118: Father's Day 2026

I'm pretty sure that I took this photograph of my father, Riley Shepard...maybe in the early 1990s? Or Ventura in the late 1980s? Hard to tell. I keep this on a cork board above my desk.

When I first unwrapped a portrait my mother made of Riley back in 1970, I called her up and we talked about the work (see image of painting, below).

"I see you skipped the raised flesh-colored mole in the middle of his forehead," I said. Reader, you'll notice it in the photograph, it's like a third eye.

"Mole? He had a mole?" Jan said.

"Yeah, you never noticed?" I was sort of surprised that she didn't see such a large feature on his face, the man she'd lived with for twenty-three years. Leave it to an esthetician to zero in on things like that, but I thought an artist might find it interesting.

Recently, my mother confessed that she has face blindness. "You do????" Was all could say after all these years...I never would've guessed. Gobsmacked, after a long pause I said, "How did you do all those portraits so well? You really capture people. I don't get it."

"I look at people's faces as if they are landscapes," she said.

My mother is somewhere around eighty-seven now. We can still keep finding things out about people, even people we think we've figured out, like our own family members. Face blind. Who knew? Not me.

Here's the painting. I've posted it before, but now I see it with fresh eyes, knowing that Jan has face blindness. Shankar Vendantam from Hidden Brain fame also said he has face blindness. Interesting!

Painting by Jan Svetlik

My mother said she was inspired by Van Gogh at the time, and that she never painting anything faster before or since. "I finished it in a flash," she said. I couldn't imagine my father sitting still for long. He always had something going–– could be baking a cheesecake, could be writing porn books, but it was all done with a sense of urgency. Jan also told me on a phone call that Riley wasn't crazy about his portrait. Well, too bad.

Happy Father's Day to all who celebrate today. Hopefully, I can send this blog out to subscribers as Wix is stingy as fuck regarding that...they want me to pay more for that service, that is if I write more than once a month. Well, too bad, yet again, Wix! Not giving you anymore money.

The new "Cowboy Philosopher" Hidden Brain episode dropped last month, and I'm so relieved they allowed me to fact check the old episode. I learned something from my journalist friends and I will pass this along: Podcasts are under no obligation to fact check their guests. That is why anyone can go on Joe Rogan and talk all kinds of nonsense. I think that's a shame. Is fact checking so time consuming? Is it expensive? After the episode first aired in 2019, I simply called up the curators for the Nashville Museum and the Buck Owens Museum in Bakersfield and asked if someone had shipped all my father's boxes (the postage alone made me a skeptic) to them. They both said no, but loved the episode. Easy-peasy-breezy-fact-checking-cover-girl. The world would be a better place if we would embrace the now out of style art of fact checking, but look at who is ruining...oops... I meant running the country.

Have a great Sunday, folks! More soon.