I don't like how everybody assumes I'm dead

I don't like how everybody, just because I haven't posted in a couple of days, assumes I'm dead. Or in a coma. Or have left for the bottom of Central America, in search of this Allan Weisbecker guy. (If you are enjoying The Year of Magical Painting, I would urge you to click through to the above link and buy his book, Can't You Get Along With Anybody?)

Does this enterprise really look to the involved bystander as if the wheels were that ready to just come off? The seams just come apart? The bottom just drop out?

Were I you, I'd take offense.
I am.
Don't these people have any faith?
Seemingly no.
Do you know what I'd do, were I you?
No.
I'd talk that Lilah S. girl into posing for another painting. Man, I've seen the photos and there is something about how she stares into the camera that makes me barely able to function.
Really?
Really.
It's funny you bring that up. I always felt like I didn't do her justice with her painting. I think it was the by-now-well-chronicled conflict over the spot of ash on her forehead.
Religion is funny thing.
God knows that's the truth.
They might have a point, though.
Who?
Your so-called gentle readers.
About what?
Well--I don't know how to say this, but some of those posts can be pretty freaking dark. Like that swimming up the river, eating the snakes whole thing.
The abyss?
Yeah.
Did you like the joke about the Nun?

The fact of the matter is, and with all evidence to the contrary aside, the engine that powers this blog is the painting. So surely even you, dear reader, can understand that if I am engaged in a secret project--the so-called Christmas Surprise Guy painting in this case--and am bound not to plaster the internet with pictures of the work in progress, it throws what is called, in a certain vernacular, a sticky-bomb amongst the treads of my otherwise robust tank of a blog.