Were I to climb inside the Fragments Time Machine, and travel back, back through ten Julys, into the calendar archives, I’d meet myself just here: on the brink of a months-long heat-induced foul mood that usually starts the middle of June. This year, I’m thinking like everything else in this upside-down climate, it is knocking on the door soon in early June.
I won’t rehearse all the physical and psychological reasons why this is, since I’ve done that here many summers before.
Suffice it to say, the floor fans have come down from upstairs; shorts and sandals and straw hat are the uniform of the day; and I plan to fall in the creek (thankfully, running higher-than-usual for early summer) a couple of times a day until we fire up the wood stove again in September. I’m hunkering down in a shady place from 9am to 6pm every day until autumn officially arrives.
But, as usual, I’m trying to put a positive spin surviving til late August with the dreaded HHH (high heat and humidity) that makes me so hot-headed. I’m making conscious efforts to remain cool, calm and focused on indoor activities not far from a fan, with water-bottle sprayer always at hand.
Inside, in the relative cool of an airconditioning-free house, I have my (40+ year old classical) guitar to restring, neglected for all of the bad-hands years, and am thinking about finding a formerly-owned steel string to purchase. I’d like to pour myself back into music, neglected for orthopedic reasons, that was once so central a part of my creative-emotive life.
And I keep coming back to other arts, since finding I enjoy doodling and crudely drawing with a stylus on the iPad. I bought Paper a couple of months back, and just this week, got ArtRage. The latter is far more complex but the creations it is capable of producing are amazing. Will I one day spring for the Wacom tablet and the Mac version of ArtRage?
My rationalization has been that drawn creations might become useful for illustrating something I may yet write that has a life between book covers. If not, I’ll doodle for the web, and mostly, just for me.
The image above doesn’t seem like much, but it required 4 layers in ArtRage and use primarily of paint tube tool for color and palette knife for color blending. I can save these “background” images, and someday, when and if I can ever sketch effectively, overlay another layer with a golden eagle against this pastel sky.
If not, no sweat.
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