Left Behind

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a marker sketch I did during Covid. Visually it's a science fiction piece, but really a symbolic representation of my circumstances during the pandemic when my wife (now ex) and our two cats were living in a 600 square-foot condo in Salem. The forced togetherness and isolation made us feel as if we were living in a tiny spaceship.
We decided to move to a bigger place, and found a property we could afford, in Gloucester.
The preparation for moving during an ongoing pandemic made us feel like we were adventurers heading to some alien planet, not knowing exactly what we were going to end up facing, but feeling that we could face almost anything together. It was stressful and challenging, but there was a feeling of solidarity. This first image represents the hopefulness and adventure of that upcoming move, settling in a new and alien place.

We moved. Two weeks later, my wife blind-sided me by telling me that she was leaving me, and about two months after that, she did.

That was two years ago. After dealing with divorce, pandemic and death I decided to rework the image. This represents how I have felt the last two years, even more isolated, like I had been abandoned on an alien planet.
 

 

Robot Dream , Part 2

Late one afternoon while I was out hunting vermin, one of the biggest, most intact, still-standing robots began to move. It was one of the big, black ones. They were different from the type I lived in the head of. There were fewer of them for one thing. Slightly larger, with a heavier build, and a lot more sinister looking. This one didn’t move a lot, but it moved enough to dislodge a section of a destroyed skyscraper, which crashed down on my home, and crushed it flat. I was fortunate to not be inside it at the time, but losing my home left me short of supplies and vulnerable to the nighttime ministrations of the rats.
I had sometimes caught a glimpse of light from the ruins of the robot my robot head had been detached from.  That indicated a possible tenant. Hopefully a friendly one. Although risky, I made a beeline for the body.

When I arrived there, I found no easy access. The robot was standing, having shut down when the head (my home) had been knocked or blasted off in whatever conflict produced the ruined city and the giant, dead robots.  It loomed above me. There was a lot of rust. Whatever markings had once been on it were faded to the point of illegibility. I could see the breached access hatch on the torso of the robot. I had to search around for a bit for the maintenance handholds which were recessed into the front and sides of the robot at fairly regular intervals.
I was going to have to climb up 40 or 50 feet to reach the breach in the robots outer skin. It was no easy climb. The maintenance handholds alternated between recesses cut into the robots skin, and metal rungs which stuck out from it. Some were missing or torn off, and others were so rusted- looking that I feared they would break under my weight.

Robot Dream

I dreamt I was living in the ruins of an enormous city. It sat on a huge flat plain, and the ruins stretched as far as the eye could see. The buildings looked like they had once been tall towers and skyscrapers of glass and steel, but now were just empty hulks of rusting metal.

Standing among the ruins were giant figures , more than a hundred feet tall. They were the remains of the giant robots, the last fighters in the war that destroyed the city. Some were lying flat on the ground, in pieces, but some were still standing. Rusted, looming figures.

In the dream I was living in the severed head of one of these metal giants. It lay on its side partly embedded in the earth, surrounded by broken bits of concrete and rebar. The severed wires and conduits and shafts that had connected it to its body dangled from the stump of it’s neck. I had emptied the head of whatever equipment it had contained, which was now strewn about the head in rusting piles. I had knocked out the robots left eye, and that was my access into the interior. I had to crawl to get inside. A curtain of some dirty red cloth served as a door.

The robot body that the head had been severed, blasted or knocked from, was still standing some quarter mile away behind a low cluster of smashed buildings.

I lived the existence of a solitary scavenger. Hunting small animals like rats, and exploring the ruins looking for anything that might be edible or useful. The rats were particularly large and aggressive, and although easily dispatched as individuals, could, in a group, spell trouble for anyone caught out in the open, especially after dark.