The Home of the Creative Mind

Welcome to PooBahSpiel, the online voice and home of the creative mind of Mark Monlux, Illustrator Extraordinaire. Prepare yourself for an endless regaling of art directly from the hand of this stellar artist. And brace yourself against his mighty wind of pontification. Updates are kinda weekly and show daily sketches, current projects, and other really nifty stuff.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

The Return of Stickman #1572



The tragic truth is that you can't take it with you. Most of my house is filled with stuff that has meaning for me, yet have little or no real value to others. Some items might be looked upon as kitschy. I have a large Tunaki piggy bank I brought home from Japan. I associate it with all the good memories of the months I lived there in 1979 & 1980. With age the fake fuzz is peeling off. I also have various gifts that people have given me that hold no value other than they are a gift from a friend. If my wife and I died tomorrow I'm pretty sure that nearly everything we own would either end up in a landfill or would be on a thrift store shelf. I know stuff in my office closet I will never need again. Why do I hang onto it?

 One year I made a New Year Resolution that each week I would fill up a cardboard box (a standard filing box) with stuff that I would either donate or toss. This was a lot harder to do than I thought. I managed to fill up the box only 48 times out of those 52 weeks. It was like pulling teeth. And now I can't even tell you what was inside those boxes. On top of that I noticed a something terrible: I got new stuff to replace the old stuff. So, I didn't end up cleaning out anything at all. The new crap stuff just meant more to me than the old crap stuff.