Just A Little Fiddling...

Well. A couple of adjustment layers, a couple of minor color changes, and it's a world of difference. To me, at least.

I need to put pink-and-white flowers in the foliage on the left, increase the contrast in the foremost mass of foliage, deform the lower right-hand side of the red rock in the middle to fill in the gap under the pitcher plant, cut an appropriate edge in the soil at the same spot, and then make the big rock in the center lighter.

But it's almost time to play music, and I need to shower, so it ain't getting done today. Getting close, though.

Further Progress

It's almost getting to the point where I can start worrying about the details... Once again, there's that weird Arizona Highways vibe.

What's Been Going On

My blogging has grown sparse partially because my thoughts have been occupied by concerns that make for bad reading. I have been undergoing an intense process of self-evaluation and improvement, and as a result, most blog posts I write are as flat and self-satisfied as so many mud turtles. Complex, sophisticated, highly-evolved, and truly beautiful in their own way, they are exquisitely dull to any but the specialist.

So I don't post them.

And while I was going to break that cycle and post this one? This post I've been working on since five this morning? I can't do it. I love you people too much to encourage you to read that kind of sludge.

But part of it was worth saving!

Of course, there were some moments that made it clear that we were still deep in the heart of Oaf country... I have a particular spot in my heart for the nameless doctor who burst into my room to tell me about the patient to whom she had just attended, a pre-op male-to-female HIV-positive transsexual prostitute.


"He's out there -- she's out there -- shit, I don't know, but, you know, no protection, no condoms, no nothing --" and the doctor's beaded cornrows rattled as she drew her hands apart to indicate great size, "-- with these anal warts like, like..." and she drew her hands apart again, with an expression of delighted horror at the indicated magnitude. She shook her head. "Just would not listen. Some people, you know?"


I grinned and shook my head, and said, "What can you do?" But what the fuck was up with that? Was she just overwhelmed in the moment? Had my physician suggested to her that a good anal-wart story might prove efficacious in the treatment of nausea, sort of like putting out a well-fire with dynamite? Is there some kind of Hippocratic loophole that lets you bitch about patients to other patients if the patient on the receiving end is sort of delirious?


Medicine is a mystery.

Listen, if I can figure out anything interesting to say about the recovery process, I will, but right now? It's too much like discussing anal warts.