Vlog the Inhaler, or The Occasional Video Blog Musings of Jim Thornton
Swimboy Pictorial
by , April 8th, 2012 at 05:03 PM (7348 Views)
Leaving tomorrow to interview Mr. Lochte; hoping, upon return, for advice and commentary on this and that regarding hodge podge below:
Picture 1.
Note: this first picture is the only entirely swimming related-part of today's vlog, so readers who can respond with advice to the questions raised therein will be excused from continuing onwards into what, even I concede, is ultimately a dark place indeed beginning around Picture 5.
Picture 2.
Artists abound within our swimming ranks. At our recent Y championships at Clarion University, an incredibly affable swimmer named Mike Genz drew the following for my coach's 6-year-old daughter, Ciara. Mike was an animator for Disney till carpal tunnel forced him to take a break. He got a tenured position at Edinboro University teaching animation, and that's how he wound up in our hickish neck of the woods. While employed by Disney, he worked on numerous films. He did, for example, all of Ariel's sisters in The Little Mermaid, plus all the eels!
Picture 3.
Another great swimmer-illustrator is our very own D.B. "Doug" Dowd, who posts under the name Red60.
Picture 4.
Red it is! Anybody with an interest in graphic design and a wonderful way of bringing travel to life should contact Red for a copy of Spartan Holiday! You can send him a private message here: http://forums.usms.org/private.php?do=newpm&u=4764
Picture 5.
Hypothesis: you don't need to be talented to be a good artist. Example: I happened upon the following picture of myself and noticed that the bottom half of my upside down face had a certain science fiction quality that was more attractive, or at least more commanding, than the top half.
Picture 6.
Using Microsoft Paint, I surgically excised the unwanted parts of my face, added a new forehead, sketched in a little mouth, and added some arms. It occurred to me that upside down, and with half my head removed, I looked exactly like one of my pugs!
Picture 7.
Hypothesis: Disproven. You do need to be talented to be a good artist. I sent my concept to my twin brother, John "Rusty Scupperton" Thornton, who brought the Pug Jim chimera disturbingly to life!
The picture reminded me greatly of a poem most of us read in college, which sounds a powerful cautionary note against the bestial impulse that, quite frankly, is universal in human males:
The Pug Child
WITH APOLOGIES TO JAMES L. DICKEY
Pug owners wild to couple
With anything with soft-curly tails
With mounds of earth mounds
Of pinestraw will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:
In the dog nest dark
And dung of yards, they will
Say I have heard tell
That in a museum in Ambridge, PA
Way back in a corner somewhere
There’s this thing that’s only half
Pug like a worried baby
Pickled in alcohol because
Those things can’t live. his eyes
Are open but you can’t stand to look
I heard from somebody who ...
But this is now almost all
Gone. The boys have taken
Their own true wives in the city,
The pugs are safe in the west hill
Kennel but we who were born there
Still are not sure. Are we,
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?
Merely with his eyes, the pug-child may
Be saying saying
I am here, in my father’s Dog-gloo.
I who am half of your world, came deeply
To my mother before her bowl
Of Science Diet, where she stood like moonlight
Listening for pussies. It was something like love
From another world that seized her
From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head
Out of the kibble, without ever looking, her best
Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face
Farther into the Kennel Ration, and in a sound
Of sobbing of something stumbling
Away, began, as she must do,
To carry me. I woke, dying,
In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes
Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment
The great dog run world from both sides,
Man and wolves in the round of their need,
And the hill wind stirred in my coat,
My paw and my hand clasped each other,
I ate my one meal
Of Purina Chow, and died
Staring. From dark meat I came straight
To my father’s house, whose dust
Whirls up in the halls for no reason
When no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner,
And, through my immortal waters,
I meet the sun’s flesh eye
To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.
Dead, I am most surely living
In the minds of pug owning boys: I am he who drives
Them like wolves from the sow and hen
And from the chaste bitch in the wind.
They go into woods into bean fields they go
Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,
They groan they wait they suffer
Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.
Picture 8.
Chances are that anyone who has continued reading up to this point will enjoy the bejesus out of my wonderful brother's latest movie, itself a tremendous gem of activist art! How I love the good nature and earnest bonhomie/sensibility of this American Baby!
To complete your Easter journey, simply click on here to find out that there are worse monsters afoot in these United States than the odd, short-lived Pug Children who live for a day among us before expiring!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrpQ...V6qahcFfHS-cI=
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