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Happy New Year from a Cat on a Table

2022 looks like it might be off to a good start. Aside from being sick and quarantined, I actually got to enjoy several hours of feeling pretty good last night. It’s been months since the pain had subsided enough for me to uncurl from fetal position in bed and stand long enough to do a small watercolor sketch. And there she was ❤️

Elektra is an alarmingly intelligent cat who gets bored easily —kind of like a feline border collie. Usually we can sate her fantastical mind by opening up the balcony or hallway for her to spring out into and upon all of the world’s chase-able mysteries out there. Instead of sheep, she prefers to herd butterflies and hornets and flocks of birds up in the sky.

For now, she’s had to settle for chasing inanimate things throughout the apartment and pissing Pytlique off. With our flat under temporary lock down, both of our cats, too, have had to deal with not being allowed outside for a while. The first thing I saw when I walked into the kitchen to see what Elektra was yawling about was her lying on the kitchen table with a palpable glower of defiance and disappointment on her face. Of course she wasn’t going to hold that pose for long and I was lucky enough to snap a quick photo before she marched back to the closed doors to the outside world and resumed yawling there.

I got the point but went ahead and painted this instead. It was hard work because the moving paintbrush immediately became her de facto indoor prey of choice. I’m going back to bed to scribble some more in my dry sketchbook.

Elektra on a Table
watercolor 22×18 cm

Happy New Year, little Elektra. Tomorrow you get to see the outside again 🤩

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Battered Down Memories Of Battened Down Memories

Battered down memories of battened down memories

I’ve missed sketching outside for most of 2020. Even before COVID hit, MS pretty much had me locked down for most of that rocky year. Watching the waves of not only coronavirus, but of how the oscillating stalwart then fickle public response to it has been a tremendously emotional kaleidoscopic plateau to navigate — especially watching how the collective memory here of the valiant stance against the pandemic back in March all but evaporated by June and now we are paying 

What will be remembered?
And how?
And with what?

Two “fresh” reminders have really brought this into perspective for me.

(1) My brain is now measurably atrophying.
Apparently, I was informed of this while hospitalized back in February for several weeks after a series of violent seizures. I hadn’t recalled that at all until just now — late November — when I apparently saw the hospital report from back then.

I like my brain. It has all of my memories and thoughts and the still unfinished rickets and scaffolding of imagination that I’ve been trying to construct to prepare sounding out the whatever it is that is.
 
I guess having somehow wound up forgetting having had learned such unforgettably shattering news from only a few months ago is a bluntly weird way of my brain asserting that it has, indeed been atrophying 🫤.

(2) If that weren’t charming enough, I mentioned to my psychiatrist that I had been forgetting all sorts of things from the trivial to the pressingly important. These lapses were in no way normal — at least for me. Examples include suggesting to my wife that we see a certain film, only to learn that we had seen that very film in a movie theatre just a few weeks ago. Even looking at trailers and scenes from it did nothing to jog my recollection. Fortunately — kinda — I apparently really enjoyed it, according to my wife. My psychiatrist asked me to get an MRI because he wanted to check something. When I came back to visit he was all gleaming and gleeful. “It’s exactly what I thought. Your brain is atrophying! That would explain your memory problems!” He was so thrilled at having guessed it correctly. Clearly he hasn’t won any awards for bedside manner.

Or, maybe that is actually the most professional and courteous tone he could’ve adopted. My guess is that nobody is going to react to learning that their brain is atrophying well. Maybe I should thank my psychiatrist for making light of it 🤔.

Shucks, I dunno 🤷‍♂️

Just gotta keep on making art and otherwise trying to grapple with the whatever it is that is, preferably with an augmented sense of urgency.

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Exploring The World Down The Street

Update 1 XI 2023: This painting found a new home with a dear old friend of mine from way back in the nineties in Prague. Thank you for supporting me and my art 🙂

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Thanks to COVID-19 (which I thankfully don’t have, yet) and a few other serious health problems (which I am currently wrestling with), I’m unable to go outside to sketch these days. That doesn’t make the visual feast of Prague any less alluring to embrace through sketching. This is from a photo that my wife snapped the other day down the street.

Dominican Court, Prague (Braník)

Since being rebuilt in 1689, after having been destroyed in the Thirty Years’ War, this structure has been used as a chapel, a brewery (several times), a walled farm, a police station, and as a cinema complex. It became abandoned shortly after the most recent brewery there failed in 1907 and is now boarded up and dilapidated with only three of its four walls still standing. Now it serves as a dangerous and spooky abandoned structure for preteens (and older) to illegally investigate Indiana Jones style and as a canvas for budding graffiti artists.

Recently there has been talk of renovating the structure yet again and repurposing it as a Waldorf school. 🙂

Demolition (which had first been proposed in the 1950’s) is also on the table. 🙁

Dominikánský Dvůr

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D.C. on my expat mind

Of course I’ve been fretting a lot about D.C. especially after the Capitol siege the other week, and the brutal attack on Lafayette Park this summer, and …
Here’s hoping for some sanity and docility.


Now, I’m thinking about my hometown the night before the inauguration.
Thank you for making it through this difficult episode. Our country is tattered. I hope we will be able to incorporate many of the excruciating revelations about who we are into meaningful human progress within, and that global efforts like the Paris accord will let a rattled version of us back in to help.

Ink and Watercolor , 8×10 in.

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Still got GA on my mind.


I quickly scrawled this out back in April while “relaxing” and hadn’t thought much of it.
Surprisingly, this large doodle resonated with me more strongly than anything I had been working on. It has remained unfortunately relevant for painfully obvious reasons; hence the repost. Truth be told, the only time I was ever there was as a child when my dad drove down to Florida for a vacation. Practically speaking the state of Georgia has never really crossed my mind except when hearing Ray Charles or Dr. John playing Hoagie Carmichael’s 1930 classic, or when when thinking about William Tecumseh Sherman’s hellacious March to the Sea in late 1864.



I’m over in Prague fretting about the senate runoff election happening now in Georgia amidst all of the dizzying poisonous disinformation that’s shrilling around it. Here it’s almost 11pm due to the six hour time difference. I’ll be asleep when(if) any results come in and whatever fallout that emanates from them start echoing through the chaos that’s brewing in D.C. for tomorrow’s Electoral Vote Count.

Got Georgia on My Mind
-frenzied scribble

Most of us are also concerned about this. A disturbing cohort actually seems to be looking forward to as much chaos and bloodshed as can be summoned.
Please let this craziness subside.

Until then …

Update: it’s 10am here in Prague (4am in Georgia) and I see that Raphael Warnock defeated Kelly Loeffler a few hours ago!