Long time, no write; what am I, a pop artist? These days I'm more of a fiddler and a standard book author. I see stuff; I see it all the time, but I haven't been making pop art out of it. It was hard to posterize there for a while; one had to go out of one's way to do it. So, I lost my drive, I lost my spirit, and I took a break.

But it was only a matter of time before posterize came back. What really got me this year was a very wet spring for Texas, and a veritable explosion in colors I had never seen. This one plant, Texas sage, seems to have all kinds of colors, with leaves the traditional sage kind of colors, and the flowers being any kind of pink or purple. Bluebonnets came out also, even in the neighborhoods where I walk; I wasn't sure what I was seeing at first, but it was an intense and beautiful color, and I was sure I loved it. The brilliant displays of color set me back to seeing things I hadn't seen before in the intense sun.

As the summer wore on, though, the sun got more intense, and I went back to deliberate blindness, hat bill pulled over my eyes, trying to keep that darn thing off me. I'm happy this posterize function has come back; by the way, it's a simple on-your-computer function, not as good as some of the ones I used in the past, but certainly good enough to get started again, get inspired. I need to play a while, see what I can come up with. I make all the covers for my own books and I need lots of covers. I have also lost the ability to upload a webpage easily; both the server at SIU, where I am retired, and TTU, where I now work, require encryption that can not be written in by hand. So a person has to learn Dreamweaver, or whatever, to proceed with uploading web pop art, which is what I'd like to do.

Thirty years ago, at my first ESL job, they moved a copy machine to the hallway outside of my office. I should have been overjoyed at the convenience of being so close to the machine, but it was early in my career, and I had to figure out how to make a lesson, sometimes three or four that I would teach on that very day. The sounds of other teachers coming by making ten, twenty, thirty copies at a time began to drive me to distraction. Finally, in desperation, I started making xerox art out of it. I'd slip in there, master the enlarge and shrink functions, and photoshop the pieces together with scotch tape. I say "photoshop" because it implies putting images together that ordinarily wouldn't be seen together, but basically, that was my start in the image business. I admit, I'm an amateur. I've gone years and not done much with it. But I'm still at it, and even if it, for the most part, has other functions in my life (maybe making memes?), it's worth maintaining. More important, for my spirit, than ever.

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