucks. When you bite into a waxy tasteless tomato or a woody peach, you're eating packaging. The depressing part of it all is that there's probably nothing to be done about it. The "local" fad is fine for those who can afford the jacked-up prices and who have the free time to cruise around foraging in their Land Rovers. But there's no way it will ever become the dominant model. The whole country depends on the constant forward motion of the commerce machine, eating up resources and spitting out self-destructing junk. We may think we're in control of it, but we're not. We're just hanging on for dear life.

Damn! I sound more like a radical commie than I ever did when I was a stoont. I even owned a Land Rover at one point. I guess getting knocked out of the fast lane helps you see the traffic patterns better. Or, as I'm sure the McMansion dwellers would have it, it could be merely a case of sour grapes.

I've just learned that smiter is a word. As in "one who smites". I had thought that was an activity reserved for deities, but evidently not. I think I would like to be a smiter. As opposed to constantly being smitten. I think it would be very satisfying, when someone asks, "Hey, whatever happened to so-and-so?" to announce "Oh, I smote him. I smote him good." I'm guessing that smiting would consist of something like whacking over the head with a truncheon. But where would you get a truncheon these days? I'd probably have to resort to a three-hole punch, which wouldn't be very romantic, or very effective, for that matter. The smitee would probably just rub his or her head and say "cut it out!" I'd ask God to smite people on my behalf, but I don't want to wipe out whole civilizations, just individuals. I'm afraid His record on that score is a bit spotty. I don't want to add the deaths of thousands of innocent people to my list of regrets.

Downtown's oldest building has a rendezvous with the wrecking ball. That's the magnificent Trader Building in the background. I'm confident that the new convention hotel will be every bit as beautiful. Below, local businessmen gawk at the demolition. "Sure wish I had brought my camera," says one.

This is what it looked like 30 minutes ago at the Harborfest Parade of Sail. How's that for reportage? Now you don't have to go.

The other day I stumbled upon this touching little event held at the edge of a rubble-strewn vacant lot downtown. The dedication, or something, of a huge, for Norfolk, new condo development that will one day, evidently, resemble a miniature Empire State Building. Wouldn't it be great if, on opening day, they had a crowd of Little People stream out the front doors? Don't hold your breath. Developers are a humorless bunch. I didn't see any dignitaries at this event, but they were bound to show up. There was a dais, aned daises draw dignitaries like flies. There were also a few balloons, drifting desultorily from tent poles. Nothing says "festivities" like a few lonely balloons. People cruising the area looking for festivities will spot them immediately. Someone in the back seat will lean forward. "Balloons at ten o'clock!" they'll announce, and slap the driver on the back of the head, much as a bazooka loader would. At least that's how it plays out in my mind's eye.

Okay, guys, the picture provides clues to the answer. You don't just make wild guesses, like last time. Also, the picture won't be this one, because it's stuck in the middle of a bound sketchbook, and if I remove it, then one day all the other pages will indolently flutter to the ground, almost certainly while it's raining. But it'll be a good one, I promise.

This is the Rotunda, which has in common with other rotundas a certain circularity and little else. And we're going to pack that sucker with upwardly mobile types who fancy themselves urban sophisticates but make sure that door's locked, will ya, for crissakes? It's a jungle out there. In its current state as a prickly rickety-looking tower of sticks looking like some obsessive backyard sculptor crafted it over several decadesl, it's interesting to contemplate. When it's spanking clean and turned into a hive of emptyheads, somewhat less so.

Sparky "Bah Humbug" D

So here I am, minding my own business, eating my ************* and sketching, when Hizzoner walks into the picture (that's him on the cell phone.)

The word "brunch" bypasses my conscious mind entirely, and goes right to those synapse-things between my individual nerves, causing involuntary twitches and guttural vocalizations. Nevertheless, it can't be avoided, especially if I continue to patronize the one at San Antonio Sam's, which I do, drawn by a dish called "Migas", which, when chemically combined with a Bloody Mary, releases all sorts of whatchamacallits, pheremones, giving me an oceanic sense of peace, which nicely cancels out the aforementioned nerve storm. No, not pheremones, that's smelly stuff. Oxycontin, it releases the natural oxycontin in my system. An inevitable by-product of this exercise is the sketch of Sam's patio and its patrons; inevitable because when I come here alone, I have to sketch so as not to appear to be an abject loser sitting by oneself at a brunch--on the contrary, I'm an artist at work, and brunch companions would just be an annoying distraction from my labors. As it happened, I needn't have worried this weekend, for I was still basking in the glow of a highly active Friday night, which included, among other events, downing beers with a bunch of old coots at the neighboring Italian "eatery", where they had gathered to admire a "rack", which I took to be the wine selection, and, to tell you the truth, I didn't find it all that impressive. But that's neither here nor there. Well, it might be there, but it's not here, for sure. The upshot being, there was no need to pose as an abject loser this weekend, having already been infected with that damn bonhomie.

You'd think I'd be a big fan of this kind of endeavor, but somehow it doesn't reach me. Now if there were random spontaneous Doo-Dah Parades bursting out from time to time, that would be pretty cool. Or like one-man Doo-Dah Parades within an office, on a whim, that would fit the bill. But nonsense co-opted isn't proper nonsense somehow. The best thing about this year's parade was the wind. It carried numerous oddball hats into unrelated contingents, and you'd often see a bald-headed clown frantically fighting his way through a Dixieland band trying to get to his orange wig before it was run over by the street-cleaning brigade. Good times.