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You know that reoccurring nightmare we all have where we’re minding our business and suddenly off in the distance a body falls from the sky? Or a 747? Or an armadillo? No? That’s just me? …kay.

Anyway…it’s a common theme in my nightmare repertoire, usually accompanied by abject panic and an obsessive need to grab my camera gear and rush to the scene to photograph the carnage (I used to be a photojournalist) only to discover that one or more of the following has happened:

• I can’t find my camera gear
• my car is locked (usually a Volkswagen Beetle for some reason) with my camera gear inside which I can see on the seat.
• I locate my camera gear but it consists of some kind of ancient camera that requires “film” and well…even in my anything-goes dreamworld there’s no film. More panic ensues.

So when Illustration Friday posted “Haunted” as the word topic for this week, my darkish side had to make this eerily accurate image. And now I’m sharing all my deepest and most disturbed visions with all of you. I clearly have no boundaries. Happy Halloween.

Painted from a polaroid image taken in an abandoned shopping mall.

Returning schizophrenically to a painterly style for this topic. “Stripes” reminded me of learning calligraphy when I was younger and the tedium of making guidelines. That idea morphed into the reality that so few people use handwriting at all these days, let alone learn fine penmanship. But it’s never too late.

In honor of our 15th Anniversary.

Where this came from is anyone’s guess. Could be seeing “The Help” ( a movie I begrudgingly attended but ended up liking a lot…although I wanted to throw my popcorn at the screen during several scenes). Add to that images conjured up when I let the topic roll around in my brain for a while and then try not to overthink what spills out.

Okay so maybe I always think of compulsion when I think of obsession. And maybe I do that uncontrollably. It’s a good thing I can stop whenever I want.

I tried to keep this week’s illo all about nature and flowers and stuff, as befitting the standard definition of perennial, but the events of this week in Norway prompted a more serious response. In fact I’ve been a little depressed all week because of it. So forgive the “loose” interpretation, but sometimes it seems human beings are bound and determined to self destruct—violent extremism rearing its ugly head as reliably as the weeds returning to my backyard every spring.