THAT DAY

I'm at the Main Library, picking up two very different comics I want to read.

First: Bill Griffith's INVISIBLE INK: My Mother's Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist. So Mom was secretive? But his dad's just as secretive--his family, history, experiences in the war... all blank to his son. Like many veterans, he wouldn't talk, and left no clues after his early death in a bike crash. In contrast, Mom's "secret" is open & well-documented; both she & her lover wrote copious letters and journals--even novels borrowing scenes and themes from their affair!

As Griffith explores his parents' (loud, deafening) secrets, I hear echoes of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Are You My Mother? Parallels, but one big difference. Bechdel's parents were artists at core; but despite Griffith's subtitle, that "famous cartoonist" isn't. You ever heard of Lawrence Lariar? Not me. He wasn't famous, even in his day---just profitable. He did whatever'd sell, not what'd last--certainly not what HE cared about. He was a hack.

Griffith speculates--if his mom had married Lariar, would the hack have been not just a stepdad but a mentor? If so... might he have suppressed or commercialized Griffith's own crazy, creepy, personal, underground style? Would Zippy the Pinhead have ever been born?

Mentors don't just nurture; inevitably they also selectively squelch and prune. If the mentor's less than the student, that can be deadly.

But for good or ill, Lariar stayed distant, and Griffith followed his own path. Ironic that his art's just as ugly as Lariar's--just way more expressively ugly. Catches how it feels to grow up sure you are ugly. I recognize it--I was taught all men are. But Griffith goes further--his women are ugly too. All bodies awkward, heavy, our souls draped in slabs of sagging meat. Griffith can capture an austere beauty now and then, but it's impersonal--architectural. Empty train stations have a lonely charm. But people? People are a blot on the landscape.

Interesting. He's married to Diane Noomin, whose cartoons have also reveled for 40 years in exposing American tackiness.

Picture her Didi Glitz & his Zippy, crossbreeding... yow!

The second comic: My Little Pony, written for kids--since you humans stop identifying with unicorns about the same time you hit puberty and lose your ESP and peak language abilities. But I'm an Aspie--basically a lifelong closet unicorn (with opposable thumbs). Or at least not a grownup human. So I find Jeremy Whitley's stories as rewarding as Griffith's or Bechdel's. They're just sung in a different key--the key of fur.

1. Tiara & Silver Spoon are mean little unicorn foals, but not innately; their rich snotty parents pressure them to snub all but their own class. As an autistic, shunned taunted and bullied all through school, it's a stretch for me to empathize even with these mild bullies, but at least I can read it--unlike William Golding's Lord of the Flies. I hated that book--it asserts that humans (well, males at least) are murderous pack animals just under the skin--so murdering the different is inevitable. Great literature or human-supremacist propaganda? In contrast, I can almost forgive these unicorn brats facing such family pressure.
2. A unicorn is kidnapped, caged like an animal, denied personhood. The jailor plans to exploit (in fact devour) his magic. I lived in that cage of everyone-wanting-to-use-the-freak's-abilities for years. Maybe you've lived in it.
3. Slender, lovely, fierce, shy, eccentric Princess Luna (former nightmare, current Guardian of Dreams) rules Equestria for a day, filling in for her sister. She feels trapped, bureaucratized, always on show. Luna much prefers the freedom of her dream job. I know that feeling.

Bike home with a contact low. Too much exposure to beaten-down people left me... hung over? Afraid so. Ugh. Sure explains my reluctance to socialize. Have I been protecting myself?

THAT EVENING

Our band, The Krelkins, rehearse. A short focused session. On Fight to Win, Nic & I try different instrumental sounds; on Migrate through Fire, Ross tries mallets to get a more tribal hand-drum sound, like the hooves of the creatures pounding as they dance. I like that. Catches a little of the feel of the original dream. No, My Little Pony didn't turn me into a furvert. I've always dreamed of nonhuman folk--meeting them or being them.

Just before bed, exhausted, I seek something light to read that won't haunt my dreams. Not Griffith, he's too grim--My Little Pony won't trouble me.

So I thought.

THAT NIGHT

I'm touring another world. The continent I'm on has green coasts but mountains, deserts, and treeless prairies inland. It may be an alternate North America or Equestria--definitely alternate, for the natives aren't human or pony. Furred, tailed, rather equine, yes--but bipedal, upright. A short horn on the brow. Reared-up unicorns? But with hands and hindpaws, not hooves. I find them exotic, graceful, sexy...

...at least along the coasts. When I travel inland, the people look beefier, puffy as if borderline ill, and mentally half asleep; only a few have that alert, slender unicorn grace I saw by the sea. The inland minority who do look gracile are often smart and ALWAYS artistically creative. Driven artists. Why? Innate, or because the majority aren't? Does art-drought cause thirst? Or is it metabolic?

"Ours can dance CAGED!"

"Well, ours can sing with WEIGHTS piled on!"

"Well ours can tell the Legend of the Inland Sea while hanging UPSIDE DOWN!"

It's to the point where competitions are abuse, really. Torture on stage, as much as art. "Artists have always suffered for their art" they rationalize.

Well, yeah, art is hard work, but... chains? Cages?

Mascot: just Masoch misspelled? No, this inland torture-show isn't masochism or sadism exactly. The artists aren't choosing pain, nor are the clans hurting them because they like causing it. More like Kraft-Ebbing fantasies, where no matter what you do or say, no one listens and you always lose. These inland clans are powerful; say no to one, and another will snap you up. You can't hide out in farming or business; you're visibly different. Everyone sees you're an artist, BORN to suffer. They pretty much draft you and toss you onstage. In chains. No one even profits; it's just competition and prestige-seeking gone too far, gone wrong.

The gracile ones who can, flee early to the nearest coast. There, gracility is normal. A majority's lean, active--and creative. Unchained. You're no longer special--but after seeing your cousins in cages, anonymity looks good.

Are these two unicorn types subspecies, or is it dietary? Slender by the sea, puffy & dull inland... Could it be iodine? Remember how humans far from the sea often develop goiter. So I hypothesize IUB (Inland Unicorn Bloat) is an equine whole-body response to iodine deficiency. It does fit!

Of course I'm biased to consider the gracile form as healthy and the robust one as ill--I grew up as a creative but nervous skinny noodle in a world of thugs (and I do need a lot of iodine). Even here, as an alien tourist, I'm so obviously their artist type that I worry I'll be kidnapped, chained, and put on show.

I meet a young researcher--gifted, willowy, dark-coated, adorable (sort of Twilight Sparkle's mind in Princess Luna's body, though biped not quadruped of course. Plus fingers). She was born in the heartland, but escaped to a college on the coast before the town bosses could trap her.

This Twilight-Luna's hypothesized, as I did, that IUB may be caused by diet, not genes. She's studying many trace nutrients, hoping to track down the cause of the bloat--and undo it. I urge her "Focus on iodine!"

For if Twi-Luna can create artists and scientists with a mere pill, proving chunkiness is illness... she can break the torture-tradition at last.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Equestria: the homeland of My Little Pony, with a geography much like the USA--if you're a sloppy-drunk mapmaker.
• Healthy coasts but diseased interior where fatcats (in two senses) exploit the different: Welcome to capitalism, Trumpism... McDonaldism. "Supersize me!"
• Puffy sick people:
  1. Griffith's nightmarish art--people as sagging, bloated, ugly meat.
  2. The malnourished, dull, addicted and/or crazy folks I saw in Civic Center. Here they're a minority; what happens in states where that's the norm?
• Small-town-boss patrons and their mascots: in My Little Pony, Diamond Tiara & Silver Spoon's snobby families.
• Gracile furs get caged & put on show:
  1. In MLP, that scheming wizard who caged a unicorn and plots to devour his magic.
  2. In MLP, Princess Luna ruling Equestria for a day, filling in for her sister. Turns out Luna feels trapped, hates being on show.
• Artists expected to sacrifice: after rehearsal, my bandmates rushed off to see La La Land--a film on how the careers of two working artists sabotage their love.
• But... most art-suffering isn't inherent but societal:
  1. Saw a bit of a TV show--a judge told an aspiring singer "You have a huge stylistic range, but the industry walls us into little genres." Duh! They don't just wreck our love lives, they block artistic change too. The market wants predictability! God forbid you grow up and say anything new.
  2. In Invisible Ink, Bill Griffith tells of his mom's affair with Lawrence Lariar, an artist who pandered to the immediate market to survive, wasted his talent, and is rightly forgotten.
• ACTION 1: Up my iodine intake. Eat seaweed and resume taking thyroxine. I'll lose weight and gain energy. [NOTE EIGHT MONTHS LATER: Did, but it wasn't enough. Testing showed I needed to raise my thyroxine dose 50%. The dream was warning my deficiency was worse than I thought!]
• ACTION 2: Keep writing, singing, drawing--but stay obscure, and stick to liberal coastal cities. Because in the heartland, they cage creatures like me.
• ACTION 3: Smash capitalism (in my copious spare time). Though this dream-diagnosis of America's illness is artistic & spiritual too, not just about money & class. Or even diet & nutrition. Though both those plagues are horribly real--I saw their victims today. As they say: "Eat your vegs--or become one."

MONTHS LATER

Only after sketching did I recognize the source of these stage-performers in chains and weights. I read of them decades ago in one of Kurt Vonnegut's harsher stories, Harrison Bergeron (a surname suspiciously like Percheron--a massive horse-breed like the inland unicorns in my dream). In the tale an American cult of equality helps the clumsy, ugly and stupid raise their self-esteem, by putting handicaps on the talented: warts on beauties, chains on runners, blindfolds on painters, weights on dancers...

Sweet Celestia! At least we haven't dumbed down our America.

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