MY KID DRAWS ME

Doggone it! Here I am, a working artist, and my kid draws better than I do!!!!! Oops, I should have said "drew" because these sketches were made years ago when my daughter was in Junior High. We'd pay an after school visit to Carl Jr.'s. and would take turns drawing each other while eating burgers.

Haw! Look how carefully drawn the beard stubble (above) is.  My kid was certain that the secret to drawing me was to draw the five o'clock shadow first. Get that right and everything else just falls into place. She took endless pains to perfect it then whipped out the rest of the drawing fast, almost as an afterthought.

Here (above) she draws me eating a burger. My stubby turnip fingers deliver the big wafer up to my massive head where it's masticated by a tiny mouth. Fleeing the carnage, every crumb that can make it to the lip takes a suicidal plunge into the ether.

 

And here she does the back of my head, highlighting the thin wispy neck hairs under the hairline. I've posted this before but I can't resist doing it again.

When she wasn't drawing me I drew my kid (above), except she changed poses constantly to make it hard for me.

That was because she believed that posing for a picture was phony. I had to be fast to get anything at all.

Here she is near the point where she'd just woken up to go to school. When she realized I was drawing she kicked me out of the room.

How do you like those hand poses? If I had a more willing subject I could have gone down in history as the artist who captured the very first moment of wakefulness. The first! Imagine that! I'd have owned that action forever and ever!

MY WEEKEND

I thought I'd put up a few pictures from my weekend as it's played out so far.  That's me (above) on Saturday, taking a selfie in my medicine cabinet mirror. 

Here's (above) a color xerox I unearthed this morning, showing my kid on the occasion of his second month's birthday.  It was drawn by John.

The genitals are there because babies of both sexes have absolutely huge genitals. If you don't have a kid of your own you probably didn't know that. The equipment quickly shrinks but it is puzzling why nature would endow newborns like that.

On Friday night I went with John to an RFA fight (Ressurection Fighting Alliance/a UFC-type organization) at the Veteran's Memorial Auditorium in Culver City. The event was wonderful and John's friend Tom arranged for us to have ringside seats.

That's (above) a real UFC Octagon, by the way. I always wondered what it was like to be on the audience side of that and now I know. That's the judge's area on the right. Left of center we see a hidden sound man with a directional mic on a monopod (a single-legged tripod).

BTW: the auditorium looks empty in this photo but that's because I didn't compose the shot right. Actually the place was packed to the gills.

I'd never been to a professional Mixed Martial Arts fight before so I ended up missing a gazillion fight shot opportunities in favor of what the technical crew was doing all around me, which I found fascinating. Here's (above) the camera crane which is an indispensable tool at events like this.

Ooooh! And the card girls....yes, yes I did get their picture!

HOW I RAISED MY KID

This post is an answer to Brian who wrote to see if I had any ideas on the subject of early education. Brian has a young son, so his interest in the subject is more than academic. I answered briefly on the comments page, but I did a horrible job. I'll try again, and maybe I'll do better this time.

Well, let's see...I think it helps if you know what virtues you're trying to teach. In my case I wanted my son to be smart, skilled, manly, kind, honest, articulate, hard working and idealistic (Today I'd add other qualities, but this was what was on my mind at the time). The hardest of all these qualities to transmit turned out to be skill. I only have skills that are relevant to the entertainment industry, and my kid wasn't interested in that. That meant general man skills, like learning how to fix a car, had to be learned outside the home, if at all.

Geez, how do you arrange for that? School wasn't set up to teach things like that, and I didn't personally know anyone who did man jobs for a living, not anybody who lived nearby, anyway. My biggest regret is that my kid didn't learn some of that stuff. If he had he might have grown up to be an engineer, which I think is a terrific thing to be. What he is now is also pretty good, so I have no complaints, but...building a bridge...now that's a real job (if you're not lucky enough to be a cartoonist, that is)!

My biggest fear for my kid was that he would grow up not fitting anywhere, not fitting into a specific niche that he has a clear and intense passion for. With the best of intentions school has turned out a generation of generalists...a big mistake, which is already leading to all sorts of problems.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's me thinking like a parent. Parents like their kids to pick careers that have clear benchmarks, the kind of thing where you get the right schooling and the right certificates and you're all set. Another term for it is ticket punching. It's the kind of security that all parents want for their kids, and that all kids hate.

Anyway, what I did do right in my opinion, was to make lots of heroic books and films available, and to talk about them frequently, and with enthusiasm. I had lots of traditional boys books by Henty and Horatio Alger, Dumas, Rafael Sabitini, Karl May, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle,  and lots of sci fi, war strategy, history (kid firendly history like Defoe's "Journal of the Plague Years") and biography (kid friendly stuff like Ben Franklin's autobiography). We also had comics and comic reprints of Carl Barks, Stanley, Classics Illustrated, EC horror and sci-fi, DC, and Marvel.

Films we watched on tape in those days included Jason and the Argonauts, Sinbad, Davy Crockett, Zulu, Excalibur, And Then There Were None, The Four Feathers, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Murder in the Rue Morgue, Sergio Leone, Hitchcock, Star Trek, The Twilight Zone TV show, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, etc., etc. We also had lots of taped comedy: Sid Caesar, Kovacs, Gleason, Clampett, Avery, Jones, Disney, Betty Boop, etc.

The guiding star of my parenting philosophy was John Stuart Mill's dad. Mill senior used to take his son on long walks where he would talk about subjects most kids never even hear about. I would have loved it if my dad had done that for me, but I'm afraid my own talks were sometimes monologues rather than dialogues.

The toys around the house were mostly war toys...the most politically incorrect plastic war toys I could find...but also building blocks, cars and sports stuff. I'm not a militarist, but war toys like swords and flintlocks are a fun way to connect with history.

My kid liked all these things until he was about ten or so, when he started to be influenced by what other kids were reading and watching. We only had one of every media appliance, and they were all in the living room, where parents had some influence on what was watched. It was bliss from a parent's point of view, but it all ended when a friend gave my kid a radio of his own when he was ten. After that everything changed drastically, and my kid enthusiastically entered the modern world.

Things I thought my kid would like and he definitely didn't: a classic chemistry set, an Erector Set from the 1930s, and the film "Forbidden Planet," which he hated. He loved the Brothers Grimm when he was very young, but after 7 or 8 or so he lost interest. Me, I never lost my taste for those stories.

So that's the kind of media my kid was exposed to for the first ten years. He turned out okay, so it couldn't have hurt him much.

A MEAL WITH MY KID

I hate to put up family travel pictures. I mean, who's interested in that apart from me and a couple dozen friends and relatives? Even so, I thought I'd make an exception here and tell you about a trip I made to visit my grown-up son in the future. That's right....the future!

It all started when I received a kind of funky greetings card (above) postmarked March, 2039. It was from my kid, then fully grown up and living in the same city thirty years from now. He said he'd be happy to treat me to dinner. Wow! Imagine that! A dinner with my kid thirty years in the future! Of course I accepted!

Getting there was easy. The card said I had only to stare at something white for a few minutes and a time warp would take care of the rest. I did, and it worked!

Following the instructions on the card, I took a paper helium plane (above) to my kid's house, which was in a small town North of LA.

We landed at Vagina International Airport (above).

His house was nearby so I decided to walk there. The scenery was beautiful.

I had no trouble finding the house but it took me forever to figure out where the door was.

I found my kid reading in the living room, behind his buttocks sculptures. Amazingly, he looked only slightly older than the last time I saw him, back in 2009.

It was great to see him! We talked and talked and talked, and finally sat down to a light lunch. That was my chair above!

To my surprise the bowls were just for decoration. The meal was the flower...I guess everybody in the future's a vegetarian! I said I wasn't hungry.

After lunch we left for the city. Above is a picture of my kid's butler, who helped us into the car. The poor guy was the victim of flawed genetic engineering.

In the city we decided to take in a movie (above) that everyone was talking about. It was the story of a poor circle that longed to be a square, but kept falling into something that looked like egg yolk. I didn't understand it but my son and the rest of the audience were moved to tears and bought souvenirs in the lobby. 

After the show we went to a swank vegetarian restaurant (above).

My son said the restaurant (above) was rather small by the standards of his time, but he thought an intimate setting was best. I kept hitting the people behind me with my elbow.

Finally dinner was served, and the proud waiters and cooks all gathered around to see what somebody from the past would think of their cooking.  That's it above. I couldn't figure out how it worked, so I had to make an excuse about not feeling well enough to eat. 

My kid called a cab...that's it above. Boy, the future does wonders with plastic!

Back home I ran for the nearest hamburger stand. The future's great but don't expect to be able to eat the food!

THE BEST SODA IN THE WORLD

A question: let's say you're in a restaurant, the kind where you pour the drink yourself...do you take whatever the machine offers straight or do you mix and match your drink?

The reason I ask is that kids take the mixing of drinks very seriously. You see arguments about it. A kid who steals another kid's recipe is considered lower than dirt, but it happens all the time. That's why some kids won't pour their drinks while other kids are around.

Now I hate to brag but my kid was one of the all-time great drink mixers. She was at the peak of her power when she was eleven. In those heady days she could mix a drink that was a million times better than anything you could buy off the shelf. Honestly, I used to look forward to it! I used to bring neighbors to drink the stuff. The kid was the Robert Parker (the famous wine taster) of soft drinks! Well, it didn't last.

I hate to air family secrets here but the day my kid hit twelve the whole dream came crashing down. The great mixer lost the knack! It was pathetic to see the once confident little fingers shaking with indecision. Through sullen eyes she watched mixture after mixture flush down the drain. I tried to help but she pushed me away. Fighting back tears she would drag herself to the car and ride home with her head buried in her hands. Defeated, dejected, no good to anybody(so she thought)...her days of glory were gone forever.

Well, that was years ago. She's all better now. The reason I'm writing this is that I found one of her old recipes in a book! We raced to the local restaurant and tried it. It was delicious! Not as good as her very best stuff but still top-notch! What a treat! Here dear reader is the formula. Try it and tell me what you think!


Root beer..................40%

Dr. Pepper................25%

Sprite........................20%

Red Fanta.................8%

Lemon aide................3%

Iced Tea....................4%


For some reason the recipe emphasizes that the Sprite and lemon aide not be added last.