A little grim, a little corny–a little sketch.
http://www.deviantart.com/view/21283551/
Mopery…
If I make a painting of this, it would almost have to be digital, I think. I dunno. I’m mopey today, and thinking much too much–Muffy’s cancer makes me think of my grandmother, who originally got me the dog, and who died of cancer herself, which is not exactly a sunny set of memories in which to find oneself wallowing. Although it did lead to the following Bad Epiphany:
Man, I hate hospitals. The oncology ward in particular. It was so weird. All those corridors with indirect lighting, and all the little rooms off them that you didn’t dare look into, and the halls either empty or studded with people on cryptic little missions not making eye contact, and nobody ever knows what’s going on, and nobody talks loudly, and the big exposed pipes and bad paint job in the back staircases where they take the gurneys, and the big machines pushed up against the walls in the hall doing god knows what, which generally proves to be useless in the long run and…
*pause*
*look at Gearworld sketch in hands*
*runs mental checklist*
Ohhhh.
Well, bugger.
I daresay that as a complicated realm carved out of my various subconscious strata, Gearworld is not entirely one thing or another–the walls are textured with WWII bunkers and my mother’s artwork, the inhabitants are mythological fragments and people I don’t know and bits of paintings and things dreamed up out of whole cloth, the tunnels are half an eight-year-old’s memory of playing Adventure, and half Anasazi cliff-dwellings, and half something else again. But still, the notion that Gearworld is based at least in part on a twelve-year-old’s disjointed and dreary impressions of the oncology floor of Salem General Hospital fit into place with the sickening click of a dislocated limb popping into the socket. Yup. That’s a big part of it, alright. Funny I never saw it before now. And that’s the sort of epiphany that makes you throw your hands in the air and go “Well, holy crap, how’m I supposed to feel about THAT?” (And perhaps more importantly, “How in heck did I not see that before? Sheesh, I’m dense.”)(Okay, I know perfectly well why I didn’t–I tend to avoid dwelling on the grimmest episode of my past because, well…why wallow? The unexamined life is not worth living, but the over-examined life ain’t no great shakes either, frankly.)
So I’m doing what women have done since time immemorial–put on some nice clothes, called a friend, and going out to the art museum. And we’ll see how I feel after that!
