Mending

It seems like I am through the worst of this awful bug. Despite a round of weird and creepy nightmares I got a decent night's sleep, and this morning I'm ready to maybe get back to work on the stone. I need to get caught up on the Arkhaven posting as well. I had several week's worth of posting ahead in the cue, but I've used up almost all of the slack I had given myself. The slideshow movie is sort of in limbo right now. There may be copyright issues with some of the Beethoven excerpts. There isn't much information available, but as I understand it the streaming platforms all have algorithms pre-set to nuke anything even in cases where the recordings are in public domain. It's a system where you are judged guilty without trial, and have little or no recourse to appeal the machine made censor.  This won't prevent me from showing the film at the museum, or the art gallery, but it may preclude my ability to upload it to any streaming platform.

 I had Nick, the computer whiz, nuke my facebarf account permanently. I am glad to see it gone. The program is next to impossible to delete, and will reactivate with a click for a period of weeks after the command to delete has been executed.

I have come to believe that it is an evil thing, a tool of the darkness that descends on the nation and the world. Blogger is no less of a tool, just another lens in the all-seeing eye, but I am small enough, and inconsequential to the beast. At least for now.

I have found a very fine community at the "How to Meow in Yiddish" blog. P'Bird is a wise, and sagacious host, and I like the other commenters there tremendously. This is the internet at its best. One more of many things for which I am grateful. Hearing from Julie C has also been a blessing. It amazes me how long now, how far back some of these connections go. So that about sums up the morning. Later I'll get a new SD card, and get a copy of the movie off to Richard Hampton, and like I said, maybe even get a little work done on the stone.

Lost

 I have been horribly ill with the covid. I was exposed to it on the fifth, and two days later came down ill.  I'm not dealing with fever or cough, just horrible weakness, fatigue, lassitude. Ivermectin has prevented the worst of it. The doctors forbid ivermectin. The doctors prescribed paxlovid which very nearly killed me. I've posted about it over on P'Bird's site, and don't much feel like repeating what I've already written. But it keeps grinding on. Last night I hit a bout of delirium wherein I felt that Mary had abandoned me, that I was used up, worthless to her. I have never in my life felt anything like that level of utter despair. My fear is for Mary. She hasn't come down with any symptoms, thank God. I'm praying for her with all I've got.

Bill, the guy I got it from, has been worse, and his wife is down with it also. They aren't taking IVM. They picked the bug up on a flight from Europe. According to Bill, this is some new strain. 

Of course. The virus was deliberately created to do what it is doing: kill as many useless humans as possible. I do not doubt this is the end game of the so-called "environmentalists." They are a death cult, and the goal is to un-make civilization as we know it. They flood Europe with Africans. They stoke race hatred among the feral savages who have ruined our cities. The weapons are epistemological, couching the politics of greed and envy in weaseling nonsense words like "social justice", and "Equity". The weapons are ontological, inventing scourges like racism, and phobias as though they were anything but what they are: hatred and envy by those who create nothing for those who create the good the true and the beautiful. 

This is Satanic at its very core.

I fear greatly for our nation. I'm afraid that we are coming undone. Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of the world we have known. Washington DC is a criminal cabal, and as utterly corrupt as it is inept. They are martyring Trump with a death of a thousand cuts. I do not see how he can escape it. All that is left, now is prayer. Civilizations have fallen before, and only the remnant survive. I am an old man. I will not live to see the end of this. Despair is a sin, I know. But I do not see much hope for our future.

 Startin' in on some new stuff.

Trichocereus Bridgesii in bloom

 

So, it's Monday morning, gray and cool here in So Cal. Mary is on a short vacation in Palm Desert, and I have the place to myself for the week.

Sort of. 

Pierre will be here pretty soon to resume work on the bathroom overhaul. We've been without a shower or bath for the last three weeks or so. The house is a mess. No point in trying to clean things up in the middle of construction. 

 My brother  recommended Pierre for the job, and I'm glad we hired him to do it. The last two rebuilds were done half-assed. There was a lot of repair needed on the sub flooring, and the construction had been done all mickey moused. Pierre is a craftsman; he does quality work. 

Even so, I'll be glad to see an end to it. I've been showering with the garden hose in the back yard. It kind of works. Leave the hose out in the sun all afternoon, and I get just enough hot water to clean up. Too, I've been feeling like crap ever since the middle of June. Had some some respiratory congestion. Doc gave me cortisone and an inhaler. It was impetus to finally hang up my guns on smoking weed. Just as well. The bud has been an ally for a very long time, but it was wearing out its welcome. Used to be a tweet in the morning lit up my creative energies, and kept me focused on task. But it was losing the magic, and by mid afternoon I was just feeling stoned out. I found myself saying, "I'm just sick of this shit." 

But over a month has passed, and my energy and stamina are still way too low. Kaiser isn't much help. I can chalk some of it up to just being seventy, but only some of it.

 

I've been working hard on the Lost Canyon stuff again. I finished the Lost Era slideshow movie using the Movavi program. Last Saturday, I premiered the film at the Whittier Museum during the closing reception for The Hills Are Alive art show. It went over very well. More on this in a subsequent post.

 

I'll wind up with a few pictures of the Smallstone Project.

 

 

 I started in on the finishing yesterday. All in all I'm very pleased with the work. What started out as a kind of goof-around improvisational effort has turned into one of my better pieces. Pierre likes it well enough that he's taking it home with him when it's done. My first really for real sale! Not bad at all.

I'll wind up with this final note. I will resume regular posting here, and try to get some kind of baloney posted up at the very least once a week. I'm bailing out on the most detestable site on earth, Facebarf, and I want to be able to trade a few notes with my on-line friends without that human hemorrhoid Zuckerbarf's AI looking over my shoulder for wrongthink. 

With that. Be well, and have a blessed day.

The Grumbling of Mondays

 

So, it's another Monday morning, 5:30 by the clock, but I've been up for a couple of hours. This seems to be the new sleep pattern: down around nine, up around three. Despite the warm nights, both cats have taken to sleeping on the bed, and I don't mind.

It has been a week of hard work on both the stone, and the Lost Canyon project. I'll be doing a presentation/performance of the Lost Era slideshow at the closing reception for The Hills Are Alive show at the Whittier Museum on August 5th. I finished re-formatting all the pics for the Arkhaven uploads. I'll be composing the text and image panels this week. I hope to have it all in the cue in the next week or so.

 

I always manage to work myself into a tight cramped space in the stone sculpture, some spot that needs to shaped just so, and almost nowhere to fit the tool into that space to shape it.

 

  And I need to do  something more with the back face of this thing, and I still haven't figured out quite what that something is. This is fun, right?

 

 The morning tour through the bookmarks is depressing as always. I won't even bother with news and current events. 

Thought Experiment:

Imagine a restaurant serving computer generated 3D printed non-nutritional synthetic food simulations.

 Just like real food only without calories or nutritional value!

 People could eat there, have three meals a day, and  stay full and satisfied while slowly starving to death. In this age, and time there would be suckers lined up around the block waiting to get in.

So it is with our newest techno-fetish, AI.

GAB is infested with AI "art" these days. Every horny ass fanboy, and his uncle is "composing" images of anime fetish girl pin-ups in sexy costumes. Fantasy scenes like the covers of cheesy sword and sorcery knock offs are popular as well. Other are making digital abstracts. 

Elsewhere, every wannabe writer is employing the chatbots to compose essays and articles.

It's all shit, and it's creepy as hell. Not one of these clowns could pick up a pencil and draw a cat, or write a paragraph.

Writing is hard work. Art takes a burdensome investment of effort. Both are fraught with failure, and frustration. Pardon the melodramatic metaphor here, but a writer, or an artist picks up a sword, and does battle in the war for Goodness Truth and Beauty. The real guys work very hard to produce food for the soul and spirit. AI clowns are wanabe cooks in the no-food restaurant. They're pretend warriors with imaginary swords.

So that's it for me being all creative, n' stuff. Breakfast is ready and I have things to do.

Thanks for stopping by.

 

Progress and Changes

Here's where the smallstone project stands at the moment.

Later on this morning I'll get back to it.

I'm pleased with where it's going, but improvising doesn't mean working with no plan. It means that the planning and carving play hopscotch. Plan a little, carve a little, plan a little, carve a little . (Music Man, anyone?)

 

It has been a while. The last three weeks have been tough. Too, I've found myself posting notes on Pbird's blog, and over at Founding Questions, rather than writing stuff here on my own small platform. The reason for that is pretty simple: Both sites have interesting content and an active, thoughtful, and intelligent group of participants. I don't have either.

I'm not doing an 'oh poor me' here, and I don't mean that as a dig on the few folks who stop by.

I have no desire to run a hundred comments a day blog. There is a shit ton of great sites out there for discussion of items of interest, news, and current events. All I want to do here is chronicle my progress on the stone carving projects, and right now there hasn't been much progress on the stone work. What little energy I have is being taken up with The Lost Canyon stuff.

 

And I have felt like total shit for the last three weeks.

This is entirely my own fault. Three years ago it was time for me to take a break from smokin' dope. I love my weed, and it has been a sort of ally for me in a lot of ways. All my artwork , and I mean ALL of it was done with a buzz. Even so, I would periodically take a long break from smoking to clear out my head. I was way overdue for that break when our evil overlords, and their rotten Chinese cohorts dropped the covid bomb on us. 

I had worked myself into exhaustion on the Lost Era Transcripts. I had begun a break in the weed routine, which set me up for a long brutal bout of insomnia. A disastrous encounter with ambien threw me into a terrifying psychotic break, and I behaved in a way that shames me to this day.

 

I had to say, "Fuck this, I'm getting my ass good and stoned, or I'll go off the deep end for reals."  And, indeed, the bud kept me from going off the deep end. The psychic overload got so heavy that it re-awakened the artistic fire in me, and I put steel to stone for the first time in nearly twenty years. And I made some damn cool shit, too. 

 

But I've been three years overdue for that break from smoking, and I've been hittin' it hard. Three weeks ago I had some scary breathing issues. There was no debate or equivocation about whether it was time to stop or not. Cannabis leaches out of the system slowly. The good side to that, is that there are no withdrawal symptoms, or craving like with nicotine, alcohol, opiates, or pharmaceuticals. But you get used to falling asleep with a buzz, and you don't dream when you do. The insomnia sets in after about the third or fourth night, and it takes a while to reset the sleeping pattern. 

I'm sleeping again, the head is clearing out, and the breathing problems have mostly disappeared. But the time for taking breaks is over. I'm seventy goddamn years old, and I'm feeling every one of those seventy years. Time let it go for good. Mostly I don't do  what I call, "finger-in-the-air" declarations. They're almost always a source of embarrassment when you don't live up to them. But I gotta' make one now, and stick to it. So it goes. 

My good friend Penny came by yesterday, and picked up the three plants I was growing. I gave her all my old-school pipe fittings, and a billet aluminum grinder. Some time in the future I may nibble a shroom here or there, but for now it's coffee in the morning, and that's about it. Maybe next post I'll have some stuff about the art show, and progress on the whole Lost Canyon effort. There is good stuff in the wind, and a new act waiting in the wings. Thanks for stopping by.