Another happenin Friday night for M. Donatello. Actually, it got better. Went out for chili and Neil Young movie with Bart. Neil's definitely looking older, but he sounds just the same. Emmylou Harris, on the other hand, looks mighty good and sounds good too. Pretty interesting movie, and San Antonio Sam's chili is hotter than a two-dollar stamen.

Whatever it's about, it's not Starbucks, I'm almost 100% positive. I thought to myself, what's as far from Starbucks as anything can get? And it came to me: contortionists!

I know, I'm in a rut. I promise, I'll do something new this weekend, something unheard-of in the annals of sketchblogging, something that's going to set the world on its ear. Or, at the very least, something not connected to Starbucks.

I've been reminded that someone may visit this site who is an attorney or is married to one. If someone who falls into that category has been offended, I apologize. It all arose from wading through a throng of young professionals and feeling invisible, and one thing led to another. It wasn't about attorneys or their wives at all, and that kind of stereotyping is something I've criticized in the past. Which reveals me, once again, as a hypocrite of the highest order. If only I could think as fast as I type.

A beautiful day today. Filled with the events that illuminate our times. Went to "Taste of Hampton Roads" last night (free tickets cause I did the poster.) Interesting food, but the people! Aside from a contingent of cross-dressers, it was a lot of male attorney-types and their well-coiffed wives. I guess these are the people who are going to populate all the new condos that are going up. They're like a different species. I'm just as invisible to them as they are to me. I have no desire to immerse myself in their lifestyle, and vice versa. My moral guides tell me they're just as human as I am, but there's certainly a hard shell over the human part. They're like turtles and I'm like a slug. And I love salt.

Just keeping in practice. Same old people sitting around, lost in their little worlds. Evidently some Starbucks are more convivial, but this one's for loners, I guess.

So what? I don't feel healthy. It's my blog. I can be sour and vengeful and a big fat crybaby if I want to. This is just as much who I am as any persona you might find more pleasant. Sometimes the black pours in like squid ink or storm clouds sped up by a film student. And who's to say it's not the temporary light escaping? This is the occasion for Richard Thompson, and I hsve a big mother 6-CD set of liver music. should have been "live", but I like liver fine. Sometimes his guitar's like a whip, and listening to him is like winning a fist fight. Where's that Windex?

Sometimes you have to laugh, even when it's not funny. The third strike against homeless people is that almost all of them are drunk or strung out or schizophrenic, so they can barely communicate with straight people. Uncle Joe, for example, was obsessed with conveying to me the fact that he could have me killed, the point being that I should be grateful to him that I was still alive. And I was. He also pointed out all the other people in the room that he could have killed, which included everybody. So maybe he would have had to bring in the killers from outside. He said that God told him to come talk to me. I asked him if God told him not to have me killed, and he said "not yet."

Just so you don't jump to any conclusions, this isn't anything I would have ever done on my own. I have a friend who's one of these damn do-gooders, and she makes me do awful things. But everyone should have one friend like that. It builds character.

Anyone who thinks they're living large at our expense should spend a night with them.

To see a larger version, click the cute little box at the end of this sentence.

When my little sister (http://nellynortay.blogspot.com) had her first baby, I did a little baby care book for her. Things get misplaced over the years, and this scans are all I have left. See my flickr page for the rest.

This is a typical Ghent bathroom fixture--radiator with several coats of white paint, so many that there are no more edges, just rounded shapes. Ceramic tile walls and floor, old-fashioned faucets. There's always one thing that doesn't work, an outlet maybe, or This isn't interesting. Sorry. I'm not on my game today. I didn't bring my game face. I'm not taking it to the hole. I'm stalling in the red zone. I need to step up to the plate. I wish I were a really good guitar player. Not necessarily as good as Richard Thompson, but good enough that I wouldn't start crying if he walked into the room. I have to find a sound effect of a fish blowing bubbles. Really. I'm wandering, aren't I? Maybe another hit of the Windex will focus me. Windex in a bong is a great idea. Leaves the bong sparkling clean. But you kids shouldn't do drugs. That would be wrong. Maybe I'll redraw the game so it has automatic weapons fire instead of a fish blowing bubbles. That would be a lot easier to find.

Once a week I treat myself to lunch at a downtown sushi place (treat because it's not cheap.) It has nice zen-like decor, and the manipulation of chopsticks requires a mindfulness that dovetails nicely with meditation practices. If I'm alone, I almost always eat with my nose in a book, but I put it down for sushi. My friend Wally has blogged about mindful eating before, but to recap, it involves not only paying attention to the food vs. distractions, but being aware of where the food came from, the huge number of living beings that contributed to its appearance on your plate. When you expand your awareness from cooks and farmers to whoever designed the little green plastic fences that separate items in a sushi box, and then to that person's great aunt, who introduced her parents, thus causing her to be born, you can see how the net extends to everyone--the whole universe has conspired to place this particular piece of raw fish in your mouth. There was a time when this would have seemed like vague, flaky, new age bullshit to me. But with just the slightest skew to my viewpoint, it seems like the most down-to-earth, practical truth there is. As usual, this has nothing to do with the posted picture, which is about surgery. Who wants to talk about surgery? I guess it was top of mind because a dear friend of mine had surgery a few weeks ago, but she seems to be none the worse for it, so I'm happy.

Her name was Anaris, and like many models before her, she was an excellent subject. The last female model was very slender, so Anaris presented a whole new set of interesting challenges--new kinds of folds and curves and shadows and proportions. And she had a very sweet face, which I didn't quite capture.

She also had a friend with her, who monitored the goings-on very carefully.

This fountain stands in the back yard of my current pet-sitting clients. I have a terrible sinus headache this morning (it's drizzly outside.) Long plugs of mucus depart from my sinuses like purulent trains leaving the station, heading down my esophagus, creating a vacuum in my skull that pulls my eyeballs inward and plays havoc with those three odd little bones in the inner ear that we all learned about in school. Don't worry, this isn't going to turn out to be about boogers again. Just about mucus. It gathers in a ball in my stomach, which tries to deal with it. but it's like making Taffy From Hell. What good is it doing down there? Of what use is all this mucus? It's not catching dust and flies and stuff in my nose and then expelling them into the atmosphere, which I understand is the purpose of mucus. It's sitting in a ball in my stomach doing nothing but making me queasy. And they call this intelligent design! I think they should call it Incompetent Design. Then let's see how many school boards in Kansas get behind it. And it's not being blasphemous, either. I mean, I'm sure God Himself didn't attend to every single detail. He doesn't sound like a micro-manager to me. He probably turned the mucus project over to the Bodily Fluids division, and they just made some extra stuff happen involving mucus so they could justify their jobs and not get laid off. That's what I think probably happened.

Yes, I did enhance it a little in Photoshop, but not nearly as much as it seems. The puddle did look essentially like this. What's the attraction of finding abstract compositions in nature? Don't know. Certainly this picture doesn't tell you anything useful about the nature of puddles. Is it the cognitive tension between what your eyes see and what your brain tries to make of it? Don't know. I don't know much of anything this chilly Monday morning.

You armchair psychiatrists might be tempted to conclude that I have low self-esteem. Oak on trare, may zamee! I have huge underground vats of self-esteem, so volumesque that should they release their contents onto the surface of this big blue marble, the level of the oceans would rise .0003 centimeters, causing a smidgeon more of mildew throughout the entire world's basements! THAT's how strong my self-love is, baby! But having, in the fading twilight of my years, come to the reluctant conclusion that sainthood is not to be my claim to fame, I've decided to go the clown route. But not in the John Wayne Gacy direction, THAT WOULD BE WRONG. More like that E. Pagliaci guy, who laughs on the outside and cries on the inside, so you can be entertained by him while feeling sorry for him at the same time. Kind of like having my pie in the face and eating it too.

When I looked in the mirror this morning, it was like The Picture of Dorian Trump. I must have been restless in my sleep and stuck my finger in an electrical outlet. It's kinda depressing to have old-man hair instead of the luxuriant flowing locks of my youth, back in the Depression. Hey, that sentence was sort of circular. Cool. The other day, someone told a friend how to find me in a restaurant: "Just look for a white-haired guy." I don't want to be known as a white=haired guy. Why couldn't they have said, "Just look for a really talented guy"? Would that have been so hard? No, I kid my hair, but I really love it. Except I seem to be getting some kind of male-pattern hole in the back. My tall friends point it out, cause I never see it, thank God. So far cotton balls seem to help. I'm not really this vain and self-centered. Am I? Do you think I'm vain and self-centered? What else do you like about me?

"The Ice Harvest" has just come out on DVD, so I got to see it. Really, really good. Jon Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Oliver Platt. All fun to watch. Black humor. Almost Coen-Brothery. Let's see, what else? I just had an orange. It was good, but it was one of those sneaky ones. When you peel it, what's left is about the size of a walnut. I have three rubber bands on my desk, big fat ones, and nobody to shoot them at. The people here, if you shot a rubber band at them, they'd turn and look at you like "what is your problem?" and then go back to work. What kind of place is this to work? I can hear Laurelines now: "Well, Sparky, it doesn't sound like you ARE working." Okay, then, what kind of place is this to BE? Why can't I hang out at a place like they have on TV, in an old warehouse with cool stuff on the walls and a guy playing frisbee with his dog and stuff? The idea of an OFFICE, with all this OFFICE furniture and phones and ball-point pens and manila folders and three-hole punches and shit...how deeply depressing. And no windows you can open. Is that any way to live? whine