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I think that is the oldest teenager I have ever seen. She has a whole lot of makeup, an odd-looking combover of sorts, and some wrinkles. I doubt this is what the artist had in mind, but to me it's a statement. At the time of this drawing, Mr. Clay was at least fifty, and that's about how a fifty-year-old woman would look if she continued to make herself up like a teenager. By all accounts I've been able to find, he was very happily married, so this doesn't appear to be lust that we're observing here. Rather, Rock (or is it Clay?) takes a rather amusing glance at a woman who refuses to accept the truth of growing old. It's hard to tell, though, if Rock is bemused or infuriated. Upon closer inspection, the fume and clouds on the runway are not ruins of a wrecked model plane, but rather emanating from Rock's head. It could be simply that the younger counterpart is outdoing him, and that it's positively burning him up. Rock is obviously knowledgeable about model airplanes and has a great zeal for flying them, but 75% of these strips feature Rock's plane either scattered on the ground in ruins, or just about to crash. All of a sudden, a woman young enough to be his daughter comes by and flies spectacularly. I think I speak for a lot of you when I admit that in a certain way, I regard myself as spectacular. Sure, there are people more good-looking or suave or intelligent than I am. But there's that one thing in which I feel as though I'm the best on the planet. For me, for example, that thing is spelling. Barring a simple typo, I never misspell. Ever. If I have to spell a word I'm unsure about, I research exhaustively until I find it, but I will never find myself thinking that an incorrect spelling is a correct spelling. I'm trying to imagine my reaction if someone half my age read something I wrote and picked out word after word I had spelled incorrectly. This is how Rock feels. This is his passion. It's his life. It's all we ever see him do, and someone effortlessly smashes it to ruins, and he just has to sit there and take it. |