Rumination + Illustration = Illumination

‘The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.’

* Samuel Johnson

Artstrek, Fairview, Alberta, 1982

Even then, deep inside, I knew.

Yet again Tumblr won’t let me post my own images no matter which I choose, what the hell’s going on?

Here’s Mr Barnaby Pickles instead, enjoying the new toy I gave him.

(Source: talktophilly)

Do the ends still justify the means when those in control of the means keep changing the ends?

‘There is only one success … to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.’

* Christopher Morley

November 1965. I was born sometime around 330 in the morning, I believe, delivered at home by my father as I was in such a hurry to get out that there was no time for hospital or midwife. (I just read that being born at home increases the chance that you are a psychopath. How does that work, then?) I didn’t cry; after being swaddled up by my Dad and placed across my mother’s lap, I just Iaid there and stared at them.

I was born in the upstairs front bedroom of 33 Princess Avenue, Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire, England, a small two-storey house built in the 1930s which cost my parents - I think - around £8000. They were both so young, only 24, and already they had 2 children and a mortgage. At nearly twice that age, as I write this, I have neither.

Princess Avenue. This makes my ‘stripper name’ Tinkerbell Princess. Oh dear.

I was born into a family of a mother, father, and older brother, a set of great-grandparents, one grandfather and two grandmothers - one Welsh, one English-Irishish - and already a fair few cousins and second cousins with more to come. I cannot put a picture of me at birth here, as there’s only one photograph of me under a year old that I know of - classic Second Child Syndrome: there’s an entire album of my older brother - and that is in my mother’s possession. As I haven’t spoken to her in years, I don’t even know if she still has it, or whether she has destroyed it.

Here’s a picture of the house I was born in, instead, taken as a screencap from Google Earth at the age of 47. Such a thing could not have been imagined on the day of my birth: that such a thing would be available to any old citizen, along with a connection to a global communications system called the internet, via a small piece of equipment called a laptop. In so many ways, I’m very fortunate to have been born when and where I was.

Think I’m going to need one or ten today.

Tornado storm coming, Wall, South Dakota, 2003