Dave AKA The Slowest Dawn of All

[smokingboot]

Spent a couple of days in a friends house playing D&D. It's cool to be part of a generation who, when shunted into OAP care can just produce dice and pretend to be someone else. The game was great, the food, company and conversation was fab, and my friend's new house has that added weird thing I note a lot of in Stevenage; many rooms that give a house a slightly labyrinthine feel and a sense of many moods.All grand but on returning I find once again that I am wiped out completely. R had to return to London this morning, and I just got lost in dreamland stuff, looking for new inspiration and returning to old stories that caught me in the past. I forgot to eat.

The meander of it all started in a FB group dedicated to AI art, where someone had created very beautiful model portraits of a woman based on the famed Nefertiti bust. The results were exquisite but so white! And I went away to find the original sculpture again and remind myself of the Great Royal Wife of Aten, she whose very name meant The beautiful one has come.

I didn't need to find a pic to use as a starter but just added her name among other prompts, and enjoyed the results. This was a woman I could believe led armies, schemed, fought, won, lost. From there I considered her husband, the often derided somewhat goofy-featured Akhenaten, who sought to enforce worship of a power behind the sun, and earned himself great enmity by it. I had much more trouble getting bearable likenesses with him, but even at the start I found myself staring at his face and thinking I know those eyes.

I tried a whole bunch of creations. One looked like a man I could imagine looking across the desert for divinity uncaged by a temple; a man who wanted realism in art, and yet held the most unrealistic dream of all; to build Tel-Armana, inspiration and holy city to an unknown god. Still, these were not the eyes I knew.

Then there was a Rami-Malek-alike, which, though it had much wrong with it including blue eyes, brought back to me who it was I recalled. Mine was not some reincarnatory waking dream of the heretic pharoah a thousand years and more before Christ. No, I was remembering Dave the stage manager.

Dave was a very pretty man without being at all effete; Short and slight of build with perfect bone structure, his eyes were on the edge of having an Innsmouth look, and yet were somehow attractive. They were so large as to be almost protuberant, a slant at each tilted edge, giving an unusually pronounced almond shape. Aesthetically pleasing, he was practical and down to earth and basically he made the theatre work. Everyone loved Dave; the nearest to a criticism I might ascribe was that he wasn't warm, or at least, he wasn't warm with the passionate adoration I needed to validate my every footstep before reaching 30. I thought he was kind, he thought I was hilarious.

Sitting here, I suddenly remembered one of my artistic enthusiams at Uni, where I was trying to do great things with chalks. One night, he turned up and along with other buddies sharing the house, we sat down and each had a crack at creating a picture. He showed his creation to me. It was of a plate, with a small figure in blue curled up asleep on it, next to massive peas and potatoes. Above the figure hovered a giant knife and fork. I asked him what it was.

'That's you asleep on the plate,' he answered, 'and that's me ready to eat you up!'

Everyone laughed and we carried on, but thinking about it, I finally understand. It has taken me 35 years, two pharoahs, one movie star, one lost city, a lot of art and a day of very little food to realise he was coming on to me.

Sweet Christ. Just as well I never bred.