Scattered Thoughts

Here are the first Illustrator shapes for the new dinosaur piece. Gonna have to adjust that jaw line... Oh, no I won't; it's hidden by the blood!

Well, I'm not going to be working on the computer for long this morning. I've been spending too much time in the chair in the last few days and my back is telling me that if I don't go for a walk I'm going to wake up in the wee small hours wishing I'd gotten my prescriptions refilled. (I'm leery of Vicodin -- I don't enjoy the stuff but I have no illusions regarding my ability to abuse substances I don't enjoy, saith the toper.)

So I'm going to head down to one of the Latin markets around San Pablo and University and score the ingredients to make a big batch of chorizo (or langoniza seca, more likely) y papas with frijoles that I can freeze in packages and lunch on for the near future. I'll get back to the new piece in the afternoon.

But I want to make sure I get a post in. I've been very neglectful of the site lately... Here's a few things that have been rattling around the old noggin lately.

BMI is retarded. Has anyone heard any doctor anywhere ever recognize that it's got a fairly serious mathematical flaw? It's based on the square of the height rather than the cube. That's how you get surface area, not volume. So those of us who live far from the center of the bell curve wind up with innaccurate estimates of what we should weigh, especially if we're solid types rather than the traditional etiolated tall person.

My dad and I saw an older woman with her grandson a week or so ago. We were in a hamburger joint and she was showing the kid off to the folks who worked there.

There were two things about her and the kid that freaked me out. First off, I'm a kid and animal person. But when this kid started noticing me and begging for attention I found myself drawing back for low reasons -- something in his face, his manner, made me think of him as a trashy person. He's maybe a year old, for christ's sake, but I immediately filed him with Nascar or Raider's fans. A Bush supporter. Someone who roots for their team. Drives a Hummer. Smacks his wife if she needs it. Big, big Chuck Norris fan.

And interestingly, after we left and I guiltily confessed this to my dad, he admitted that he'd had the exact same reaction.

Does this indicate the existance of a dipshit left-wing judgmentality chromosome? Or was it an accurate perception of an asshole in its larval state?

Anyway, his grandmother had a piece of fruit and she was cutting off sections and feeding them to the kid. But this was no ordinary fruit.

It was a plantain.

For those not in the know, plantain is related to bananas but it's used as a starchy vegetable. And when it's raw it has a texture midway between raw potato and mahogany. More like wood than something you'd eat.

And our little future Nascar fan was gulping the chunks down whole and unchewed, a grin plastered all over his face. He was such a happy kid; why did he seem so unsavory?

My eyesite keeps getting worse and it's making me crazy. I now need four pairs of fucking glasses; distance, reading, computer, and bifocals for class, when I have to go between the teacher and the textbook.

It sucks; I keep finding myself wearing the wrong pair of glasses and not noticing until I start wondering why I feel as though I'm hallucinating. It's messing with my sense of reality -- the bifocals are the worst. On the other hand, my computer glasses can be a treat -- the focus is about a yard from my face so it exaggerates perspective. It's pretty dramatic.

I'd consider the eye surgery but a) I can't afford that shit, b) the results are pretty varied and there are loads of nightmare tales making the rounds, c) I'm probably a bad candidate -- I have so much astigmatism the surface of my eye is shaped like a raspberry, and d) I keep picturing the pie-slice pattern they laser into your eye and imagining hitting a bump in the road on my bike (actually, I've had to give up on my current bike as unrideable, there goes a few hundred bucks down the drain) and having all those triangular flaps seperate, my eyes just flapping open and dolloping the vitreous humor all over my shirt as I run into the back of a parked car.

And let's stop rambling now, shall we? Time to go see if the missus is up and find out if we're doing anything this morning -- yard sales are not out of the question.

Have a happy day and try not to think about your eyeballs just going flurp the next time you hit a bump in the road.