snotty notty

When I said a few pages back that the rest of this book was going to be a mess, this was partly what I had in mind. A weak, flimsy picture of a balding man with snot dribbling out of his nose. God knows what I was thinking when I did it. Nothing, probably. But the more I look at it, the more interesting it gets. I’ve realised now I must have done this page in two sessions. The first was the big picture of the head, obviously scrawled in a hasty moment of lazy madness. It might have been the same day as I wrote Robschnitt’s Age but, looking at the state of the pencil, probably another day entirely. The second session, in much bolder pencil, is what happened when I came back to reopen my book later in the week - a picture of a stick figure (with multiple limbs - literally a ‘stick insect’) looking puzzled and horrified at the picture I’d already drawn, plus a few written comments and/or annotations. There’s an arrow pointing to the picture, naming the giant head as ‘Snotty Notty’, but when the stick insect asks what it is, we’re asked to answer that question ourselves. Like it’s a quiz. But if we wanted to verify our answers to see if we got it right, we’d have a very hard time, since the answers can only be found ‘on Mars’ (rather than in the back of the book or wherever else you’d expect them to be). What this basically means is: 1. One day I drew a bad picture 2. When I came back later, instead of erasing it (like I often did with pencil stuff in this book), I decided to comment on it 3. I had no idea what it was either and was just as horrified as you are 4. So your guess is just as good as mine Or, as my wife said when she saw it, I must have been very, very bored.