Wednesday, April 22, 2009







We’re just talking about how fun it would be to shoot pictures and make up stories with friends. It’s what we’ve just done. There’s no place in the past too dark for me now, because there’s a light in my day today that speaks of a life filled with whatever is most fun next.




Fun a minute ago came just before I sat down with memories of our badminton-style game we’d invented in the park. But that wasn’t where writing about that would begin: there was a more fun way. Look for some way to do what you’re doing that is fun and still gets it done: that is a theme recurring in my life, which exists to create one life that harms none, to serve the joy of another that wishes to harm none. Simplest purposes created the past two days, which took me deep into the solutions and alternate possibilities to improve details on a story that’s waited inside me all my life, made with the process which dominated my boyhood. This time the story is meant to entertain me truly at all ages.




The president of Liberia , Ellen Johnston Sirleaf, talks to John Stewart after the television comes back on; for an hour we made our own fun by ourselves. “No photographs,” I said as I faced the dresser, thinking how we might be in too latent a state to produce pictures. “This is the kind of time,” she said from on the bed, “when I might have pulled out the camera to make pictures of myself making silly faces.”




Glad we tuned in tonight: not only did we feel inspired by the Cynac street video of gorgeous Swedish women, but we just saw “their” culture mix with “ours”: She just made jon a chief. With full costume ---“I’m assuming , and I’m just assuming here, this is in a 39 regular...” And Colbert was just recently knighted; what do you know about our media people here in America?




Turkey, ground, and fat free cheddar cheese, the last of the spinach leaves on torilla, toasted over the stove eye in the communal kitchen down the hall, while Kenny told us of his wonderful two bedroom Ocean Beach home in the days when he was still married, with a living room his friends joked about, all for five hundred fifty dollars.
“You can’t find anything that good like that anymore!” he exclaimed wistfully, as though marveling at how he lived in early days here in California.





As I collapsed happily all over her, she watched The Biggest Loser with I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant on the alternative channel; I simply rested and, while awake, took a dream like look into the wonderful creation in my mind. I’ve dreamed many times of comic books that I find and hold and enjoy without remembering their reading, mostly found in some public place (or perhaps in a room open to my wandering).





This one, titled "The Vanishing Wave," I’ve been "reading" over the course of this month, since 4-4-09, visualizing as a dreamlike source of pure excitement, a state jarring loose such a multitude of details included to make the story great. Without taking the time past the first two hours, there was a good story present, but I have been taken to a very satisfying place in my activities as I drew out the dreamatic scenes, always sensing there was still something shadowed in the story, as though I had previewed it, and sensed it in a connected and full way, a sight of the end in the distance to which I could journey with my imagination, picking the symbols out of my psyche while meditation on the characters gave me an indestructible link to my imaginative engagement with my knowledge in the many days of my youth. I suppose some would consider my life a fulfillment of providing a haven for the inner child, striving to remain free of outward conflict, so that the light of possibilities and agility necessary to formulate new concepts and relate them to previously integrated learning. This sense of fun serves a sublime purpose, to make one play with ideas and experiment with thought, leading to a more interesting look at the world around us. Having previously seen ourselves as the DNA of god, we could wonder at the sense of sublime vision in our creation around us and laugh at our inventive nature.




Make Fun, Ask Questions Later




(The Dreamatics---“That would be a great name for a band,” I said, and reflected upon three times over the next twenty minutes)




So the t.v. is off, and she decides to take my picture first. She begins narrating, and I’m never sure if it’s on video recorder or photograph, so it takes me through a trip of mercurial mental postures. I wanted to leave in these records the notion that we’d taken our badminton rackets and birdie out to the park again to recreate our invented sport. So I began posing as though discussing our recollections of the game.




Many things occur simultaneously; as I write she again recites the fact that the ground turkey had resulted neatly in three double servings. Also, at the moment, the History Channel features quartz crystal formation deep underground, evidencing a volcano that powers the Old Faithful Geyser of Yellowstone Park, which brings up my sister, who once lived there while training as a chef. In that gently rolling landscape, how much danger lurks beneath? (Ah, there’s a perspective fitting the place I’m holding in my “Dream Comic,” the pages of which I’ve been methodically discovering and rediscovering re-invented!) Capturing the complete events of a given moment consumes attention that moves impressions of those moments into the full place of one’s mental projections, though one’s mind naturally creates a commentary response of associations while reading along: that is the true reward, the self-discovery found in good reading.




I remember switching to left hand grip “for the next five points” when our first game was about 7-2 in my favor. In the second game, she thanked the tree on her side for ‘not letting me run into you, though it would have hurt you than it could damage my hard head!’ I’d switched back to that side on the third game, as the iron light post in her play area was hit with the birdie as we swatted it into play. “Point for the lamp post!” she would cheerfully call, and from then on, the scores were called with a tally for the lamp post each time, as the tree now on my side would receive, were it hit. “It’s playing, too,” she said, in an innocent, fun-loving and humble voice. At one point in that close game, the score was called 13-12-3. Jocularly, I called as though to our imagined player, congratulated the post on its record high score during this match. Our game is fun indeed, you can hit twice on your side, thus setting yourself up to be your own partner---“it wouldn’t be the first time, “ she said coyly.




I think we will go back many times, to see the patterns of the walked dogs and who comes to hang out, ever shifting faces in a city that we nonetheless treat with the familiarity of our own small towns, for we are happy here and engage things mostly within walking distance, though our transit adventure the day before was the first of many beach daytime visits, this one a brightened late afternoon sequel to the cool windy and cloudy night we went to participate in the oceanside beneath the full moon.




This visit to those memories, of the two of us laughing through most of the first two games, instantly becoming full of jokes again after the quiet few moments late in that match, made everything after sunset so comfortable and full of regard. But it did one more thing for us, creatively:




Early in the day, before the time became 12:34 am as it is now, I’d drawn a horned fellow, dressed as I was in the photograph on the laptop screen, in a host of poses for that character. All the while, Angela talked with her sister Dixie, who was preparing a traditionally delicious meat and potatoes meal, asking her when would be a good time for us to talk over the story from their personal lives that would become the basis for the horror/ comedy first story for d’n’a, our comic soon to debut on the web as I prepare three unrelated episodes to illustrate the range of tones and approaches of our concept quickly as we prepare the pages of drawings and words for “The Mountain,” an ominous tale based on the remembered experiences of real people, one of which is Dixie. In the meanwhile, we chose the places in which to Photoshop her drawings and I studied one more time my share of them, which has been part of a weeks-long consideration that surprised me, even disappointing me at times with the continued wait for its completion, but one that satisfies a need in me to bond with the understandings of what I choose to convey and have practiced to depict. How much more practice does it need? Some version available for Dixie to see would help her understand the imaginative devices by which we seek to explore the motives hidden beneath the surface of what began as an innocent gathering of friends that resulted in a tricky but successful upper-ear piercing and a suggestion from this new figure that will lead everyone to a shared terror and desperation.





So tonight, while posing with the badminton racket, I eventually noticed how my shadow seemed to crown my head with a shadow halo, crying out to be passed along as a symbol. Suddenly an alternative conception of depicting my angels seemed to bring together many imaginative experiments with depicting the nature of our minds, their processes. We experimented with the light and some angles on creating different shadow selves, each bestowing a halo created with the racket.




"I like that one," she said once: "looks like you've just turned to discover and meet your original self and said, 'he-llo!'" She was the one who evoked the word "original" when I tried to express what manner of acting is involved in the performance art that makes a live act "rock and roll." It is about an original form of acting.




Creating halos is a racket; We create halos with our racket; we play a game with no net because we use the cinder blocks erected between us, placed regularly throughout the parkway paths so that vehicles do not enter, and somewhere in set two we establish rules for points and serves when the birdie hits the boundaries, and the process of reacting quickly to the presented possibilities, as always, is the fountain head of fun, which I’m happy to remember, now as ever.

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