Riding the White Horse.

Well, the day calmed down a bit in the half hour left to me. I got home and flopped out briefly - I live with my folks, so I was grateful to all the gods in Heaven when my father didn't immediately knock on my door and ask about dinner, but instead went to make a series of phone calls. I love the man dearly, but the only way he'd make dinner if there were someone else in the house is if that person had a wet hacking cough and was rambling about Lady Bird Reagan. . . anyway, I got five minutes of peace before I had to get up and make dinner. Fortunately, it was leftovers, and we had enough to make a reasonable plate for each of us without someone running out of stuff they were willing to eat. I cleaned up the kitchen, then grabbed my drawing pad, clicky pencil, big fat eraser, and Fall Fashion Special GQ Issue from 2001 and plopped myself down on the couch. (More on that later.) The drawing went well, so I went upstairs when I reached a stopping point and worked on my homework for Data Mining. Eventually I got to RP, and life was good.

The thing about a day like yesterday is that it was... I suppose spastic is close to the right word. I don't mind working hard. I don't mind having a list of tasks as long as my leg in front of me, and I don't mind knowing that I have to get things done NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW. I temped in a patent attorney's office for two or three days, and those were some of the best days of my temping career. The attorney would smile at me in the morning, hand me three dictaphone tapes and a floppy, and ask me to get the changes done and paragraphs inserted as fast as possible. Then he'd leave, and people would leave me alone. I liked that. I had near-impossible deadlines and complicated tasks, but I was left alone to concentrate on them, and that was good. Even if it did mean periodically forcing my brain from writing about the design of nuclear reactor fuel rod storage units to the design of a new sort of down comforter, I got to do each thing intensely and in its own good time.

Yesterday was not like that.

Yesterday I was accosted every ten to twenty minutes by someone with a computer problem. I'm the only real computer person here; we've got another technical type, but he's essentially bound to our Braille printing division, and he's mostly hardware anyway. That means that if something goes wrong and you can't convince the computer your login ID is ok, you call me. If you don't understand why it's not picking up your email, you call me. If you're supposed to work on the machine next to the soda machine, but your boss who left for a job in Montana last week insisted that you were actually supposed to work on the piece-of-crap computer three cubicles away, you call me. If you find yourself typing in boldface and can't figure out why, you hunt me down at lunchtime and say 'oooh, it's not a priority and I know you're eating so don't rush or anything but just as soon as you're done can you please come over here and fix this for me since I don't know how to get out'. You get the idea.

Add to this the fact that I have three or four ongoing tasks at all times, because I handle a significant portion of the work in direct mail and finance, and you have a recipe for disaster. By the end of the day, my old friend the facial tic (a slight twitching of the lower right eyelid, which may or may not be visible from outside - God knows I feel it, though) had moved in, set up shop, and petitioned for membership in the local Better Business Bureau. That's why my last journal entry was the way it was. I had important work to do, and it kept getting interrupted. I couldn't turn the interruptions down because if I did, these folks wouldn't have been able to get any of their work done - but mine was suffering in the process, and absolutely nothing was actually getting DONE. Not the way to make me happy.

The whole thing reminded me very much of a dream I had two nights in a row back in October, when the Red Cross was in a tremendous amount of trouble in the public eye. The management had rather stupidly failed to convince the American public that preparedness for another terrorist attack was at the heart of their strategy for funds recently received, and events were spiraling out of control. The email we were getting - and I get all the email addressed to the chapter in general - was the kind of thing that'd scorch your eyebrows off. It was just more than any human being could handle, and we were all feeling it locally; I was really close to invoking about five or six of the threats on yesterday's list all at once, mostly because it's hard not to take that kind of thing personally when you're still wondering what the hell is in your lungs from spending Sept. 11 and 12 in lower Manhattan. The end result was two nights of the same dream - of riding a white horse, a stubborn and spirited creature who refused to respond to the reins no matter how hard I tried. Eventually he'd go in the right direction, but not until he bloody well felt like it. The only way he'd accept even the slightest bit of guidance was if it came in the subtlest and least intrusive ways possible - light leg pressure, shifting of weight, etc. Otherwise? Otherwise the horse took the bit in his teeth and did what he damn well pleased. In the end we got to where we needed to be, but the ride was naked hell...

Yesterday the horse had the bit in his teeth and a burr under his saddle. The only thing that kept me from goin' bow hunting for Toyotas was that I knew from experience he'd settle down eventually and it would all smooth out. That's more or less what kept me going until I could get home last night, knowing the horse would end up where we needed to be -

(Okay, at this point I have to stop and note something that's been nagging at me. There's all kinds of things that animals in dreams can stand for. In this particular case, drugs ain't on the list. I know one of the old names for heroin was 'horse', but that has nothing to do with the format of the dream. I neither drink nor smoke nor take any drug stronger than the caffeine concentration in dark chocolate covered espresso beans and/or Manhattan Special coffee soda. The horse imagery in this particular case is drawn from different cultural sources. Part of it is Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising books, which I read as a kid; the idea of a rider of the Dark mounted on a white animal was a fascinating prospect. Part of it has to do with Hans Christian Andersen, who planted the notion that Death was a living person in a carefully embroidered coat, riding a pale or white horse, with his story about the Sandman. And part of it has to do with the fact that one of the scariest archetypal personae to live in my head is the Priestess of the Morrigan, aka the incarnation of Conquest, White Rider of the Apocalypse. Apparently either she or Death lent me a horse for purposes of the dream.) (No, the white rider of the Apocalypse is not Pestilence. G'wan back and look; the rider in white on a white horse is given a crown and a bow and told to ride forth to receive his victories. Pestilence is some kind of traditional intrusion, but the original and still champion is Conquest.)

Anyway. I rode it out and wound up at home with a little peace and a decent drawing, which I am still working on. And some good RP. And this morning it is relatively quiet, and I get to skip several hours' worth of staff meeting (still gotta attend the end, but that's not a problem), and the head of another chapter just called me and offered to hire me on Saturdays for a while to help him set up his new software system once he gets it installed. I can deal with this.

Binky's a real pisser to ride, but he gets you where you need to be.

Well, it's later.

Just got back from lunch. The rest of the office has pizza and salad, the traditional compensation for sitting still through an entire staff meeting; in this case it's compensation for sitting still through the workplace first aid course that includes the Accident With The Fry-O-Lator as part of the Burns section. I don't mind. I just got back from my daily visit to my PO box (sometimes the only thing that keeps me sane is being able to escape at lunchtime regardless of what my food options are) and I had some leftover Szechuan shredded beef. I'm happy.

I mentioned in my last posting that I had the GQ fall fashion special with me. This, like the other issues of GQ I have, is an integral part of my artistic development. See, as a kid I had an absolute passion for horses. I had more Breyer horses than most kids my age had Star Wars action figures. I built prosthetic legs for some of my horses out of cardboard, because they had an annoying tendency to break at the pastern or just below the knee if they got knocked off the table. These horses taught me how to draw, because I could set them down and stare at them until my eyes bled and I was fully familiar with every detail of musculature, posture, etc. - Breyer's good for stuff like that. I could take as long or as short a time as I wanted to draw them, too. They sat there. They didn't complain. They held whatever poses the factory shipped them in and there wasn't the slightest hint that half an hour or an hour or ninety minutes was Too Damn Long. They were *good* for artistic modeling, and I think it shows; if you look at the Pencils Gallery at http://www.megaloceros.net/pencils.htm , you can see that I've got a certain facility with large animals now.

People are not nearly so cooperative as Breyer models. They don't hold the same facial expression for any length of time, and as for poses - feh. My father complains if I ask him to hold his hand in a certain position for more than two minutes. I haven't got the money for a drawing-from-life class, and I haven't got anyone I can really use as a model, so I'm stuck with two choices:

1. The stick-figures ball-and-pipe construction espoused in every bloody Learn to Draw Comics book to come down the pike (along with its cousin, the Bendy Mannequin with a Stick Up Its Bum), or
2. Drawing from reference, i.e., photographs.

I've been doing stick-figure construction since... gah. Sixth grade? Earlier? Who knows. The point is that it hasn't worked for me. I can block out what I see, I can lay down all kinds of guidelines and stuff, but inevitably something bends wrong or stretches too far, and it winds up that the stick figure looks infinitely more alive and realistic in its posture than the end result. It's pathetic. It's the same way that drawing the ball-and-cross head and laying down five eyes in a neat little line across the front of the face is supposed to enable you to create a good-looking human face with accurate proportions, etc. All I get when I do that is something flat and lifeless.

If I had human models that didn't complain about having to hold still, I'd go for 'em. I haven't had that chance since high school, when Sister... shoot, I forget the nun's name... had plaster-of-Paris hands and feet for us to learn to draw. What I have instead is photographs. See, the Breyer models - though excellent to work from - didn't cover everything. Books with titles like The Complete Horse and The Encyclopedia of the Horse and The Huge-Ass Book of Every Frickin' Horse Breed There Is, on the other hand, had LOTS of photographs. If I wanted to see a different breed of horse and learn its proportions, no problemo. Page 342 was much much cheaper than running out to buy a model Percheron. Magazines - the glossy, stupid kind that have more advertising than copy - have been my equivalent of the horse books. The GQ fall fashion special does the trick for men, generally; the female equivalent tends to be Glamour, but I take what I can get. (Yes, I know, posebooks, but I've only recently been introduced to those.)

The neat thing is that once I've got the pose in front of me, I don't have to draw it the way the photograph shows. I mean, I tried that once, and the result was the little heap of festering pain that made it into the Pens Gallery as 'The Progress of a Work'. As long as I have the basic reference to work from, I can more or less dispense with the details in front of me. Horses taught me respect for musculature and bone structure. Physical practice for archery has taught me the specifics of human upper-body musculature. Legs I know from the sports I indulge in during the summer (rollerblading, horseback riding, etc.). I just need to see how it all comes together in order to make it work out right. It's given me a nice familiarity with fabric wrinkles and textures, too.

The new picture I was working on last night isn't linked, but it's available at http://www.megaloceros.net/Pencils/test.jpg . The original was a two-page ad for some company with a name like Jhames Redd, and the guy was wearing a sweater and baggy trousers. Also, his right arm was outstretched behind him. We'll see how this one develops as I get the chance, that empty hand (the raised one) needs some finger work.