Second grade–and yes, I know that I look like a VW driving down the road towards you with both doors open. What you don’t see was the way my ribs stood out like xylophone keys in an old cartoon.
There was never a medium look for me–before I attained my human fire-hydrant physique in my teens I was so skinny that my mother wouldn’t let me take my shirt off at the beach for fear that people would think she was starving me…
In May of 1982 I was part of a Field Training Exercise at Malamute Drop Zone, Fort Richardson, Alaska. I was responsible for managing the Army end of all airlift coming in or out–the Airedales will fly anything, but the user has to make sure it’s ready to go. Because of that assignment, my small detachment was located a few miles away from the main body of the battalion.
Between the length of the initial deployment (I was awake and working for 36+ hours) and the environment (dust combined with wide ranges in temperatures) I came down with a cold… which rapidly turned into pneumonia when I couldn’t get to the aid station right away. It wasn’t until our medic determined that I was running a 103-degree temperature that things started to happen, but I still spent a night in my tent by myself before getting to a doctor.
It was during that night that I saw this creature. Yes, it was a fever-dream but it literally scared the hell out of me. When I was finally able to make noises when moving my lips I asked who he was and he responded “Skaaa, the bringer of pain”
As I said before, I know it was a dream–and I know I have an over-active imagination at times as well… but every time I go through particularly nasty bouts with illness or pain that last for any length of time I can almost see this bundle of spruce sticks over in the corner, eyeing me with malicious glee as he sharpens the skewers, hooks and other implements of his trade.
There are two types of posts I make to this blog. The first type is a spontaneous post and usually involves a piece of art. The second type is in essay form, usually 600-1200 words and has been drafted, proof-read edited offline so it comes out exactly right. This post is going to be a mix of both.
While this is not a political blog, and I am not an overly political person I started out with a rant about prescription pain medication. Granted, there is a problem with abuse and diversion in the country but in humanity’s usual mode of over-reaction a lot of deserving people are being not just hurt but permanently damaged.
I was that rarest of anomalies, a drug-free college student in the early 1970s. I didn’t start out with any hard and fast opinions either way, but I made a promise to my girlfriend that I would not indulge, and I kept that promise even though it brought enormous pressure from the other residents of my dorm to include threats of violence. When they finally figured out that (A) I wasn’t a narc and (B) I wasn’t going to cave their attitudes changed and I became the token “straight.” As my good friend The Badger said to me “Deitrick I guess you have character,” and from then on anyone from outside Lathrop Hall risked damage to life and limb if they pushed the drug issue with me.
It’s been that way all my life. I had extremely high security clearances and was selected to control large amounts of money and extremely valuable items of equipment because I have proven myself to be scrupulously honest. When I returned an extra $20 a clerk gave me with change after a purchase she was amazed that I did so, saying, “No one would have ever known” to which I answered, “But I would have”
So, where is this going? Please bear with me.
At the same time that I have been going through life as the living embodiment of Richie Cunningham from Happy Days, I have also been going through sheer physical hell. As the result of a now overwhelmingly disproven SIDS prevention measure known as Thymus Irradiation I was deprived of a healthy immune system. Because of that I have multiple auto-immune problems: advanced rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis and multiple skin rashes which are often severe enough to bleed through.
…and did I mention the pain? I don’t have a thesaurus big enough or accurate enough for me to find words to accurately describe the exquisite torture I go through just to get up in the morning. You know that little graph they use to help verbalize pain, the one with the little faces on the number scale? At any given moment I have at least five areas bouncing up at about #7–and there are days when I could tape an extension to the end of that little scale and draw in three additional expressive faces showing pain at level 11 (vomiting) 12 (voiding bowels) and 13 (giving the world the “one finger wave”). I have knuckles that look like walnuts and major joints which possess 20% of the range of motion I had ten years ago. Because of the various non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs prescribed to me I’ve gone through pancreatitis twice (usually a one-way trip the first time around). I have gone all the way to “the edge” because of uncontrolled severe pain. The only way I can live anything close to a normal life is by using pain-killers.
OOOOOOHHHH. AHHHHHH. See–already you’re sucking your breath in and looking back over the previous half-dozen paragraphs to see if I ever car-jacked someone or dried a baby off in a microwave. If you use pain medication you are automatically judged as a criminal/addict. Never mind that all these “conditions” are due to massive stupidity on the part of doctors that are all dead now–I am flawed because I need this kind of help. What is bitterly ironic about all of this is the fact that pain-killers don’t really “kill pain.” The pain is still there, but you’re able to ignore it to an extent.
Long term chronic pain acts almost like a disease in and of itself. As your body copes with the overload on your nervous system it changes and adapts–and not in a good way. To take the pressure off of one joint I have to kind of twist in an otherwise unaffected area-–but which now causes more pain because it has been forced into an alignment it wasn’t made for. The longer the pain goes on, the faster and more intense it becomes as well. One doctor explained to me this simplistic but effective manner: it’s like the pain messages have worn a groove they can zip down.
At one time I longed for a device that would allow someone to experience my life for just thirty seconds–a small hand-held device with a push-button on it–but in the end was glad it didn’t exist. I’d be leaving a trail of people collapsed on the floor, covered with vomit with their bladders and bowels voided.
…and contrary to what thoughtless people have said to me, this isn’t a moderate condition that I am “using.” As you would expect with growing up in Alaska and life as a soldier, I have experienced other periods of severe pain before all of this set in. At age 10 I walked on three broken bones in my foot for a week before getting a cast. I had my left thumb slashed/dislocated in an industrial accident and I took care of it with aspirin and a butterfly closure. Passed gallstones twelve times before the operation with only ibuprofin to ease the pain. I know what pain is and what I go through daily equals those brief incidents.
Fortunately there are exceptions in the human race, people with unfeigned compassion. I have two attending doctors now that both deserve sainthood for what they have done for me but in many ways their hands are tied by government rules and regulations that are just not thought out very well by people who know nothing of the science involved to begin with, much less the misery their actions have inflicted.
I make it through each day only because I have a great support system, with my beautiful Saxon princess at the top of the list. As I mentioned there are my two doctors and their staff who regularly save my life through their care and compassion… and there are the members of The Club.
The Club. I am certainly not the only person in this situation and I refer to those friends of mine in similar straits as members of The Club. I can readily pick those individuals out of a crowd–there is particular combination of a dark exhausted look around the eyes, a careful way of walking and an absence of judgment that comes only from countless sleepless nights, regular spasms and chronic joint pain… and the fear that comes with it. It is something that can only be experienced to be understood and it gives you a compassion that nothing else will.
At the outset of this post I said I didn’t know where I was going or what I wanted to accomplish, and I still don’t have a totally cohesive thesis statement to tack onto the introduction. Just do me a favor please. If you know someone in pain-hell, or in your daily activities encounter someone with a cane, moving in an oddly stiff manner or maybe wincing while moving around at a desk or handling objects, please be kind. No matter the kind of life they’ve lived, they’re going straight to heaven because they’ve already lived in hell.
With all the emphasis on our new book (Airship of Fools), I thought it would be nice to show the cover art for the first book. This will also give most of you a chance to see the entire painting as well; by the time the text lines and graphic devices were added, 15%-20% of the image was lost.
I loved doing this painting because it was created with my old process (airbrush/paint/pencil) that actually a lot more fun to do with the wide variation in tools and activity. I think that this process also makes a painting with a bit more “pop” to it.
By this time you’ve all probably tumbled to the fact that I am very much the family man. Whether we’re talking wife, kids, grandkids, siblings or nie-phews, family is important to me and makes the distances that separate us disheartening.
I love having my daughter Meghan and her son Jayden (a.k.a. Monkey Boy or “ouuggg ooblee” as he calls himself) but I really miss my other grandchildren as well, so I try to make sure they are still aware of “Pop-Pop” or “Papa Moondog” and how much he loves them. Sometimes I send little gifts–trading cards or books, but I try to send hand-drawn postcards at least twice a month.
Subject matter is determined by a story conference each year during on of their visits. We all contribute to the list and the contributions can be very interesting and illuminating. Oliver is all little boy and goes for airplanes, giant robots and the like, but my grand-daughter Hazel is a little goth-girl artist in training. She asks for giant eye-balls, huge tubes of toothpaste–you name it.
Below are a couple of sets of cards that I have sent in the past ( I try to document them all).
Taken sometime in 2012: there is a scar from the post-cancer plastic surgery but I can’t tell if it is from the first or second procedure. Never mind; the important part of this photo is on the viewer’s right, i.e., my beautiful Saxon princess who I carried away after painting myself blue and jumping the wall one summer’s evening long, long ago.
Another cardboard construction–this was made for a Saturday morning “drive-in movie” activity for church. Most of our time was spent keeping older kids from sweet-talking Meggie into trading rides with them.
This is also a good example of the viewer interaction I try to incorporate into my work. At times I will render only part of a background or just “indicate” it via simple line work. I do that so the viewer will be able to complete the image in their mind.
I found that my enthusiasm waned for things like Star Trek, Star Wars and Traveller as more background information was added. It was more fun for me to fill in the blanks myself.
I learned early on that good reference material get you a good painting. I have file cabinets full of clippings laboriously collected over the years but I find that even with all of those images available I usually end up shooting new photos for each project. It’s better to have a photo tailored to your design than it is to tailor your design to the reference you have on hand.
I have also found that even with the ba-jillion images available via the Internet I still have to set up shots. Google “The Romulan Starship ‘Buzzard’s Breath'” and you’ll get 100K results… but 998K of the images will be the same identical shot.
I don’t set out to use myself as a model but I often find it so much easier to do so. With this cover painting I wasted 45 minutes trying to get my model into the desired “crazed cult-member pose,” and in the end I had to pose while he took the photo. My only regret is that I couldn’t keep my McGuyveresque locks into the painting.
You never know beforehand who the best models will be either. I tried using one of Lori’s drop-dead gorgeous friends for a FASA Star Trek piece but the girl had no acting “muggability” at all. The gentleman who posed for the soldier in this painting verbally worried about “everyone in the neighborhood staring at him” during the shoot despite the fact that there were two, maybe three kids (no adults) within a four-home radius.
I make fairly precise comps, to the point that some of the more literal editors I’ve encountered will assume that the final art will “have all those black lines.” Luckily that wasn’t an issue with this project because the art director was Kirk Wescom, one of the best ADs I’ve ever worked with.
(How good is Kirk? When you look in the dictionary for “art director” you’ll find his picture next to the citation.)
…and the only change he requested was to change the background color to the teal shade I had specified for the first and third volumes.
Toward the end of the run for GDW there was an effort to revive the Traveller line through a reboot. Well, not actually a “reboot” in that it wasn’t a remake like Traveller: 2300 was, but they moved the time period a couple of decades along and tweaked some of the dynamics of the races involved.
I did some work for Traveller: the New Era (TNE) but nothing near the amount I did for the original game. TNE didn’t have nearly the sales and it hasn’t held up as well over the years with fans. On a purely self-centered level that is very disappointing because some of my best work was for TNE and this set of three covers was the best of the lot.
Even though they were unlikely to all be on the stands together at the same time, I designed the three books so they would work together if they did. While not completely accurate, the term “tryptch” has been used in describing this set. Unfortunately the third book was never published; it wasn’t a matter of quality (Paul Brunette is a good word-cruncher) but rather economics. There was a change in paper stock with the second book which made it noticeably heavier and sales (or lack thereof) did not do well enough to warrant the extra freight charges so The Backwards Mask (Book 3) never saw print.
David R. Deitrick, Designer 