barbarianprincess

Exclusively for those who frequent the forum, here's something I pulled out of the rejected renders folder and twiddled with until it's a halfway decent wallpaper:



New page will be up tomorrow or Friday!

macnut wrote:Very nice JE, I especially like the come hither look on her face. Ah Mentl, you lucky bastard (even considering his present circumstances!)

All men who are with the woman they really love and who love them back are lucky bastards. Since my divorce, I find that this hobby of mine has been good therapy. I'm essentially working out what went wrong and what should actually go right in a "perfect" love affair. All artists do it, I guess, to one degree or another. Zona certainly didn't start out that way, but that's part of what she's become to me. Now, some artists/writers go too far and just wank off onto the page, then have the nerve to be surprised when their stories are perfect adolescent shite. Gods preserve us from self-important self-indulgence masquerading as introspection. Hope I never sacrifice the basics of good storytelling to make some weepy emo bullshit that takes itself too seriously. Trust me - Zona would haul off and thump me a good one and then tell me to get back to some action, jokes and firelit rippling muscles.

And boobs. Lotsa boobs.

Big boobs.

Steve wrote:Ah! And I see other parallels to our own lives.

There's been alot of talk on this forum about whether Zona and Mentl's relationship will survive a realization that it all began because of his (at the time) unrealized magical gifts. That maybe when they realized that their love started out under "false pretenses" there'd be doubts and hesitations.

No offense meant, but that's a bunch of crap.

As Mssr. Draft and I both know from what we saw growing up, true love is true love, no matter how it starts, and it has a strength and fidelity that transcends its circumstances and endures forever.

And yet, me elder sibling, we both know how often shinola is mistaken for shit - and vice versa. Doubts can be crap, but they're doubts nonetheless. Especially doubts about ourselves, and those can be the most damning of all.

Mom and Dad's love story was, I think, the exception. The rest of us seem to have to make mistake after mistake before we finally get to something like that, eh?

Regardless, I need to get back to action, jokes and firelit rippling muscles.

And ... well, you know the rest.

warnie wrote:I haven't been here for a while, and let me say that is just beautiful.

Dad was a good-looking, funny, smart, clever and charming fellow from a small town in Illinois. He was a staff sergeant in the USAF, stationed at a MAC base in San Bernardino, California. He was 25. Mom was 20, a local girl - brown haired, black eyed, extremely pretty, petite and sharper than most people you ever meet. Essentially she was one of those women who is truly a force of nature. ( She was five-nothing, weighed ninety pounds dripping wet, and you just never wanted to get in her way. Seriously. You would regret it. )

They met at a USO dance on January 1, 1952 and began dating. Twelve days later, at the races at Santa Anita (in the rain, so the story goes) he asked her to be his wife. She said yes. They were married about eight months later, and until her death in 1999, they were together and madly in love with each other. All the time Steve and I were growing up, no matter what the trouble was, or how hard the times were, there was never any doubt in our minds that these two were completely nuts about each other. Physically, emotionally, intellectually - whatever differences they had, they worked them out. Whatever hurts they took they never nurtured them against each other.

No human being is perfect, and neither were they (thank the gods). Still, occasionally, we get to touch a little bit of that perfection that we all so desperately want when we truly give ourselves to each other. And that's all I have to say about that, today.