The Rabbit Head

WTF?!

I was on my way to the library, when I saw this from across the street. I had to cross the street for a closer look. Sometimes I see random objects hung in the chain link fence, like the skateboard sold at the dollar store or a missing baby sock, but this stuffed animal took me way back, to a time when me and my brother outgrew our childhood toys forever. 

Instead of play, my Barbie doll got a Mohawk haircut that I dunked into a paper cup of blue food coloring on the kitchen counter, and we froze my brother's Stretch Armstrong doll in the freezer, just for kicks, to see what the red goo inside would do. It cracked into big chunks after we took it out and threw him onto the hard kitchen tiles. Oh. Neat! 
After that initial experimentation, everything we had was up for grabs. 

Oh, I see. It's "Don't let this be you!" in kid-talk.

My Kermit the Frog doll was hung by a rope-fashioned noose from the top of the stairs by my brother and our cousin, as a tribal warning to me when I came through the front door about what was in store. Aha! Something was afoot with those boys, and methinks our childhood is officially over. I could fight the tides that be, but true to me, I shrugged it off and joined in the fun. 

Kermie went into the dryer, Barbie was blown to bits by firecrackers (after she drag raced Mad Max style a few times in several horribly disfiguring crash-and-burn scenarios), and then we just simply tore things apart. The next year in junior high school, we read Lord of the Flies for the first time. Lesson learned.

Reading

Ah, that "Q" is perfection. Well done!

I've been a reader for so long, I don't actually remember when I couldn't read. I know I was a very early reader, about 2 or 3 years old, and so was my oldest brother. My mother said he taught himself to read The New York Times so he could check the Mets score, and that certainly may be true. 

I know I attended a pre-K reading class for toddlers at the local library, because I begged my parents to take me to school so I could read, and that was the closest they could find to nursery school before 
I went to an actual school, during the brief year we lived in rural Pennsylvania after leaving the city, before settling down in the Hudson River region.

Discovery and a new chapter.

It's hard for me to describe an experience I do so fluently; it's almost a subconscious thing at this point. I take in information so quickly visually, that I see things way before the lay person can. I've likened in to being an expert swimmer dipping and swirling through the clearest, warmest tropical waters (and I am that, too). Reading is a feeling so sensuous and fluid, few hobbies can replicate that kind of pleasure for me, and I know the same is true for other hardcore readers. 
We occasionally speak between nose dives.

Oh, I've designed flaps like this before.

Few hobbies create the kind of erudition and experience that bibliophiles have, with the exceptions of medical fields and clergy. 
We empathize immediately with the writer, because as soon as we read words, we're right there with the author. Some of us are so adept at it, we work at it professionally through publishing and media. Unlike a purely visual artist, I am also a writer and reader: the harmonious blend of a variety of highly skilled sets that transcend majors taught at the leading universities.

Lots of decorative elements and ink coverage. Some gaps in typesetting.

And so it is that I can talk with ease to an advanced physicist at their level, because I read their words when I design books for the students majoring in their curriculum. I sing along perfectly to Ella Fitzgerald while I riff through a series of graphics that vibe off one another, like a flutist times himself to a jazz pianist, either in the planned syncopation of an orchestration or the more advanced styling of an abstract expressionist who goes off on a tangent. 

To find someone who can follow along like that is the rarest of the rare, and just like the books we collect, so too are the odd ducks of the creative world who finally find their intellectual homes within the great literary houses of the world: those weird combinations of dancer, musician, photographer, model, writer, reader, designer, engineer, artist, and muse, because we are all of those things, and so much more. Open a book, and come find us. We'll be there between the vanilla-scented pages of a hundred year old volume and the near-constant flickering of a computer screen. See you soon.

Lawn Perfection

When I was a kid, I once complained to my mom about boredom during a particularly slow summer, because I grew up with kids who weren't exactly on my level, which always left me wondering what to do next. Naturally, I developed an enormous amount of entertainments while alone. In response to my "whining", my mom ordered me to the basement for a big, white, plastic bucket to pick out every dandelion in the backyard with my little next door neighbor, because she didn't want "weeds" in "her" lawn. She would also suggest we do laundry, wash dishes, fold clothes, and other horrors when we hinted at boredom, so I learned industrious, productive habits early on.

We did that for awhile, then became actually bored, after exhausting every avenue available to us through this venue: we decorated ourselves with flower crowns and garlands, then went indoors and pretended to be Greek Goddesses, wrapping ourselves in bedsheets, giggling in the guest bedroom downstairs, doing playacting that I sourced from the books on the shelf. Finally my mom came downstairs to see what all the commotion was about, to find me and my friend jumping up and down on the bed, grabbing each other when we fell down, laughing over the stupid romantic phrases adults used in soap operas, like "Darling, I'm yours!", pretending all the world was a stage.

I still do that, and I still appreciate a really nice yard, even ones with hundreds of wildflowers one might consider a "weed" in passing, as I still love hammy, over-dramatic, bad acting for sport; life lessons learned in childhood, now made into art. Such is the life.
 

My Mega Foes

The Evil Borg Kitty "Mecha-Anchovy", my first real foe.

Enemies are hardly new to humankind. It pretty much happens whenever there are more than three people in a room, and because of a basic principle called "factioning", the producers of the day stage morality plays in the guise of "reality" t.v. shows, catering to the interests of the drunk and/or mentally ill among us. Me, I prefer the classics in those old school renditions by Shakespeare, but as a publisher, I respect all revisions, updates, and new editions of this ever appealing and exciting classic tale of Good vs. Evil. Who will win?!

Harbinger of Gloom, the evil "Doom Shroom"!

It's all so falsely cliffhanging that students since time immemorial have created drinking games about spot societal clichés to pass the time; time that would be excruciating without a serious crutch to numb and dull the senses, which puts us on pretty much the same level as the morality tales' participants. And just like my college days, I still prefer cartoon enemies over the real, dull, and repetitive kind. After all, new foes are so fun to create, aren't they? Witness my ascent on the game Bejeweled Blitz, as I climb the ladder up, up, and away! The evil Tiki Gods get angrier and more powerful as I rise, and also, strangely, boringly, achingly repetitive. Thanks for watching with me.

I had a post-Apocalytpic dream about an Alien Yeti invasion=I won!

Maya Angelou, 1928-2014

At the library, in April.

At the library: May 29, 2014.