If you want to make God laugh, make a plan

This has always been a saying I have carried with me like a saved fortune cookie slip folded with warning into my wallet. It has always stayed with me as it often bodes true. When you think you know what you doing, you don't. When you think you've got it figured out, you aint.

We lost power for the second time a few days ago. This time, however, we were without our beloved old (and loud) generator. What a difference it made not having it.

We go along with our modern trappings living a luxury we take for granted in electricity, heat, fresh food, running water, and internet...when it is gone in one moment we are left to only look inside ourselves.

There is a bit of catharsis in an experience such as this. When the basic luxuries and staples are striped away you are left viewing your path of chosen life and it's choices dead in the face. They can't be set aside or ignored whilst you watch another cat video or watch the falling freezing snow and rain on the cold icy sea in your shirt sleeves in the over warmth of your heated house. Even the ease of toilet flushing reduced to trudging down an icy stone path to a snow strewn beach to scoop cold sea water into Home Depot buckets to flush your toilet. How simply the divide between 19th and 21st century is closed with the snap of a power line and the piling of cold snow around an old house meant to be enjoyed for three hot months a year.

My obsession with androids and the Singularity keep arising during our power outages

Whilst freezing and hundling organic blobs in our drafty old house I imagine myself or even a faithful robotic servant out there amongst the cold, impervious to it. And this latest contemplation of our own sudden thrust into 19th century life of candles and oil lamps, no flush toilets or running water, toasting hands over open fires, just sort of keeps immerging into this future of impervious beings aching for an odd human antiquity.

Rather than cold steel worlds of flying cars and post apocalyptic scenes I keep picturing the composite human/android clearly searching for a moment of beauty and delicacy.

This piece was sketched during the storm. Today I outlined and added colour. The cool icy branches mean little to the singularity me...I am my own generator...I am my own power source.

Maybe having our detritius of modernity occasionally stripped from us is a good thing.

It makes mental paths clear and open to view what is of import: friends, family, joy, happiness where and when we can find it. And in all the struggle Art has always been there for me, a way to distract from pain, work through toil, and imagine yourself out of a bad moment.

Well, in my case in my scribbles I keep making these androids. These robo women caught in a web of past and present. I shall have to follow this path and see where it leads. I currently have another robo piece that I had shared during last power outage that is currently reworked and I am working on it in digital oils. I'll share more of that later.

Here is today's piece before colouring.