Here we are starting New Year 1981! Congratulations on the new year! 1981! Wait, you don't really…want…to re-live…33 years ago…aaaaggh! Was there anything good about that year? Do you even remember it? I have my journal to remind me. I was living in Cambridge, Mass. being a good Bohemian making fantasy art for pennies. This is the frontispiece of my lavishly illustrated journal-book for that year. You can see things that are, or were, symbolic for me in this stylized architectural drawing. There are stars, planets, the Eye in the Triangle, the Ayn Rand dollar sign, a satellite dish (long before most houses had one to pick up TV), and cats everywhere. The large black and white cat in front is my totem animal, the Tuxedo Cat. Most people have some noble beast as their totem creature, such as a wolf or a Pegasus or a dragon or at least a clever fox, but I have a fat lazy housecat as my spirit animal. Oh well.
In 1981 no one but the privileged scientific specialists had access to the computer networks that would later become the almighty Internet. I wrote letters and put them in the mail. Some of my friends and colleagues probably were already connected in the 1980s. It would be another 10 years or more before it transformed my life and then, everyone else's.
1981 Frontispiece is ink on sketchbook page, about 8 1/4 x 11 1/2", January 1981. Click on the pic to be transported back 33 years.
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