Remember those really boring study hall periods in junior high school? Since we weren't allowed to talk to each other, each student had to create an activity to do at their desks to look as if they were working on school assignments. I don't remember anyone who actually DID school work, instead we invented things to do to whittle away the time until the next class.
I alternately doodled, sketched, created to-do lists, day-dreamed, composed plans to smuggle a gun into school and blow away as many people as I could...(JUST KIDDING! Man, that was not an issue in my day, thankfully!)
One of the really interesting things I did though was making maps of fantasy worlds made up of interconnected continents and archipelagos. I would start with a clean sheet of notebook paper...the kind from a spiral-bound notebook. When you tore a page from one of those notebooks, the perforated edge would always end up with these snippets of paper, I guess they would be similar to the oh-so-famous "dangling chads" of the 2000 election ballots here in Florida...just jagged little bits of paper with fuzzy edges from the ripped fibers that make up the paper.
I would take one of those "chads" and from a height of about 2 feet off the surface of the paper lying on the desktop and drop it. Because of the fuzzy edges, and its relative light weight, it would gently but erratically flutter to the paper surface in a pretty much random way each time it was dropped. When it landed on the paper, I would use my trusty freshly-sharpened No. 2 pencil (Eberhard-Faber were favored) and trace the outline of it on the paper.
Sometimes it would snag one of the errant fibers sticking out of the edge of the chad and that was okay...it added to the random-ness of the outline as it dragged the paper bit across the blank sheet.
After multiple drops, the blobs of pencil "islands" would tend to merge and I would need to erase the boundaries at the connected parts to build up an ever-evolving "world" of continents and islands, resplendent with jagged fjords, inviting bays and harbors, gnarled peninsulas and twisting isthmuses. Once I felt my world was aesthetically complete, I would start to imagine countries on this map scape.
Now, the allocation of land to these imaginary countries would have its own rules, regulations and ritual as well. I had another sheet of paper on which I drew a grid of as many as 20 to 25 squares. Each square was numbered. I would, again using my trusty (though now a little smudgy with graphite dust from the pencil rubbing up against it's edges) chad, drop it from the same relative height as before onto the grid in order to select a number for each fake nation. The number would correspond to the number of island pieces (either individual islands or the congealed segments making up the continents) each country got as it's territory.
I would fathom all sorts of outrageous names for the lands like "Confederacy of Aeotinia", "Chastenkean Republic" and the "Crotherian Empire". Some of these names I got from the SF books I read, other were anagrams or reconfigurations of the names of friends and family.
From this pastime I eventually developed a few of the maps into a more rounded picture of a planet rich in a history of the rise and fall of civilizations over a span of thousands of years. This developed into the saga of the Nastralian world...a fantasy realm in which I imagined myself the Supreme Leader...the Riothamus Clovis the Great.
Geography, history and fantasy/SF were and still are favorites of mine so this somewhat geeky and quirky pastime oh so enjoyably filled my otherwise boring study periods.
Another study hall practice of mine was keeping a log of the passing snigglets of thought...random rants and raves or solemn reflections on anything and everything. Expressions of a teen aged boy trying to make sense of things out-of-whack or the perfectly-sensible.
These entries were called Time Reports and they were designed to be messages from the young me to the older me, to be read many years in the "future" (perhaps, I imagined, in THE YEAR 2000 (cue Conan O'Brien and his band member La Bamba, please)).
Well, let me tell you, I've never been good at keeping things over the years...not one survived past 1982. So much for that. I do remember though they were at times quite insightful and I remember pretty well written (at least I thought so, of course, no one but me had ever read them). Some had drawings, others quotes and many had short poems or one of my favorite things to compose, haiku.
Well, consider this blog the 21st century comeback of the Time Reports...this time created for whomever wants to read them...take from them what you will. But just like those old logs, they should aid the confused mind and build resolve for the "Mot De Guere" (I'll define Chausseisms like that phrase as time goes on), at least for me anyway.
I alternately doodled, sketched, created to-do lists, day-dreamed, composed plans to smuggle a gun into school and blow away as many people as I could...(JUST KIDDING! Man, that was not an issue in my day, thankfully!)
One of the really interesting things I did though was making maps of fantasy worlds made up of interconnected continents and archipelagos. I would start with a clean sheet of notebook paper...the kind from a spiral-bound notebook. When you tore a page from one of those notebooks, the perforated edge would always end up with these snippets of paper, I guess they would be similar to the oh-so-famous "dangling chads" of the 2000 election ballots here in Florida...just jagged little bits of paper with fuzzy edges from the ripped fibers that make up the paper.
I would take one of those "chads" and from a height of about 2 feet off the surface of the paper lying on the desktop and drop it. Because of the fuzzy edges, and its relative light weight, it would gently but erratically flutter to the paper surface in a pretty much random way each time it was dropped. When it landed on the paper, I would use my trusty freshly-sharpened No. 2 pencil (Eberhard-Faber were favored) and trace the outline of it on the paper.
Sometimes it would snag one of the errant fibers sticking out of the edge of the chad and that was okay...it added to the random-ness of the outline as it dragged the paper bit across the blank sheet.
After multiple drops, the blobs of pencil "islands" would tend to merge and I would need to erase the boundaries at the connected parts to build up an ever-evolving "world" of continents and islands, resplendent with jagged fjords, inviting bays and harbors, gnarled peninsulas and twisting isthmuses. Once I felt my world was aesthetically complete, I would start to imagine countries on this map scape.
Now, the allocation of land to these imaginary countries would have its own rules, regulations and ritual as well. I had another sheet of paper on which I drew a grid of as many as 20 to 25 squares. Each square was numbered. I would, again using my trusty (though now a little smudgy with graphite dust from the pencil rubbing up against it's edges) chad, drop it from the same relative height as before onto the grid in order to select a number for each fake nation. The number would correspond to the number of island pieces (either individual islands or the congealed segments making up the continents) each country got as it's territory.
I would fathom all sorts of outrageous names for the lands like "Confederacy of Aeotinia", "Chastenkean Republic" and the "Crotherian Empire". Some of these names I got from the SF books I read, other were anagrams or reconfigurations of the names of friends and family.
From this pastime I eventually developed a few of the maps into a more rounded picture of a planet rich in a history of the rise and fall of civilizations over a span of thousands of years. This developed into the saga of the Nastralian world...a fantasy realm in which I imagined myself the Supreme Leader...the Riothamus Clovis the Great.
Geography, history and fantasy/SF were and still are favorites of mine so this somewhat geeky and quirky pastime oh so enjoyably filled my otherwise boring study periods.
Another study hall practice of mine was keeping a log of the passing snigglets of thought...random rants and raves or solemn reflections on anything and everything. Expressions of a teen aged boy trying to make sense of things out-of-whack or the perfectly-sensible.
These entries were called Time Reports and they were designed to be messages from the young me to the older me, to be read many years in the "future" (perhaps, I imagined, in THE YEAR 2000 (cue Conan O'Brien and his band member La Bamba, please)).
Well, let me tell you, I've never been good at keeping things over the years...not one survived past 1982. So much for that. I do remember though they were at times quite insightful and I remember pretty well written (at least I thought so, of course, no one but me had ever read them). Some had drawings, others quotes and many had short poems or one of my favorite things to compose, haiku.
Well, consider this blog the 21st century comeback of the Time Reports...this time created for whomever wants to read them...take from them what you will. But just like those old logs, they should aid the confused mind and build resolve for the "Mot De Guere" (I'll define Chausseisms like that phrase as time goes on), at least for me anyway.