Yet another of life's imponderables

Reproductions are kind of lousy but it gives you an idea of what once I did

I had a curious internal change transpire in 1992. It’s one I am still attempting to find answers for, but have met with no real success. Indeed, I don’t really know where to look. I may be an accredited counsellor, but I am not a psychologist/psychiatrist. You got troubles with your bad behavior, come and see me. You want me to suggest possible reasons for your smoking of, injecting of, drinking of substances that stand in good stead of killing you, and I can probably take a stab.

But, you want me to assess the whys and wherefores of some of my own stuff, and I end up nonplused beyond the realm of guessing.

So, back to 1992. It was a tumultuous year to say the least. Sometimes agonizing, sometimes exultant, but always relentless. In early June of that year I took a trip to Vancouver Island’s west coast with my wife. Just a long weekend kind of thing that saw us residing in a little B&B near the resort town of Tofino, a stone’s throw from the thundering surf of Long Beach. I remember it all so well. I even have photographs from the weekend. Photographs that were on a film I didn’t have the nerve to get processed until about 5 years after the fact. When I saw them I was struck by how pastoral and lovely everything looked. But, they lied. We were both miserable and we both knew it was ‘over’. We didn’t know what the final crunch would look like, but we knew it was due to happen soon. I can actually still get rather sad writing about it. It had been a very long marriage that had likely run it’s course for us both a decade before the Long Beach weekend. Anyway, no more about that time specifically, but just back to 1992.

In early summer, after the marriage had folded, I began keeping company with the woman who would become my second wife. God is very mischievous in his ‘hard lessons’. So, she and I were besotted with each other and our besottedness was manifested in all the conventionally carnal ways and I thought I had died and gone to Heaven, little realizing my sense of afterlife direction had been compromised profoundly.

Again, not to belabor, she and I began keeping constant company and were like a couple of kids with a new toy. We moved in together the following spring. But, back to 1992.

In September of that year, my mother died. Unexpectedly and ‘expectely’. She’d had a very long bout with chronic alcoholism by that point and that she last until the age of 72 is still amazing to me.

I didn’t really grieve at her death. I tried, but it didn’t work. I didn’t know how to tap into such an emotion as pertained to her.

But, following her death something radical did happen within me. I stopped drawing. I didn’t even notice at first that I was no longer spending evenings in front of the TV with a sketchpad on my lap, turning out items of whimsy. Often cynical, sometimes profane, but nevertheless whimsical cartoons. I was actually kind of good at it. I should have been. I’d been doing it all my life.

I started to draw well before the time I went to school. Coloring books and other such pre-prescribed kiddie art offerings meant nothing to me, but give me a blank piece of paper and a pencil and I would draw. I would draw and draw and draw. Later I moved onto ‘funny’ pictures. My caricatures and so forth were honed and continually refined. I even had some stock characters and I worked out stories around them. I had a little crook whose name was Smudge. He had a dumb friend named Gus. Years earlier Smudge had been blown up by his arch-enemy (whose name I forget), and had been left with a hook, a pegleg and a patch over one eye. But, he carried on with his crookish ways always wanting to ‘get’ the man who’d maimed him.

So Smudge and Gus were later supplanted by cartoon girls (real girls in my dreams) – since I had discovered them by that point – and I found that their tendency to fill out sweaters in a soft and curvy manner added a new dimension to my art. A pleasing one. By the time I was in high school, what I wanted most of all was to go to art school. My parents wouldn’t hear of it. My father was an adult education administrator in Vancouver, and his bailiwick included the Vancouver School of Art. When I made the suggestion, he dismissed it posthaste and referred to those involved in such ‘aimless’ pursuits as “a bunch of beatniks.”
“I know they are, you philistinic fuck, that’s why I want to go.” That was what I thought, but didn’t express.

But, at a later date some of my avocation talents came into play. I actually became an editorial cartoonist at the newspaper at which I worked as a columnist and reporter. I loved it. And, some of my work wasn’t bad by that time. I even had an art show at a local gallery and attracted a sizeable crowd.

And then in 1992, as mentioned, I stopped. I have no idea why, as I also mentioned. It’s just not there any more. I still know how to do it, and my drawing technique hasn’t suffered from lack of practice, but the impulse left.

I’m really sorry about that, and it still confuses me.