Dixon's Forum

The zeroth strip was the July 28 activity.

  Click here to see it and a Back Button to return here.       Click here for its home page, Back Button back.

The zeroth strip isn’t so bad, but the first one is likely the stupidest thing I’ve ever written.    Hence, the bag over my head.

I never realized just how stupid it was, until I looked it up again for this webpage.    Then I stopped wondering why the cartoon got rejected so much, with that as the intro piece.

I was trying to explain the concept of “Diégo el Ciégo”, in a strip of its typical style, which was illustrated Limerick in four panels.    I liked to call the form “Poetry Visual”.

The concept was basically a person who interprets things differently than the rest of the World, or just flat-out misunderstands, and tries to present these alternative viewpoints in rhythmical rhyme.

I once misunderstood the Sunday-School lesson of Jesus stopping a bunch of men from throwing rocks at a sinful woman like, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.“.    I thought that meant Jesus — He Who is Without Sin — wanted to throw the first rock himself.

I floundered for years with Groucho Marx’s wordplay “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.”    Clearly brilliant, especially with that double entendre of the second half, but how can time move along a parabolic arc, when it’s clearly on a straight line?

I only recently got the true sense of it when my sister-in-law kindly, sympathetically divulged:    an arrow also flies fast.      Click here to visit her website in a new tab.    Return to this tab to return here.

These kinds of alternative perceptions constantly occur on every level — trivial, crucial, paramount, mundane; my world is weird and wonderful.

“Diégo el Ciégo” was to submit these viewpoints, and, hopefully, comically awaken peoples’ consciences a little.    The concept was of a man blind to the way most people see things, but who sees things in a way most people don’t.

With no talent at all for drawing, my faith was all in the writing, which adds to the irony of putting such a terrible piece up front to the publishers.

Expressing a complicated concept in a well-balanced Limerick is never easy, no room for extraneous wordage, limiting lexicons to the rhythms and rhymes.    This time, five of the words — fifteen whole syllables — were spent on Spanish translations of English words of the same meanings.    There was simply not enough room left to explain the concept, or even vaguely allude to it.

Back then I thought the rhyming was the most important thing, and it does indeed rhyme.    But out-of-step thinking has nothing to do with the reading of souls, and trying to tap into the ubiquitous universal un-understanding among the genders, skewed it further off track to a train wreck.

High hope let me think at least one of the publishers might get the idea anyway, and take interest, but no.    My “About Me” page    sheds light on that kind of thinking.   Click back by Back Buttons.

Click here    to see the first strip, “Intro”, of “Diégo el Ciégo”, and here       for its home page. 

Next Week:   I still don’t know yet.    Now that I’ve gotten the horror and shame of the stupidest thing I’ve ever written out of the way, my mind is completely blank.

Perhaps I’ll start a new category to exhibit my artform, Essential Art, so named because it’s directed toward expressing the essential nature of the paint, rather than having the paint express everything else.    That would be a lot of work — trial-and-error developing photographic techniques, snapping the pix, offloading them, renaming and organizing.    There is another Gallimauf all ready to go, in case I get lazy, about capturing dust.    There’s the play “Down your Throat” around here somewhere, and a couple short stories.    Still haven’t run across that aforementioned considered essay on urination yet, but I’m sure it’s still around.