Rosemeal 👁🌹👁

Figure 1. Roses eating eyeballs. Friday’s artwork from Janet Nelson, Brite Idea Tattoo, Ypsilanti, Mich.

A little bit drawing games with artists, designers, and art historians. A little bit carnivorous flora Little Shop of Horrors. A little bit ocular ingestion theory of consumptive aesthetics. A little bit thorny. A little bit odd-petaled like we all are. A little bit number seven and a little bit three irises. A little bit vampiric methodologies. A little bit the paradox of seeing is whoa! entrapment vortex. A little bit revised Outkast lyrics eyeballs really taste like nom nom nom. A little bit deathiversary holiday wreath. Mostly sweet associations. #ninety

Wander Specific

Tuesday’s needlework by Janet Nelson, Brite Idea, Ypsilanti, Mich.
  • Black Friday and my daughter tells me she’s going to rebegin a bullet journal. What’s a bullet journal? It’s a meander, part lists, part planner, part whatever.
  • Here at this coffeeshop where it’s too loud at the time in the afternoon when they’re serving coffee drinks and beer, sometimes both at the same time to the same people, I’ve abandoned codingwerk on the edited collection to exhale for a moment, glance and screencap a few more tattoo ideas, spin a new entry at this blog.
  • The ideas are mainly lotus with long stem and roots showing because muck is where the development happens, or a dragonfly. Or an abstract squid. Anyway, the ors are ands, except that we only get these canvases for a little while.
  • I had a mocha latte. It was fine. I should have just had a chocolate bar instead.
  • Back at the Ypsi condo there’s a crock pot with honey barbecue pulled pork set to “keep warm.” That’s gonna be dolloped atop mac and cheese waffles in a little while, second day of overdoing it, same as the first day of overdoing it.
  • The pulled pork topped mac and cheese waffles need sriracha. I’m sensitive to “needs” discourses, but this time, yes, add sriracha, really.
  • I’ve never been in a hot air balloon. Never floated in a basket into the sky. This balloon, as such, is an imaginary. It’s what drifts. Labeled there at its side (both sides?), “wander specific,” what’s an autocorrect message from daughterchild sent to me some time ago, just before I took up working in Virginia. Something like, “I wasn’t specific,” reaching as, “I wander specific.”

Resolving in 2017

Daughterchild, sonchild 2016 holiday selfie.

So many to choose from, but this is the photo that best captures–hinge-relay–the juncture between the old year and the new, a recent selfie, maybe Christmas Day, back wall echoing in school portraiture their aging, foreground punctuated with their resilience and sturdiness and joy. I don’t know about every parent, but photos of your kids laughing together elicits, elicits, elicits a delightful and lasting effect.

Photo aside, I made a list yesterday, touched it up for five minutes this morning: I am resolving in 2017 more laughter, longer beardgrowth, occasional blog entries, regular running, new tattoo, Grand Canyon, more kimchi, early yoga and earlier meditation, watercolors, heartier alliances, coalition building, political resilience, generosity and kindness, when to habituate and when to digress and when to rest, longer olive branch, mightier dynamite, more olive branch dynamite, cayenne hot chocolate, eclectickler reading, more drawing, bigger optimism, more sunshine, and more laughter.