Attack of the Santa Clones

 

The diminutive Santa clones had attacked Grandma Dee in the run up to Christmas.  

They marched in columns down the alley forming dark parallel lines through the frost and surrounded the back porch with malice in their beady eyes.  Their sparkling artificial eyebrows and mustaches caught the slanting rays of the morning sun as they stood breathless and bearded portending something ominous.

Grandma Dee was busy in the kitchen prepping food for the holiday when she spied them through the window.  “What the heck?” she mumbled as she dried her hands on her apron.  “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”  Family and guests would be arriving later that afternoon.

With a determined look in her eye she tied up her housecoat and slid a large carving knife out of its holder.  On the elevated back porch she waved it around and told the clones in no uncertain terms they should turn around and go back to wherever they came from.

When that didn’t work she waddled down the steps and charged into their ranks, knife flashing in the sun, her slippers stomping and kicking as she went.  Little red bodies converged only to be dispersed by the irate woman intent on saving the holiday from certain disaster.  “For the grandkids!” she bellowed.

Later when the guests arrived and Grandma Dee  had changed into something more presentable they marveled at her Christmas lights and decorations that covered every conceivable surface.  And from the rafters hung with care were several shiny Santa heads.

The Lord provides indeed.

***

STATION ELEVEN

January 5th, 2022

STATION ELEVEN is a new post-apocalyptic series on HBO Max based on an award winning SciFi novel of the same name.

I have been captivated by these type of stories since I was a teenager when there was so much I did not understand about the wider world and what dangers might lurk there.  Post-apocalyptic stories were a way for me to explore some of these dangers from the safety of my bedroom.  If I were to look for metaphors of what an apocalypse might be and what follows it I could do worse than to see it as that transition from the stability and comforts of home as a child to being exiled into the unknown territory of adulthood where one must begin to make one’s own way in the world, sink or swim.  It is simultaneously an exhilarating and terrifying prospect that involves finding seemingly radical new ways to adapt.

My transition was extremely bumpy and protracted to the point my mother despaired that I might be that “failure to launch” scenario.  I threw myself into impossible situations to see how I would respond with varying degrees of success and failure.  This included changing my major in college at least three times, changing colleges, dropping out of college and joining the Army during the first Gulf War, ending up in Korea for two years, returning to finish college and then globetrotting for a bit.  I did not lock into a trajectory as such until a decade after graduating from high school when I was accepted to medical school.  At that point I felt I was finally moving into what my metaphor might consider the post post-apocalyptic period.

And STATION ELEVEN hits all the sweet spots for me.  A pandemic sweeps the planet with a one in one thousand survival rate.  I read today that it was developed (and two of the episodes filmed) pre-pandemic so its release has been coincidental to our own pandemic woes, but everything hits so much harder now that we are in the midst of our own.  The characters that emerge are distorted by it just like we are seeing now, bringing out both the best and the worst in us in how we adapt to this new situation.

At the heart of the series is a comic book entitled “STATION ELEVEN” that features a mysterious character in a blue space suit who lives on an abandoned space station and is known as “Dr. Eleven”.  Yesterday I was wearing my PAPRs (powered air-purifying respirator) to see a Covid patient and it struck me that my appearance was not unlike Dr. Eleven.  So, of course, I took a selfie and cosplayed myself into the STATION ELEVEN universe, imagining I’m in one of those stories I love so much.

***

 

Fade to Gray

***

Mixed emotions

Dead devotions

Empty oceans

I 

Fade to gray

Posthumous Letter to KVJ

 

Hello Kurt, you probably don’t remember me but we met at a high school somewhere in Indianapolis.  I was the teenager with a copy of Cat’s Cradle and a pen trying to get you to autograph it.  There was no Security present so my friends and I simply ambushed you at the back stage door.  You were smoking a cigarette (nothing you'd blink your eye at inside a building in the mid-80’s).  I wish I’d made a better impression.  You looked irritated.  I understand that now.  The cult of celebrity is a mixed blessing at best, a perpetual curse at worst.  

I remember it was a cold and wet evening in late Fall.  We drove up from Mitchell, Indiana.  The only thing I can still remember about your talk these 36 years later is that you were mad as hell at Ronald Reagan and his bombing of Libya.  At the time I was a Reagan fanboy and your words left me conflicted.  I understand it better now.  My “big brain” has processed quite a bit more information since then and I’ve had opportunity to travel the globe learning some humility and maybe even grace.  Blessings to you wherever you are [3 words here].

Aaron

***

The Birth of Impressionism?

 

Having taken a few photos through my rain-soaked windshield this morning and run them through a paint app the thought struck me just now… what if the impressionist style of painting began in just such a way? It would have been a Bob Ross “happy accident” on steroids.

Stay with me. A glass maker who also happens to be an avid painter is carrying a pane of glass to fix a friend’s window. As he walks with it in hand and held in front of him an unexpected downpour hits and he finds himself in a so-called sunshower and the glass covered with water.

At first he is a little put off but then he sees the landscape before him through the glass in brilliant swirls and mottled colors that takes his breath away. The world and his perception of it has been utterly transformed and he is not sure that he’s ever seen something so beautiful!

He immediately turns himself around and hurries home in a kind of daze leaving the glass behind. At his house he begins dabbing heavy blotches of bright colored paint over a staid landscape he had been working on and transforms it into something never seen before.

Impressionism is born!

***

Blood Moon

 

Blood moon 

mood more

bleed soon

heart sore

sad tune

slam door

rock hewn

love poor

sand dune

far shore

never noon

night lore.

***

The Lonely Persimmon

 

It’s a lonely time of year

for unfallen persimmons.

I respect their tenacity

to ward off the inevitable

but it makes me sad none

theless, a spot of orange

against a gray & sullen sky.

***

Kevin’s Friends

 

I’ve had a large art folder with some of Kevin McCarty’s charcoal sketches stored away in a closet for over a decade and I’ve been meaning to pull them out and put them in their poster protectors. The few times I’ve stumbled upon this folder it has always seemed like there would be time at a later date to make it happen. Well, today is finally that day.

As I’ve handled them I realize the paper has thinned and dried out into a brittle dark beige that is turning brown in spots. The poster protectors that they were meant to be placed in have sat unused and still shrink-wrapped with the sketches all these years. None too soon I have unwrapped them and carefully slipped the large pieces of sketch paper between the thin particle board back and clear plastic cover.

The thing that stands out to me is that three of the four sketches are of one person. The remaining one is of three people in various stages of completion sitting in chairs and at a counter. I recognize the setting as The Country Shed which was a greasy spoon restaurant in Marion, Indiana where the locals hung out but was torn down when the bypass was expanded.

Initially I did not realize the three men in separate sketches were the same person, but then on closer inspection it became clear: beard, large glasses, baseball cap, dark sleeveless shirt, and coffee cup. The different iterations looked different to me because he is drawn from three different angles. This kind of sketching was typical for Kevin in preparing to create an oil painting. It allowed him to understand what he was seeing with his one weakened eye and lack of depth perception that most are afforded by virtue of having two eyes. Maybe even more important than the visual aspects was the process itself which gave him time to talk to his subjects and get to know them on a more personal level.

I’m sure for Kevin it was a win-win situation. He loved talking to people and could spend hours going back and forth about any number of topics though he had a preference for existential questions. I never specifically asked him about it but as someone who has knowledge about retinoblastoma and sarcomas from medical school I wondered if his elevated risk for cancer recurrence as an adult and related increase in mortality was always somewhere in the back of his mind.

And here I sit at this desk surrounded by his long hidden works trying to give them their due. His eye has become my eyes trying to understand this man from decades passed when The Country Shed was a place to experience the connections that bind us all together.

Kramer’s Kronicles and Kollege

 

When my son was in elementary school he liked to write stories from time to time in his school notebooks and even illustrate them with drawings.  Some were required for school but others were done just for fun.  Early on he would weave in elements of Minecraft that he played on my old iPad.  We still laugh about his main character charging into a cave of zombies sword-in-hand with the cry “FOR LIFE!” 

He drew ideas from TV, especially reality shows that would cut off at some particularly thrilling point for commercials in cliffhanger fashion.  He picked up on this notion and would end some of his chapters or sections of a story with an element of acute danger or excitement that forced the reader to pause but then continue on reading in anticipation of a resolution.

And as he went from grade to grade his tastes changed.  He had a scary story phase somewhere around 3^rd and 4^th grade and then was coming up with ideas for sports-related stories in 5^th and 6^th grade which reflected his experiences of competing on baseball and basketball teams.

To encourage this early on I created a blog site for him called “Kramer’s Kronicles” which was a riff on his middle name and Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”.  I would take his hand written stories and type them into the blog and then get his ideas about possible pictures to illustrate them if possible.  These stories became few and far between as he progressed into middle school despite my encouraging him to keep writing.

At some point I imagined he was done with all of that as a passing childhood fancy but it lingered in the form of high school writing assignments.  In this context he would sometimes come home excited about things his English teacher would say about things he’d written.  His attitude was always one of astonishment that he had the ability to create something compelling from the words he would write.  This recently found a kind of culmination in his personal essay for his college application.  It was well thought out and emotionally charged in a way that I can only imagine caught the attention of College Admissions and helped him get an early acceptance letter from his favorite college this past weekend.

And so here I am thinking of those early years of Kramer’s Kronicles and an idea has formed in my head of an image that combines a picture I took of him over the weekend at a college visit and a Martian landscape as imagined by the great SciFi artist Michael Whelan for Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”.  It is a visual “kronicle” of the journey my son has made over, around, and through many obstacles to find himself at a point that was hardly imaginable all those years ago.

***