Lots of stuff on my mind today...

Well, not this little painting. He is finito. Didn't come out badly at all. Always a dilemma how finished to get with these images. And the answer is just enough to get the drift. Here's hoping that eventually, I will know exactly when that is. So, my trip through cyberspace today yielded a few little gems. After feeding my virtual hamster, Balthazar, I learned that, wonder of wonders, the New York Times chose a Stephen King novel as one of the top ten of the year. Yes, I know his genre is a little low from most of the highbrows out there. Personally, I love his stuff. Never a dull read, that's for sure. And, as writer's go, he is a damned good one. His stories, bizarre as they are, always are driven by his thoughtfully render characters, often, as in Salem's Lot, a whole townful of them. And, unlike more literary authors, his writing is dynamic, never over-written like Jane Hamilton, or to emphatic, as in italics-lover John Irving, not too many sentence fragments, as Joyce Carol Oates is so enamored with, more colorful than my Trumanesque mentor, Ann Tyler. And he wrote a splendid book on writing, called, strangely enough, On Writing. Dear man. Let me end with a comment on the passing of Christopher Hitchens, wondering if he got undone once he left this earthly plane. I am sure God believed in him, after all. How arrogant to believe that the world begins and ends in one's tiny mind. Think about it. Every seven years, every cell in our bodies is replaced. What are we remembering with? It seems SOMETHING has organized this pretty amazing universe so that we can rise out of the primordial ooze to become folks who think they did that all by themselves. Whatever.