Author Archives: littledragonblue

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About littledragonblue

Dreamer, Writer, Artist, Lover

Prepare to Enter…the Scary Door

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Really, it’s more magical than scary. But it’s mostly a door. 

This should have been a post about how my novel was now available in paperback, but apparently it won’t be available in paperback until tomorrow, and I have no links. But I do have a picture of this magical door. The Man took me to see an old barn for my birthday, and while it doesn’t sound very enchanting when you put it that way, it was quite the charming barn, particularly in the right light. Plus we were in northeastern Kansas, so the options for excitement were limited to begin with.

This barn has a name: the John Dickenson Barn. Apparently, it has achieved a measure of fame among old-barn-enthusiasts. It was built between 1852 and 1861; that is to say, it took 9 years to build. It’s in fairly good repair–the owners have put a lot of work into it since the 1980s–and has hosted many weddings in the last 12 years. This is my favorite shot, but there was one more that was almost as good, which shows a wide section of the loft, where various items–animal skulls, wagon wheels, tacks, and tools–are displayed.

As we drove, south to north, across the country, The Man and I noted a large number of crumbling and abandoned buildings, and discussed a photodocumentary project where we just stopped at every single one we saw.

Doing my best here to keep my promises to myself, re: art. But it’s tough. Generally speaking, I have been a pretty angry person my entire life, which is something I spend a lot of time working on. I’m not really angry now, though. I’m mostly terrified and despondent. Any words of encouragement are welcome. I actually had an idea for a comic–a funny one–tonight, which is the first time that’s happened in weeks. Maybe I’ll even remember it for later.

Watermelon Quilt Mandala

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It reminds me of pie. But maybe that’s just because it’s pie season. 

Here’s a jagged pink Monday mandala, straight out of that time that Laura Ingalls Wilder ate those funny mushrooms after Pa told her not to. Little House on the Psychedelic Plain.

Saturday was my birthday, and I tried to spend it being true to myself, even I had to do it in the state of Kansas, which would not have been my first choice.

What follows is a more intense political-ish essay that I also ran on Facebook:

I want to thank everybody who wished me well on my birthday. It’s my “life, the universe, and everything” year (42), and the day went as well as could be expected. It’s hard to celebrate when your prevailing emotion for the last 2 weeks has been “terrified,” and, like a lot of people, I’ve had to check out from social media a bit. Even though 97% of the friends in my feed have political values more or less in line with my own, it’s still scary. Maybe it’s more scary that way I’m not scared so much for myself, even if I am a genderqueer, pansexual, Jewish/animist/Buddhist/pantheist, because I can pass under people’s radar pretty well most of the time or get a pass as an artist even if I ping as a subversive (that’s class privilege). But I’m terrified of a world where all people are not created equal, and I’m nauseated over what’s certain to be an ongoing assault against the first amendment. I don’t know how to be an American under an administration that’s vocally opposed to the values that, to me, are most representative of America.

It makes me happy to know how many people are mobilizing, how strong the resistance is going to be. We’ll need that power to withstand the assault against human rights that has already commenced. But at the same time, more than ever, I believe that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and that only the ability to build bridges and will save us in the long run. We can’t tolerate bigotry, but we can’t pretend that bigots are not American too. Yes, racists, yes, misogynists, yes homophobes/transphobes. They live here. They aren’t going to go away. They probably aren’t going to change. But they are human beings. They are Americans. I hope some of them can be won over with love. I hope that things are not as bleak as they seem, and I hope that this country finds its way back to the 21st century. Those of us who have gotten this far are NOT GOING BACK. Obviously. You can’t kill an idea. You definitely cannot kill 100s of years of ideas.

I support everyone working to ensure that it doesn’t happen, to mitigate damage. Personally, I’m not very good at in-the-street activism. Just being near a crowd of angry people is kind of debilitating to me, even if I share their anger, but I know it’s an effective tactic, and more effective the bigger it gets.

After 9/11, like a lot of people, I kind of went a little insane with grief and fear, but after a few days, I remembered that I am a fantasist, and that I’m fortunate to be one of those people whose purpose in life has always been clear, and has only become more clarified with the passage of time. I create things–art and food primarily–and that’s basically all I know how to do. And that’s all I can do. And that’s what I will do. And I hope that, in doing so, I remain true to my purpose, and my values, and to the people doing what I cannot. But I can’t abandon a doctrine of love. As a pantheist, I can’t draw a line between myself and the rest of the world. I refuse to answer hatred with hatred. I will stand up for the oppressed and I will oppose oppression, but I will not hate.

Sunset over Seed Sorghum

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I risked frostbite to bring you this image. 

We saw this huge pile of seed sorghum–milo, if you like to be specific–by the side of the road in Kansas, just in the last hour of sunlight, glowing like (The Man and I agreed) the sand dunes at Death Valley and the hills of the Painted Desert combined. I took about 100 pictures, most of which were pretty breathtaking, and settled on this one with the grain auger visible (top right) to represent the set. The different strata are caused by the different weights of the parts of the grain, the chaff and such. Every section shifted into its own spectacular pattern, so choosing a favorite wasn’t easy.

There was also a lovely field just to the south, all full of rolled hay bales. It was cold as a narwhal’s nose but at least it hadn’t snowed in that part of the world, as it had in Denver the day before, rendering all my pictures washed out and gray skied. It’s a long story, why I didn’t update Friday, but this is Friday’s update.

 

Not Sleeping *is* My Magical Power

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What things? Allow me to make a list. I’ll start at the beginning. 

It can safely be said that my digital comic creation skills have improved by an order of magnitude or 2 since my first stab at drawing webcomics. Although I still find that first comic hilarious. But this one vaguely looks like the artist had some idea as to what they were doing.

There’s not much to say about this. Obviously, I’m mining a very deep vein. I don’t sleep, and everyone I know is terrified all the time. And it seems like at least if a person has to live in this reality, a person deserves 8 hours in the dreamlands and a fresh start every day. Imagine how much more effective I’d be at reality if I hadn’t been sleeping walking through huge swaths of my life.

The Very Large Array

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Is there anybody out there? Any pulsars? Can I get a show of hands? So to speak.

Today we returned to a place I’d been through once before but hadn’t had a chance to stop and really get a decent look at: The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array. This telescope comprises 27 massive (82 feet across) radio dishes that can be moved around the desert on train tracks into different configurations in order to gather an accurate picture of what space sounds like. A computer capable of 16 QUADRILLION operations per second sews all the data together to create images of various sectors of the universe.

This dish was fairly close to the road; the dishes are so big you can see them probably 30 minutes before you reach them. For scale, those concrete blocks on which the entire apparatus rests are about as tall as I am.  The dishes are 94 feet high. For $6 ($5 with the military or AA discount) you can take a guided walking tour of the facility and get even closer to a dish along with some other interesting astronomy related objects.

We also saw a herd of antelope grazing near the telescopes, which was a treat for me, as I’ve never seen them in the wild. Should have stopped to take pictures, since they were right by the road. On our way out they were too far away for a good shot.

Ensomnus, A Wide Awake Wyrm

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Someone read me a bedtime story? Please?

Per usual, the very idea that I have to be up early in the morning turns me into wide awake wyrm, no matter how tired I might actually be. In fact I’m to exhausted to even bust out the tablet and draw a Dragon Comics that’s already written. All I could draw was this armless, legless, wingless wyrm while doing 12 other things and thinking about 27 ways I could forget something important in the morning. Today was really another artistic bust. It took 3 hours to fold the laundry; that takes a good chunk out of a dragon’s day. And soul.

The next 3 weeks are going to be even more unpredictable and out-of-reality than last weekend was. Blog posts may be spotty.

Grayscale Mandala

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I recognize that some of that’s drab olive green but that doesn’t make a very good title.

If someone were to grade me on my commitment to my art for this weekend, I would flunk, but if the grade were for running around like a crazy person and accomplishing half of everything that requires doing: A+. The Man and I are gearing up for a couple big things plus I had to celebrate my upcoming birthday with all the people I won’t be able to hang out with on my actual birthday.

Saturday, The Fox and Ms. Kitty took me out to one of our favorite restaurants, Feast, which is what we did, and then to a Japanese garden where I fed koi. And pet them. Because that is a thing dragons enjoy. And then there was a big party that night, and then we went to another big party Sunday night. And now most of my tasks remain undone.

It’s important to get to gatherings like these, though, because they remind me that there are good, caring, compassionate people in the world, that there are whole communities of Americans who believe in a doctrine of love and will never support hatred, who will actually speak out and take action and defend others.

Trigger Warning

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I considered going dark: that is to say, getting the heck off the internet, or at least not posting anything so no one could see that I was on the internet. But instead, I’ve gone dark: in the sense of my hero, Gahan Wilson. The world is a scary place. In my human interactions, I strive to remain a beacon of beauty and love. But art…

In the wake of this cataclysmic election, I found myself added to a number of secret Facebook groups; if you have ever been involved in any sort of progressive activism, you probably know what I mean. People trying to support each other through a crushing blow, people preparing to mobilize for an assault on civil rights, people just trying to understand the world. In one of these groups, someone mentioned that the next 4 years is going to see the production of a lot of powerful art. Art is always more powerful when it’s motivated by something beyond beauty and love, although most people prefer not to confront that type of work until it’s absolutely necessary. Myself included. I try to stay light.

But there is darkness in the world. I know so many people right now suffocating under the pressure of the unknown. I know too many queer and trans people terrified about what their status will be in the near future, whether their gender markers will be honored, whether their marriages will still be legal. I’ve heard too many stories of children being bullied in schools, told that they’re not really Americans because they’re the wrong color, taunted about being deported. I know too many women frantic about the possibility of losing their reproductive rights, and who knows what other rights. And I know too many heterosexual white men who feel helpless at atrocities being committed in their names, against the people they love, in defense of values they can’t support.

So, for all my friends, I say: don’t hold that darkness in. It only consumes you from the inside. Don’t be afraid to be afraid. Don’t hide. Put it all in the light: fear, anger, sorrow. Whatever you have eating you, it doesn’t have to fester. You might think that it’s unfair to release your darkness in the world, to burden others with what scares you most, but what you find, when you do, is that you’re not alone, and that what vanquishes darkness is light.

Suicide jokes: appropriately inappropriate.

It’s been a rough day. So what?

Nope Nope Nope Nope

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I mean, right in the face. You know what I mean?

We’re having this little altercation with the city concerning the state of our yard even though we’re working on those stupid weeds. All. The. Time. So anyway I decided to tackle some amaranth and some kind of little tree growing in a very narrow space between the house and the neighbor’s wall, maybe 3 feet wide. And this lady is just hanging out with her massive abdomen right in my face, 4 feet off the ground in the middle of her 3 foot wide web.

After recovering my composure and documenting the event with my macro lens (and then gently relocating the dear thing in her massive home with the farthest end of my loppers and then hacking away at the weeds for 15 minutes) I determined that I had likely encountered a female banded garden spider. With a surprisingly large abdomen and distinctive stripes, it’s seems like an easy identification. They’re also prominent in the autumn. According to the internet, they probably won’t bite you unless you really tick them off, and that their bite is only mildly annoying if they do.

Higher res image hosted at imgur. 

E Pluribus Unum

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Of course, she did much more than most people, with much less than most people. 

Usually, my holiday bulletin boards are sort of cheerful and joy-themed, but last night, while considering my intentions, I decided that there was a message that everyone needed to hear. E pluribus unum; one nation, indivisible, a house divided against itself cannot stand; we are one. If we can’t find a way to come together, to heal the rifts between people that brought us the most polarizing and depressing election of my almost-42 years on this planet, we can’t expect to achieve much of anything.

After settling the theme of “unity,” I researched for a while and found a lot of wonderful quote, most of which were a bit sophisticated for my primary audience, a number of whom are still learning to read. This Helen Keller quote summed up the intention in words that your average 8-year-old can understand.

Before anything else, I had already decided I wanted to go font-heavy, to use fancy lettering, which takes 4 times as long, but used to be a mainstay of this genre for me. Once I had settled on the quote, I chose the typeface by searching “19th century fonts” and “victorian fonts.” These letters are based on  Longdon Decorative. I smoothed out a few of its peculiar bumps, but otherwise feel like this cut letters are pretty faithful representations.

No visual imagery really jumped to mind, except maybe hands, reaching or helping. Maybe I’ll go back tomorrow and add a picture if one comes to mind, but I doubt it. Had I more time, I could have come up with something, but I was already 45 minutes late to help the Girl with her report about Jane Goodall, plus getting sick due to the overwhelming stench of the laminating machine. Someone said that they might have changed the type of plastic used in this machine, because they’d actually relocated it to the next room and it still smelled twice as bad as when it was behind the library desk. My head still hurts from those noxious fumes. At any rate, it seemed important to have this bulletin board and this blog post available first thing Wednesday morning.

So, what do you think? Can we just try to love each other? And if that’s too much, maybe acceptance? Tolerance, at a bare minimum. Can’t we just tolerate one another?