Eye Trouble is apparently a sketchblog of some sort.

As usual, I have zero time for this sketchblog thing, although I guess I should be making time for it, ’cause that was the original idea, to draw something new every single day. But, you know, time is always running away down different furrows in the earth. Plus, there’s forty tons of other work to do, all of which I’m glad to do, but still. Anyhow, the big distraction recently was, this weird orange car that kept showing up in front of our house was out there once again on Saturday, so we had to deal with that, meaning we waited for the driver to show up, so we could ask him who the heck he was and where the heck did he actually belong? Turned out, he was just this poor confused kid who was all tangled up in a messy romance with a girl from up the street. Apparently, the girlfriend’s mother didn’t like him parking in front of their house, so he parked in front of ours instead, even though we live hundreds of feet away. All of which, I guess, is a pretty exciting story, which is over now anyway, ’cause it seems the mother must’ve had a change of heart, ’cause now the confused kid’s parking up by his girlfriend’s house. We kind of figured he wasn’t too bad of a person, ’cause his weird orange car had a Stevie Wonder sticker on the back window, and who nowadays has the nerve to drive around with one of those?

Otherwise, I haven’t been sketching much worth posting, except this one thing, which was me just working out patterns for some objects I’m making. When I was doodling it, I was thinking about aerial views of farms and cities, and about various kinds of maps, and about ritual patterns, and also game boards. Plus, I reckon there are a lot of germ forms in this kind of drawing, too, cells and organelles and the shapes of various imaginary viruses. And also, I was thinking about Sixties SF book covers, especially the ones from Ballantine. All of which, of course, is totally un-original, but whatever. I think it’s possible I even had Pucci patterns in the back of my head, although who knows how or why I ever have patterns like that anywhere near any part of my brain.

The objects, meanwhile, are kind of hard to explain at the moment…they’re vaguely for a future project that’s vaguely called “Martian Destination,” which is a term for misdirected internet traffic (sort of). Maybe I’ll post pix of ‘em later, if they ever shape up to be anything more than a glimmer of an idea.

Oh, and I guess I did do this one other thing, which is a very simple little drawing based on a fairly ancient memory. According to a story I heard a long time ago, one of my extremely distant cousins once had a motel way, way out on a State Highway (I don’t know which state). Anyhow, supposedly, once a year or so, this guy would come through town with a traveling Snake Show. And, so, besides showing off different kinds of snakes to motel visitors for whatever loose dimes they had laying around, he also would get in this kind of aquarium-style contraption and let rattlesnakes roam about all over him. I suppose that was the capper to his whole little roadside attraction, the snake-tank bit. I actually have no idea if the story’s even true, but it sounds at least half-true, knowing the odd types of folk I’ve encountered down the years. I do know I kind of like the idea of some old character roaming mid-century America making a living off his talent for charming snakes. If I could write, I’d write about him, imagine a whole back-story and everything, but drawing’s slightly more my thing.

P.S. Here’s what I’m reading now: an interesting article about the Egyptian novelist Alaa al Aswany in last Sunday’s New York Times; Swimming Lessons by Rohinton Mistry; and Production for Graphic Designers by Alan Pipes, to refresh my memory about some stuff I haven’t dealt with for a while, but expect to deal with again soon.

Also, this painting’s from Tuesday, which was during my recent Critter Period. I think the red shapes are sort of symbols for buildings and clouds and sounds. I think I was thinking about stray cats in places like Ouagadougou and Conakry and Colombo. Like, how they wander around in the noise and dust and heat, all hungry and grumpy and yet not wild anymore. Or, who knows. Anyway, now I’m back to drawing airplanes and cosmonauts.

While I know it’s pretty hard to imagine, I actually have 13 or 14 things I’d like to write about, although I’m not sure “writing” is actually the right word. But, anyway, I’m super-busy at the moment, so I doubt a lot that I’m gonna have time today for any sort of writing or scribbling or whatever at all, which is a shame (for me, not for you), ’cause I wanted to write about this weird orange car that keeps getting parked in front of our house, and about the book I’m reading right now, which is a good book for learning arcane graphic design terms like “beard” and “nick” and “quoin.” Also, I wanted to write about book covers I’ve known and enjoyed down the years, and how it’s really strange I dream so often of golf courses, ’cause I’m not remotely fond of golf or the way it uses up the surface of the Earth (with all due respect to my dad and to the memory of my grandfather…I mean, I guess golf was a pretty solid family tradition until it took a detour around me).

Like I said, though, I have zero time at the moment for all that kind of stuff. So, instead, here’s a painting. Which, you know, I guess I’m trying to paint as much as possible, to maybe try and rediscover how to do art. The goal’s to do maybe five of these things a week, but I am, as usual, behind. Anyhow, I think the idea of this one came from spending time in Phoenix, where the sun is sometimes kind of relentless (although I love Arizona), and figures can sometimes look kind of like silhouettes against the bright, bright air. Plus, I remember from Texas how people would often carry around parasols for portable shade, which is a cool visual. Plus I draw in silhouette anyway, ’cause it’s a cheat for how I don’t actually know how to draw the right way. Okay, enough, I’ve gotta go.

Or, well, I reckon it wasn’t all that awesome, more just kind of funny, in a good way. I dreamt that my mother-in-law had the new R.E.M. record and when my wife and I went to visit her, she played it for us and asked us our opinions about what all the lyrics meant. I didn’t, of course, have an opinion, ’cause I never ever know what lyrics mean, but my wife’s a writer, so she knows how words work and she and her mom had a pretty good discussion about the songs. If I could remember what all they concluded about this or that turn of phrase, I’d report it here, but I can’t remember, which is how it goes.

Last night I dreamt that my wife and I were in London and that we, for some reason, were under the impression that Joyce Carol Oates lived in a little white house tucked away in some odd corner of Hyde Park. So we were looking for the house, just to see it, not to bother Mrs. Oates, which we would never do. Anyhow, we couldn’t find the house, although we wandered from one end of the park to the other (it wasn’t really much like the real Hyde Park, but was instead some sort of weird Isamu Noguchi-style futuristic land-sculpture sort of park, with funky swingsets and a bunch of Constructivist pavilions). What we did find was this extra-cool bookstore that was filled floor-to-ceiling with graphic novels and contemporary fiction paperbacks with way better covers than the covers usually are in the States. Which, 90% of my dreams end in bookstores, so that’s not unusual, I guess, unless it’s just unusual in general to dream about books and how they’re designed.

Anyway, I’m posting some old landscape drawings just to sort of have ‘em out where I can look at ‘em, which might help remind me of some work I’ve gotta work on sometime soon, in the middle of all the other work I need to get done.

There are two unisex salons in our part of town, which is a big number of such establishments for a town as accidentally retro as this one. Anyhow, been in one but not the other. The one I’ve been to (out of desperation ’cause my head was starting to look like an abandoned truck garden) had pale blue paint on the walls, thick as elephant skin, and the pressed tin ceiling was painted blue, as well. There were, of course, lots of crooked shelves stocked with tall and short bottles of pink and yellow fluids, sundry vintage styling appliances hanging from tangled phone cords, assorted industrial blow dryers that looked like the type you’d use to dry the paint on a battleship hull, enough worn-out Soap Opera Digests to restock the Library of Alexandria, and some really stilted CBS soaps on the t.v. (the kind where everyone has a completely unlikely name and several of the actors have dimples in places where normal humans rarely get dimples, like in the middle of their foreheads and on the ends of their noses). We never saw any of the CBS soaps growing up, so the characters and locations were all even more alien to me than usual; can’t stand that style of storytelling, in any case, but daytime t.v.’s also weirdly interesting, if you only have to see it once in a great while, like for the quick ten minutes it takes to get the occasional haircut. One minute more than that is way, way too much. But, you know, it’s funny how there are all these fake lives getting lived out on some soundstage in Culver City or wherever, some of ‘em connected to storylines that are decades long, and yet, it’s really, really hard to care about ‘em, ’cause the artistry of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it is pretty much 100% nonexistent. Meanwhile, there are real people with real stories walking into salons and beautyshops and barbershops every single day, and that’s what I wish I knew more about, all that kind of stuff, all the tangled-up hidden stories that are next door or just around the corner. Guess I oughta quit cutting my own hair (nowadays I work a trimmer over it like how a lawn care service works a suburban lawn - quick and without any subtlety). Guess instead I oughta go try out every barbershop in the whole dang city, maybe set aside a monthly budget for social research. Guess I oughta do a lot of things I don’t do, but which are nonetheless not completely terrible ideas.

Anyhow, the other unisex salon a couple of miles from me has this kind of nice sign, probably unchanged since the Seventies, with the name of the place in an old (and completely un-ironic) groovy font. In order to illustrate the nature of the business, the sign sports two portraits, a man and a woman done with a few sketchy brushstrokes. The hairstyles depicted are, in fact, pretty unisex, since the man and the woman both have Farrah Fawcett hair. You can only tell there oughta be a difference ’cause the guy has a scary moustache…it looks like a roadkilled ferret, or perhaps it’s more like a ruined wet cigar. So, yeah, obviously, I’ve nothing real compelling to say anymore. Tomorrow I’ve got to work and then work some more…always getting caught up. Better go think about that instead of thinking about this sketchbook thing, or whatever it is.

I know, I know, I’m supposed to talk about the drawings instead of droning on about completely other stuff. The thing is, right now, I’m sort of busy trying to see if I even remember how to operate a pencil or a pen, since it’s been about 100 years since I last attempted any kind of remotely art-like endeavor. The reasons I ever stopped doing it are all boring reasons, and the reasons I’m restarting the engine now are also not super interesting. Just a little curious, mostly, to see if there’s anything left in my head besides how to do other people’s jobs. Now, instead, I’m just trying to do the one job I should’ve been doing all along…but, anyway, I always knew I had a million miles to go before I was anywhere close to where I wanted to be with all this junk, so even if it’s a little dispiriting to look at old sketchbooks, it’s also giving me a little bit of a kick in the ass, which is always nice. Even if the way to actually talk about stuff, like why I drew a thing this way instead of that way or whatever, that skill, if I ever had it much, is still pretty much dormant. Guess I’ll work on it, though, in-between the 9000 other things I equally need to work on.

I’ll tell you what’s lately caught my eye about 90 times more than Second Life: it’s this website called Catalog Choice, which is a place where people can tell companies to stop sending ‘em catalogs all the dang time. Which, I guess that would make First Life a little nicer, if we could possibly help out with not denuding the Amazon and wherever else there might still, for a while, be trees. Like, I for sure don’t need Bean’s catalog for lobster boat captains, or the one they send to people they think might be interested in moose-themed dinnerware (why on Earth they think I’m one of those people is a pretty complete mystery; I’m more of a caribou person). And, well, I suppose I also don’t need the catalog that’s full of pictures of Charlie Sheen wearing different styles and colors of bowling shirts, or the catalog that has nine million jigsaw puzzles in it, eight million of which feature scenes of life in the Netherlands. Plus, I definitely don’t need to be reminded every month about all the delicious remaindered books I could have for various low, low prices, ’cause me and books, we’ve got some bad history to sort out. Anyhow, this Catalog Choice thing’s already been talked up a bunch by people who talk better than me, so I’m out of here. Just thought I’d mention how it seems like a good idea, if it works, to have one-stop shopping for telling people you don’t wanna shop via paper anymore. I waste enough paper as it is, scribbling pictures of god-knows-what.

Today’s task list is about five million tasks long, so I better go get started on all that stuff. Some of it’s even semi art-related, believe it or not. First, though, there was this great picture on the BBC site of a guy riding a wooden scooter. Apparently they’re having a festival somewhere in the Philippines, right at this exact moment. And that’s the full and complete extent of what I know this morning, except, I guess here are some more sketches from the olden times…new ones maybe next week.

Worked in the workshop all morning, now covered with sawdust and getting sawdust on my lunch. Thought about Seymour Chwast, or at least thought about his name, which is one of the best names ever for an illustrator. My own name, I write it out in different handmade fonts and it still looks uncool, so I’ve gotta work on that, think of something better (plus, obviously, need to draw a million times more drawings to develop some actual facility). One thing I know, I want a Z in my name someplace, ’cause, as everyone knows, the letter Z imparts instant coolness wherever it’s used, especially in science fiction. Anyway, thought also about the Push Pin Graphic and how it must have been enormous fun to dream it up and put it out. Work, too, of course, but the kind of work that’s not work, even if it’s also usually hard and keeps you busy as hell. The kind of work actually worth doing, in other words. And, well, whatever else I thought, I don’t remember what it was, since I was mostly preoccupied with measuring and cutting and trying to figure out what exactly to make. Guess the “what” should have come before the “how”, but that’s not how I roll, man.

Oh, and speaking of molas, the scuba diver mola I had over my desk got demoted by an octopus mola I found online a couple of months ago, so now when I look up from work, which happens on rare occasions, I see this weird blue critter waving at me from its perch among a bunch of swirly seaweed. It’s got kind of a quirky face, like the face on a character in a Max Fleischer cartoon (the Betty Boop kind, not the Superman kind). Anyhow, as far as I know, cartoony is not actually how octopus faces actually look, but that’s one of the reasons I like it, the wrongness of it. I mean, perfect realism’s okay, I guess, but hardly ever all that engaging, at least to me and how my lopsided brains work.

Dang, but these are some super-fossilized old drawings, from back when my sketchbooks were full of endless, pointless cross-hatching (it’s almost as if I thought ink and the money to buy ink grew on some sort of tree or something, which I now know is 100% not the case). Also, I was looking at a lot of molas and books about molas, and sort of half-assed collecting ‘em, too, until nowadays I’ve got one on nearly every wall, which is a way better thing to have hanging around than any number of plasma screens. Ruined me for doing perspective, though. I mean, I used to do it, way back in the jurassic, even had to do it on jobs, now and then, especially on jobs that involved drawing all kinds of weird experimental gadgets, but I suppose now my error-prone eyes are only good for cave painting and maybe ecstatic prophecy art, if I was into that sort of thing, which, for better or worse, I’m not. Anyway, it’s funny some kid on an island off Panama’s got a better hand at this stuff than I’ll ever have. But, you know, not at all funny in a bad way.

I just vaguely remembered: one of my crusty backwater professors used to always get on my ass about doing “regional funk” instead of Deeply Serious Theoretical Art. Which, I’m massively glad to be far, far away from all of that kind of talk, ’cause regional funk’s way more what I care about in my heart and soul and bones and wherever else it is that people harbor feelings and opinions.