Stray Thoughts

A new option for you. But first, a preamble.

Readers, you and I owe a vote of thanks to my good friend Rich Spees, for maintaining this blog and making so many successive improvements. (We also owe my friend Larry Giannou for creating it, so many years ago, before handing off to Rich.)

Rich and I met at The Monroe Institute in July, 1995, where we did Lifeline together. As happens sometimes, he and I didn’t so much become friends as realize we already were friends, and over the years we have maintained one of those enduring and sustaining long-distance friendships that are such a gift in life.

The only thing better than a good friend is a good friend of long standing.  The only thing better than that is a good friend of long standing who happens to be a technical wizard. And the only way to top that is for the wizard to be ready and willing and able to come to the aid of the party, time and again.

Rich, unlike me, understands and likes working with software. In fact, for several years now he has worked for WordPress, the company that makes this blog possible. So when i emailed him the other day with a query, he not only said it was possible, he accomplished it in about three and a half nanoseconds. (That’s how it looks to me, anyway.)

Continue reading Wonderful new resource for this blog

Visions of Shasta, I call this one.

A Study in Purple

The Bow of the Titanic

(All right, so I’m beating the Clint Eastwood theme to death. So sue me.)

I am picking these paintings more or less at random. No cosmic significance, and no implication that these are my all-time favorites, just that they happened to catch my eye at this time.

“Sea and sky,” I call this one. Don’t ask what the structures in the foreground are. I wouldn’t know.

Sometimes I start out trying to paint something resembling something, but not usually. Usually, I find out what the colors and shapes want to do, and sometimes I like the result.

(Catchy title. Maybe I can get Clint Eastwood to star in the movie.)

I have painted hundreds of paintings over nearly 50 years. Of course I have a few that came out all right.

Never came up with a title for this one, but I did frame it and hang it on the wall.

This one I named “Tunnels.”

Imagined nighttime seaside. Too much flash glare, though.

 

Many of my favorites I have given away, so these images are all I have available to share. But this one I still have. I call this one “Polar Bear,” because to me the figure on the left resembles a polar bear playing a xylophone. No heavy symbolism, just a happy accident. I liked the overall effect.

The only painting I ever did at a TMI program, “Camp fire” was painted on a night in July, 1995, when most of the others were watching a movie. That Lifeline program was where Rich Spees and I met. I gave him the picture at the end of the program, and I understand it now lives with him in Hawaii. Not really a picture of a fire; more a picture of that gathered-around-the-campfire feeling.

“Celebration.” This one has a happy feeling that I enjoy. I do wish these photos had been taken by someone who knew what he was doing, however.

This site is getting to be what they call a cobweb site, it’s been so long since i made an entry. But this month has been full of company and, more than that, full of early morning hours spent working on my novel, which is a sequel to Babe in the Woods and also, in a way, to my first novel, Messenger. Just passed 79,000 words and i’m nowhere near finished. I decided not to rush it and not to truncate it, just to let it spin itself out. I think of Hemingway being willing to spend 17 months writing For Whom the Bell Tolls. The comparison is not to his talent or to his subject matter, but to his diligence, which i am attempting to emulate.

But this site suffers neglect, as a consequence. Stay tuned, not dead yet.