20150528 Dream of Joining the Army Again

Author receiving medal circa 1988

Over the years since I got out of the U.S. Army back in 1988, I have had occasional dreams about being in the army again, that I join again voluntarily. I have not had a dream of this type in a number of years but I had one this morning.

I dream I am arriving back at my old unit in Germany. It is modern times and I am being driven by a female soldier whom I know, that we have served together before and although there were female soldiers I served with, this one is completely made up by the dream.

She is explaining to me that I security as been vastly upgraded since the last time I joined. I check into the company, get assigned a room in the barracks. I take my gear to a bunk that is only partly made and I stow it. I am not sure why I think the unmade bunk is mine but I stow my gear anyway.

My first assignment is to get drugs from a local bar. I don't know why. The female soldier who drove me from the airport takes me to a residential place and we pick up two wives of other soldiers. They are partly cover and partly operatives. It isn't clear to me how much they know.

The place we go to acquire the drugs is a strip bar and the three women I am with are dressed very well compared to both the girls who work there as well as the clientele. I notice they seem out of place and that makes me worried about completing my mission. I fear that the patrons will notice how different they are and our cover will be blown. I also notice how the faces of the three women are brighter and more alive than anyone else in the club. The three women take up three different positions in the club and I see one who has dark hair and is wearing a blue dress. I feel embarrassed that she is in this place because of my mission. I tell her she and the other woman should go home, I can handle whatever I am there to handle but she politely refuses. I still notice how no other woman in the club is as well dressed as the three I cam in with. I see another young woman who is obviously the girlfriend or wife of another patron and she is wearing kind of capri pants and a shirt and flip-flops and looks rather shabby, like everything else in the club.

The woman who drove us motions me to the bar in the back. When I get there the bartender is Anita! She reaches over the bar, cups my face and kisses me straight on the lips. She greets me in a think German accent. In all my dreams of rejoining the U.S. Army, I don't recall ever meeting a civilian I knew in real life. Anita was a short, plump, middle-aged German woman who worked as a waitress at one of the Guest Houses right outside the depot. We talk for a bit and then, finally, she passes me a small packet. It is supposed to be pot but it looks more like a packet I've seen on a TV show I've been watching. In the TV show it is heroin.

At any rate, I put the pot in my pocket and me and the driver exit. We are walking in an underground parking ramp discussing the small amount of pot which I am to deliver to someone inside the barracks. Somehow, as we round a corner where the car is parked, the small bag falls out of my pocket. I quickly pick it up feeling relieved this mishap happened just out of view of a security camera.  The driver takes me back to the base she says, “Now you'll see exactly how much security has been beefed up.” I think of where I should hide the small bag and have visions of all my pockets being turned out by the gate guards but then I think, it shouldn't be any big deal as the small amount couldn't be anything other than personal use. But when get get to the front gate, nobody searches me. Nothing happens.

I go back to my barracks room and look for a place to hide the small packet of pot. While there I notice how big the barracks room is and I see some other soldiers there. At this point I go back the the bunk that I selected as mine and realize that it might already belong to somebody else.

I remember when I checked into the company I only talked to one person who did some very limited paperwork. I wasn't even issued any linen.

Everything in the barracks seems degraded. The other soldier in the room seems like he is on drugs. While I am putting stuff into a locker another old familiar face turns up as two soldiers enter the barracks room. I look at him for a few minutes trying to place the face and then I call him by name, which I no longer remember in real life but he recognizes me and we chat briefly about our old times back in AIT.

I think how everything is actually so degraded here. I'm sent on a mission to get drugs, everything in the barracks is lethargic, nobody seems motivated. I think about how it was when I was younger and first went into the military and how now it was barely a whisper.

Self Portrait 16

I'm still behind in getting out one self portrait per week but I am learning a lot. Mixing colors, watching YouTube videos, patience, and when to stop for the night.

Here I think I did a pretty good job. Maybe even a very good job. I might go back and see about adding a visual representation of the stands and maybe to touch up anything I notice later but essentially SP 16 is in the books. And only 7 days after the last one which happened to be on Walpurgisnacht.

Today, all I know about was the British elections, and within a week of the last one.

Well, don't have too much to say tonight. Brain is ready for rest.

My Vision of May 4, 2015

Isabelle Tuchband's studio looks something remotely like my vision

Parts of this actually came to me on May 3, 2015 but it wasn't until I sat down to draw tonight that I thought I should write it down:

In the not-to-distant future, I know this because I look much the same as I do now.  I have a very large art studio, most likely a converted barn, I see sunlight streaming in from the skylight and art and materials piled everywhere and a loft and a ladder leading up to the loft. And there is welding equipment because even though I am very satisfied with drawing right now, it is not enough, and I get satisfaction out of drawing down what I am going to make in whatever material.

I am wearing clothing unfamiliar to me, black shirt where the sleeves come down to about my elbow, and shorts that come about down to my knees.  And I am wearing black shoes and black socks of some kind. I am wearing glasses but they are black rimmed and I have a welding shield on my head.

I am smiling as I walk to my current project. My beard is longer too. I feel like I am made up of cones. my beard is a cone blending into my chin, my arms are cones blending into my shirt sleeves and my legs are cones blending into my knees and when I have my welding mask one my head looks like on giant cone with a big black Cylon eye.  I am also slimmer and more, how you say...sinewy.

Gary Numan is blasting throughout the studio as I am walking to my latest project.

Some friends are outside but they hear the music and they say, "No, it is Gary Numan Telekon, he just started working. We'll let him go for a while. We'll let him listen to all of Telekon and all of Replicas and if he starts The Pleasure Principle we know it is a good time to visit him."

Ambition: Fueler of Dreams or Dream Killer (SP 15)

My ambition to produce one self portrait a week has gotten side-tracked by my ambition to work with color.

After Self Portrait 14 and the fun of doing a mostly landscape color portrait, I picked a picture with quite a bit of blue in it and I spent two weeks just working on getting the drawing part as good as I could and finally I decided I needed to move forward on the color.


The drawing I had intended to be SP 15 is still a work in progress but while trying to figure out how to blend color I finally saw that I had bitten off way too big a chunk so last night I made a mini drawing of my face and tried to find something with the colors I have that approximate skin tone.

Dougie Anime

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Oh! Wait! No eyebrows! Here we are with the signed version:

I really needed those headlines too! And you can see the lighting difference too, when I drew this one I used a LED bulb but when I touched it up today I used an awful old earth-killing CFL.

Onto the ambition part, the lesson I learned from working on the more ambitious project is that finally, I am ambitious about something, maybe for the first time in my life, and I like to encourage my ambition but this time I may have over-indulged in it and threatened my new livelihood, not livelihood in terms of making a living at it but livelihood in that it makes me feel alive to dig these things out of me and share them.

And that is the Master Run-On Sentence! Take that, Grammar!

Anyway, I will have to decide if I should continue work on the intended SP15 or shelve it until I learn more. I'm included to simply work on it and do my best.

Here is the color worksheet that SP15 appears on:

Self Portrait 14: Back on Schedule

As I reported in the Self Portrait 13 update, that my drawing has been much more of a flow since I have been listening to Gary Numan from his Replicas and other Metal Period albums. This week, the idea came to me that the reason for this is because when I was 15 and 16, however old I was when I first listened to Gary Numan, I was at the height of my potential.  Or something like it.  And instead of using Gary Numan to relive my so-called glory days, I am using Gary Numan to tap into the limitless potential I had when I was that age.

I do not wish to be that age again. I like the age I am now.  It feels like the perfect age for me.  But I do want that potential I had back then. I want the thrill of discovery like I had when I first discovered Philip K. Dick and Gary Numan with my friends. But I do not just want that thrill of newness and discovery just for the sake the thrill of the newness and discovery, I want to channel it.

The other thought that struck me is how pure an act of true magic it is to exercise my will and recreate a photograph into something coherent on the paper.  To work my will and create something that did not previously exist in the world and that it is something that only I could bring forth.  And when I put all my effort into a drawing and I feel that tiredness that feels good.  That feels like I have done some real work today. That is sheer joy.

And I then the third dominant thought I have this week is how my friends in podcasting, Phil Leirness and Dean Haglund of the Chillpak Hollywood Hour and how I would not be doing any of this now if I had not listened to their show in January that inspired me to do my best. To draw and put it out there no matter how bad or good I might think it is, because it is the act of drawing and struggling to improve that is the important part, not the fear that I may not be good enough or that I may never draw for anybody but a very small audience. But that is enough.  Thank you Dean and Phil for getting me started allowing me a visit every week. It has been a blast so far.

And thank you to all my friends who see my drawings and encourage me.

This week, I really wanted to experiment with color once again.  About two weeks ago, I bought some water soluble colored pencils so I had to find something colorful to draw and I settled upon this picture of me playing my flute from March 9, 2014 at sunrise on the Sanibel Island beach:

I am very happy with how my first use of these colored pencils turned out.  First I I worked on the drawing and blending the colors. And I really liked just the pencil but it was rather streaky and the beach had very little beach-like feeling to it so I continued by making the beach darker.  I even tried to draw in that sea slinky that is just to the left of me in the picture but that definitely didn't look good.  I tackled the beach first using my broadest brush and working the light as best I could.

Next I worked on the sky starting with the cloud, then the sun, then the rosy dawn and then I worked on the central figure and decided to just make him grey against all the color except for a little brown for my flute's pouch.

I also purposefully decided not to draw feet since they are cut off in the photo in order to make it feel like the figure, who is me,  is some sort of spirit coming out of the sand.

Thank you for reading.

Self Portrait Number 13:The "Replicas Word Salad" Edition

In the last two weeks I feel I have achieved a breakthrough in my drawing. It started when I started working on Self Portrait Number 12 and I put on Gary Numan's Replicas album.

Me and my friend, Jay, discovered Numan, I think in 1981 shortly after we had started reading Philip K. Dick. I'm not too sure of the timeline but we discovered Philip K. Dick shortly before he died in 1982.

We were drawn to Numan's music in part because his early albums have a science fiction theme. The self-titled Tubeway Army, the first full album by Numan and his band starts off, "Flow my tears, the new police song.." which is an obvious reference to Dick's 'Flow My Tears,' the Policeman Said.

The second album, Replicas, takes place in a future where humanity and technology are alternately at war with each other and loving each other and certain characters on the album are either humans attempting to become machines or machines emulating human traits.

While all science fiction is really a reflection and commentary on the era in which it was written, it is very interesting to compare Gary Numan's vision of Machmen, 'Friends,' the police, and humans and see how it compares to today.

In Numan's dystopia, there are electronic robots known as 'Friends' that seem to exist for humans to love, they have different faces but they are all programmed the same and at times, while listening to the album one is never sure if the character narrating the song is a 'Friend' or a human. Or if it is the opposite of what it claims to be and is simply confused in its thinking.

In the Machmen, the protagonist appears to be a human trying to fit in with machine culture, he starts out eager to please whoever or whatever he is singing the song:

"I'd give it all up for you, even become a number just for you. The strangest living boy you could ever wish to see. That's me."

But he cannot quite seem to be able to quit his humaness, first he grows to resent himself:

"then my mind turned on me with a vengeance I had never known, my own."

And later he turns on his new culture:

"I saw you behind the wall, I even heard you laugh at me, you disgust me tonight with your answer to something new, that's you."

Today we have our own version of 'Friends' we call smart phones and while I don't feel I have any level of intimacy with my smart phone, I will not share my phone with anybody who I do not have a level of intimacy with. If a stranger asks to borrow my phone, I cannot lend it to him and I even feel violated that he has asked.  Yet if it is someone I have a level of intimacy with, I don't even think twice about lend them my phone.

Very often, I wonder who I am when I look in the mirror.

I actually took the picture as an interesting self portrait to draw because of the weird way we have mirrors in our bathroom.  First of all, it is not easy to find a place in the bathroom where one can stand and have two faces reflected in both mirrors, so that was the first challenged.

Then, of course, starting the drawing process. I actually tried to start on this drawing a few weeks ago but only ended up making some rough sketches.  I am very satisfied in how this one eventually turned out.

It took me three or four drawing sessions to complete. I had almost completed it by the time it would have been due, which was Wednesday but I ended up finishing it up on Friday, not having any time or energy to work on Thursday. Overall, I like it.  Seeing them side by side for the first time, I do see where improvements could be made. Right now, I am adverse to even using a straight edge as I train my mind to draw what it sees, to the best of my ability.

Dream of Great Dane, Two Lions, and a Tabby Cat in the Morning of the Blood Moon

This morning, 20150404, I woke up around 1:50 AM and watched a little bit of the lunar eclipse through the window and I went back to bed around 3:00 AM. I did not watch the eclipse the whole time and I missed the blood moon part but I did see the shock of moonlight suddenly brighten through the window around 3:00 AM when the eclipse ended.

After going back to bed, I had a dream. I dreamed I was in my mom's basement and there was this huge Great Dane there. Even though I identify where I met the dog as my mom's basement it wasn't her house. When I entered the house it was this great mansion and the basement even wasn't really her basement, it was more like a great dining hall, only after hours or after a party and there was clean up going on.

The dog suddenly appeared and seemed very happy to see me. I was not immediately warm to the dog, I liked it well enough but it was so big, I definitely made a “no dog in the bed” rule but somehow I started talking to the dog and I could understand it. It was like someone I had known a long time ago and I was happy to be reunited and I let the dog sleep in my bed.

In the morning I am upstairs in the mansion and I see what I think is dog waste on the carpet and it disgusts me but I do not want to think ill of the dog. There is a guest registry nearby and when I walk to it I notice that the mess is just an item of some kind that fell on the floor.  Probably a dog toy but in my memory it looks a bit like a fishing bobber.

The mansion aspect of the house is both very elegant and yet somehow stuffy and not very bright. No natural sunlight is getting in.

I go outside to get some air and sun and it was once again my mom's house and I am in the back yard looking at one side of the house where I see a tabby cat at the border of the property. It is very small and cute and with a greenish tint to its stripes and as it moves closer to the house it gets bigger and bigger. I am approaching it to see if it is friendly when I realize that it is a mountain lion, a female one. I freak out because I do not understand how I could so thoroughly misidentify a tabby cat.

As I look on I see the Great Dane trotting out in the front of the house when it sees me it has this look of curiosity and fear on its face. I yell to the Great Dane to stay where it is as a full maned male lion suddenly appears next to the female mountain lion.

I start trying to get to the back door of the house but I have that horrible dream thing where perspective is skewed and I am both impossibly far from the door and I am very heavy and can barely move.

I wake up and it is 5:00 AM on the dot. I am having a mild gas attack but it makes me wonder if I am going to die? Was the dog Anubis? Was I embracing my own death when I embraced the Great Dane?

Later I thought that perhaps the lions represented some solar configuration, like a sun dog, I had seen a sun dog once, years and years ago driving back to Madison from Milwaukee and the two suns were very close to each other in the sky and it reminded me of how the maned lion appeared next to the mountain lion. Kind of close together, maybe 4 or 5 degrees separating them and both sort of blobs, not circles. Or maybe one was a circle and the other looked just as bright was more of a blob.