5. I have a love/hate relationship with the ocean. I love looking at it from a distance. I am fascinated with the life therein. I can remember, as a child, watching with breathless amazement the work of early oceanographers like Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Steve Zissou. I remember the calm, sage scholarship of Jacques' French-accented narration. He would calmly comment as members of his team jumped into the water and were immediately eaten by sharks and octopuses (octopi?) "Notice how zee flailing of Gerard's arms whips zee enraged tiger sharks into a frenzy. Soon zee blood will attract even more of zeese majestic creatures."
As much as I love the ocean "in theory," however, I don't enjoy the ocean "in person." I don't enjoy, for example, being in the ocean. I don't enjoy feeling the salt of the ocean mix with sand of the beach and form a thin, briny concrete exoskeleton over my skin. Once, when I was a teen, I swam into the tentacles of a Portuguese Man O' War off the beach at South Padre Island, Texas. I could tell he was Portuguese because he had a tattoo that said, "Todo Bem!" Man O' War just float along. They cannot attack you with their tentacles; you have to be stupid enough to swim into them. When you're pretty far out from the beach, though, and you look over and see the little, inflated sandwich baggie of a Man O' War, and then you see the tentacles just under the surface coming straight at you, and then you feel them INJECTING BURNING POISON INTO YOUR NECK, the sensation is similar to that of being attacked by a monstrous Kraken from the dark depths of Hell.
So, I don't go into the ocean. I just watch from afar, surfing from the safety of my favorite TV-watching chair (Just to clarify: the chair doesn't watch TV, I watch TV while sitting in the chair.)
Hello, friends. How are you today?
Later. Love.
P. S. - I hate this drawring. That's why you won't see it in my public collection of sketches. It doesn't live there. It lives with all the other rejected sketches in The Archipelago of Bad Perspective. The face on this one came out too flat. I'm not just talking about a flat affect, which would actually be appropriate for this picture, but an actual flatness. The tip of the nose is too close to the back of the head. But, I decided that it was at least as good as yesterday's landscape. So, here it is. Thanks for stopping by.











