Pretty happy to get more than half-way when the month still has 2/3s left.

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Byrucha is an artist's Eden. The descriptions don’t come close to the excessive coolness of the planet. The colonization is legendary for its tale of idealism realized. A community of artists left Terra to establish a utopian realm whose sole purpose was to foster creativity. The original constitution is still in effect: all resources, all surplus is dedicated to creativity. All structures, all civil planning must satisfy in form as least as much as it satisfies in function. At first, this produced chaos. It was known as an anarchy planet in its early inception, completely unstable. The now facetiously-deemed Taste Tiffs (though the earnest citizens of the time called them the Aesthetic Conflicts) left the capital city looking like a graffiti-scrawled mess.

The citizens of Byrucha have evolved considerably since then, especially after the orignal generation, tainted as they were by typical Terran politics, passed away, making room for a generation well-steeped in the new ideology and shared vision. The result is a planet with vibrant towns and cities. The farm lands are not only pleasing to the eye with their geometric complexity but orchestrated to revive the land through choreographed crop rotations. The buildings, great works of imaginative architecture in themselves, taken together were breath-taking exercises in synergy.

Kah had told me that there is still a section of town in the country that recalls the chaos of the time when prima donnas contended for the title of grand poobah artiste. I turned my wanderings in that direction. Horrendous displays that depicted the egos of the creators more than any pure expression of the imaginative faculty still warp the fabric of the amusingly pitiful village. They kept it as a monument, reminding modern Bryuchans of the ugly results of inflated self-importance. I’m almost embarrassed to admit I rather liked the haphazard burps of creativity fretting the town’s underlying structure. These pieces here had plaques with the name of the piece as well as the artist’s signature. In contrast to what Byrucha had become, these desperate attempts at self-glorification seemed as pitifully quaint as a tiny handprint and scratched name in a cement sidewalk square (Byrucha didn’t have cement sidewalk squares, they had pretty mosaics). It made me laugh outloud several times, coming across, for example, the cornerpiece that looked like a discarded pile of eyeballs and lips and eyeballs coming out of lips and lips crushing eyeballs, coloured to clash with the buildings around it, given the title with a blatant double meaning: “ID.”

The street lamps here had no symmetry or attempt at synergy. Along one street, the plaque dates revealed the competitive spirit that drove their production. The earlier ones were relatively simple, but as they progressed, the one-upmanship grew increasingly shameless through more shocking colours, angles, appendages, and proportions.

In this part of the city I started my sketchings. I sketched the progression of My-Lamp-is-More-Cutting-Edge-Than-Your-Lamp lane. As I hadn’t drawn in months beyond absent-minded doodles, I used it as a technical exercise.

That evening, after the curry lesson, I sat down to play with the images in my journal. With a glass of wine and my M-pod playing my favorite tracks of uni-mix music, I was set for the night. I thought of the original artists as the lingering dryads of these distorted trees and found myself drawing fantastic parodies of that impression in pencil crayon, like imps and faeries and superheroes in a graphic novel universe (yes, I’m a geek, I know). It took extra time to get reacquainted with the pencils, but as the evening wore on, I managed to colour in six samples. By the sixth, my tools were responding to my expectations. I was happy to get the hang of it again and eager to practice in this perfect environment. There was no telling how much I could improve in a planet entirely devoted to art.

“Whatcha doing?” Kah asked.

“Playing around with images from the old city,” I told him, moving the book to show him.

He blinked at it, a small furrow in his brow. Feeling a little shy, I flipped the pages to one of my favourite: the winner on one-up street. The light was in the shape of a howling severed head impaled upon a thorny spire; each thorn looked not-so-vaguely phallic. What I had done with it was to add musical notes from the gaping mouth of the head in fluid waves around it; I also studded each “thorn” with a pair of jewels to look like flashing eyes—they ended up looking like benign little worms poking their heads from a stalagmite upon which vines and flowers blythely grew.

Now Kah’s nose was wrinkling. I began to feel decidedly self-conscious.

“Why did you draw that?” he asked.

I moved the book away from him, my self-worth shriveling to the size of a pea.

“Draw what?” Culana asked as she entered the room.

Kah gestured toward me dismissively, but she still seemed interested. As she seemed the most eager pupil in the kitchen, I trusted her enthusiasm. She leaned over my shoulder. “Let me see! Let me see!” she prodded.

I relented and showed her. She laughed, and I was relieved that she appreciated the wonder mixed with good-humour.

“You went to the old city,” she declared.

“Yeah,” I said modestly. “See how I—“

She patted my shoulder. “Well, Seph, at least you’re a great cook.”

Was that supposed to be a compliment. “What?” I asked.

She smiled a smile full of pitying indulgence.

“You gotta stick to what you’re good at,” Kah said behind her.

I closed the sketchbook. So much for a supportive atmosphere.