Posts

Purpose...

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In this crazy mixed up world people who believe they have a purpose, a strong belief they have a reason for being, usually end up with the the whole 'Crazy' label stamped on their asses. As kids we're prone to follow the example of our parents or family and become little replicas of their lives...We might not enter the same work as them but our attitudes and, yeah, our prejudices, will dig into our souls.  The whole 'Nature vs Nurture' conflict...Which I'm not going into. Ever. From the time I was a kid I knew two things: I wanted to become an artist (Not just any artist, mind you, but one who could make my drawings look like photographs) and, secondly, I never saw skin color. Thing is, and I didn't learn this until decades later, I could afford to not see skin color because I was white (Gasp!) I always went to the movies with my friends who were different races and never once thought twice about it. We were friends and that's what friends did.  ...

And then...

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September of this year marked 30 years of being sober. I had quit counting the years a while back but I'd been gong through some files and ran across the Visa Slip for the rehab place and it had the date of my admission. Honestly, it doesn't seem that long ago... ...But then everything doesn't seem that long ago these days. Anyway, back to rehab. They put me into the 'Quiet Room' as I sweated the last bottle of booze from my system and then we got down to business. I won't bore you with the details so if you want to know about what happens in rehab watch the Michael Keaton movie 'Clean and Sober'...My experience was pretty much the same. Only one thing different. They gave me a little notebook and told me to write down every illegal thing I'd ever done and I wrote down on the front page in large letters: NOT IN THIS LIFETIME. They weren't amused. Then came the whole group therapy part. They kept asking me why I was an alcoholic and I ke...

Jus a Little Insane...

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I have had a lot of strange things that have happened to me in my life..Visions, visitations, floating bodies, spilling of blood and so forth...Many of them were, and still are, unexplained and will doubtless remain so. Some I have discovered to be cautious about sharing because there are those people out there who will love to give you lithium and Prozac all manners of drugs to make you 'Well'... ...They tried but I have a sister who challenged them every step of the way. Anyway...My father came from an old fashioned Pentecostal family with the speaking in tongues, miracles and all the rest and my mother, my mother was a child of the Earth, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter with a load of stories to tell that defied all logic and entranced me from the beginning. Personally, I found the 'Church' a problem in a lot of ways (Which would seem to be a major problem when I went off to 'Bible School', but that's another long story we'll get to...

History Is Made of Dreams (Pt 2)

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We stayed in San Francisco for three days and, for once, my friend didn't have to worry about who he was and I discovered a lot about the world outside of my little small town. SF wasn't a perfect city, there are no perfect places on this planet, but it was more embracing of the different. To a point, anyway. There were still raids on gay bars and gathering places, but I saw a part of life I'd never have even imagined back in those early days of the '70s. It was hard to make the trip back to Casa Grande. Back to the 'Real World' where being different put you on the lowest rung of the human scale. Over the years I'd make various pilgrimages to San Francisco and it always gave me a spiritual lift. The city changed here and there, new buildings and new people, but it continued to have that certain special charm that led me to start discovering the history of San Francisco. My friend died back in 1994. He was able to find a community where he was accept...

History Is Made of Dreams...

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Our parents give us life but it's the world that gives us our destiny...Not always fair or right or just, it simply is. So many have any dreams of being better than our birth station in life have that idea squashed almost immediately, usually by those same parents who we owe for this time on earth. Not all, some.  I had dreams from the beginning. They were unformed, nebulous, maybe even idealistic, and I was always a slow starter in pretty much everything, but I discovered early one specific truth: If one person can do something, so can another. For me the future was in art, always has been even before I read comic books. I just wanted to do the whole 'God' thing and create a world I could control and there were no problems...And that is the grown up giving words to a simplistic idea the child in him had a million years ago...There were problems in our home, most families have them, and it doesn't matter any longer what those problems were. Once we grow up and move ...

Eyes Wide Open

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After my father died the result of his death was classified as 'Failure to Thrive'. Basically, I suppose, that means he simply gave up on life and slipped into death, which is probably true. Toward the end he'd lost all control over his bodily functions and one such embarrassing incident happened in front of the woman he'd been dating. In the span of ten days he went from awake and (Semi) aware, he kind of lost cohesion in the afternoons, he went to catatonic human being. The last thing he said to me happened while I cleaned him up after one of his accidents and I did the reassuring thing of telling him he just needed his rest to get better. He looked at me and said 'I don't think I will get better.' He lay down, closed his eyes and never opened them again. Failure to thrive.  What causes this? Is it the idea that you have nothing to live for anymore? Life around you has lost something precious you know won't be found? Most of us have something t...

Hammer Horror

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It's safe to say that without the old 'Hammer' horror movies we would never have had 'True Blood' or 'Kolchak' or a multitude of other films/series...Good and bad. Hammer Films is one of those memories best left where they are or in still photographs because today they are not great...Nostalgic, yeah...Good? Nope. Still, as a youth they were incredible and were the first time I ever thought of sex and horror making the perfect kind of film for a pubescent pre-teen. And I started to draw those scenes from the films back in the 80s when a writer and I worked to create a comic based upon the first Hammer 'Dracula' film. (Side note: Because of Hammer I tried to read the original 'Dracula' book by Stoker and it was, and still is, incredibly boring. It wasn't until I was in my 40s and had a copy of an annotated version of Dracula that I actually understood it. Still...Boring.) But it was the 'Hammer Glamour (An actual term used for t...