When I got to the door, I pushed my face up to the window to sneak a peek inside. I could see all the paintings on the old brick walls, some abstract stuff, like splatter on canvas, clocks hanging from trees, and faces made from triangles and incomplete circles, and this one especially weird painting of these sun and moon people hugging each other near a black hole so they looked all spaghettified, painted by this girl Phoebe, who always sat in the very front of the class and barely spoke a word but was like idiot-savant levels of talented when it came to painting.
There were about ten kids sitting at these long wooden tables, laughing, drawing, talking, big sheets of tan paper in front of them, rulers too, and I could see Aaron sitting in the back, alone, keeping a spot open for me. Ms. Vickers was nowhere in sight, so I figured she must be in the back, getting supplies or whatever, which was the perfect chance for me to sneak in unnoticed and pretend as if I wasn't eleven minutes late to class, so I cracked the door open, slid through, and pushed my way between the tables, into the back, where I sat down next to Aaron, all without drawing Ms. Vickers’ attention, so I guess my lucky break was actually lucky, because it didn't seem like I would be getting written up, at least not yet.
“Where’ve you been?” Aaron said, all baritone.
“Heaven.” I was only being partially sarcastic.
I guess I was distracted because I kept looking at the classroom door, imagining KB walking in for some reason, so I was sucking my cheeks in a little bit because I thought it made me look thinner, more attractive, and then, elbow on the table, I rested my head on my palm, feigning obliviousness, and said, “What’s going on?”
“Ms. Vickers is on a call.”
“Oh,” eyes flicking back and forth from Aaron to the door, hoping, wishing, wanting for KB to walk through, see me, wave, maybe even walk right up to me, tell me she actually knew what I meant, about what I had said earlier, tell me she wasn’t freaked out that I had just bolted out of the grove like a madman, that she actually found it quite endearing and cute and “here’s my number, we should hang out some time,” and I just couldn’t stop thinking about her, her nerdy glasses, her freckles, her duck lips, her viola, kissing her, holding her, not in a sexual way or nothing, but in a romantic way, even though I’m a terrible romantic, awkward as hell, but I'm excellent at falling down, face first, into love, at first sight, which isn’t so much a skill as a curse, having gotten me into a lot of fucking trouble in the past.
“Do you want to play Counter-Strike tonight?” Aaron said in like a baritone whisper.
But I was twirling my hair, totally unable to look away from the door at this point.
“Nathan.”
I made one of those oblivious huh’s.
“Source, Counter-Strike.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.” I was just saying stuff, having not really heard him. I was too busy hallucinating almost, forever blowing dumb romantic bubbles, wanting so badly for her to walk through the door so we could coyly steal glances at each other like kids in love often do, already pretty much convinced that we were like destined to be together or whatever.
And then that’s when Ms. Vickers walked out to the front of the class, to the big green chalkboard, ruler in hand. She started pointing at something on the board, then, noticing me, she stopped and simply said, “Mr. Wheeler.” And that’s when the class went all silent, some kids looked back at me, oh-shit looks on their faces. And then Ms. Vickers said, in her most stern teaching voice, “Mr. Wheeler, when did you get in?” and that’s when Aaron gave me a nudge, because I guess I was staring off again.
“Oh,” I said, adjusting my gaze to Ms. Vickers, taking my elbow off the table. “I’ve been here,” I added, leaning back in my chair, arms crossed, all casual as hell. “What’s up?”
Ms. Vickers’ eyes narrowed, then she shook her head, sighed, and said, “With the call I just got, and everything else going on, I just don’t have the energy to deal with you right now.” She was always saying stuff like that, dropping little hints about her life, but no one ever seemed to care. But I did notice that she wasn’t looking too good, like she was sick or something. She was an older woman, maybe in her late fifties, and she had this wiry gray hair, pulled into a ponytail, some strands falling down around her face, and her cheeks were all sucked in, gaunt, like her skin was pulled way too tight over her skull or something, and she was looking a little yellow in the face, and when she lifted her arm and pointed her ruler at the words LINEAR PERSPECTIVE, I noticed she seemed a little slower and shakier than usual, like maybe she was dying or something.
“If you remember,” she said, looking right at me, “last week, we covered Filippo Brunelleschi, the father of linear perspective,” and then she tapped the board with her ruler, “which is really just a way of tricking the brain into thinking a flat picture has depth.” She emphasized the words “flat” and “depth.”
But I was leaning back, pretending like she wasn’t annoying the shit out of me, although she actually was, because I was starting to suspect she was trying to make a point or something, and I can’t stand people who try to make points.
She put the ruler down, picked up a piece of chalk, and started drawing as she spoke, “You start with a horizon line, then you pick one or two vanishing points, and every line in the picture that’s not vertical or horizontal points back to these points.” She stopped to finish a simple drawing of a road. “See this road,” she paused, looking around the class, “see how it looks like it’s getting narrower the farther away it gets, as if it has depth when, of course, it’s just a flat picture?” She had emphasized the words “flat” and “depth” again, before pausing to look right at me. But I wasn’t really paying attention at this point, because I was forever blowing dumb romantic bubbles, so I didn’t really notice the awkward silence and all the kids looking at me again.
“Mr. Wheeler,” Ms. Vickers said.
Aaron nudged me.
“Mr. Wheeler, do you see how the flat picture appears to have depth?”
I was looking but just sort of blinking.
She started going off again, “You could say that, perhaps, the picture is lying to us, superficial in a way, tricking us, could you not?”
And that caught my attention because she was definitely trying to make some sort of point now, so I glared at her and said flat out, “What’s your point?”
And then she said, in this annoying tone, “My point is, despite how much superficial depth one might add,” she started drawing some sort of house on the road, “it’s still just a boring old canvas underneath.”
Trying very hard not to sound bothered, I said, “Is that the lesson today, like, canvases are boring, or something? You know, my stepdad pays a lot of money for this education, and like, if that’s the lesson, then I don’t know if he’s getting his money’s worth, to tell you the truth.” Not that I cared about my stepdad getting his money’s worth, I was just a little annoyed, is all.
By now, some students were looking back at me, some with looks of fear, some with awe, some started laughing real loud, but they stopped instantly the moment Ms. Vickers cracked her ruler against the chalkboard and said, “No, Mr. Wheeler, the lesson today is a test of your perspective, I want you to draw a black-and-white structure using this technique.” And then she walked to one of those rolling carts and pulled off a rolled-up canvas, unrolled it, taped it up to the chalkboard, and pointed at it with her ruler. “Like this.” It was a picture of a church or something, but with the illusion of depth. And then she said, “Good luck, hope you were paying attention, and remember, black-and-white.” And then she walked off to the back room in sort of a huff, coughing up a storm. The room filled with chatter.
“I wish I could do that,” Aaron said.
“Do what?” I said, blinking.
“Just not care about stuff, like you do.”
He said it in this reverential tone that made me feel kinda sad for some reason, so I averted my eyes to the door and said, “I do care about stuff.”
“Really,” he said, a few octaves higher than normal, “like what?”
But I didn’t want to get into it with him right now, so I just stood up, walked to the front of the class, to the supply drawer, found myself a pen, a tan canvas, and, feeling a little rebellious, a box of very colorful pastels. I wasn’t about to let Ms. Vickers get away with making some sort of point, although I couldn’t figure out what the actual point was, I just knew she was making one, and I also knew that I wasn’t about to draw some lame-as-fuck black-and-white picture. No, my drawing was going to be colorful as hell and full of perspective, so I walked back to my table, sat down, and, overflowing with defiant purpose, got ready to make the most vibrant thing that I could think of.
You see, back then, I considered myself somewhat of an artist, so I knew a thing or two about art, I really did. I knew all about the big artists, from Wikipedia mostly, like da Vinci and van Gogh and Picasso and Pollock and Dalí and Warhol, but I was particularly interested in Yoshitaka Amano, the artist for Final Fantasy, and Marcel Duchamp, who was like the father of this movement called “dada,” which was an anti-art thing. The guy took a toilet, signed it “R. Mutt,” and put it up in a gallery, to illustrate that like anything could be elevated to the status of “art” simply through the artist’s intent, but that wasn’t really what drew me to Duchamp, what really drew me was the fact that his toilet was also like a big “fuck you” to the art establishment back then, which I imagined had gotten all huffy and pretentious and gatekeepy, like artists often get, and I hate huffy and pretentious and gatekeepy. So Duchamp was sort of like a hero to me. He kind of inspired me to start making art, to tell you the truth. I would take pictures of everyday stuff, like televisions and beds and the East Beach shoreline, print them on big canvases at Michaels, then smear oil paints all over them, not to make a point or nothing, but as a fuck you, as a way to illustrate that anyone could be an artist, that you didn't have to learn all these dumb high-minded techniques like shading and layering and perspective to make some really aesthetically beautiful stuff, because the cool thing about aesthetics is that they’re totally subjective, meaning I wasn't going to draw some dumb-as-fuck black-and-white picture of a building, because that would have offended my personal subjective aesthetic values, which Ms. Vickers didn’t seem to understand, even though she had the audacity to call herself an artist, which blew my mind, because she was about as rigid and by-the-book and creatively bankrupt as they fucking come, an artist my ass.
So, eyeballing it, I made my lines and my vanishing points, then I drew this plain-looking house right in the middle, with a few windows, a porch, and a chimney, pointing all the edges or whatever right back to the fucking vanishing points, like Ms. Vickers told us to do, then I whipped out my pastels and started going crazy. My thought was that even the most boring thing in the world, like this dumb assignment, could be made interesting given enough color, so I divided the house into vertical sections and colored each section a different color, like a rainbow or whatever, then my mind wandered to KB, so I drew all these big sunflowers in the foreground, overlapping the house a little bit, then I took some of the dark blue and orange pastels and colored the background like early twilight, and after about twenty minutes, I had completed my rainbow-sunflower-twilight dream home, then I leaned back in my chair, hands locked behind my head, grinning a little bit, feeling proud for having stuck to my personal subjective aesthetic values.
Aaron leaned over, looking down at my picture, and said, “Didn’t she say black-and-white?” He didn’t have an artistic bone in his body, as far as I could tell, so I didn’t really expect him to understand me or my artwork. He was all intellect. He had like a 200 in trig or something.
“Yeah, so what? I did the whole perspective thing, or whatever it is.”
Then he leaned his head real close to my canvas, studying it for a second, “Aren't you supposed to use a ruler?”
I blew a raspberry and shrugged, “Didn’t need it.”
“But your lines are all wobbly.”
Then, almost out of nowhere, that Phoebe girl walked up to our table. She just stood there, staring down at my canvas. She had this pale mousy face, and her hair was blue-black and bobbed. She had like no feminine grace whatsoever. She wasn't ugly or nothing, but she was no KB, that's for sure. And she was staring for like a whole minute. It was weirding me out. Both Aaron and I were blinking up at her, like what the fuck, but she just kept staring for a while until she looked up at me with this creepy toothy smile then, without saying a word, abruptly turned and walked off, footsteps not making a sound, as if she were a ghost gliding eerily back to her seat or something.
I turned to Aaron and whispered, “What the fuck was that about?”
But before Aaron could answer, I heard a loud, “OK, Students!” And just like that, Ms. Vickers was back in front of the class, pen in one hand, notebook in the other. “I’m going to walk around and give you each a grade.” Then she started walking, and talking. “The criteria is simple,” she said, “did you follow the instructions, or didn't you.”
As she walked, she looked at each student's canvas, “pass, pass, fail, pass, fail,” while making little marks in her notebook. And as she got closer and closer to my table, I started feeling more and more excited, because I knew she was going to hate my artwork, and that made me feel pretty good in this dada, punk-rock sort of way.
“Pass, fail, pass, pass.”
Then, excitement reaching fever pitch, she was right on me, staring down at my canvas, which I had so graciously spun for her, so that its rainbow-sunflower-twilight glory was in full view. I was leaning back in my chair, arms crossed, looking her up and down, starving for some sort of reaction.
But all she said was, “Fail.”
Then she turned to Aaron, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Good effort at least, pass.”
Then she just started to walk off, toward the front of the class, me still leaning there, arms crossed up hard, kinda annoyed, so I said, in my loudest speaking voice, “That’s it?”
She stopped, unmoving for a good few seconds, then she slowly turned like she was in a made-for-television drama or something, this subtle scowl on her wrinkled old face. “What were you expecting, Mr. Wheeler?”
“I don’t know, Ms. Vickers. I think it’s aesthetically pleasing, to tell you the truth.”
“This wasn’t a lesson in aesthetics, Mr. Wheeler,” she said sternly as she walked up to the table, picked up my canvas and held it out for all the class to see, eliciting some laughter from the students, at which point my face got all warm and fuzzy and I melted a little bit into my chair.
“Mr. Wheeler obviously didn’t use a ruler, and he obviously missed the part where I said, ‘black and white,’” she said, speaking to the class more so than me. Students were still laughing. In fact I think the only person not laughing was Aaron, and Phoebe, too, for some reason. Then Ms. Vickers turned back to me and said, “But it’s more likely that you just ignored my instructions on purpose, to make some sort of point, isn’t that right, Mr. Wheeler?”
I was the one scowling now, couldn’t help it. “I wasn’t making a point.”
“Then why all the color, why the sunflowers?”
“Because it’s pretty,” I said, “and the assignment was boring, so I thought, like, why not make it more interesting?”
“Remember that time, months ago, during our cubism lesson,” she said, laying the canvas on the table, “when you decided, for some absurd reason, to, instead, draw a person made of circles?"
“Yeah, what’s your point?”
“And what was your reason then?”
I didn't really want to answer her, but after a few weird seconds I did anyway. “Dada.”
“Do you know what dada is, Mr. Wheeler?”
“Sure I do, Marcel Duchamp, early nineteen hundreds,” I would have kept going, but Ms. Vickers cut me off.
“You know some names, some dates, some superficial facts,” she said before coughing a little bit, “But did you know that Marcel Duchamp was a trained artist, educated at the Académie Julian in Paris?”
“So what?” I said, trying to hide my scowl, but the more I tried to hide it, the worse it got.
“Did you know that, early on, before dada, he painted in the impressionism and cubism styles, and that he even displayed a mastery in shading, perspective, and human anatomy?”
The whole class went silent. I could feel everyone’s eyes on me. It was making me kind of nervous, to tell you the truth, and my face was heating up, so, with my arms still crossed, I said, again, “What’s your point?”
“My point, Mr. Wheeler, is that Duchamp was a trained artist who mastered the most basic principles, he learned the rules, and he learned them so well that, later in life, when he broke those rules, his output was not only taken more seriously, but, most importantly, it was all the more shocking and subversive."
“So what?”
“So, what I’m trying to tell you, Mr. Wheeler, is that it’s easy to sit there and pretend that you've got it all figured out, that you're above all the rules, but before you can break the rules, you must first learn the rules, because only then will you know which rules are worth breaking, otherwise it's all performative, superficial, lashing out for no good reason, as if you're trying to make a point without knowing what the point actually is.”
I was both fuming and embarrassed as hell, cursing like crazy in my head, leaning there, arms crossed, saying nothing, trying my damndest to look unbothered, but I could feel my lips quivering and my nose scrunching and my face turning red. I was praying, please aliens, please abduct me, right here, beam me up, take me away from this place, but then I started thinking that, if aliens did abduct me, I wouldn’t see KB ever again, and right when that girl popped into my head, all the fuming embarrassment faded, and I relaxed in my chair, and I even uncrossed my arms, but Ms. Vickers just kept going for some reason.
“The difference between you and Duchamp, Mr. Wheeler, is that Duchamp mastered the basics and knew exactly what he was doing, but you, you haven't a clue.”
Then there was a long silence, her just glaring down at me with this holier-than-thou look on her face, like she had just made the best damn point in the whole universe or something.
So all I did was, I slowly raised my hand, as if I had a question.
“Yes, Mr. Wheeler?”
I let my hand hang in the air for a moment, building up the suspense, then I said something I probably shouldn't have said, but I said it anyway.
I said, “Why do you have to be such a bitch all the time?”
And then the whole room gasped.
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ecosophia) wrote2025-09-30 10:50 am
We are now into the fifth year of these open posts. When I first posted a tentative hypothesis on the course of the Covid phenomenon, I had no idea that discussion on the subject would still be necessary all these years later, much less that it would turn into so lively, complex, and troubling a conversation. Still, here we are. Crude death rates and other measures of collapsing public health remain anomalously high in many countries, but nobody in authority wants to talk about the inadequately tested experimental Covid injections that are the most likely cause; 
It's a little past midnight, and
Welcome back to Frugal Friday! T
...or at least it looks like that. The deluxe limited edition of my new translation of John Dee's Propaedeumata Aphoristica, Dee's first major publication, will be released next month, and there are still copies that haven't been preordered yet. The photo on the left is the riveted leather traycase marked with Dee's hieroglyphic monad. The photo below is the volume itself, with gold leaf and brass corner protectors on the cover, handsewn signatures, ribbed spine, fine Spanish endpapers, and a sewn in satin ribbon bookmark. Yes, I know it looks like the ultimate Lovecraftian tome! Azoth Press always does a good job with its fine editions, but to my mind this one's exceptional even for them. Yeah, I'm feeling a little giddy about it. 
The book itself is probably the best general introduction to the worldview of Renaissance astrological magic ever written, and I've included a commentary to help unpack it. It's also essential if you want to make sense of Dee's cryptic Monas Hieroglyphica. 
We are now into the fifth year of these open posts. When I first posted 
It's almost midnight, and
Welcome back to Frugal Friday! T
As regular readers here know well, large language models (LLMs) -- the technology falsely labeled "artificial intelligence" by flacks in industry and media -- have managed to evoke the testier side of my personality. I've banned LLM-written text from this journal and my blog, and stomped hard from time to time on attempts to divert conversations into rhapsodies about the supposed wonders of the technology or the equal and opposite rhapsodies about how LLMs will surely destroy us all.