My reply was “How brilliant can you be if you are in hell right now?” All the money in the world can’t buy you out of separation from God and his goodness.

Give me poverty over the temporary pleasures of wealth. I don’t need eternal trouble!

Self-portrait, 2007. Pencil on paper. Drawn as demonstration for Drawing DVD/podcast

Model, pencil on paper, 2005. Private collection

Myst (silly title). Acrylic on canvas. 11 x 14 in. Collection of the artist.

Everglades Fireflies, 2007. Acrylic on canvas. Private collection.

Everglades Smoke, 2007. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist.

Everglades Sun-up, 2007. Acrylic on canvas. Private collection.

Danielle, 2003. Pencil on paper. Private collection

Unfinished Self-Portrait, 2006. Oil on canvas. All underpainting. I'll probably never finish this...I lost 30 lbs. since then.

Now, does my character’s paramour do the same? Snicker, snicker.

Flapdoodle I knew awhile back.

Now, I teach high school at a large inner city school.  I know surly characters, and there are some I wouldn’t trust with a wooden nickel.  I’m thinking of one who looks like a pink fireplug, out on bond for stealing a bag of money that he thought was valuable but the cops said only had ten bucks in it.  A whole bag of quarters worth only ten dollars?  The cops here aren’t any better than a 16-year old troglodyte.  They’re a lot better organized, however.

A writer or artist is  exampling the world.  He is saying to his/her readers This is the way the world is. Whereas the world is mean, it is also beautiful beyond compare.  The grandmother in A Good Man Is Hard to Find seeks to reach the good in The Misfit, to no avail.  Once a person has made up his mind to do something, something horrible, they’re probably going to do it, and in this story there is no countervailing principle in which the antagonist believes that can moderate his behavior.  O’Connor is saying  The Misfit is the world without God.  The real God, one of love and who suffers with us.  The Misfit never knew that someone was suffering with him in that cell.  I believe O’Connor leaves much unsaid that the reader is supposed to flesh-out.  Like life.   There are layers of meaning in the story that develop  into a whole family laying in a heap in the woods, blood draining from their bodies, irredeemably dead.  The story says to me that one wrong turn, the world of unredeemed man, in its ill temper, will do you in. The evil in the world is in man.  I can see that.

My mother just died a month ago last Friday.  I know what the world can and will do.  But O’Connor is a Catholic.  She knows there is something more than this veil of tears, but you can’t tell the entire tale of the world in a short story.

I am quite enamored of The River.  That story hits me where I live.  I see neglected children all the time, so little Harry is no stranger to me.  I have also seen and known wild-eyed fundamentalists and encountered Jehovah Witnesses and Mormon missionaries on the street, the former without any English-speaking skills, and the latter without cars.  But, as a person who has lived nearly sixty years, I may have different view of the world than O’Connor, who died at 39 and lived a sickly life with lupus.  I believe strongly in living to as old an age as possible and acquiring wisdom that is unavailable to a person in their thirties.  Longevity transforms some people.  Not everyone, but some.

What would a completely sane person who is not deathly boring look like?  Could a sane, fully developed, happy person be the subject of a great story?  That person would not get there without some side trips into the wild side.