The joys of self-publishing. Yes, it is book four of The Otherwhere Chronicles, written by yours truly. I have received the very first copy, in order to proofread it, and look for formatting errors and what not.
I couldn’t decide which selfie was best to share for this post, but I have noticed two things already.
There are no page numbers in the book… a glaring oversight…
And I am not as good at taking selfies as I thought I was.
They are right over there—>
The new tiki is coming alive. There is something sad and very earnest about the eyes that I like, and the big grin might end up looking cute.
And yes, I am giving him bangs. HA!
The thing is… and in art, there is always a thing… that when I began to chisel out the mouth, the lips started to peal away. This is the first… no, second… time I ever tried to carve a tiki from a Mexican fan palm, which a cool guy who carves tikis down near the beach here in San Diego gave me… I mean, not a whole Mexican fan palm tree, but some logs from one. I usually use scrap logs that I find various places, of all types of wood. This wood is nice and soft, but that also means that you might not be able to keep the bark on if you aren’t really careful.
It also means that I will just have to carve much deeper, which I didn’t do on the first tiki I carved in this wood…
That is a picture, as you may recall, of the first one I did, not so long ago. I actually glued a few pieces of the lips back on that one. This time, I will just go deep, and see what the inside layers are like. Maybe they won’t be so fibrous, and might even be better for carving. I guess I could Google that, or watch some videos, but I like my art to be original, even if it is wrong.
When painting, you add layers to cover a mistake. In carving a tiki, you just take more layers away… I hope… because one of the eyebrows is coming off too… sigh…
Nearing the final leg of my journey back from Arizona, descending from the mountain pass and getting ready to turn left… South… so as to end up in San Diego and not… perish the thought… in Los Angeles… I took that photo. It sort of sums up modern life, in a way. I was in the high desert, surrounded by snow-topped mountains, and when I wasn’t seeing the mountains behind rows of palm trees, there were power lines and power poles and wind turbines.
We want to live surrounded by the beauty of nature… but we want our power too.
And humans have gotten really bad at coexisting with nature. The Pueblo Native American people did it really well, and I had just passed close to their original homelands. Have you seen pictures of their cliff dwellings? They blend in with the environment so well they seem to be a part of it. We do strip malls and housing complexes.
We scar and defile the very beauty we want to live near.
I think that a lot of people who live where they have a spectacular view get so jaded, so used to it, that they take it for granted. I grew up in the hills across the bay from San Francisco. I knew many people who had views of the Bay Area that would blow your mind. A lot of them just stopped looking at. Oh, they might glance now and then, or pause to look at a particularly nice sunset, but they didn’t drink it in anymore. It was just a thing that was there.
I find that unutterable sad. I do have to say that I don’t mind the wind turbines. Not just because they have their own interesting charm, but because I know that they are helping to save the very natural environment that they often block the view of. They will, hopefully, help that beauty stay around a little longer, or at least let humans survive to look at it for a little longer.
We could bury the power lines underground. They do it in some places, but it is expensive.
I don’t know what to do about the strip malls and the fast food places. Maybe we can bury them underground. That might help some humans live a little longer too.
And I do love clouds.
Almost as much as I hate strip malls.
Did you spot the dinosaurs? There were two of them. Or one of them in two of the photos.
Yes, I know it doesn’t look like a tiki yet… this is just a picture of the log…
I looked at the log for a while. I found the face that was in the wood… the spirit of this tree. I decided that it wanted to be a happy tiki. Now, technically, there is no such thing as a happy tiki. A tiki is supposed to be scary to scare away evil spirits. But hey, I never do anything the normal way, right? And I think the droopy eyes will look sad, so we have that going for us.
So far, all I have done is started knocking away wood, but trust me, there is a happy tiki in there, waiting to come out.
Is it just me, or is this a little like some burglar breaking into a house and stealing a bunch of stuff, and then, when he is being investigated, complaining to the police that the homeowner didn’t do enough to keep him from breaking into the house to steal a bunch of stuff?
You gotta love California, where you can gaze past palm trees and see snow-topped mountains.
I am nearing the end of my posts of photos I took on my recent drive back to San Diego from Arizona.
We saw a lot of desert. Technically, this mountain pass, through which I was descending towards Los Angeles, is still desert… high desert.
Now remember, I only took this route, which is slightly longer, because my normal route was blocked by a snow storm. I don’t have snow chains in my car.
But, even in San Diego or Los Angeles, during the winter, you can drive to play in the snow in just an hour or two.
I have to admit, I am baffled by you people who live where it snows right on top of you… and your car, and your roads.
We keep our snow like we keep our tigers and lions… near enough to visit them, but not right out in the backyard.
We have zoos for the dangerous animals, and mountains for the snow.
Because I don’t ever want to wake up, go outside, and find either of those things piled up on top of my car.
Okay, back the the story of my recent drive from Arizona to San Diego. We left off with me almost running out of gas at the California/Arizona border. I found a gas station with 12 miles of fuel left in my tank… and, speaking of tanks… I do like a tank with a clear message. Although, that ‘keep off’ sign is not a memento of some tank crew, but rather was put there by the people who run a small museum.
It is a museum dedicated to this man, General George Patton.
I had no idea the museum was there, in that little town nestled in that mountain pass.
I walked around behind the museum… I didn’t pay to go inside, but I might do that someday. I found the tank graveyard, where they put the wrecks that they might someday refurbish and restore, or maybe just use to cannibalize parts for other tanks. It really did look a battle had been fought there years before.
A Sherman tank, the main battle tank of U. S. forces in World War Two. This is the tank that Patton led against the Nazis. It wasn’t as strongly-armored as the German tanks, and the gun wasn’t as big as the German guns. But we made a lot more of these than they made of theirs. Patton died… in a vehicle accident… shortly after the Germans surrendered, so he wouldn’t have ever seen many of the tanks in his museum.
But I am sure he would approve of the museum. He did like any kind of publicity, and the high mountain desert does look a lot like parts of North Africa where he first led our troops against the Nazis.
And then, I was back on the road.
I was heading down out of the mountains, heading towards Los Angeles.
Okay, see you soon.
I am particularly proud of that photo. It is a very localized rain shower in the middle of the desert, seen through some high-power lines… highpower lines… high powerlines… high power-lines… high-power-lines??? Not bad for a shot taken one handed at 85 miles per hour without even looking.
And then, the unthinkable almost happened.
I came within 12 miles of running out of gas… in the middle of the Arizona desert. Okay, I was technically at the Arizona/California border… but still.
I have never run out of fuel in a car in my life, not even in my old Suburban with a busted fuel gauge, that you had to write down the mileage in a little notebook and do math, which I suck at. But there are some wide expanses in the American Southwest. One minute, I had plenty of gas. Then, I had very little. Then, the warning light… in the shape of a little gasoline pump… came on. I watched my range indicator read down.
12 miles from disaster… well, extreme embarrassment, because I do have AAA, and could have just called a tow truck for free… I found a gas station.
I also found some tanks, but we can talk about that in the next post.
I will just leave you wondering about the armored vehicles for now.
And go back to tranquil scenes of the desert, like this one, with cloud shadows turning the hills dark.
Okay, catch you in a while.
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Pouring My Art Out by Arthur H. Browne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.Based on a work at https://pouringmyartout.wordpress.com/.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Pouring My Art Out 