Overhaul

Well, it’s been five years since I paid attention to this site. I thought I’d breathe some life back into it. Gone is the emphasis on the book I wrote. I’ll keep the mumbo-jumbo synchronicity aspect since that’s the way my life stories unfold. But I’ve been an artist all my life so I’ll put up a gallery and post some of my recent and not so recent work. And I’m alive on Earth in 2025 so I’m sure I’ll have something to say about the tumultuous times we live in. Damn greedy, narcissistic idiots in power should be sitting in jail.

I drew this monster back in 2017.

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Coincidence? No way!

Back in the olden days, I was once hired to paint two golden geese on a giant frying pan. The skillet was cast iron and was about three or four feet in diameter. Situated on a main street intersection, it hung outside the primary entrance to The Tidewater Inn in Easton, Maryland. I did a nice job designing and then painting the golden silhouettes of the two birds, flying close together with their wings slightly overlapped, onto the solid black background. It was a very striking and attractive sign.

I moved from the area and would occasionally drive by the frying pan when visiting family still living there. It’s a good feeling to see your artwork on public display. About fourteen years after I painted the geese, I woke up one Sunday morning, putzed around sleepily, then clicked on the TV. That show whose logo is the Sun that’s been broadcasting for forty years now, lately with Jane Pauley, was on. The host, I imagine it was Charles Kuralt back then, was standing in a field or swamp and talking about ducks or geese.

“Oh, there’s that Sunday Morning show. I haven’t seen this in years. It looks like it’s about Easton’s Waterfowl Festival.”

Then—BAM!—the scene cut to a shot where the host was talking to the camera, and over his shoulder, purposefully the backdrop, was my painting of the golden geese.

“Wow! What? On national TV! Cool! Unbelievable! I just flicked this show on after years of never having seen it and almost immediately my golden geese show up! Talk about tuning in! What the heck does this mean?”

The only answer I come up with is the incident wasn’t just a coincidence. But it was exciting and fun, plus a good ego boost, and an interesting story to tell when thinking about the unknown ways we communicate with the world around us.

The Muse

I had a story inside of me, and it was jumping around and banging things in the night.

So I wrote and wrote—about ghosts, gods, women, war, sex, healings, monsters, and strange dark coincidences.

Had I lived it?

Much of the fictional Deets Parker odyssey came from restless memories of long ago escaping from some inner shadowed dungeon. The old demons put themselves front and center as inspiration whenever they sought a place on my written page.  But even after appearing there, the manifestations insisted on continuing their harassment of me. It became obvious that my muse must have been busy listening to their hauntings.

The banging got louder.

Many incidents in the The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker center around synchronicity. Invariably, as I composed the epic tale, some real life event would come along, echoing words I had just written the day or hour or month before. There’s a scene where Deets feels psychically connected through one of his drawings to a man who kills himself in another city. Editing, I asked myself how pertinent a vignette it was to the novel. I decided not to delete it. It seemed the essence of the trilogy’s theme of mystic or spiritual connectivity because the night I wrote that heartbreaking section, miles away and without me knowing it consciously, a good friend of mine committed suicide.

What’s real and where’s it real can be hard to fathom sometimes. Writing episodic magical happenings became my world. There’s a conversation in Miracles, Book 3, where Deets is asked if his story is true. He answers, “I don’t know anymore, but I believe it because it happened to me.” 

The Beginning…

…Of a new journey—the end of an eight-year stretch of writing and editing The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker. So now I enter into a realm of sales, reviews, marketing, profit/loss, and… where’s the fun stuff?

I enjoy writing and when I’m really rolling, love it!  As I put together the Deets Parker series’ business plan, I naturally gravitated towards the artwork, design, and writing aspect of it. I’m not much of a social media user, but I find writing and designing newsletters and web pages keeps rust from forming in my brain, my iPad finger, and my Apple Pencil. A blog/editorial? Lord, deliver me from opinions. Expert advice? Nope—thick as a brick and empty-headed pretty much mean the same thing. Fuzzy thinking? Probably! Which brings me to ask—who invented the comma? If five different authors were asked to punctuate the same five complex sentences, they would come up with twenty-five different comma placements. I’m sure the monkey banging away at a typewriter for a hundred years managed just as well.

There, I’ve already incorporated an opinion, and maybe hiring a monkey could be considered advice.

My imagination has always been my guiding force. It’s the adventure I live and interpret to the world. Goofy—serious. Illustrations—story telling. Reflections of my mind—reflections of the times. This site will concentrate on drawings and writings, both enlightening and inane—whatever comes to mind.

The adventures continue…