THAT DAY

My friend Patagia calls to say: "You're not poor now! What can you throw money at? Do you HAVE goals?"

"Only short-term. I'm getting dental work done."

"How about music?"

"My friend Kathleen Dunbar spends real money to hire good session players. But my songs are complex--you can't just pick them up, they take committed band members. Maybe hiring players and backup singers would speed realizing some songs, though."

Patagia suggests two more: "Why not self-publish your dream-comics? and it'd help both your creative and social life if you had your own place with more space." True, but I know I won't tackle a move for at least a year. Health issues first.

Read The Undrowned Child by Michelle Lovric, a fantasy about Venice full of mermaids and monsters.

Work on Spira, a sculpture of a furry centauroid modern dancer made of fused Barbies. Gouge & spackle... build knee tendons, glutes, cunt. Lay on a gray & cream basecoat--unsure of her final pelt pattern yet.

Evening: our band, The Krelkins, rehearses. Rework 14 songs for a small show next week. Progress!

THAT NIGHT

In Venice, a guy mocks the chief of police (or of the Doge's guards): "Coward!" The bearded stocky old chief (how do I know him?) blusters "Generals don't fight in front, or always wear a uniform; they put it on, go to work, plan from behind, take it off after work!" But he protests too much: the heckler hit a sore spot.

So the chief gets a hollow Roc egg--over 2 meters long, brown, plated and veined--and bores head tail and leg holes. Then he rents a rhinoceropotamus and makes it wear the egg like... armor, saddle, Carnival disguise? A bit of each. With a Roc-shard helmet hiding most of the critter's face too, the resulting chimera looks more like a reptilian unicorn than your ordinary rhinopotamus.

Next the Chief dons Conquistadorean potbellied armor, and rides his chimera round town--narrow canalside paths, stone footbridges. The mandatory rhino handler (rental requires a certified wrangler, of course; insurance!) rides on the neck, and the chief's blonde girlfriend sits behind him, arms round his tin-can waist.

Now who'll dare to call him coward?

All this is an Italian TV series of course, and I'm here in Venice touring the set with the cast regulars. His girlfriend's played by Goldie Hawn, circa 1980 (say, Private Benjamin or Protocol. Big blonde hair. Floppy hats.) The couple plus the chimera wrangler rehearse a scene where the monster backs up in sudden panic and the Chief must calm it so civilians aren't crushed, showing his heroism. Or lack of it if he fails.

They rehearse in a jeep, though--about the right size, weight and noise! Goldie stands up, as she'll do in the scene proper. Lurch and roar backward along a canalbank. Fenders grind on stone walls.

Now I watch the filming of the real monster-panic scene, from street level. REALLY street level! As if I'm drunk in the gutter, looking blearily up through a fisheye lens. The roc-clad rhinopotamus rears, the wrangler swears, the Chief falls off--of course. Hope his armor's padded! Goldie looks like the brave one, standing akimbo like a circus stunt girl, bare feet grasping the egg's ridges--all the more circusy for wearing a short white toga blowing wildly in the wind. Sexy. And extremely Fellini. The wrangler shouts and tugs the reins and the chimera rears and roars. Goldie's toga streams in the wind.

Turns out she's naked under that toga.

Yep. No doubt. Fellini!

SO WHAT'S IT MEAN? NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Venice, chimera, bumbling civic leader, masks and carnival: in The Undrowned Child.
• Rhinopotamus: 1: short-tempered? Hippos and rhinos are both reputedly irritable. 2: they're both nearsighted too. Like me about money?
• Goldie Hawn in the movie Protocol, rhino seems a weird unicorn: echoes an epic dream of mine, Hunt Of The Unicorn
• Nudity, bare thighs and cunt: sculpted cendancer Spira's thighs and cunt today
• Wannabe hero with plated roc-egg, like a plated skin over the rhinopo's ALREADY plated skin: In Undrowned Child, the villain steals a leathery skin from the tomb of a hero skinned alive by the Turks in the 1500s
• ACTION (today): draw this, obviously; it's too vividly weird not to. But what ELSE?
• ACTION (negative): don't, like that guard, do stuff to impress others. What do I WANT to do?
• ACTION (deep): take off your armor! Goldie was the one who kept her footing, and she rode, um, bareback.

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