Four-Hundred-and-Fifty-Three

I don't look under my foot and find crazily curious or seriously silly drawings and the like much anymore.  But, every now and then something does come to my attention.  I've had this stack on my desk for a while now.  Do you mind looking at them so I can tenderly archive them into the fabric get them off my desk.

Let's see...

This was in one of Nick's notebooks for school.  That dino is too damn cute to intimidate any thing bigger 'n a bush, in my opinion.

There's this from Zack:

This is, clearly, a Ninja fight.  There are a lot of questions one could ask here.  Which direction is the carefully rendered "death star" headed?  Is Ninja Dude on the right executing a fatal death kick, ducking the star, or falling dead onto his face?  Do these dudes know each other?  Why are they blind folded, seems hard to duck something with a blindfold on?  Why is my favorite part of all this the shadow underneath horizontal dude?  What is the damn context here!?

Lets move on to this top-hatted turtle from Nick:

Again, more questions than answers.  Is that his natural shell or is it giant checkerboard Jamberry of some sort?  Why is he going uphill?  Is that a monocle?  Why is he hoofed and how can he be holding his cane?  Was he finalist in the Monopoly piece competition?  Is that Lincoln's Hat?  Again, I need context!

Let's try something that makes more sense, like this Maze from Z-man:

Yeah... well, that didn't work

Perhaps this lesson Nick did to study for a test a while back:

Well now, see.  This all makes sense, doesn't it... ?

Both of the boys worked on these, the fianl renderings are all, I think, Zack's, but I heard them talking about names and such together.  In a perfect world of my own design - fiction, that is - these are names for some as-yet-realized punk-pop-heavy metal-post-apocalyptic-fusion bands.  The truth is, they are names for clans - or guilds is it? - they lead or are a part of in a couple of on-line kids games they play.  I like the fiction better:

REMiup.  A bad REM cover band?

XTOXiC A good XTC cover band?

 BiO ToXiC  Aren't they a basketball team?

I hate to say it but XContaminated just doesn't work for me... for anything.

I think this is the final logo, XToxicon.  I think it's a mash up of all of them...  I love that, "The Toxic Keepers".

They did mock up something for a glam rock tribute band.

Sorta just speaks for itself, doesn't it.


So, that's what I found, thanks for taking a look.  It's been fun.


I've been doing this a long time now, it'll be five years around Thanksgiving.  Four-hundred-and-fifty-two posts, not too far off from my hope of a hundred a year.  Sometimes I poke around in the archives.  I wince a bit at some, laugh at many, and, even this short ways away from them, I feel the weight of melancholy that hangs on them.

Writing this post, I decided to try to recapture what I did earlier on in this trip, I hope you don't mind.  If you write or paint or sing or whatever, I think it's important to look at how you used to do things.  It can offer insight, that's true, but it can do more - it can offer a sort of validation.  You can say to your former self, "hey, that was good" or "you were right about that" or "I cried again, just as you did when you did this."  It can feel good, but there's more:  If you recognize and validate the thoughts you once had as good and right, you can rest assured that your future self will probably feel the same about what you're doing now.

Make sense?

As always, peace.


If you are interested, there's tons more of this stuff in the Archives.  Try the labels "silly" or "take-home folder" or "paper arts" or my personal favorite, "hairbrainage".