And now, a word about my (non) sponsor

Sherman boy
Originally uploaded by Elvira Black.

Before continuing on to part 2 of Magnificent Obsession, I wanted to write a few words (in addition to the thousands I have written thus far in this blog) about my boyfriend BG, his art, and his attitude regarding my blog.

A few months ago, I began to incorporate some of BG's expressionist portraits into Shithouse rat. On occasion, I also managed to persuade BG to take 10 minutes or so to draw a funny illustration for a blog post. One example can be found here.

Nevertheless, I haven't utilized BG's art here in awhile. As far as the paintings, I generally have to do a post that somehow relates to the portrait at hand--be it Ezra Pound,, Humprey Bogart, Sid Vicious, or other notables.

BG never pressed me to post his art, but I thought it would be a nice addition to my blog. Since he didn't have a formal portrait of Dr. U (lol), I thought it would be funny as hell if he did a quick sketch of her in her surgical scrubs to accompany my latest piece.

But BG is a man of many moods and mental states. Being a schizo, he tends toward paranoia at times. Although I read him the post below during a night of partying, and he liked it, the next day he decided that he disapproved of me using my blog to "cut people down"--especially people he dealt with. He then started railing about the fact that I, too, had complained on occasion about my dentists or doctors. Although he'd told me many VA horror stories, he didn't like me to rub his nose in it. And always beneath the surface was the fear of getting into some sort of "trouble" for things I posted.

Though BG is an artist and I am a writer, I've never pushed my work down his throat. He doesn't know squat about computers, and he likes to refer to my beloved Mac PowerBook (aka Herman) as "that stupid toy." He thinks I waste a lot of time blogging, and is definitely jealous of the time I invest in Herman and my blog. Deep down, I'm sure he understands, but he loves to kvetch nonetheless.

Since I don't take the time to print out most of the pieces I blog about, he hasn't read that many of them. Once in awhile I'll read him one, and though he insists he'd be more than happy to see them all, he's not exactly on his knees begging to peruse them either. Since I often bare my blogger soul here, I've remarked to him more than once that regular Shithouse readers probably know more about me, in a way, than he does.

Nevertheless, I love him dearly--and that is a vast understatement.

So, although it has no relevance whatsoever to Robo-dentist, here is BG's portrait of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, the burner of Atlanta, who coined the saying "war is hell." Since I name a lot of BG's works, I like to call this one "Portrait of the Artist as General Sherman"--not because it looks like BG (though in a way it does) but because something of BG's persona seems to shine through in this portrait, as it does in all his works.

And indeed, Sherman's grim, stubborn, fierce, determined expression is very similar to BG's visage when he refused to indulge me with an illustration for my latest post.

Yes, General Sherman, "war is hell." But the reason I spend so much time on my blog dissecting crazy, weird, nasty, and bizarre folks like Robo-dentist can best be summed up with another quote--this one courtesy of Jean Paul Sartre:

"Hell is other people."