Live in the Now

I have a confession to make. Lately, I find myself stuck in a bit of a rut. To be specific, I am stuck in the past. Yesteryear has become a sad, tired old rerun, and it’s on every stinking channel. You see, a family crisis I prefer to keep to myself has brought me back to a place I never again wanted to revisit, and yet often find myself being drawn back to, proverbially kicking and screaming all the way! A place where every street, every shopping center, every business, and every building and every plot of land holds a particular memory. It’s as if I find myself in a vast cemetery, and I know every single gravestone, every tomb, every marker, every everything, right down to the grounds keeper's dwelling, and the towering centenary trees.

There is where I used to take martial arts lessons. There is where I went to junior high, but they’ve now changed the name and it’s presently a middle school. Here is where I worked my first job. It’s a parking lot now, and the new building was built behind it. The movie theater is now a boarded up shell of a building, surrounded by a tall fence. The toy store where I bought all my Star Wars, Masters of the Universe, Joe, Transformers, you name it, is a daycare center now. Almost every day, I drive past the house, where my friend from high school lived. He used to play drums in our band. He died rather tragically, a few years ago.

My pediatrician’s office is now a Dentist’s office. There’s my grade school, down the street from where my sitter lived, further down the street from which is where we held cub scout meetings. There’s the used bookstore my dad and I loved. Pop used to walk in and buy a mint’s worth of dated paperbacks, and I always made a killing in comic books, the back issue selection of which was rather astounding, for a little Podunk town like ours! The place where I used to buy Ral Partha and D & D miniatures is a parking lot. The used CD store where I bought many hard-to-find albums and traded in old VHS is gone, along with the local Blockbuster video.

See what I mean? If I were a character in a roleplaying game, I would swear I’ve descended into the Realm of Shadow, and am being tormented by ghostly reflections and spectral figures of the past. Thankfully, that’s not the case.

Often, we dwell on the past out of fear, guilt and regret. We take things for granted while they’re happening, but when that chapter of life is over, we miss it. Maybe we didn’t appreciate it at the time, and now it’s gone. And don’t fall into the nostalgia trap, folks. I mean sure, break out the trusty family photo album and take a trip down memory lane with the kinfolk, every now and then. Just don’t get stuck there! Because nostalgia can easily become an excuse that says that you would rather go back in time and have things be like that time-frame again, than do the best you can with what you’ve got today to get through “this thing we call life.” And at risk of further sounding like a classic 80s Billboard number, or a Dear John letter, I’m going to up and share with you the only way out of the Nostalgia dungeon.

Instead of focusing on all the things that didn’t turn out the way you would have liked, center on the lessons you have learned. Remember that what’s done is done, there ain’t no going back, and even if you could go back in time to change it all, it wouldn’t be the same. I think it was the character Oogway, in Kung Fu Panda (2008) that said (paraphrasing) yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That’s why we call it the present. So live in the now, man! And live well.

So...in light of lessons learned I shall now share with you a lesson I learned...Lorelei. I don’t know why I wanted to call her Lorelei. When working in Adobe Photoshop, I often give the file a name, even if it may not totally fit. And I never liked this project very much either, but I suppose at the time, I felt I had to demonstrate that I too could be the standard stereotype for my profession, by sitting around drawing beautiful shapely goils with big boobies and big badonks. Cliche much? I agree.

Don’t get me wrong, I dig that art too. I like a great Frazetta painting, like Goblin Queen, for instance. Also works by such renowned artists as Frank Cho, Jim Balent, and of course it only stands to reason that I better drop Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell’s names as well. Truth is there are far too many great graphic artists out there, so I guess I better stop naming names, or we’ll be here forever! But after this attempt at ‘pin up art,’ for lack of a better term, I decided that style wasn’t really my forte. I choose to never say never, but I think I’ll stick with cartooning cute and creepy characters, and Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Gothic Horror art, for now. Maybe if I actually get some skill, I’ll change my mind, but what I do now seems to be what I’m best at.

So, getting back to Lorelei, the oldest versions start on the left and go to the newest on the right, in the collage. I did the pale one with a red outfit and blue eyes recently. I still don’t quite know why. Nostalgia, perhaps.

Since this was a personal project, I had originally borrowed an image from an issue of Maxim, at the time, though I’ve obviously elaborated quite a bit. I used Sharpie and a Prismacolor black marker on tracing paper. The model was ascending a staircase, while turning and observing the camera, so her left arm wasn’t in the shot. Right then and there, it should have been common sense to get a different image, but I insisted on polishing away at that turd, like I always do. I copied her right arm in Photoshop, placed it on her left side, and gooned her left hand. And you can tell. So...there you have it. Do as I say not as I do. Start with a GOOD image, take your time and be deliberate, or don’t bother, as one of my illustration teachers often observed. You’re welcome. 

Thank you for reading, and I hope you find my little joke amusing. I could never decide between an R rating or a PG-13 rating, so I did both. The stars are a deliberate pun, based on the usual opinion, regarding nudity.

SLiM