Eye Trouble is apparently a sketchblog of some sort.

All right, so, as usual, today’s one of those days where I have next to no time for any type of cyberspatial activities. What I’m doing instead is, I’m spending the day out in the actual realistic world, painting and drawing and writing and also maybe studying, if my eyes and brain’ll cooperate, which is always an open question. Plus I guess I’m gonna try to take care of some paperwork that badly needs to get taken care of. Plus, perhaps today’ll be the day I catch up on politics…it’s been a while since I last heard or read anything about the primaries and I need to see how Chris Dodd is doing.

Anyway, since all of that sort of stuff is not, of course, the sort of junk worth blogging about, I’m gonna go ahead and not blog about it. Assuming “blog” is now officially and not just casually a verb, which I guess it’s been for a while now.

Oh, and here are a few old drawings I’m sort of tossing overboard from out of some ancient sketchbooks. Sometimes I have a very foggy notion what I wanna draw, but usually what I end up drawing is way, way far from whatever the first idea was. And also usually not a tenth as “good” as I’d pictured in my head. Which I suppose is normal, although who knows, I’ve only ever known about 1.5 other visual artists in person, so all I’ve got to go on for how to do this stuff is just various sorts of hunches.

Before I go, I need to mention (’cause I forgot to mention when it happened), congratulations to Sophia Camille for getting born into this crazy world! You’re a lucky kid, on account of hundreds of reasons, but especially ’cause your parents are very good people, and also ’cause you’re gonna grow up near one of the best taquito places on the whole entire planet of the Earth.

Okay, back to work.

Except: the idea for the butterfly drawing was stolen from an original artwork by one of my nieces. Sorry, kid, but your uncle’s one of those type of pseudo-artists who steals ideas from wherever he can steal ‘em. I totally always admit I’m not original, though. If that helps. Which I’m sure it doesn’t.

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.

Today I’m doing miscellaneous organizational things, so I don’t have time for random thoughts, which is lucky as hell for you and me both. I mean, I did think of twenty things I wanted to ramble on about, but they’ll all have to get written later. Maybe. In the meantime, I found some more completely ancient sketches in a couple of old sketchbooks I used to take to the Day Job. I can’t remember that there was any plan for these things, just sorta tried to scribble out some junk between phones ringing and people shouting and copiers breaking totally down.

Meanwhile, there are tons of birds in the fresh-cut yard, all of ‘em enjoying easy access to worms and, I guess, bugs of various kinds. Finches and sparrows will now and then touch down and steal prey from the much more numerous starlings and robins, which I suppose is sorta like how my so-called art career needs to work. Like, completely forget about joining the flock of big birds, and instead be content kinda darting in and out of the market to grab only weird little random jobs. Or something. Anyway, I very much need to get to work.