2011: Year of Dreams. 2012: Year of Becoming.

It’s 6:28pm on the last day of 2011. What a year.

The sun is down already, and I realize the next time I see it, we’ll officially be in that year which has been giving apocalyptic conspiracy freaks wet dreams since the discovery of the Mayan calendar: 2012. I find myself in a brief, rare moment of sweet, sweet solitude in my more-crowded-than-ever apartment before the new year starts, and I’m savoring it ever so ferociously.

I’m home almost entirely alone with one roomie, who’s in the shower hosing off the old-fridge filth. (There could be one more roomie here, but I’m pretty sure his corpse is dessicating upstairs.) We just spent four hours cleaning out a brand new Ghettofridge (acquired through many ninja hijinx and the warping of the space/time fabric) to replace our current Cancerfridge, which was raining asbestos insulation all over our food. Let it be a lesson, kids; never accept a fridge that has a crack in the inside casing. Not even for free. That shit will disintegrate and you’ll spend six months trying to replace the fridge and getting recurring lung infections and it will just be generally All Bad.

My new roomies (two of six total) are currently up the hill, fighting their mother’s newly filed restraining order so they can get their shit and move out, possibly at this very second, possibly with fists. God knows the bruises, black eyes and scratches I saw last night attest that that possibility. Let it be a lesson, kids; never be spawned by Satan. Oh wait, most of us generally don’t have a choice in the matter. Sorry.

Their puppy is being quiet in his kennel, and as cute as the fluffy, conniving little bastard is, I can’t say I can rouse enough of an interest to actually check whether he’s still alive in there. If you’re keeping count, that’s two possible corpses in the house currently with me that I’m too exhausted to drag out to the shallow back yard graves, even with the possible ensuing stench. You may applaud now.

A lot of things seem to be coming to a head today, some of them freakishly coincidental yet appropriate. That said, I’d like to comment on a few things I planned to accomplish this year that I didn’t:

– Sell more of my art

– Focus enough on any one of my comic book projects to actually get more than a few pages in without being distracted by one of the other ones (thereby effectively playing Project Ping Pong, one of the more elaborate, deceptive and self-destructive forms of accidental procrastination one can fall victim to)

– Get on that fucking hormone therapy that I so desperately need

– Figure out my art school situation

– Move out of this chaos realm and into a tiny crappy studio apartment of my very own

– Effectively move my life in any single direction

 

Now that I’m done being down on myself, I’d like to point out a few things I HAVE accomplished:

 

– I DID draw a lot more. Not enough, it can never be enough (and I wasn’t even close), but I did draw more.

– I got a job outside of the food bank. I don’t have any hours yet because the snow hasn’t hit, but I’m on the payroll.

– I pulled off a ninja convention mission and got to meet one of my personal heroes, Jhonen Vasquez. I can’t say enough times that I did that. On a budget of four dollars. Beat THAT.

– I made it through a massive psychotic episode this summer without getting hospitalized, fired, estranged by my friends, or committing first degree murder. Now THAT took some doing.

– I made it, at least, this far, and I think I have a little better idea of who I am every day.

Shit gets a little more real with each passing moment, the hallucinations get more vivid, and lately I seem to get lost in my own head a few more times in each 24 hour period. But on the sparkly end of this shitstick, I get more inspiration and possibly even more motivation to do things that will take people into a world they’d never even had the balls or the psychosis to dream of. Every day I get a little closer to creating something extraordinary, and I know (and this is the sort of thing you have to have unquestioning faith in, taking chances that you may just die with a broken heart, but at least knowing you gave it your all), I KNOW that one day I will do things that will change the world. Maybe not the whole world, maybe not forever, maybe not even in a particularly positive or useful way, but I will do things that will alter the vision of the people they touch, and that I definitely look forward to doing.

So, on to the last list: Things that WILL happen in 2012 (unless they take me until 2013 or possibly later to achieve):

 

– I WILL do what it takes to get on testosterone (EVEN if it means I can’t go the medically approved route. I’ve spent too long waiting to get on insurance that will cover all the doctor’s visits, I’m 23, and my whole life is going to pass me by with me in the wrong body if I don’t take initiative. People like me [i.e. poor as SHIT] can’t afford to be careful and safe, we don’t matter enough in the great scheme of the system to be afforded such a luxury. </rant>)

– I WILL learn to ride a motorcycle. Enough said about that for now, I’m playing this one pretty close to the chest.

– I WILL complete at least ONE comic book this year, even if it’s a terrible short crappy one; I will at least finish ONE.

– I WILL figure out my art school situation, even if it means traveling to the doorsteps of my most respected artists and groveling at their feet to teach me their mystical ways like in days of yore. (Looking at you, Eliza Gauger.)

– I WILL find ways to connect my greatest asset and passion (i.e. my art) with my need to generate income, and stop treating it exclusively like a hobby. The way will make itself clear if I take a deep breath and jump, HARD.

– I WILL stop expecting my dreams to come true for me “Some Day”, when I’m done saving up stupidly piddly amounts of money at dead-end-job after dead-end-job; no, the jobs I should be looking for should lead into those dreams.

– I WILL stop living in a fantasy future world, with no real path between Today and AwesomeFutureLand, and start taking steps towards actually getting to that place before it becomes entirely fictional; I will take (at least) some small baby step towards the things I want to do and to be every single day.

– I WILL continue to live by Howard Thurman’s great words: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

– (must throw in silly frivolous selfish one:) I WILL create a successful web series this year.

 

To wrap up my thoughts for 2011 (a year of dreams and the inherent associated disappointment), and head into 2012 (hopefully a year of action, becoming and Being), I’d like to leave you with the most sincerely inspiring words I’ve ever heard from such a silly man.

“There’s nothing terribly wrong with feeling lost, so long as that feeling precedes some plan on your part to actually do something about it.
Too often a person grows complacent with their disillusionment, perpetually wearing their “discomfort” like a favorite shirt.
I can’t say I’m very pleased with where my life is just now…
But I can’t help but look forward to where it’s going.”

-Johnny C., from Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
(Created by Jhonen Vasquez)

Christmas RAGE!

Pictured: Christmas Rage.

I realized I was about to get on a Twitter rant about the world of Scrooges and Grinches I suddenly seem to be surrounded by, which is never good, cause people don’t like reading backwards, especially about Christmas.

You may be thinking that I’m angry about Christmas for the same reasons everyone else is, but no; commercialism and twisting of holiday values and all that rot can go take a leap.  I’m angry about Christmas because… I love it. Yeah, I said it, and I know your smarmy, ubiquitous little brains are all writing me off into the the “Lame” list, but hear me out.  I had to listen to 59 people YESTERDAY ALONE preaching to me about why they HATE Christmas, which sucks cause I hate when people harsh on my Christmas buzz, so it’s MY fucking turn.  You complain about how unpleasant Christmas is, but you people are some of the things that makes Christmas so unpleasant- didja stop to think of that, Shymalan?

WHAT A TWEEST!!!

I’d like to reiterate what I already said on Twitter:

Slightly irritated; at that age where every single one of my friends is on their “hating Christmas for one reason or another” high horses.

Not impressed. Hating Christmas doesn’t make you cool. It just makes you yet another bitter, angry person. Got a whole world full of ’em.

It just seems more and more like Christmas is the “cool” holiday to hate, and if you don’t hate it, then you’re instantly “lame”.  Yeah, I get it.  There are a lot of good reasons to hate it.  Christmas is just this big ‘ol clusterfuck: it’s this one guy’s birthday, who seriously screwed up a lot of people’s lives anyway, being smashed together with a pagan holiday that got completely obliterated in the appropriation thereof, and then there’s this whole creepy guy sneaking down your chimney thing (which in my opinion, the creepier it is, it just adds to the atmosphere and experience), and slicing down trees and dragging them in the house for no adequately explorable reason, and there’s the whole irritating Christmas lights and decorations thing, and the annoying music in the stores (okay that I can get on board with), and on top of it, the media overhyping and the pressure to buy everyone and their uncle presents and the goddamn slowly-inching-back every year Christmas sales and COMMERCIALISM COMMERCIALISM COMMERCIALISM, blah blah blah, if you think I don’t understand THAT by now, then you must think I’m a fucking toadstool or something.  The CHILDREN in fucking CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS had that shit figured out, and in the year of our Lord NINETEEN SIXTY-fucking-FIVE, you dinosaurs, so STOP PRETENDING LIKE IT’S SOMETHING NEW AND HIP TO BE ANGRY ABOUT, cause people have been angry at Christmas for the same GODDAMN REASONS for at least the last FORTY-FIVE years!!!  AAAAAAAUUUUUUGHSPLAGABBLE-

…

Kay.  We’re back.  It felt good to get that off my chest.  I’m sure the hobo now chained to basement pipes by his entrails is angry about the same shit and glad to have given his life to the cause.

Pictured: Christmas Cheer.

ANYway, I’d just like to put a couple of general things out there before I get all personal.  First, there isn’t a holiday celebrated today that hasn’t been seriously twisted and mutilated from its original intent, so ease up on Christmas, huh?  You’ve all got your holiday that it’s “safe” to like, Halloween (which I enjoy even more immensely than Christmas), but if there’s one day that you Holiday purists should really be getting angry about, THAT’S the one. What most people don’t seem to realize is that a lot of “innocent” holidays are originally the celebration of overcoming something truly horrible, and every year we bury that a little deeper to make the day more palatable.  Valentine’s Day: death of a martyr.  Independence Day: end of a terrible war.  Even 9/11, ten years into its life, seems to be slowly burying the horror of its original intent and trying to become more pleasant.  But one of the holidays that’s fairly innocent, the one about paying homage to your dead ancestors, is the one that everyone perceives as the “evil dark spoooky” day.  I’m okay with that, but by the logic everyone else is touting, you all should be livid.  But Christmas is the one people get worked up over.

Pictured: Respect for the dead.

Here’s a heartwarming little family anecdote- betcha don’t stop and remember too often that King Herrod, on hearing the prophecy of the baby Jesus, got all paranoid and went out and ordered the slaughter of somewhere between dozens and THOUSANDS of infants to keep the baby Jesus from rising to power and stealing his throne in little-known event lauded as “Massacre of the Innocents”.  It’s true!  Merry Infanticide Christmas, hope you enjoy your new MP3 player!  So if you’re here to whine about how Christmas is slowly becoming more cutthroat and losing the gentle holiness of days of yore, realize it actually may be getting closer to its original traditions than you realize.  I’ve got me a nice sharp baby-stabbin’ pitchfork and there’s a spare one in the garage if you’d like to join me in keeping the spirit of the season alive.

I could get behind an annoying song celebrating this event.

Baby-stabbing aside, Christmas may be the worst case of Holiday mutation, being one of our oldest, but in my opinion that’s one of the things that makes Christmas (and holidays in general) so interesting.  Everything evolves down through the years, and to me, holidays just seem to be this kind of slowly aggregating art form built of time and traditions, sometimes taking seemingly twisted forms and profiles from its various tumors and growths.  There are more traditions every year, some things fall off through years of wear and tear and abuse, but there’s no escaping the living, breathing essence of what a day means if you look at it across a long enough time line.  When you look at it like that, there’s something breathtakingly beautiful about it, in that hideous disease-ridden abomination of nature kind of way.  I, for one, can’t wait to see what Christmas will look like another two thousand years in the future.

(On a semi-unrelated topic [of over-analyzation of a little show that just wanted to be funny and didn’t want to be ridden with a whole lot of meaning,], I think that’s where Invader Zim’s “The Most Horrible Xmas Ever” really got it right- it understood how fluid a thing like Christmas is and accepted that.  It looked millions of years into a future where the traditions had gotten so hilariously muddled that nobody really understood the original intent anymore, but somehow it was clear that there was still a sort of atmosphere- this day was still special to them [albeit a day of intense national security as well], but it still had some strange semblance of meaning that had just memetically been passed down through the years.  That’s magical.  And broken.  But still.)

Merry Xmas, circa approximately year 2,000,245 A.D.

I’ve gotten on a tangent, so let’s get back, and look at the holiday season on a more simple wavelength- you’ve got your tree, Santa, lights, presents, dinner and that general “Christmassy feel” that we all are supposed to remember from our childhood.  The thing that many of my friends just seem so embittered about is that their parents never really went out of their way to make the season special for them, that it was just a time of boozing and shouting and family hatred and angst.  I feel for you.  That sucks, it really does, and I can see how being surrounded by merry people who are expecting you to just “tap into your childhood holiday cheer” when it simply never existed can be really grating, even painful.  That said, I’d like to share a little peek into my childhood with you.

Follow Dr. Samuel Beckett on a mysterious adventure through time and space...

There are three things in this life that truly make me feel safe, and those are the smell of cigarette smoke, christmas lights, and funerals/graveyards.  These are all truly guilty pleasures.  It took me a while to deconstruct them, but here they are laid out and hopefully I’ll never have to explain it again.

Cigarette smoke and Christmas lights come from similar places.  My uncle Jim smoked heavily, and whenever we went over to his house, my mother eased up and tried to be mother of the year, all kind and sweet.  I associate the smell of cigarettes with a safe place where my mother “loved” me, and whether she truly did love me at Uncle Jim’s house didn’t matter to my shattered little seven year old psyche- it was where I could pretend she did, and she would never lay a hand on me.

Every year around Christmas time, also, she seemed to get guilty about the way she was the rest of the year.  When the Christmas lights went up, the abuse slowed and ground to a halt.  She stopped touching me in places a child should never be touched, stopped screaming how worthless I was, and all those other terrible things I don’t care to go into, and bought dozens of presents in penance.  Every year around Christmas time, I was safe, and I never wanted it to end.  It helps that my parents were both avid Christmas decorators and Christmas movie watchers, and all those old traditional baubles and shiny things, as vapid and gaudy as they may seem to an outsider, took a truly special place in my heart.

So I guess I’ve got this knee jerk response: when I see people mocking Christmas, trying to make it creepy and twisted, calling Santa a creepy old bastard and all those things that are hip to say, to me, you’re not mocking all those shallow concepts of Jesus’ birth, family values, the spirit of giving, or any of that cheap Hallmark crap that I ALSO don’t believe in.  You’re saying, “There is nothing left that is pure or good about your childhood.”  You’re taking away the one time of the year when I was growing up that things were okay, and you’re stomping it into the ground, and it makes me get secretly defensive inside despite the reluctant chuckling through gritted teeth, and I get Mama-bear angry, I get Charles Manson crazy, I want to jam a screwdriver in your eyesocket so you’ll stop kicking my inner child in the ribs.  Let me have ONE good thing, yes?  (And if you ever stop and wonder why I’m so screwed up today, you can probably extrapolate everything you ever wanted to know about it from this post, so stop asking.)

Oh yes.  You’re curious how funerals and graveyards play into this.  I’ll just keep this short and say, the first time I realized the Mother-Jailkeep would never lay a hand on me again… was September 13, 2001, standing at her grave in the Atwater cemetery.  I was 14.  I’ve been visiting cemeteries to get grounded on my crazier days ever since, and there’s nothing I love more than a good funeral, even for someone I genuinely regret seeing go.  Funny what a graveyard can do to make you feel all safe and warm and fuzzy inside.  Dying was the best Christmas present she ever could have afforded me.

MERRY FUCKING CHRISTMAS, ASSHOLES!!!

Sketch: Artistic Frustrations

Here, have a sketch of a work in progress because I’m impatient and I can’t wait for the paint to dry on the canvass.

Kinda how I’ve been feeling lately. Very festive.

Last night we put up the terrible hobo Christmas tree formed out of a coatrack and a green ratty blanket, with the impaled angel on top, and I set about painting this and felt very much in the holiday mood, really for the first time this December. There’s nothing quite like the demented screaming and desperate scraping one’s headguts out of their own skull and the squidgy splattering of brainmeats on the floor to really remind you what Christmas is all about.

It’s about family.

…Naw, just kidding. I’m pretty sure it’s about watching the passing of years and feeling older and more pathetic every time you see that DAMN TREE and desperate to get all these ideas and stories and characters out of your head and feeling more and more helpless to be able to do that because THERE JUST ISN’T TIME and-

Well, that’s what it is to me, anyway. This jolly guy embodies that, I think, pretty much to a T.

MERRY XMAS!!

 

Disjointed tidbits.

Looks like it’s time for another all-nighter.

Everything cycles, my sleeping tendencies mutate and shift horribly in a pattern that’s only predictable if you look at it over a long enough stretch of time. I’m beginning to think my internal clock runs on Altarian time or something. It’s definitely not synched to standand 24 hour earth time. Bastard aliens fucking with my biorhythms…

I hate these nights, where my perception of what’s normal shifts every few seconds and everything seems so much bigger and scarier than it really is. One minute I’m fine with the scurrying ghosts and demons in the background, and the next second they’re gone, everything’s normal again and then I realize, HOLY SHIT, I’VE BEEN SEEING GHOSTS AGAIN, and it’s not okay, IT’S NOT, I should NOT be okay with that, it’s been years since I had to deal with this shit, or at least months at a stretch, well, time is relative, THE FUCKING POINT IS, I thought I was something close to sane again- [i turn the all the lights back on ALL OF THEM if im lucky they block out everything that shouldnt be there like some kind of visual filter if im not THEY return and reach out from under my desk and all i can do is stare like some kind of walleyed child-]

Then a third degree shift happens and I realize that the phrase “everything’s normal again” is irrelevant because my head is gibbering on like some kind of lunatic, but now, really, everything’s normal again and it’s okay, I just gotta get a hold of myself. They can’t hurt me. They never have. They’re not here. I’m just hallucinating again, there’s a scientific explanation for everything.

Then the words start spilling out of me wherever my fingers touch the keyboard through the sweat and mindfilth and panic, and my idea of what’s good to say, what’s normal and okay and acceptable, really falls through a lot of filters that aren’t functional. I embarass myself. One second the words feel honest and I can’t stop the wordvomit, I really CAN’T, and it seems right, but the next (after it’s all over the internet) I’m ashamed because it looks like some kind of melodramatic tripe and I know that if I’d been in my right mind I wouldn’t have said it at all. I would have said something with humor and cleverness and maybe even some level of forced sarcasm, because humor is the yardstick of civilization and sanity, and the fastest way to get people to think you’re normal and sane is to joke with them about something.

GodDAMMIT all I want is to talk to someone without scaring them off, without coming off too potent, without them thinking I’m some kind of twacked out loser with a complex, without them forcing a subject change every time I open my mouth, and realizing the hard way that all the eccentric people in the room are edging away slowly, turning their backs on me, speaking in whispers, telling me without words to SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP because my stupid word things are so obviously a cry for attention when really it’s just a failed attempt at human communication. I get so fucking SICK of the people who try so hard to seem crazy, and yet always somehow seem to have this finely attuned compass for appropriate social interaction; and these days it’s really easy, it’s really fucking easy most days out of the month, to sort out the acceptable things to say and to say only them, I’ve come SUCH a long way since the really Bad Times, but on the days when I can’t figure it out and my words aren’t good, I get so FUCKING envious of the people who try so hard to come off quirky when it’s obvious how boring they really are. Spork, monkey, paperclip. Whirr, beep, generating contrived random response. LOOOOOK AT MEEEE, I’M WACKEEEE!!!

I’m not saying I want to “fit in” or any of that tripe, I’m a unique person and most days when it’s under control, I don’t resent that, but the point is, there are days, man. There are fucking DAYS, I just wish I knew what was okay to say.

I’ve gotten sucked into the mundanities of this whole affair, when the thing I really should be freaked out over is, every time I start seeing these things again it’s always the herald of worse things to come. Will I stay in one piece this time? Or will I wake up at 2 in the afternoon to find my bedroom rearranged? My underwear folded? A dead cat nailed to the wall? A bloodstained journal filled with handwriting I don’t recognize? I’m afraid to go to sleep, because who knows who will wake up, or if it’ll be me, or if I’ll ever return?

I don’t want to miss Christmas.

Meeting Jhonen, Pt. 2: The Oddysey (A Question of Unnerving Levels of Fanboy Devotion).

(Part One here.)
This was one hell of an adventure.

It all started the night before…

Picture me up at 3am, woozy and feverish, smack in the middle of my medicinal LOTR marathon. I think I’ve spent more time in my life sick than well, so I have a lot of practice at it. I always find that, for some reason, one of the only ways I can recover from any kind of illness is by pickling myself with some kind of cough medicine and hot tea, planting myself on the couch and watching an all-night movie marathon of some kind, usually LOTR (though I have broken the pattern with Star Wars and the occasional T.V. series such as Twilight Zone or Quantum Leap.)

I was in and out of terrifying sleep, knowing that in a few hours we were set to leave for Sac-Con, where Jhonen Vasquez was doing a signing, and I had to be well or stay home, because that would just be selfish and cruel (not to mention completely disgusting) to expose my personal hero to the flu. I was torn in two because this was pretty much my one chance to meet the guy who’s inspired so much of my creative process lately. I had a Christmas present for him, a replica of the GLaDOS Potato, the materials for which were pretty much the only frivolous money I’ve spent in six months (and I still have to get my car fixed). I can’t afford (and probably wouldn’t enjoy) a giant convention like Comic-Con, and god forbid I surround myself with screaming GIR fanatics at Invader Con. No, I just HAD to make it to Sac-Con.

This is probably pretty pathetic, but I think it was the first time I’d plea-bargained with God since I lost my faith in middle school when my pastor’s wife said with manic scary eyes that God told her I was faking being sick to get out of going to school, and even the x-ray of my abdominal masses didn’t change her mind. I almost died thanks to that woman and her so-called God because my dad would rather believe a crack-pot than his child screaming in pain-

Where was I? Oh yes. Jhonen. I digress.

Anyway, through my fevery haze I focused every spooky power of the unknown on obliterating the ugly infestation in my body; I tried praying, meditating, psyching myself out, calling on the elements in a Wiccan fashion I haven’t used since that one weird summer in high school, and I’m pretty sure at one point I tried using the Force to mutate the genetic makeup of the bug inside me into a 24-hour bug. While focusing on being well made me feel better in my head, there was no denying the fairly consistent flow of bodily fluids from my face that showed next to no signs of stopping. It was around 4am that I developed a Strategy.

I decided that if I could clear it up, make my face stop leaking and coughing and sneezing and refrain from touching my face for a few hours, and douse everything he was going to touch in Lysol, and douse myself with far too much hand sanitizer whilst in line leading right up to our encounter, then I could effectively reduce the chances of passing the bug to him to zero. I just had to take a chance.

I spent a little while screaming at the internets to tell me what was the best “TURN YOUR FACE INTO THE SAHARA DESERT” nasal spray, took an extra strength Mucinex, and redoubled my powers of positive thought, pushing my freakish wee-morning-hours hyperactivity mutant superpowers to critical mass. I’m not generally a hyper kind of guy by any means, but if my bleary-eyed roomies weren’t just a little freaked out by my too-bright grin, wide twitchy eyes, and bouncing, vibrating movements when they stumbled out by 6am, then they were probably just being unobservant. After a little while, they commented on how much better I seemed, and I squeaked “YEAH!” with over-enthused glee while inside the guilt gnawed me apart and I deviously thought “Good, if I can fool them into thinking I’m not still sick… I can fool anyone.” I have regrets.

Meanwhile, my nose continued its unwelcome impersonation of Niagara Falls (much like that guy who JUST WON’T STOP quoting Peter Griffin). I started to get dressed, getting weirded out by how much of my casual clothes accidentally seemed to be from the Jhonen-verse. (Alternately I had some polo shirts for work, and FUCK THAT.) I did my damn best to pick an outfit that would look casual and not like a lazy Johnny C. cosplay; I didn’t want Jhonen to get weirded out and think I was one of those people who thought they were Nny incarnate or something. My mind entered a self-perpetuating paradox as I wondered if trying so hard not to dress specifically for a person counted, by proxy, as dressing up for that person, just because there’s so much energy behind it with that specific person in mind. I’d say my brain imploded and roll credits, but sadly that’s not the case.

***

On our way out of town I demanded a stop at the drug store for the Afrin. An odd little moment happened as I scanned the aisles up and down for nasal spray, and I began to lose hope as my listless eyes landed and locked on the bactine. I stared confusedly at it and tried to figure out why this had significance, why it was tickling the back of my mind, and as my road-mates approached, it clicked and I had a geeksplosion. “DUDES! IT’S BACTINE!!!” They reflected my confusion for a second, and I tried to stop the wordvomit with my hands as it spilled from my mouth whilst inwardly growling STOPITSTOPITSTOPIT-

“It’s Johnny’s first line from his first appearance in the first book…”

They surprised me by joining in.

“WHERE THE FUCK IS THE BACTINE?!”

I facepalmed. We had a laugh, and I felt deep shame for knowing that. How many times do you have to read a book to know things like that? I swore to myself that this would be my final nerd outburst for the rest of my life and put it behind me, and got the spray.

Convinced this would be my saving grace, I snorted it like a happy hooker and waited anxiously for the nasal blistering effects to take hold as Weird Al blared from the stereo and my road-buddies horribly sang along with glee. (Now that’s a treasured experience.) Five minutes passed, ten…

I began to panic a little inside as the miles rolled past and I kept throwing balled up tissues into the nasty bag on the floorboard. WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?!, I inwardly screamed at the geek-gods while raising my inward clenched fists towards the sky and outwardly continued to sing Weird Al with a distant and sad look on my face. Terrible images of sneezing all over Jhonen, him running from the room with a horrified expression screaming about being contaminated, or him shooting me a dirty look as I tried to discreetly wipe my drippy nose in line, were all rolling across the landscape of my mind, and I was resigned. If the flow didn’t stop by the time we reached Sacramento, I was just going to sit in the corner and stare longingly at him and hope he had a hilarious paranoid story about the weird kid who wouldn’t stop staring at him to tweet about later on. Or, you know, just hang myself. Whatever came naturally. Anything other than expose him to this.

Luckily, my compatriates needed a bathroom break somewhere in the neighborhood of Jackson, and as I wandered inside listlessly, a last-ditch idea flashed across my mind. SPICY FOODS!! Dear god, if this didn’t work, nothing would.

I found the spiciest looking bag of Blazing Hot Snackeroonies I could find, and bought it- without a drink. (cue musical sting) This was the first time I’d ever made such a ballsy move. I gazed longingly at the slurpee machine and then turned my back on it melodramatically, knowing drinking something cold would only make matters worse.

As we roared down the final stretch towards Sacramento, I began cramming the evil little powdery red items into my mouth. I normally won’t go out of my way to torture my mouth, but this was an emergency. A few minutes in, I was breathing heavily, but I screamed at the bag: “I’M NOT IN MORTAL PAIN YET!!! YOU’RE NOT DOING YOUR JOB!!!” My car-mates laughed uncomfortably and I chewed silently with tears in my eyes. These things were honestly not living up to my expectations. I should have just bought a bottle of hotsauce and been done with it-

But just as I was having these bitter thoughts, a realization was coming over me. My nasal evil was thinning, drying out and grinding to a halt. Ode to Joy began playing in the background of my head and I pumped my fist more than the socially mandated number of times. I didn’t care. I was through the gates of Mordor.

***

We got confused about where the convention center was more than a few times before the car grumbled to a halt in the parking lot (“Where was it? The Masonic Lodge? The Hasidic Cultural Center? The Irish Masquerade Hall? Something something…”) We were also doubting whether we were even in the right place, because the lack of a giant eight-block-spanning mass of cars and the surprising number of people in just street clothes threw us off. Then we saw a terrible Kingdom Hearts cosplayer, and we knew we were home.

My hands began to shake. “Oh god… he’s in that building somewhere…” I snapped myself out of it. “Get ahold of yourself, dude. He’s just a man. That’s all. He did a lot of work you love, but you have to try and keep in mind that all he ever did was apply ink to paper, and you do that yourself. You’re just not famous for it. So get a grip.” I started to have an internal dialogue about the weird nature of fame and hero-worship and all those Deep Things, but then I realized I was at a convention, and HOMYGOD RIKKI SIMONS IS HERE TOO?! So I decided to put the existentialism on hold till later.

As we entered the convention hall, me precariously balancing GLaDOS in her box and hoping she wouldn’t get broken in the shuffle, I was taken aback by how stupidly cramped it was, with tables lining every nook and cranny and a person within elbow’s reach no matter where you chose to stand. I’d been to small conventions, and I’d been to cramped ones, but this one took the cake for both. I tend to get about eight hundred times more claustrophobic about my personal space when I’m having trouble breathing, too, and I can’t say my chest congestion was totally gone, so I began to weave my way to the left towards the dealer’s hall to try and find some open air. That’s when all the trivial worries went away. The crowd parted, and there, at the table against the far wall, gazing foggily up at some kid in a GIR hat…

It was him. I think he had a halo.

I completely did NOT wet myself, or begin gibbering. Instead, I very coolly and calmly, with great logic and decorum, ran hollering back to my adventure-mates shouting “COME WITH ME TO A LAND OF WONDER!!” (It seemed logical at the time. In retrospect, the geek overload probably shorted one of my circuits.)

I dragged Mia by the elbow back to where I’d been standing when I saw him, and the crowd parted again dramatically. “See?! It’s… him.” I heard her breath catch and felt slightly better about how weird I’d just gotten. Then, the unexpected happened. He glanced across the room, and unless my imagination was getting the best of me, locked eyes with me.

He looked kinda irritated.

I realized my Pointing Arm of Triumph was still in the air and whipped it behind my back. “Oh god oh god oh god, he saw me pointing at him, major faux pas, NOT FUCKING GOOD,” I muttered to myself like an idiot savant as I turned away and stared at the floor. Wasn’t there some kind of unspoken geek law against that sort of thing? I racked my brain. Neh, he was probably just irritated that more people were probably about to get into the miles-and-miles long line to his table-

I peered down to the end of the line and hiccupped, swallowing my gum. It was only about a dozen people long.

“I need some air, man.” I decided, for the sake of my own sanity, he’d just seen his mortal enemy walk in behind me or something. We wandered back out to the car where Mia had forgotten her copy of JTHM. GLaDOS had rolled around in her box a little and some of the wires had popped loose, so I casually screamed in panic, fixed her, created a soft bed of tissue paper for her to NOT roll around in, and prepared for the return.

***

As we reapproached the table with greater fortitude, I tried to ignore the buzzing feeling of being about 12 feet away from my biggest personal hero and pointed my eyes solidly at the Angus Oblong table on the other side of the room.

“Do you wanna, like, go check out the Artist’s Alley for a few minutes before we do this?” I asked breathlessly. I was having a hard time keeping my lines straight. I had a total of three things I wanted to say, and no more because I HATED HATED HATED the idea of being that jerk who held up the line. I knew if I didn’t set some boundaries for myself, I’d be off rambling on about my life story or something equally terrible and I’d be another mark on the wall of Terrible Fan Experiences. No… no, I had to hold it together. I needed more TIME.

I floated down the Artist’s Alley in a daze, and gazed at the table with the art contest. “All entries due by 12:00 noon.” I stared at my clock. 11:53. I HAD brought my portable Sumi-e kit for no clearly definable reason, after all… (I had this paranoid instinct to take it with me whenever I traveled long distances; painting Sumi-e portraits of people for money when I was stranded in L.A. once had got me a train ticket home in a pinch.)

I shook my head. This was unreasonable. It was time.

***

I got in the line, which was moving unreasonably fast. I doused myself heavily one last time with hand sanitizer, praying to god that I wouldn’t smell too strongly of chemicals. The line ground to a halt one table away, in front of the Zombie Cupcakes table, which were cute and gave me something to look at that wouldn’t make me lightheaded.

I began to hear his voice, in a heated discussion about something. I failed miserably at not staring at him, then realized he was too oblivious to care. “But that’s when I started watching Voyager on Netflix,” he gesticulated to the gentleman next to him. His eyes were on fire, a grin lit up his face and he was lost in the throes of geekitude. I’d seen him tweet about how terrible Voyager was some time recently and how superior Next Generation was and so forth, but hearing these things directly from his mouth made everything real. They continued their Star Trek dialogue passionately, guffawing and gesturing, and I was reminded he was a geek just like me. We’re all unreasonably passionate about unusual things, stupid things that don’t directly relate to food and shelter, and that doesn’t make us terrible people. It’s what makes us come alive.

I was feeling unbearably alive for a second there, so alive that I’m pretty sure blood was going to start shooting from my ears from the sheer speed of my heartrate. But that little zen realization about geekitude made my heart settle down, and before I knew it I was the next person in line.

I was surprised by how much of a good mood he seemed to be in. I want to personally thank whoever engaged him in that conversation just before I got there because he seemed to be charged with positive energy from it (though he could just secretly be that way all the time and I’d never know). But then, the moment was upon me. I ordered my voice to remain a steady baritone, which it utterly failed to do, as I set the box marked “Wheatley Laboratories” on the table before him and popped my first quip.

“So Jhonen, how are you holding up?” I smiled.

“Oh, pretty good, pretty good,” he responded, looking slightly confused at the box. I popped it open, unable to hold back the grin.

“…Because she’s a potato.” I pointed into the box (sighing with relief that GLaDOS was still in one piece.) His eyes lit up, and I knew he’d gotten the reference.

“Hey wow, that’s pretty cool,” he exclaimed, then paused and raised an eyebrow. “Wait, you seriously want me to sign a potato?”

“Nonono, I- I want to you have it. It’s a Christmas present,” I grinned shyly, secretly pissed off that my voice was edging on soprano and for some reason I was acting like a girl and couldn’t get it under control.

“Wow, that’s awesome,” he replied coolly. “I’m gonna want to take a picture of this and post it up, is your contact info on this…?” He began scanning the box.

“Oh no, I didn’t want- to presume-” I stumbled. “I- I do have a twitter, so-”

“Yeah, why don’t you give me your Twitter?”

The world went white. He shoved a receipt and a pen at me, and I proceeded to forget how the alphabet works as I tried to write my Twitter as quickly as I could with jittering spaghetti-fingers. I could only think, “Holy shit, Jhonen’s gonna follow me on Twitter. OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD, HE’S GONNA SEE THAT MY ART’S SHIT, OH SHIT, OH FUCK…”

I handed him my failscribblings and he squinted. “The… TornFace?”

“Oh- Oh god, that’s supposed to say TheTomFace, you know my handwriting kinda…”

He let out a sudden, odd laugh. “I totally thought that said TheTornFace,” he chuckled and dropped the paper into the box, which he set gently on the floor. I laughed along with him, suddenly realizing that, yes, that IS his sense of humor, this IS the REAL JHONEN VASQUEZ, not some weird decoy, I just had a moment with Jhonen and it was AWESOME. I realized my time was drawing to a close. I went into Food Bank client-paperwork-intake mode and put the three papers in front of him.

“I’m just gonna want your signature here…” I opened the Most Horrible Xmas Card Ever. “That’s for my sister Ellie. And here, this one’s for my friend Sofie in the UK…” putting the Johnny poster on the table. I felt slightly disappointed that he didn’t make his signature out to anyone, just put his name, but that was more than enough for anyone, I should expect. “And this one’s for me.” A frame from his “Meanwhile…” of a day in his life, where he bursts into the QuickieMart demanding Ice-Sucky. I gathered everything up, panicking that I was forgetting something. This whole exchange had been no longer than a minute and 30 seconds, but it was dangerously close to being rude. I thanked him for the signatures and started to edge away, then remembered the last, most important thing.

“Jhonen?” I said, making sure I was looking him in the eyes for Maximum Sincerity. He looked up at me and time stopped. “I really wanted to thank you for coming to a smaller, more affordable convention for us proletariats. It means a lot…” I trailed off.

A series of expressions clambered over his face, and I don’t know if I’m just really bad at reading people or if maybe my memory is exaggerating things… but first it looked like confusion, then surprise, accompanied with a slight eyebrow-raised chuckle, followed by the biggest, most genuine beam I’d ever seen. I’ll never forget that last look on his face; I wish I’d had a camera.

It really made me stop and wonder if people ever truly show appreciation for his attending these terrible, uncomfortable things, or if they just show up and demand his time, attention and signature as if they just automatically deserve it for liking his shit. I mean, I could be totally off, it could be that he’s just really good at pouring on the charm, it could have been the best fake smile I’d ever seen, the confusion could have been that his weird robot brain was having trouble selecting the proper response in that moment, I could even have just been seeing what I wanted to see. But I think I’m going to go on ahead and remember things the way I do, because it makes my heart sing to think that maybe, for just a couple of minutes, I made my hero’s day.

***

Other stuff happened, I got to see a panel with Rikki Simons, which was awesome, we got lost about five times on the way home, etc. (Also, all the energy I poured into not being sick for a couple hours seems to have sapped me completely of any remaining energy and what was hanging on of my immune system was obliterated, and I’m now sicker than I have been all week. I think it goes without saying, it was worth it. Cue Quantum Leap Marathon.) But you’re not interested in any of that, because you just clawed through my long-ass rambling story to get to the bit about Jhonen, so I’mma let you go now. I hope you enjoyed the story and maybe even got a little touched; I’d like to think everyone has similar experiences when meeting their heroes. Probably not. I’m just a creepy obsessive weirdo with a fixation and I probably shouldn’t have gotten so worked up about it. Oh well.

Be good and stay silly,

-Tom
P.S. The terror that he may follow my twitter, see the fact that I’m a “Comic Book Padawan Learner”, get curious, click the link to my blog, and see how devoid it is of the shit I’ve been drawing (mainly due to a lack of a scanner big enough) makes me really want to pour the gas on getting my project produced and online. Somehow, the idea of him smiling at my work the way I’ve smiled at his is, like, the fucking coolest thing that could ever happen, period, and that’s not going to happen if I don’t get to work. So this really could have jumpstarted my creative process. THANKS FOR EXISTING, JHONEN!!!

BG&SS,
-@TheTomFace

Entry completed: 3:09am.

Meeting Jhonen, Pt. 1

(You know that weird stale-taco scent you smell when you’re around someone sick? Try to imagine that scent and hang onto it whilst reading this entry, it’ll lend it a more in-depth experience.)

So as my fellow freakish and terrible JhnenVee followers may be aware, Jhonen is making a surprise splash-landing at Sac-Con tomorrow, and as some of my more observant and terrifying stalkerish @TheTomFace followers may have derived, that’s actually within a reasonable driving distance from me for once. (Seriously if any of you knew that before I just told you, you’re starting to freak me out.) It made me undignifiably squeal with stupid fanboy joy to discover that Jhonen would be attending a convention that was not only close-ish by, but affordable (starting at $4 a ticket!), what with the whole biting-my-nails and waiting-for-my-new-job-to-start situation.

(LIFE LESSON BONUS: unless you’re set financially for a couple months, never just blithely accept a job that depends solely on the status of the weather. You may never work again, as shown by the impertinent lack of snow so far this winter.)

So, I’ve spent the last couple days (outside of working on commissions) getting ready for this thing. For one of the first times, I’m not going to a con in cosplay, cause while I think he may be somewhat impressed with my freakishly accurate cosplay of Nurse Joker, I just don’t want to make him uneasy. Plus it’s just a one-day, small little thing, and I think for once I’d rather spend my time walking around, observing and just blending into the background than be mobbed for pictures all day.

Instead, I focused my garish uprising of geek energy into creating a neat little goody that I think he’ll really enjoy: a GLaDOS potato [picture forthcoming]. (I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that he’s a massive Portal fanatic.) It’s just an aesthetic re-creation, non-functional (I really didn’t have the resources to assemble a flashing, glowing, speaking potato, though I could have if I really, really tried), but it’ll look good on a geek-shelf. I’m all ready to put it in a neat little pastry box marked Wheatley Laboratories, stick a bow on it, and hand it to him as a Chrismas present. I’ve also got the Most Horrible Xmas Card Ever for him to sign for my sister, a small poster for him to sign for my friend over in the UK, and I think I was just gonna bring a headshot for him to sign for me, and I was going to do all of these things quickly and smoothly and not annoy him, and graciously thank him for attending a smaller, more affordable convention for us proletariats, and walk away without wigging out. (I considered bringing my original of “Johnny and the Rapist” for him to sign the back of, but I just don’t think I can handle the robot laserbeams of Jhonen-rage shooting from his eyes should I present him with someone’s attempt at drawing like him, much less my own.) It was going to be a very cool and collected encounter with one of my greatest idols and he was hopefully going to leave the convention center steaming about how weird everyone else was with barely a recollection of me, other than “that kid who gave me the awesome GLaDOS potato.”

So correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m pretty sure the Gods of Geekitude are getting back at me for those years in early high school I spent obsessed in the worst possible way over Death Note, because now I have a pretty nasty cold (or god forbid, the flu), and one day to get over it before the two hour drive to Sacramento. (Plus it’s my birthday in 3 days, what’s up with that?!) I spent all of last night either in and out of feverdreams about horrible convention encounters gone wrong, and up at stupid hours sweating about it and trying to make the bug go away through sheer force of will. I’ll never forgive myself if I’m that terrible person who gave Jhonen the flu at a convention, nevermind how unpleasant it is to walk around pit-to-pit with a bunch of sweaty screaming convention-goers while fighting back a fever. Plus there are so many people counting on me to bring back signed things for them, I could never let them down! (Well, okay. Two people. And the card is a surprise gift. BUT NEVERMIND!)

This is the worst time to get sick I’ve ever experienced, right on par with that time I was heading up the Holiday Food Baskets rush at the Food Bank and there were literally thousands of people in the community depending on me to do my job. Dear GOD was that a nightmare, the Food Bank’s nightmarish enough without fever-hallucinations of centipedes and aliens. At least then I could displace some of the prep work for get-well time. But I think my body has it in for me this time. I swear I don’t know what I did to deserve this (aside from that one terrible Death Note crack-fiction I wrote when I was sixteen, BUT I’VE SINCE PAID MY PENANCE FOR THAT!!)

So, BY THE POWER OF RA, BY THOR’S HAMMER, BY EVERYTHING YOU CAN SWEAR ON, this will be a 24 hour bug and I WILL be better by tomorrow morning, or so help meee… I’ll be very unhappy. I’m ready to turn to the dark arts to cleanse this unholy bug from my body, or at least sell the unused portions of my soul for a speed-along. (If anyone knows any anti-sick incantations, please don’t be afraid to use them on me, I’ll do a drawing for you if you do and it works, I promise.)

All I wanted was the opportunity to give one person who made me smile… something that would make HIM smile in return. I figured, everyone else is gonna be there geeking out over him (which, from what I can tell, is pretty overwhelming), so why not give HIM something to geek out on?

Anyhoo, stay tuned, cause Part 2 is coming, and I’m sure I’ll have epic tales of my journey by late tomorrow night (or prossibly Monday morning depending on how wiped out I am.)

As I pickle myself with cough syrup, orange juice, and the rituals of the undead, I wish you all a happy holiday, and hope you’re sending your spooky get-well powers at me so I can gloat over how much more lucky I am than you to meet Jhonen Vasquez. NYAH NYAH NA NA NYAH!

BG&SS,
-@TheTomFace

Good things sometimes come from bad.

(P.S. In case you were wondering, Nny was totally bullshitting about that whole traumatic childhood thing. He couldn't remember his childhood if he tried.)

On Dec. 4th 2011 at around 7:00 pm, something truly terrible and personally emasculating happened to me. By the morning of Dec 5th, this had come out of me. Worse things have happened.

Shit happens to everyone, and no matter how scarring or terrible it may be, we all choose how to deal with our trauma. Some deal better than others. Sometimes people make awful, immature or even illegal decisions. Me? I chose to draw. I’d like to apologize to Mr. Vasquez if he feels that this is an infringement of copyright, but know that this was never an attempt to make money, ride the pigtails of his genius, or rip him off in any way: This is, quite simply, a therapeutic exercise, and I’m choosing to share the results with all of you.

In closing, I’d like to thank Jhonen for creating something that (despite his worst intentions) was so personally empowering for me. In short, just drawing this made me feel better than anything else I could have done, and if it weren’t for Nny, I’d probably still be shaking in a corner instead of laughing.

All copyright, trademark, money and praise to Jhonen Vasquez.

BREAKING NEWS: The Tarantulasaurus Rex, a most fearful chimera, exploded out of the TomFace Scientific Experimental Menagerie late the other night after nachos and a hilarious 2am conversation resulting in a horrifying sketch session.

Simply the best abomination since that one snowman guy.

Just a little taste of what’s going down over at my Deviantart.  Once again, I’d ramble here but everything you’ll ever need to know about it is all over there.

(Just realizing this is a monumental moment; the first time I’ve actually posted any of my art to this blog of mine that’s all about art.  And here it is, making your eyes bleed.  I’m so sorry.)

I’d like to also acknowledge the undeniable influence of Ethan Nicolle’s monster-mutations on my mindset at the time of creation.  He is a continuing inspiration and every page that comes out at Bearmageddon is a little more awesome.  I guess you could say this is fanart in a weird almost entirely unrelated way.

Be good and stay silly,

-Tom

And now for something completely different: POSITIVITY!

 

Well, I’ve crossed some strange little bridge where I’m finally remembering that frenetic, stay-up-all-night, I’m too goddamn excited about this project to sleep, kind of energy that I used to get in high school. And I have to say I haven’t been happier in a LONG ass time. I feel like I’ve finally fixed that broken module in my brain, and the only thing I’m afraid of is when it’s going to short out next.

Sure, my computer’s broken (so I’m using someone else’s to do this), my teeth are screaming at me and falling apart with no sign of dental care in sight, my car makes a funny grinding noise that only goes away when I turn right and I’m constantly in terror of dying every time I leave my house, my job at the Food Bank ended and my new job at that winter resort doesn’t start until the next big storm which isn’t due till the middle of December, and I’m running on the fumes of my last big paycheck from A-TCAA which are sure to vanish the second any minor emergency comes up. Sure, I’m in the most dire financial situation I’ve been in since that time I was squatting in the Linoberg St. shacks, making soup from other people’s old chicken carcasses. But I got through that time, didn’t I? And tell me, how did I get through that one time I was stranded in L.A. with no money for a train ticket home?

I painted for money.

It’s time to do so again, and finding a real, dire reason to do so, rather than just practicing, is really lighting a fire under my creative ass. It always seemed like a bad idea before; every reasonable voice in my world said that to try and paint commissions while I should be looking for a “real” job would be a waste of time. Well, guess what, you lousy sadsacks? The joke’s on you this time, because I HAVE a “real” job lined up, I’m just waiting for it to start, and to sit around with my thumb up my ass and NOT try and paint commissions would be a waste of time on my part, so HA! Bugger off, I’m actually trying to turn my skillset into money responsibly with the time allotted. I feel like, with my world coming apart around me, all my weird reprehensible creative blocks have been shattered and there’s nothing for it but apply paint to canvas. Not that I’m necessarily celebrating the whole “starving artist” thing, but goddamn if this wasn’t exactly the kick in the ass I needed to get the juices flowing.

So, I’m opening (an embarrassing, embarrassing) shop on DA. Here’s the link if you want to watch me fail.

I’ll be painting traditional, reach-out-and-touch-it, non-digital work through various means that I’ll be shipping in the mail. I’d sit here and write about it more, but everything you’ll ever need to know about it is over there, and if I continue writing I’ll start focusing on the negative aspects of my life again and starting thinking why this is such a ridiculously stupid idea, and that kind of thinking is why 99.9% of the world’s cool shit doesn’t happen. I’d like to say that I tried to make something cool happen than stay on the reasonable side of things and wonder all my life if that would have worked if I’d just put a little elbow grease into it.

ON TO VICTORY.

In which I ponder the artist’s quandary.

I think I’m finally pinpointing what’s bothering me most about life, and the difference between successful artists and people who just wish they were.

It’s a theory at best, mind you, and just one factor in the overall equation for a wildly varied group of people that I’m just sloppily boxing together with the term “professional artist”, so there’s little science and hardly any thinking behind it.  But it’d be a fool not to notice the common thread between a great deal of these people.

They don’t sleep.

Some of them seem to derive boundless energy from the act of creation, some struggle against it in the face of their artistic drives, some deprive themselves of it for the lack of time, some seem to just plain not need it, some even seem to fear it (I’m looking at you Jhnen Vee).  But for whatever reason, whatever strange hand Life dealt them that ingrains them to go without it, it seems to be one of the most common denominators in deciding who gets to be a creator and who doesn’t.

There’s a cruel and ugly fact of life out there that I’m getting more and more used to, and it’s this: unless by some astronomical coincidence one immediately becomes wildly successful, every artist must work in the free space around that 9-5 grind that’s necessary to sustain life.  That’s why it’s so important to treat your passion as more of a hobby than a living, because unless you eventually become one of those people that Fate smiles on and audiences adore, you may be doing that balancing act for the rest of your natural life.  If you’re not okay with that, then you need to pick a different hobby.  Some people can’t deal with it, and thus natural selection runs its course.  Only the people serious enough about their art to devote their sleeping hours to it get enough practice to get good at it, produce enough of it to get noticed, etc.

It’s a conundrum that’s been eating my brain and making me slam my head against the walls lately.  Have I mentioned the eye twitch I’ve developed?

It’s more of a problem for some people than others.  I hear all the time about those young college kids who balance two part-time jobs and 18 units of classes and still have time and energy to party hardy on the weekends, and I envy the fuck out of them, because a lifestyle like that would almost certainly literally KILL me.  I once tried to work at Wal-Mart and take 12 units at college at the same time, and I got so sick that I was fired and I had to drop out, so I simultaneously failed two major things at once.  That felt great.

I’ve always been the low energy sort.  If I’ve had a particularly draining day at work, I come home, struggle upstairs, and flop into bed until I have to get up and do it again the next day.  I’ve been known to sleep the better part of some weekends, and it’s not because I’m lazy.  Some people were just wired to need less sleep, it’s their lot in life, it’s written in their physiology and I hate all of them for getting the deal I wish I had.  It’s not as if I particularly enjoy sleep.  You try running reports at work for 12 hours in your underwear with people laughing at you while centipedes crawl all over you and bite you in strange crevasses, every night for weeks, and tell me you’re just chomping at the bit to tuck in tonight.

Damn, if I could run on 3 hours of sleep, that would free up a whole 9 hour work day that I’m missing out on almost every day in my life these days.  There’s so much that I have to say and to do and to make.  Almost every day these days I’m bursting with ideas, paintings I want to do, things like that, and I’m afraid to embark on one because I know how much energy it’ll suck out of me and I’ll be shit at work the next day.  Sure, last weekend I embarked on a six-hour oil painting on Saturday, and it was WONDERFUL, it felt better than sex once I was done.  But I didn’t wake the following day until about 11:00, and I went to bed at 8:00.   That’s 15 hours.  Fifteen hours… that’s MORE THAN HALF of a 24 hour time period, in case anyone wasn’t doing the math.  That scares me.  Half of my life is literally being whiled away doing nothing useful.  I’m still preeeetty convinced it’s the aliens, but the question remains- what are they DOING with all those hours of sleep I keep giving them?!

It makes me want to scream.  I feel like some kind of nefarious goblin is following me around, eating every spare second of time that I have, slicing my life in half, infecting me with Sleep.  I hear the clock ticking raucously in my ears every waking second, watching my life run out, my 23rd birthday is coming up and for the first time the terror of mortality is clutching at the seat of my being because I feel like I’m running out of time to do the things that I want to do.  I even dream about clocks a lot lately- I’m just standing there in black and white, watching this Lynch-esque clock spin faster and faster, and this feeling of dread grows deeper and deeper while screeching music grates louder and louder (I think last night it was looping soundtrack from “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared”) and I wake up in a soggy sweaty mess.  And then I fall back asleep because I don’t have the energy to do anything about it.

I really feel like this sleep/energy thing is the barrier keeping me from doing the things that I want to do.  I wonder if there’s anything can be done about it, any kind of psychological rewiring I can do, or anything I can take that ISN’T caffeine (it makes me jittery like you wouldn’t believe and then I get paranoid and jumpy about everything and I can hear my own heartbeat and I just want to jump out a window- well, it’s not healthy.)

The point is, it just doesn’t seem fair that now that I’m really getting serious about what I want to do, the energy isn’t there for it.  The thing that really bothers me is the implication- if I don’t have the energy to force myself to stay up and work on it, then I just must not be as passionate about it as other people and therefore it just wasn’t meant to be.  Selfishly, pathetically, I want someone to tell me it’s okay, that I really am an artist, just one with low energy, one maybe going through a period of dormancy at worst, but the fact that I don’t have the time and energy for it- that I have to devote every ounce of my energy to the one thing that provides my income- doesn’t preclude that the passion is there.

I mean it just as hard as the guy who can’t sleep, or the guy who gets re-energized by doing it.  And I’m not looking for a free pass here.  I know I have to put in my hard time burgerflipping days and hunched squinting over the drawing board at night, just like everyone else.  But I’d like to think that just because I can’t stay up at night like some people can doesn’t mean that I care less.

The things that I want to do rip my heart out through my chest while I’m showering, they walk into oncoming traffic while I’m driving to the grocery store, they talk over my telephone conversations until people get tired of repeating themselves, they bash me in the head with a sledgehammer when I try to get away from them by reading a good book until the words become blurry unreadable bloodstains.  Their screams echo across the indeterminable years that I have left, they beg the question of whether they fit inside that time and my stomach knots every time I think of the possibility that I might not have enough time left on this earth to get them out of my head.  I feel like my purpose on this earth is to give birth to them and nothing more- there’s not a human being or a video game or a movie that I consider worth my time any more if it’s taking away from the time that I am awake enough to be fully engaged in something.  They invade my dreams and shape every decision that I make, their notes and scribbles are splashed across my walls and floor, and I wish that I could open the catheter and pour a little more of my life’s blood into them, but my job is already sucking so much blood out that I’m afraid if I give one more drop I’ll wither up and blow away.  I KNOW this is what I’m supposed to do- I tried giving it up for a week in pursuit of something more practical and mundane, and then I realized that this is what my whole life has been devoted to, and I felt like I was falling over a precipice of death and oblivion.  I scrambled back up the cliff to be tortured by demons that I understand and know and love.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll find my way over this one if it was meant to be.  Maybe I just need to take a chill pill.

Where I’m at.

I haven’t been coming back here for a while because I’ve been in this terrible ugly place where the only words that want to come out of my fingertips are complaints.  I didn’t want to subject anyone to that.  The truth is that I’m at a very ugly point in my life, but so are a lot of people, and it’s not interesting, it’s just grating- hundreds upon thousands of people have complaints to register and you’re probably better off reading theirs, or better still, something completely unrelated to whining.

That said, I haven’t really been giving myself the opportunity to vent, and I’m slowly coming around to the realization that I really need to.  It was a thread on /r9k/ that basically said, “It’s okay.  Let it out.”

“Go on /r9k/. Get it off your chest. Type in all caps if you need to. Just say what’s pissing you off or bugging you at the moment.”

So, I responded with this:

Can’t fucking sleep, waking up at abnormal hours, going to bed at abnormal hours because anxiety is taking over my ability to drift off. I hate my job. I can’t afford to eat and on the days when I can, the shakes and nausea are too strong to choke anything down. I’ve dropped 20 pounds last month. I’m hearing things more and more, and the hallucinations are coming back. THE MOST ANNOYING THING IS THIS DAMN EYE TWITCH THAT WON’T GO AWAY. It feels like there’s a mosquito stuck in my eyelid that won’t stop squirming and it’s making me feel even more insane.

Most of all, I know that absolutely nobody cares. The energy I’m expending on typing this out makes me sick because it comes with the presumption that my problems are worse than anyone else’s, or any more interesting. Nobody cares and nobody should need to, and yet still I’m here complaining instead of doing something about it, if only because I don’t know what else to do.

I’m getting a new job that starts next month and moving out of this hellhole, I’m making a lot of changes, but that’s not stopping the anxiety. I feel like I’m finally coming apart at the edges.

 

I know it’s not what the world wants to hear.  But then I realized- if nobody cares- if as few people really read this blog as I think- then it really doesn’t matter what I post here.  If I need to get something off my chest, I should go on ahead and whine about it, even if it’s ugly, instead of holding it in like some kind of martyr under the illusion that I’m saving a lot of people from a terrible fate of reading my shit.  Truth is that if you don’t want to read my shit there’s this navigation bar at the top of the screen that I’m sure so many of you have already used to escape my screaming drivel.  What I’m doing when I don’t write is denying myself something that could be truly therapeutic in the fear that it’ll ruin some non-existent image that I have.

So, I guess this blog for now is less about my art, which has been escaping me in my lack of energy or drive and increase in paranoid delusions and feverdreams, and more about just figuring out what’s wrong with my life and fixing it.  It’s gonna be about sorting shit out, and it’s going to be boring, so go look at pictures of funny cats or something.

On the off chance anybody cared…

I only here have the time to inform the world that the only thing worse than a friend spilling water all over your laptop is when you lose your flash drive the following day.  Everything I’ve written, starting in 2003, was lost in a weekend.  Get your mind around something like that happening to you, eight years of work gone, and come back when the hangover starts to lift.

If you never hear from me again, it may be because I’m dangling from a noose somewhere in a dank basement.  Or, you know, maybe just drowning my sorrow with funny pictures of cats.  Who knows.  Motivation is hard to come by when you have to start from ground zero.

Sorry, world.  Maybe I’ll be back when I’m done being melodramatic.

My life has been ostensibly taking different directions anyhow, and maybe a clean slate was just the kick in the ass I really needed to realize that anyway.  Sorry to get your hopes up.

Bye for now.

LBC #1: Big Star

Inspired by a news story.

If this were how the story actually ended, I might consider it newsworthy.

I guess the humor could be a little more clear.  After beta testing it on my first three readers here at home, two of them stood and stared for a few minutes before exclaiming, “OHHHH!!!”, one of them I had to explain it to, which by my standards means that it’s completely a lost cause (although he WAS high as shit), and one of the first two just now looked at it again and went, “OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!  NOW I fucking get it!!!”

Part of me wants to think I just live with a bunch of dumbasses, but they’re all pretty damn sharp and I’d also like to think that I’m not so morally bankrupt that I’d decry their intelligence just so I could justify my own artistic competence.  So I’m just going to assume that it’s crap and make another better one tomorrow.

Please do let me know if it makes sense, or if it doesn’t.  The thing about a comic is that you can’t teleport yourself over the shoulder of everyone who reads it to explain what the hell is going on- you have to make yourself clear in one shot, no exceptions, no mercy.  So a little feedback would go a long way in figuring whether my test audience’s reaction was just an isolated incidence of mental thickness, or if if this piece really does suck that bad.

On other notes:

– It’s one of my first times playing with extreme lighting special effects kind of drawings and I feel okay about the way that turned out.  Just okay.

– Also Jimmy in the second panel could definitely have a more natural pose and look less like he’s trying to eat his own teeth.

– Finally, I’m not sure if the mini segue panel between 3 and 4 reads clearly.  HINT: It’s fucking skeletons being disintegrated by the light, heat and magnetism of a star suddenly exploding in their faces.  If you didn’t get that before I just told you, then I’m not doing my job right, so tell me, dammit.

My own rating: All in all, for a comic it’s pretty crappy, but for a 30 minute comic it’s not terrible.

I’d also like to put it out there that, despite my in-depth analysis and requests for critique, I actually don’t care as much what people would think of it as you might gather from my nit-picky post, for one reason- I had a LOT of fun drawing it.  I was laughing my ass off from start to finish, and whether I have trouble communicating what’s going on in my head, or even if my sense of humor is just idiotic and bland to everyone except me…  I honestly couldn’t care less whether anyone else enjoys my dumb little test run of a comic, because I’m enjoying it enough to make up for everyone else, critics be damned.  I think I’ve finally found the core of what all this is really about.

Also, if you did just happen to enjoy today’s little aneurysm, come back Monday.  The next one has a pterodactyl in it.

Brace yourselves.

Today I drew another Lunch Break Comix, and this time I blew my own mind by actually finishing before my 30 minutes was up.  Honestly, I thought it would take me a few more tries to find my pacing for this format and time frame.

Also, I got a beautiful awesome pen for lettering and fine detail (a 0.5 Staedtler, if anyone finds that to be anything aside from mind-numbingly boring. It’s the smallest thing I’ve ever spent 4 dollars on and it makes me cream my slacks between the hunger pangs and bouts of buyer’s remorse.)   Therefore, today’s issue is inked and completed and set to be online by tomorrow afternoon!  (Don’t expect miracles, the scanner’s pretty old, so I’m expecting an ugly preview, but it gives me something to do, anyway.)

This is becoming a very big confidence booster, so do expect this to become a regular fixture.  I may even forgo my NaNo challenge just to focus on this, as I’m having a lot more fun with it, but we’ll see.

I can’t think of much else to say other than, STAY TUNED!

-Da po’ kid

Lunch Break Comix!

After yesterday’s decision to draw my book through NaNo, I decided I’d need a warm-up.  SO, I decided that every day on my 30 minute lunch break, I’d draw a 4 panel comic.  No excuses, no script, no plan, just 4 panels of whatever comes into my head, in the space of 30 minutes.  When the clock hits 1:30, I drop the pencil, wherever I’m at.  It’ll be little bursts of forcing myself to focus on quantity vs. quality.

My first one- the penciling, anyway- came out pretty epic, and when I got home I was going to ink it.  I had an evil plan:

1) Be a ninja and bring them to work and scan them onto my flash drive each morning while nobody’s looking

2) Post them in the afternoons when I get home (WE HAVE INTERNET NOW SO PRAISE ALLAH)

3) ????

4) PROFIT!!!

Hojever, my favorite inking pen (yes, I’m that poor- I actually only have one good inking pen) ran out about two scratches in.  I love Microns, mean fine point and a steady flow, but DAMN if it didn’t die on me just when I was getting all creative and shit.  All I have left are freaking crayola markers.  Goddamn fine detail work.

DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN

I can’t even run into town for a replacement.  My radiator’s acting funky which means I can only drive the two miles to work and back at a time until I figure out what’s wrong.  I guess I could craft a nib out of my toenail clippings and use my blood as ink, but honestly it doesn’t seem worth the trouble.

It’s these sorts of moments that make you question yourself as an artist- if I’m not dedicated enough to use my own blood as ink, then am I truly ready to pursue this as a life course?

Existentialism aside, I have to get a ride into town tomorrow to pay my rent anyway, so I’ll be sure to swing by the good ‘ol MalWart then and grab some pens.  I’m going to need them for November anyway.  😀

I’m sure you’re all dying to see whether my art actually backs up my claims (all two of you), so this week will be a big one- the use of company resources (come on, it’s not like I’ll be actually printing them) will see the publishing of my first one-pagers online!

[dear god you’re all going to tell me they’re shit]

IGNORING THAT LITTLE STAB OF TERROR, God willing I can make this work and start actually putting these out on a semi-constant schedule.  I work Tuesday – Friday, which will dictate my scanning schedule,  so every afternoon on Tu – Fri I’ll be able to put something up.  I’m sure that’ll all change come December when my term ends, but by then maybe I’ll be done building my own steampunk scanner out of the inner workings of old pocket watches, laser pointers and that printing press I stole from the museum last summer.  Good times.

 

Bears, NaNo, and cyanide pills.

It should be known that shortly after posting that last terrible entry, I got off my fat ass and did things, which the lack thereof was what I was complaining about.  I got my application submitted, got an interview (which went well and I’m pretty sure I’ve got the job) and worked on a few more chapters of my book, among other HIGHLY RIVETING THINGS (<behold: fiction at its finest).

I feel that I can safely say that I will be done at least scripting Book I of “SURPRISE!” by tonight and be ready to begin inflicting its terrible contents on the poor unsuspecting world by next month.  I’ve been wrestling with a lot of extremely terrible feelings of inadequacy and doubt lately, which tells me I must be doing it right.

On the other hand, despite Ethan Nicolle’s insanely awesome insight on the world of comic booking and whether it’s right for a person to take on as a career, his blog posts have been rather instrumental in me really, really truthfully examining my own ability to do these things I keep bragging about, and making me question myself honestly for the first time, and I have to say I hate it.   He’s a meany-pants for making me look at things logically and objectively and I’m harboring all this spite.  Thanks, Mr. McHonestDOUCHE.  (Seriously he’s awesome, I jest and I hope you all understand that.)

I’ve been slavishly following his latest work, Bearmageddon, which makes me wonder if I’ll ever be able to come up with a concept so effortlessly cool and epic.  Just stop and think about it: an all-out war between humans and mutant bears with octopod arms and neat things like that.  This is the sort of unobtrusively awesome thing we ALL wanted to see when we were little boys.  I’m offtrack.  I was on about honesty and all those other boring things.

The point is, he was explaining how you can really only pursue comic-cooking as a career if it is THE THING you can effortlessly churn out, the thing you’re passionate about enough to spend all your spare time on, the sort of thing that just flows out of you.  He went on to confess that early on, he truly wanted to make a living on his music, but it DIDN’T come as naturally as he would have preferred, so he stopped trying to force it and did what came naturally- drawing comics- and get this, HE DIDN’T EVEN NECESSARILY DEPEND ON IT AS A CAREER AT FIRST, but more as a hobby which just so happened to take off.  (I understand that’s the way you’re really supposed to go about it but, come on, who doesn’t have those naive dreams of sitting in their room and drawing all day for money?)

He also went into something that really roasted my gills- the fact that you can’t pick and choose which one of your works becomes the latest virally celebrated cult fad, that it’s your AUDIENCE who chooses that- and while I knew it somewhere deep down in my infected little heart, there’s that other part of me that went, “DAMN!” and slammed his fist onto the desk.  But we’ll go into that some other time.

Now here I am, as someone who truly has a passion and an interest in drawing comic books, and hell, I’d go so far as to even say a modicum of natural talent (though I lack the ability to back that up at the moment due to lack of scanner etc.,) but let’s face it- every single day that I try to draw, I DO have to force myself.  Once I get going, it flows fairly easily, and though I can draw happily for hours, it’s not up to my standards for a full work day, though I expect longer-term stamina will come more and more with time and practice.  But it’s absolutely a struggle to force myself to put pen to paper, a true test of will, and the only time I truly feel good about drawing is when I’m in the middle of it, or done with a sizeable portion of it.  I hate that I don’t get excited leading up into it- I get ANXIOUS.  Nervous, irritable, depressive, and that’s when the procrastination happens.  I make no excuses.  I won’t say that I CAN’T get myself to start, and blame it on a bunch of other things (despite my lazy ‘Murrikan upbringing desperately begging me to do so).  Some days, I just DON’T start, and that’s terrible.

Now, for three months straight I’ve made it my goal to strenuously break myself of this horrendous cycle with a regimen of self-discipline using every methodology I can think of.  From positive reinforcement to negative (as you’ve seen with me repeatedly slamming myself in my blog), to setting deadlines, to removing deadlines, to rearranging my room with motivational posters, to working on other projects, and just about everything they’ve ever written a self-help book on… just nothing seems to be working.  Yet.  I put that “yet” in there because I still hold out hope that I’ll find it within me some day to fix my spark-plugs.  But my biggest horror is waking up one day and finding out that this is ISN’T what I enjoy doing, that it makes me miserable and poor for no reason, that I DON’T have what it takes, that I’m not truly an artist, because it’s so horribly unnatural for me to just wake up in the morning and draw, and I may never be able to change that- that they’ve been lying to me all these years and you CAN’T reprogram yourself to beat the merciless tides of procrastination if you weren’t intuitively set to do so.

And trust me, art is what I’m best at.  It’s how I’ve defined myself for years, it sits right at the core of my identity, it’s how people in my community have come to know me, its evidence is strung all over the walls of this house.  If I wake up one day and come to the realization that I JUST CAN’T DO IT, then what does that say about me?  Am I just another nobody, working down at the convenience store with silent dreams that will never come true because I don’t have the natural ability to make them come true?  Is that what you’re telling me, Ethan- that since I have to genuinely struggle, HARD, every day, to make it come out of me… that I don’t have what it takes and I’d be better off picking something else to do with my life?  Well geez, I’m really good at scanning and bagging.  Where’d I put those cyanide pills?

YES, that was exactly the direction I did NOT intend this blog to go.  Sorry.  Anyway, I’d just like to put it out there that I’ve been considering what really does come naturally to me, which is honestly just writing.  I’ve put brief consideration into just making my story into a good old-fashion series of novels, but I’ve always envisioned it in some form of visual format and honestly feel I’d be cheating the story out of itself if I didn’t at least put it visually on paper.  I owe it to some of the people in this story to finally give them a body.  I MUST draw this, if nothing else.

So, I’m going to test myself.  Seeing as November is coming up, and November always makes me feel more productive what with NaNoWriMo (a.k.a. National Novel Writing Month- seriously consider looking into it if you’ve ever had any interest in writing at ALL), I’m going to take advantage of that creative energy and use it to draw my book.  Yes, I understand that the point of NaNo is writing a novel in 30 days, not drawing one, but I have no intention of collecting a reward, or learning to force myself to write.  I’ve got that down pretty good.  No, since I’ve got Book I essentially planned out and started, I’m going to force myself to draw the rest of it (or a rough draft of it, anyway) in 30 days, no matter how crappy it comes out.  I can always fine-tune later.

I’m aware that I may be setting myself up for disaster.  I’m not aware of a novice having ever crapped out a graphic novel of any considerable length in 30 days.  But hell, if all it does for me is get to me to draw AT LEAST ONE PAGE of my comic, every day, for 30 days straight, then I’ll consider THAT an accomplishment; if I wind up with a rough storyboard that I can commission a greater and more prolific artist to fine tune for me later on, then at least I’ll have another option to consider, and maybe, JUST MAYBE, I’ll wind up with a workable draft of my first Comic Book (rather than the one-page four-panel variety I’ve thus far cranked out), completed, and the sense of accomplishment I’ll get from THAT may just turn this whole thing around for me.  I’ve always heard there’s nothing for it but to just get your first book done, just to prove to yourself you can do it, and it gets at least marginally easier from there.  If nothing else, it gives me a solid deadline and a good reason to say “Sorry, I’m working on a thing” to all of my friends all month.  I can’t figure out any reason not to try.

I’ll only know one thing, if this doesn’t work out for me in any way.

It’s time to let go and figure out another direction for my life.

Whine bitch moan, life sucks unreasonably despite the fact that it would probably improve if I just got off my FAT ASS AND DID SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

Oct. 18 2011

2:17pm

So I’ve hit another slump, though I really have no reason to have.  After getting a good run of productivity going for a good week or so and feeling really good about it, I’ve fallen into this ugly place where finding motivation to do ANYTHING is just… gone.  Just gone.  GOD I SUCK.

Can’t most people just, you know, realize that there’s shit they need to do, and do it?  Can’t I be spending this energy that I’m spending, right now, bitching myself out, by instead focusing on something productive or creative?

For example, in two months our lease is up and I’ll be able to move somewhere else.  Okay.  My short term contract with my current employer will also end in December, creating perfect timing to start over somewhere different.  Okay.  I’ve made it clear time and time again that I just want to move out on my own come December.  Okay.  My roomies have made it clear that they’ve got their eyes on a pair of girls with income to replace me once I abandon ship.  Okay.  I need another job so that I can actually AFFORD to move out in two months, I need a full-time, PAYING job, one that’s not just 25 hours a week.  Okay… despite my best efforts, it’s not happening yet, so I’m starting to get adrenaline sickness.  Okay… Oh fuck, these girls are making life-changing plans already to move in, done things they really can’t go back on, so…

even if, when my contract runs out

even if I just don’t happen to have gotten a job by then

I won’t have a place to fall back on, nowhere to live, I’ve essentially kicked myself out

so come December, unless something changes REAL DAMN FAST

I’m going to be homeless and jobless in the dead of winter.

…

You’d think a situation like that would light a fire under my ass, but the overwhelming urge is escapism, rolling over and going back to sleep, pretending that the world doesn’t exist, reading all day, doing nothing about it and letting the terror wash over me.  I’m a fucking dumbass.

Sure, I’ve only let that compulsion take over since this last weekend (Sunday I spent all day long- no shit- sitting in my bedroom from the second I woke up at 8:00 until I went to bed that night just reading. [It was “Piece of Cake” by Cupcake Brown, if you’re curious.])  And even with a book like that, which was essentially the ultimate “turn your life around and get your shit together” pep talk, it just made me feel guilty about my lack of motivation despite the fact that my life, by comparison, really wasn’t all that bad.  I’ve spent the last four days doing nothing but giving myself motivational speeches, getting myself fired up, and then finding an excuse to start “right after I do this other thing.”

Today I’m right now trying to work up the drive to submit an online application to a nearby ski resort which is having a job fair this Saturday.  Today’s my only day off before then and I really really should get it done.  And I’m putting it off and putting it off and watching youtube and not getting shit done.  No excuses.  I’m just not doing shit.  What’s the DEAL with me?

I just… suck.  I’m a worthless pile of dogshit.  I don’t have anything to say.  Somehow I expected to start writing and, forced to face the fail that is me, force to confess it to the world, I’d come to the end of this blog with the same sort of revelation and turnabout that always happens and gets me going.  This blogwriting thing is what warms me up on the days where I need to get shit done and I just can’t find the start.  But I can’t find the end I was looking for.  I still feel empty.

I have nothing to say.

Sorry, world.  Looks like I’m just one of you.

And welcome to a day in my life…

While I’m in the middle of stomach-wrenching throes of the artistic process (and trying to cleverly figure out how to get my work scanned onto a computer without having to spend any money), I thought I would satiate my enormous, ravenous, imaginary internet audience by pointing you all in the direction of someone else’s work.

If your artistic endeavors haven't driven you to have precisely this neurotic conversation with yourself, then you're doing it wrong.

All credit for this to the incredible Anne Emond, creator of the transcendent and evocative “Comiques“.  Her beautiful work, to me, evokes some kind of delicious combination between Persepolis, old timey French postcards, that kind of nostalgic crosshatching illustration you might find in a turn-of-the-century storybook, maybe a dash of The New Yorker cartoons, and some other tasty things I can’t quite put a finger on.  Be sure to pop over and have a look at her other things.

The steam is finally picking up.

Oct. 11th, 2011
3:49pm

It seemed like it’d only be fair to let “the world” know that, for all intents and purposes, Book I of “SURPRISE!” is finally on its way to being written (as opposed to agonized over.)  

 

Not that ANYONE is actually holding their breath.

 

A jumpstart the other night from the Mysterious Headmate (and his sometimes cataclysmically hermittish ways) finally led me to the ladder that would actually get me over the creative block I was facing- the one where I had to figure out which element of my personal life I was going to completely betray, really stab in the back with the introduction to my backstory.  The solution (which, by the way, takes everything into account with grace and consideration)  is so elegantly simple and genius that I really don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself, years ago.  Traits such as “considerate” and “subtle” really didn’t strike me as any of his more prevelant qualities, but there you go.  (That little bastard is going to wind up claiming the credit for the entire book eventually.)

That said, for this to really take off, I also had to come up with a way to mentally re-hardwire myself to stop procrastinating on my big project.  I’ve come to a really, REALLY strange realization over the last couple days about the way my brain works.  It seems that, in order to get the majority of things done effectively, I have to have some major thing in my life that I’m procrastinating on, and if I move the thing I actually NEED to get done into the Periphery in lieu of a project I’ve arbitrarily assigned to be “more important”, then I can trick my subconscious into thinking I’m procrastinating when I’m really working on what I need to get done.   Neat, huh?

And here’s the weird thing about the way my brain processes the whole procrastination thing.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a project I actually enjoy and WANT to work on- if I deem it my Primary project, it’s going to automatically be the thing that I’m procrastinating on, because that’s just the way it works, and there’s no way I’ll ever be able to get around to it.  That’s a really shitty way for a brain to work, but until I find some way to undo the whole ingrained procrastination tendencies and actually develop something resembling a decent human work ethic, I’m just going to have to find sneaky and clever ways around it.  I never noticed it before, but it’s always how I get shit done at work- I procrastinate on a big project and get all the little ones done and when the next project gets dumped on my desk, I procrastinate on the new one by working on the old one I was putting off before.  In a workplace where you never have less than two dozen major tasks on a given light-paced day, that really works for me, and nobody’s ever the wiser that I get all my work done by being a lazy bastard.

So, I developed the Decoy method, quite by accident.  “SURPRISE!” had been my primary project for a long time and I was straining to get it to go, not unlike a single person trying to push a steam engine down the track with their bare hands.  I just couldn’t make the mechanisms in my mind flow by sheer will- I had to be tricky about these things.

I was job hunting Monday and realized quite to my shock and horror that there were still no job openings I was qualified for around here.  Whoop-dee-doodle fuckin’ do.  Shaking in my boots as usual, this is NEWS.  Cue the Yawn of Frustration.   I started looking around for ways to make money with the talents I already have- “clearly I enjoy writing, as long as it’s not one of my projects,” I was thinking.  This blog I certainly enjoy enough.  I’d heard of Constant Content, Associated Content and things like that.  Long story short, I signed up for one of those, and took a homework assignment: “Write a short story about Halloween.”  Easy peasy.

Except, all of a sudden, I had something I needed to do that might actually bring in a few immediate bucks.  Suddenly the idea of working on my own stuff instead seemed a lot simpler and more attractive.  I don’t know why this happens.  At first I was screamingly frustrated that I couldn’t work on the things that seemed most important to me.  Then I stopped and realized this was a blessing in disguise.  Maybe if I can keep up this locomotion, I can actually get Book I published, EVENTUALLY. 

As the great wise-man Confucius once said, “Hey man… whatever floats your boat, y’know?  Do what works for you, man.” (-may be an ad-lib; citation needed.)

Tags!

Oct. 6, 2011
7:58am

This: A lighthearted break from all the heavy soul-wrenching topics I’ve been gnawing on lately.  (Reading through “Asterios Polyp,” “Maus”, and “Without You” by Anthony Rapp in the last couple of weeks has been flavoring my mind with exactly the sort of Serious, desperately open, painfully melodramatic kind of memoir writing that I was kinda hoping to avoid.  Has anyone ever written a memoir that was more funny than soul-crushing?  Carry on.)

So I was noticing after my last post a little note from the good people at WordPress saying something like, “You’ve used nineteen tags on this post. WordPress recommends using ten or less tags.”  Whhhyy?, thought the indignant little free-speech center programmed into my brain. (‘Murrika.)  My curiosity got the better of me and I clicked on the hyperlink with the explanation behind it.

I guess if you use more than ten tags, WordPress suspects you of some kind of google search optimization scheme, or overtagging with irrelevant topics so that people searching Angelina Jolie will be led to click on your fascinating blog on soothing foot cremes.  Therefore, posts with more than ten tags don’t get listed on the global taggy hoobymonger or something like that.  I can grudgingly respect WordPress’s stance against such exposure-mongering tactics, but by the same token, I very rarely hit on less than nineteen independently relevant points, and I, for one, enjoy being able to single them out and let my readers be able to find my blog based on a search that just might have a lot of those terms in it.

Plus, I almost view the tagging process as an extension of the artistic license with this blogging thing.  It can be kind of like a thoughtcloud where I underline more directly what I was getting at, throwing emphasis on an angle that I thought was particularly poignant.   It can be a comedic device where I tag with one of the words I just invented for the sheer unadulterated liberating hell of it, a word absolutely nobody would actually search; for example, my old tagging habits almost certainly would have had me tag this post with “hoobymonger”.  It’s also one last subtle little field where I can take a final jab at my post; say, insert a self-deprecating tag that says something like “melodramatic teenage-style whining hissyfit” (obviously a search term that really isn’t going to bring a lot of views) when hindsight reveals that whatever I was moaning about really wasn’t all that important in the scheme of things.  It’s where I can maybe throw in a word that I’m pretty sure everyone was thinking but I didn’t bother to say within the blog proper; things like that.  I have fun.

To be fair, I have to admit that I was taking a kind of sick joy in making a running joke of attaching the tag “stabbing people in the face” when whatever I was talking about at that moment clearly had nothing remotely to do with homicide or even pissy thoughts.  It was for shits and giggles, a little game I played to see if anyone would notice, really.  I guess that’s technically a violation of their irrelevant tag clause, but it’s a damn funny one, at least to my tiny diseased head.

But, the end has come for all this tomfoolery, because I’d be lying if I didn’t say that getting some pageviews would be a little nice.  I’d continue my rebellious tagging ways, continuing to tag in a manner I deemed ineffective but hilarious just for the good of my own soul, but knowing now that tagging that way isn’t just neutrally ineffective but actively detrimental to publicity, I’ll step off my soap box and start grudgingly doing the damn thing right.  I’d like to draw in my fellow artists and writers and share in the agonies of the creative process and maybe garner a little encouragement along the way, and I don’t think there’s anything too wrong with that.

So, it’s time to go back through all my posts and whittle the tags down to the ten I think are most relevant, moving all towards functionality and removing all the little inside jokes I was snickering at each night as I hit the submit button.  I did so enjoy it.  It’s a shame I’ve lost one of the few little pick-me-ups I get after posting a particularly depressing entry, but maybe it’s a sign I should stop being so damn depressing in the first place.

“Being true to yourself” and other Disney-esque gems in the face of severely brutal torture and maiming.

10/5/11
1:55pm

I feel compelled to continue along the vein of yesterday’s rant (HERE if you’re a new-comer), but with a less community-oriented, presentational slant, and a more personal and selfish motivation.  Quite simply, one of my biggest PERSONAL fears with telling my story, one that has all to do with pride and self-image, is that it’s hard to maintain the public image of Male when you’re going so deeply, and so honestly, into a past where you had to present (at least visually, 95% of the time,) as Female. 

It puts you in a painful position where you have to present publicly everything you fought so hard to escape from.  Most everyone I know now even uses the right pronouns with me, I sign documents by the name Tom, and I’ll be damned if the method by which I make my living is by laying bare a past that will almost certainly have my entire future audience misgendering me.  It’s one of the main reasons why I’ve been having such a hard time figuring out where to start.  Generally I let people get to know me, a past-less, semi-interesting, generally pleaseant-ish fellow, before I let them in on the Secret Lurking in my Pants.  This method cements the male pronouns in their heads before they get the chance to picture me awkwardly and plaintively donning a skirt in my miserable hellish childhood, and therefore makes my incongruent past seem out of place and absurd rather than the other way around.  But when people know my past before they know me, they generally can’t escape the mental flytrap of using all those “she”‘s, “miss”‘s and the ever-damning “ma’am”‘s.  I don’t want to force my fans to do mental acrobatics just to be able to figure out which pronoun to use.

Compound this with the fact that it’s much easier to get away with not making a big point of gender when a book is text-only, and mine is NOT.  The medium I’ve chosen is probing and obtrusive and makes me feel claustrophobic- because it’s a graphic novel, from the get-go I have to figure out which self-image I want to throw in your face first!  For example, my current instincts want me to start the story at my mother’s funeral, and there’s no getting around the fact that, at the age of 13, in a highly religious family, I had to wear a black dress.  So my other instincts say, “Save that for later so you’re not cementing yourself in the wrong image,” but what’s really best for the story?  No matter where I pick (even up through Junior Year of high school where I finally got the courage to stand up to my dad’s dated religious ideals and standards and wear my first pair of jeans), it’s going to be painfully revealing.  You can’t hide anything with clever writing when you choose a blatantly visual media.

Part of me just wants the entire first book to be set in present day just so that you can get to know me before I start letting you peek at that ugly be-skirted past.  But that would be ridiculously boring, self-catering and not really get the series off to a good start at all.  I’ve been rather happy with the level of un-interesting I’ve been for the last couple of years, but I’m sure all of you would rather go read Spider-Man than the boring daily life of a very slightly deranged individual. 
I’ve worked at a food bank for over a year processing painfully dull government paperwork.  I live with other semi-interesting sentient beings.  We barely make ends meet each month.  Recently we went for burgers with the change we scrounged out of the couch and felt very devious.  WHOOHOO!!!  Livin’ on the edge.  Who wants to read that?

All the really juicy, meaty, ugly, compelling stuff happened in the thick of my teenage years- the moments winding up on top of Safeway with people I didn’t know calling me by a name that wasn’t mine and traffic cones I never would have stolen; or waking up in my van in the middle of a orchard as the result of one of my alter’s half-baked plans to drive to the city at 3am; getting fired from my first job because one of my headmates was dying and the other one- the one who wouldn’t shut up- was frantically trying to save his life; the time another one held me at ransom and nearly drowned me in the pond, and the time that same one made a bloody death threat on the neighbor girl; it’s the little sentimental moments like that which make up a rich and wholesome family tale.  These are the things you want to hear about, and specifically, these are the people you want to know, not boring old me.

But to get at all those juicy tidbits, I’m going to have to expose the visual aspect of who I was at that time.  And at that time, I was still finding myself in that maelstrom, still dressing the way my father’s religion dictated, still unaware of the source of the abuse by the brainwashing and supression, still under my mother’s hypnotic spell demanding who and what I should be despite my youngest instincts to the contrary, still trying (at least as a means of survival) to fit in, and, to get to the far-too drawn out point, still visually female. 

It’s the whole point of the story: the search for the reason why I was so fucked up in the face of a past that had huge chunks and holes gouged out of it.  The search for an identity in a mind where everyone seemed certain of who they were despite the fact that they didn’t technically exist.  The search for the REASON WHY my mother had been so unspeakably ugly- what had I ever done, or been, to make her do the things she did?  I was still painfully unaware of what had unleashed her poison on me, right up until just a few short years back, and it wasn’t until I revealed that gem, the holy grail of reason that she’d worked so hard to bury, that I found reconciliation and the storm inside my head wound down to a sweet and glorious peace (only briefly interrupted by the slight flurries of the past.)

So I’m faced with a conundrum- if I tell the story, knowing who and what I was from the beginning, revealing my maleness off the bat, it invalidates and waters down the search for truth, the Great Mystery that hung over my head for those seven long years.  It almost seems essential to the integrity of the story to bring my audience along with me blind and in the dark, and make all of them walk through the Shyamalanian twist that I went through in the end.  Yet, how do I do this without betraying my own sense of self?  How do I walk you through seven years of a female self-image, reveal the truth only at the end, and expect you to just do a mental u-turn with all my own conviction?  No, I can’t, not if I want you to know true Me.  You’ll go through the same thing my family and friends went through, which was get attached to a crudely constructed edifice standing in the place of Me while I was waiting to wake up, and when I rise to knock that over and take my place in your minds, you’ll grieve that mask, that person you THOUGHT I was- you’ll consider me an impostor and a murderer. You’ll hate me for taking away the person you thought you knew, and somewhere deep inside, you’ll never truly believe that the person you got to know was nothing more than a robot.

I’ve gone off on a badly constructed melodramatic rant, so let’s just wrap it up and say I’m conflicted about what beginning will truly be more honest, best for the story, best for me, best for the audience, best for my community, and it’s all really coming down to just deciding what’s most important to me in life.

Responsibilities vs. honesty.

10/4/11
7:01pm

After taking a break, noshing a bit and letting some thoughts flow back to me rather than trying to pry them out of my head with a crowbar, I’ve come back to a couple of delicate issues I feel I need to get off my chest in order to move forward with the project.

First of all (and I’ve been avoiding saying this all along because I know it’ll come back to bite me in the publishing of my book, but fuck it- it’s more than relevant to the topic,) I’m a transsexual.  FtM, to be precise.  After years of fighting through abuse, identity crises, confounding psychoses, self-doubt, social transition, constant misgendering, and all the other fun things you can think of, I’ve come out the other end as a rather happy and relatively well-adjusted 22 year old male with a job, a home, and staggeringly few complications.

Now before you go off and develop your theories on the corelation between crazy people and transsexuals, I’d like to set straight the record once and for all that the two coinciding in a single person are purely incidental and almost entirely unrelated.  I’m not a transsexual as a result of being insane, and I’m not insane as a result of being transsexual.  There is a connection between the two, but it exists purely as an external influence; the cruelty of a world that would mutilate its children into conformity.

I’d go into detail, but I’m sure the Book will cover it all, so I’ll lay it down as simply as this:

1) As a very small child, I asserted that I’d been born into the wrong body, that I was supposed to be a boy, and not… what I was.

2) My mother’s negative reaction: the abuse (physical, verbal and sexual), the mindwashing, the social isolation of the 13 years of imprisonmen- erp, I mean, “homeschooling”, and other unimaginable unpleasantries, set the stage for a trauma most foul.

3) Her death at my age of 13 inserted a twisted, socially inept, but finally broken-spirited “girl” into the Real World of high school to confusedly sort through the suppressed memories and dissociative episodes over the course of seven long, haphazard years.

At the end of it all I still came out somewhat okay, albeit with a lot of battle scars and a brain locked into a defense mechanism that still flares up from time to time in the most inconvenient and baffling of situations, but altogether I still turned out more-or-less to be the person I was meant to be in the first place: JUST SOME GUY.

But I’d like to take a moment to note here the chain of events:

Transsexual > abuse > 7 years of crazy

Now note what happens when you remove one of those factors:

Transsexual > no abuse > an alternate universe where I might have grown up a lot more well adjusted and found myself much sooner.

Note also, what might have happened if I weren’t transsexual, but my mother were still a psychotic raging abusive bitch:

Not transsexual > abused anyway > 7 years of crazy?

Or, if I’d somehow survived the abuse without becoming a raving Seven-Headed Beast:

Transsexual > abuse > normal transsexual

Are you starting to see a pattern?  The one didn’t cause the other.

The thing I’m most terrified about with this book, however, is what I like to call the Buffalo Bill effect.  Transgendered beings in our society are still a veritable boogeyman- little is commonly known about them, and they’re still, on the whole, feared and hated (or if you’re lucky, just generally disdained, ridiculed and laughed at.)  Thousands of us world wide go about our daily lives, not hurting a soul- in fact, most of us (or so I’ve seen) are pressed with this internal drive to live as upstanding, Type A citizens to prove to the world that we’re not out to rape and murder your children.  Think about it.  When was the last time you can think of a where a transgendered individual- SPECIFICALLY, by name- was on the offending end of any major kind of crime?

Bet you could only think of Buffalo Bill, a FICTITIOUS character, but altogether a popular negative media portrayal of transsexuals.  It pervades everyone’s minds and creates a negative stereotype, while the rest of us- hello, yes back here, THE REAL ONES- work tirelessly to negate the effects of images like this.

This pressure to perform as upstanding citizens, this “community responsibility”, weighs heavily on me as I try to figure out how to present my book.  There’s another stereotype that I feel pressured to fill by my fellow trans people, my community: the positive, upbeat, mentally sound, community oriented, socially responsible, transsexual role model for everyone to look up to.  The Example.  For some reason, we all “owe” it to our team mates to stay clean, live responsibly, and fit into a cookie cutter lifestyle that I thought we were trying to escape from.

Tell me, whatever happened to “fuck conformity”?  Whatever happened to “No matter what I am, I’m a person too?”  Whatever happened to “diversity” and “equal human treament” and all those things we were fighting for?  I get it, we can be whatever we want to be, as long as it’s acceptable.

Do you have any idea how much of my story I’d have to censor to make it acceptable?

The problem isn’t that I’m telling a survival story where a transgendered person survives the resulting abuse and comes out on top.  That’s what they would want you to hear.  That’s the sort of thing the Community thrives on- a clear cut case with a moral at the end.  But that’s not my story.  It’s much more complicated than that.  And I’m not that person.  I’m much more fucked up than they’d like you to think.

A huge part of me, a part marinated in guilt that can feel the barbs of the Future critics already opening wounds and letting in the acid, feels that I’d be abandoning the people who got me this far and undermining the civil rights and the little social respect we’ve worked so hard to achieve if I made a departure from the Formula.  If I tell the story with me coming away as anything but their Poster Boy, it’ll be betrayal, mutiny, irresponsibility.  I can hear them already.  But there’s a problem with that.

I’m NOT your poster boy.

I’m a human being, with a diverse and complex past.  I’m not just a transsexual with an incidental side-life of quirks and features to make me three dimensional.  So many people see these kinds of stories that way, but the truth is it’s the other way around.  I’m a unique individual, with hopes and dreams and hallucinations and talents and people in my life and stories to tell and all kinds of ugly things, who incidentally happened to be born with a mismatching brain and crotch, who was abused because of it, but that’s no more than an incidental detail.

I’m extremely concerned that people will zero in on the wrong detail, as they are so wont to do, and that’ll be the end of it just being a Story about a Person- it’ll become a cautionary tale, or a set of morals, or manual by which we’d be damning ourselves, or a standard by which to live, or an exemplary work with some kind of heavy-handed message, when that’s not what I want you to see at ALL.  I don’t want you to think, “So this is what Transsexuals are like,” NO!  This is what TOM is like.  I speak for NO ONE but myself.  End of story.

What it all boils down to is that my life has been an interesting story, and I’m not really trying to get at anything at all- I just want to tell the story, and tell it honestly.  I’m going to have to handle it carefully in order to do that, but I’m not going to manhandle it and mutilate it to fit some sick set of ideals imposed by an emerging demographic that, I’m sorry, just doesn’t seem to have a clear handle on its own identity yet.  This is MY story, not anybody else’s, and I won’t slice it up into something unrecognizable and fake just make it easier to swallow.  The best I can hope for is that people can just have FUN with it, and maybe be encouraged to try and face and understand their own inner demons with a little less fear than before, and that it hopefully won’t be misinterpreted as some heavy-handed preachy message.

It probably will.

The beautiful result of pain.

 

Oct. 4, 2011
6:31pm

My first thought on sitting down to this computer, irritatingly, is that I really should get some kind of small notepad I can keep on me at all times.  I’ve had three or four really good thoughts that I wanted to write about throughout the day, one of them not an hour ago, and almost all of them are lost to the wastes of time.  Let’s see here:

-That thing about children’s novels

-Something about the Doors (not the band)

-…something having to do with my priorities?

This sucks.

OH!  A rather good note about keeping very strongly to a certain point.  I want to revisit a recurring theme all throughout my books, something I learned in my teenage years and growing up around a lot of broken, battered souls.

I did, indeed, come cranked out of the other end of that meat grinder called Childhood in a weird-ish shape.  Some of my issues are more convoluted than other people’s, MAYBE.  Some people just don’t have the strength to put their pain into words, and would rather pretend at normalcy than lay themselves bare- and that takes a different kind of strength altogether, which I can admire in another way.  And some people don’t have to vanish down the rabbit holes of complex mental defense mechanisms in order to survive terrors that may have been even worse than mine.  The truth is that everyone carries around the hurt of their lives, everyone has a hard fight, and I NEVER want to play that childhood game that somehow got really popularized in the 90’s where I try and pretend that my trauma was any worse than anyone else’s.  I admire and envy the people who may have gone through a past similar to mine and somehow come out on the other end stronger, better, maybe even more “Normal.”  It all comes down to this- Life hurts us all along the way, and it makes us all strange and beautiful and hideous and incredible creatures, so why not celebrate the walking works of art that we have all become?  (I’d really rather focus on the effect than the cause, anyway- it’s so much more interesting.)

Feng-shui fuckaroo.

Oct. 3, 2011
6:16pm

I have to admit, “Cartoon Clinic” by Ben Cormack was not having the most positive impact on my life.

No, no- before you get the wrong idea, let me say that the book is incredible, the tips (though most of them were things I already knew) were spot-on, and I even learned a couple tricks concerning perspective and proportions that blew my mind.  I have no problem with ANYTHING in it.

Well, almost anything.

There was just one little thing that was fuckering over my artistic processes, by proxy, in a very obscure way.  It was one tiny little tip in ONE of the tutorials, and it technically wasn’t even a bad tip- it just wasn’t working out for ME, at this time.  It had to do with the tutorial on “Creating a Workspace.”

It was something I’d been thinking about for a long time.  Typing in bed and drawing sprawled out on the floor really wasn’t exactly conducive to, say, professional work, not having a terrible back, things like that.  I really didn’t have it in my budget to go out and get a desk, even from a thrift store.  But since I checked this book out of the library a month back on my quest to jumpstart my creative juices, and I came across a section that made it okay- nay, DEMANDED- that I find a proper desk in order to work efficiently, everything went a bit… tipsy turvy.

The quest to find a desk for free was a bit infuriating but, on the whole, dull and uneventful, so let’s just say, “I managed to get a desk into my tiny room through the Forces of Evil,” and pretend it was exciting.  (I do have to thank Mia for it, though.  I do owe her one.)  Anyway, where to put it was a different problem entirely.  Here we come to the insidious Tip:

*…rifling through the pages for a direct quote*

*…embarassed choke, stutter*

G’uhhh… OOPS.  Major malfunction.  I can’t even find the Tip I envisioned; it was more of an implication!  It goes, “Choosing a room with a good source of lighting is also recommended,” with an illustration of a desk with a window over it.

Here is where the trouble comes from.  For some reason, it seemed to be an absolute ESSENTIAL to put my desk under the window!  In order to do this, I had to swing my bed to face a different direction, and also have my desk half-facing the Wall occupied by my Mysterious Headmate (yes, I gave him a wall to own and decorate a while back as a part of a truce, and it’s covered with chaotic dark scribblings and drawings and demented and/or mutilated hanging stuffed animals and all kinds of fun things that give me a headache to stare at too long.)  In other words, I had the natural setup and energy flow of my bedroom all cracked out, and nobody was happy.

Furthermore, now the head of my bed was between a wall and the desk (which I was DETERMINED not to let become a nightstand for all my shit.)  It was a huge goal to keep the desk uncluttered and untouched with anything unless it was Project Related, almost as if it were some kind of unholy shrine to Art.  This made me very uneasy and awkward at night, because now I had nowhere to put shit like my alarm clock, my soft lamp was practically across the room and I had to get up to shut it off after reading which completely interrupted my falling asleep pattern, and if I wanted to put a glass somewhere, too fucking bad, it was going on the floor.

It was as if my work life was intruding very unwelcomingly into my sleep life, and the constant reminder of Work in the form of inconvenience didn’t do anything but make me more and more anxious about it.  I couldn’t do anything but toss and turn.  Plus, just the direction of the bed made me angry at night.  I hated staring at the wall that I was now facing as I tried to sleep; it had some of my more anxiety-inducing art on it, and for some reason it never occurred to me that I could just fucking hang it somewhere else.  My head got clouded, my reasoning went out the window, and I wasn’t getting GOOD sleep anymore- just retarded, tense, half-assed sleep that couldn’t be condensed into the minimal amount anymore.  When I finally DID fall asleep at night, I would keep at it like some kind of marathon runner, because I wasn’t getting the quality shit, and I was looking to squeeze as much Good out of it as I could.  Too bad there wasn’t any to be had.  Commence the first time in my life I’ve been more likely than not to sleep past 5am, or more likely to sleep for 12 hours a night than 6.  It got ugly.

Not to mention how uninviting my work space was, no matter how uncluttered I kept the desk proper.  Tell me, have you any idea how hard it is to work when the wall staring you in the face is the result of a phantasmagoria of alternately self-centered and self-loathing psychotic mind-vomit with a few spurts of manic, sick humor thrown in?  (Let it be said, here and now- whether you know who my Mysterious Headmate is or not, and whether I’m feeling generous tomorrow or not, and whether he is currently some kind of muse or maybe just a demon- he is NOT an easy person to live with.)  That Wall makes you feel like you have a brain fever just to look at it, but by Decree of the… Fucking Whatever, I can’t touch it, or that’s a violation of treaty.  I’m sure I’ll feel better about it tomorrow, but right now I’m bleeding spite and happy to be done with it, so ~nyeh~.

I’m off topic.  Where was I?  Oh.  To be more precisely to the point, the arrangement of the room was fucking with my sleep, and fucking with my work, and it was all because I’d decided that my source of lighting was more important that my peace of mind.

Now, all of this is DEFINITELY not to say that there weren’t a whole lot of other factors playing in, and it’s not an attempt to shovel the responsibility of not working onto someone else’s well-meaning attempt at making my life easier.  I’d go into the whole myriad of reasons I’ve been failing at art (and therefore life), but that would just get me down and be unproductive as all fuck, so let’s stick with the issue at hand and go into the deeper problems when I’ve got more stamina.  All in all, this is just an amusing reflection on how one little misinterpretation of advice can have such a huge impact on your life.

So, there I was this morning, after being released from a work meeting I was suddenly told I didn’t need to attend, surfing the web, looking for tips on how to de-hitch a creative block, reading the advice from the pro’s, when it hit me:

The feng-shui of my room is all fucked up.  I can’t work in there, I can’t sleep in there, and if I fix just this one little detail- hell, it probably won’t fix everything, but at least it might be a step in the right direction.  How in the FUCK did I not see this before?

I put my bed back where it belonged, and already the room breathed easier.  I put my desk on the opposing wall, which admittedly didn’t have the window all that near to it, but FUCK that noise.  It was like cracking an egg and all the sunny goodness just flowing out like some kind of godly epiphany.  Suddenly my room was enjoyable again.  I flopped on my bed and nearly screamed in ecstacy- I had my bedroom back!  Plus I now had my desk against a wall I could rearrange to my heart’s content and decorate with inpiring things and quotes!  I’ll include a few of my favorite here as a wrap-up.  I hope they’re good for you too, and I hope they don’t just irritate the crap out of me later on when I’m feeling more cynical.

More about October: the EVOD.

Oct. 2, 2011
6:04pm

There’s really only one thing I don’t like about the approaching Fall, and that’s the effect it has on my car (who, if you’re interested enough to know, goes by the name of EVOD).

Specifically, the shortening daylight means I’m stuck inside sooner and sooner in the evening.  Being a poor little shit, I can’t fix my rear lights (the wiring’s all fuckered up at this point) and so, after dark, it becomes painfully obvious that none of my rear lights work and I instantly become a cop-magnet.  No shit, I get pulled over 1 out of every 3 times I go out after dark.  The cops in this town are very bored.

In the summer, that’s a little easier to deal with- a curfew of 9 sucks but it’s at least reasonable.  Now, my curfew has already shrunk back to 7:00, and by november, I’ll have to be home by 6, or maybe even 5:30.  I don’t like having to be home by dark, I miss the midnight taco runs and things like that.  But, small price to pay for not getting another fix-it ticket that I can’t follow up on.

Course, that’s not to say my car isn’t already a cop-magnet.  To be perfectly technical, it’s not so much a car as a van.  A rape-van (or so it looks).  Here, I’ll show you some pictures of that one time we decided to draw all over it with sidewalk chalk.

It took considerable effort to get them NOT to write "FREE CANDY" on the side.

A little closer detail on the back…

A cameo by Happy Noodle Boy, and other paranoid scribblings.

Say, who’s that?

This little Person really spoke to me as far as character design; you'll probably see him pop up somewhere in my work.

We had fun.

I have a lot more pictures to add, really, but the upload function is taking for-bloody-ever and, glory of glories, it’s getting dark, therefore I have to go home.

I get tired of coffee shops.

Therefore, this post will probably get a lot more attention tomorrow, if I find it worth the time and energy.  For now, I go home and write.

Happy Oktobertime!!!

Oct. 1st, 2011
10:23am

October.  Gotta love it.

It’s when I start to see the candy aisles and the costume sections go up in the drugstores and Wal-Mart and they start selling pumpkins outside that a little energy thrills through me and I start to frolic down the street like a retarded poodle-dog version of Jack Skellington, declaring that the most wonderful time of the year has arrived.  People look at me funny.

It’s always been my favorite time of the year, because it signifies a time of freedom (and many other things) for me.  Specifically, Halloween- or any costumed event, really- has always been personally important to me, in a kind of spiritually empowering way.  It’s a time of penance, a pressure-release valve, a way of saying thank you (or at least paying a debt) to the Ones who kept me “sane”.

It’s as simple as this.  All year long, the Others have to pretend to be Me, they have to wear Tommy clothes and be sane and play along.  Because of their individuality, they’ve often come to resent me and the image I wear, but to remain safe and under the radar, they can’t just willy-nilly wear the things they like or act the way they’d want to, and it’s all for the benefit of the System.  More often than not, they will grudgingly bear this cross.

But on one night of the year, I can pick some movie or comic or cartoon character that most resembles my currently most active Headmate, dress up in that costume, hand the body over and say “Go to town!”  Nobody questions them because they think it’s just “Tommy getting all into character again.”  It’s the one time of the year I can pay them back for upholding a sane image, the one time they can truly be themselves, and because of that, Halloween is very important to us, if for nothing other than relieving tension.

So some people might look at my obsession with costuming, and think to themselves, “what a weirdo geek-freak!,” but they’d never truly understand what an important ritual this is for someone like me, why I’d go all-out and obsess over it and get so excited when this time of the year rolls around.  The truth is that it’s always been a time of peace for us, of good-will in Headspace, of thanksgiving and co-empowerment and self-sacrifice and love.  It’s when the people In Here are at a truce, and everyone is at ease.  It’s why I’d give up Christmas and Thanksgiving and all the other holidays just to have Halloween, it truly is a holy day for us.  There’s really nothing, no snide criticism or funny looks, that can take that away.

So every Halloween, you might see me walking down the street in some kind of weird, elaborate costume that I put way too much time and effort into, and you may think, “There goes the King of the Geeks,” but keep this in mind.  It’s probably not demure little old me you’re looking at.  It’s someone very similar to the costume you’re looking at.

(Now, I almost just revealed who I’m going as this year, but my Mysterious Headmate has actually requested my discretion on this.  He’s probably one of the first people In Here who really actually thinks it’s a bad idea, thinks it’s very silly indeed.  I think he’d probably rather go as some kind of terrifying bloody rabbit or something.  He is rather mysterious.)

More life shit. Setting priorities, etc.

Sept. 29, 2011
7:32pm

Obviously all these desperately ugly and depressing thoughts I’ve been having lately must be coming from a lack of drive, and that comes from a lack of direction.  You can’t have a drive without a direction.  I need to figure out my priorities.

I’m trying to root out the honest core of my problems.  The truth is that it’s been extremely hard to give myself a creative environment without the ability to cut myself off from distraction.  When I live with people, I feel obligated to congregate with them, particularly the ones who act desperately lonely without me (and there are some, believe you me, who seem to take insult at the very thought of hiding away in my own room rather than even just sitting in the same room watching a movie.)  The guilt is incredible- when I’m here in this room, I feel I should be out there, and when I’m out there I feel I should be working in here.  There’s not a room in this house I feel comfortable in.  The strain is breaking me.

I need to do what I felt I needed to do a year and a half ago but passed up on, and what I’ve felt I needed to do for far longer than that, which is find a tiny crappy little studio apartment where nobody would ever THINK of moving in with me, and isolate myself from all distractions, all people, and let my creative proclivities bloom there.  I want to plaster the walls with ridiculous things that I won’t have to explain, let my eating habits, sleeping patterns, cleaning tendencies and so forth change and evolve naturally without people questioning the strange and rapid turnabouts that always come, because if there’s one thing about me that seems to drive people the most nuts, it’s the inconsistencies.  Everything changes and there’s never a clear explanation (though I will say that when the explanation IS clear, it’s usually terrifying.)  I feel like I can’t live where my own insanity is fighting other people’s insanity for breathing room, where my tics and tendencies need to have an explanation and fit together like some kind of painful origami with everyone else’s.  I’m tired of accomodating.

I left my parents’ house because I was forcing myself to be someone I wasn’t in order to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach.  Obviously you have to conform to a lot of your parents’ expectations when they’re paying your rent.  I felt like a cheap sellout and I was far more willing to pay my own way just to be myself.

Now that I’m paying for a part of a house with five other people, I have managed to distill myself down to a purer form, but no matter what, when you live with people, you have to change aspects of yourself to accomodate them.  I still don’t feel pure- not enough.

Anyway, I’ve gone off track.  These ways of life are follies and idealisms and preferences, not practicalities- the practicality comes in when I can’t draw because I feel I’m somehow insulting my roommates by it.  I’d rather not have roommates at all.

In order to move out come December, I’m going to need a real job.  And in order to get a real job, I’m going to need to focus my spare days and energy on job hunting rather than drawing.  I know I’m not going to have the fundage to make it to a spring semester in Pasadena, or AI San Fran- if I want to do a spring semester at the local community college just to keep my drawing chops sharpened, that had better be the best of it, but I’ve definitively decided that I won’t be going to any of those fancy schmancy colleges till fall of next year.  I’ll have time to submit more scholarships and file for FAFSA.  For now, I need to figure out what I’m doing come December when the lease expires.

What it all comes down to is this:

I need a better job

so I can get my own place

so I can draw.

Bleurgh.

Must streamline my life down to its most essential forms so that all these things don’t keep blocking me up…

(I promise my next post will be less depressing, as it will have been written on Oct. 1st, which to me is the gateway to my favorite time of year etc.  For now I must go see to Other Things.)

Depressing bullshit; I have funnier posts elsewhere and you should go read them instead.

Sept 28, 2011
12:31pm

The terrifying mindgap continues, though my perception is getting kicked back into synch with reality at short intervals, for which I am grateful.  Being able to see clearly is a gift taken far too often for granted, and it makes me want to cry with relief every time the lenses shift back into alignment and I realize that Time is working properly and I’m back in control.  I keep falling back out of step, though, and every time, I panic at the thought that maybe this is the time I won’t be able to escape it.  Maybe this time I’ll be stuck this way, in this perception-shifted incomprehension of time, forever.  But I’d like to think it’s more like a phobia of your face getting “stuck that way”- irrational and silly.  Things have to clear up some day.  They always do.

On to cheerier things.  This last Monday I woke up out of a grog some time in the early afternoon to find a script and a crudely sketched layout page lying peacefully on my desk.  It seems my mysterious headmate (though mysterious only to all of you, on request at the consequence of severely brutal torture and maiming) had decided to wake out the of the Void and take the helm of the Lucky Joe project.  Good call, too, the humor is right up his alley.  He scripted the first episode (taking the humor in a direction that was completely unexpected but surprisingly pleasing) and did the layout for the first page.  I really wanted to ink it, but the fog I’ve been bumbling around in has been making it difficult to find motivation to make it downstairs for a piece of bread on the mornings I’m not working, let alone work on projects.  This is sick, when the only work coming out of me comes from people who don’t technically exist. (Smile and accept it and move on with your life.  Stranger things have happened.)

I keep looking at myself in the mirror and hearing the Demons. “You’re a lazy bum.  You don’t have what it takes.  This comic booking thing is NOT making you happy, it’s just making you crazy, and you’re crazy enough as it is.  You’re driving yourself up the wall fighting the ugly green-grey Procrastination Monster, trying to create when you’re not built for it; you’ve never been prolific and you can’t force yourself to start being something you’re not.

“The art has to pour out of you like it pours out of people who can’t NOT draw for a living, like it pours out of the people who were always drawing in class when they should have been paying attention.  You paid attention.  You took notes.  You were a “good” student and that’s all you’ll ever be.  You only drew over lunch period, what kind of dedication is that?  Look at you, there was a whole year where you drew one or two pictures total- that’s not a dry spell, that’s just someone who hasn’t got it and never will.

“Plus, nobody wants to hear your story.  There are a million better stories out there.  Better get used to corporate administration, or at least being an office jockey, and giving your lifeblood to the Faceless Kraken.  You know what I’m talking about.  Time to fade to gray like everyone else, give in, get a Pontiac, do what you have to in order to sustain yourself and nothing more, take part in the grind, become a cog.  The Machine can’t exist without cogs.  Not everyone can be the voice of a generation- get used to being a smooth muscle cell somewhere in the lining of the small intestine.  Nobody will ever think about you, just like nobody will ever think about the millions of cells around you, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

Everything in me rails against it, but the logical section of my brain, the part that thinks in ratios, percentages and statistics, knows it to be true.  I will pass out of this life essentially unnoticed, I will never gather the strength to make my dreams come true, I will never tell my story and pay my homage to those souls who deserved to be known, I will never garner a fanbase or become a best seller or the inspiration of a cult following.  I will dream of these things, like every person you know who dreamed of writing a book or producing a movie or becoming a star.  I will live in a fantasy world that keeps me sane, makes me believe I’m something special, just like everyone else does to survive, while being a small unnoticed piece of a society that dangles dreams in front of a machine built from people who believe that if they strive hard enough, they’ll beat the pack while so few ever do- the powerful locomotion of the western world is built on so many dreams that never come true.

I really really did mean to move on to cheerier things.  I have to admit that suicidal thoughts haven’t been far from my mind lately, which is unusual for me.

(Today’s my sister’s birthday.  Can’t forget to give her a call.)

Mindgap.

Sept. 23, 2011
2:51pm

I’ve been finding myself in a very strange state of mind since this mysterious oversleeping bout has overtaken my life over the last week or so.  Mainly, I’ve been watching my entire life run on autopilot, with a mind-lag of exactly 1.5 seconds before my brain has the chance to catch up and monitor anything.  It can be a little nerve-wracking to perpetually live in a state of receiving a memory-feedback loop of your activities rather than being in control of them, in the moment.  It’s like ongoing deja vu, but backwards- it’s not that you know what’s about to happen before it does, it’s that you don’t know what’s happening WHILE it’s happening, but your autopilot and body-response time is quick enough on the uptake to continue conversations etc. in the mindgap, and then you receive the memories of what your autopilot did after it did them and you have to try and make sense of all that to figure out what the hell is going on.

It feels almost exactly like a form of dissociation, except that I have yet to uncover any evidence that the person controlling my body is anyone other than me- just a subset of me from 1.5 seconds in the future.  Luckily, it would seem that my future self has at least some semblance of self-control and maybe even a cracked-out sense of humor because the feedback loop I’ve been getting hasn’t recorded me doing anything particularly destructive.  I haven’t had to jump up with wild eyes and holler, “DID I REALLY JUST SLAM THAT PIE INTO YOUR FACE, CHRIS?! I AM SO SORRY!!”  Sure, I’ve said a few really weird things over the last few days that I wish I had the opportunity to inhibit before they made their way out of my mouth, but nothing too out of the ordinary for me.

Also, do you have any idea how strange it is to type when you’re in a mind-phase like this?  A lot of gobbledygook spills onto the page, and it’s almost like watching a ouija board spell out a message where you just KNOW what it’s going to say, then you realize it’s because that’s what you were going to type anyway.  But since it’s your own writing, you get the chance to go back and fix things that you didn’t necessarily intend to say, and THAT feels like you’re editing someone else’s work without their permission… or something like that.  You know what, this is really difficult to describe.

Maybe I ought to just get my ass to a doctor.

(A note: Future Me also has really bad handwriting, because I can barely read some of the notes I’ve taken these last few days.  Is reduplicative spelling a symptom of time-phase dissociation?  I keep seeing recurring letters at the ends of words, like I think I’m not quite done spelling yet or some shit.)

Lucky Joe

September 22nd, 2011
7:23am

Last night I came home and actually slept for a solid 12 hour chunk, and THERE WAS NOTHING ENJOYABLE ABOUT IT.  Dear God.  For some reason I feel like I’m trying to escape a horror movie placed within the squidgy universe of the back of a cereal box… or something like that.  My brain is way too foggy and I’m having a hard time conceiving of going to work in an hour.  Surprised I can even spell.

Luckily, however, the night was not a total loss.  The oversleep-induced dementia of the long hours of the night blessed me with a charming little side-comic concept: “Lucky Joe”.  I have yet to figure out if it was just one of those things that seemed funny because I was 3/4ths asleep or if I’ve actually stumbled onto pure comedic gold, so let me lay it out-

A convict (Joe) awaits the judge to hand down his sentence for some unspeakably heinous crime.  The judge, through with being inundated with criminals in a prison system where there literally isn’t even room for the inmates to move, throws his hands up and decides to let the Fates deal with him as they might see fit, and turns him loose.  His final words as he hands down the sentence?

“May the Fates have mercy on your soul.”

They don’t.

From the second Joe steps out of the courtroom, celebrating what a lucky guy he is, the Fates begin to unleash their own brand of Justice on him in the form of increasingly wacky misfortunes and terrors.

It’s just a silly concept, a plot vehicle in which I can take a character and do horrible things to him in one-page shots, practice drawing him being tortured in various unthinkable ways from falling down a manhole to being chased by a pack of wild rabid infants to being abducted by extradimensional beings to just not being able to fix a damn pot of mac-n-cheese properly. We all love an infinitely unlucky protagonist, and even better if he deserves it, right?

We’ll see.

In Memory of Moe.

September 21st, 2011
12:01 noon
I’ll have you all know that I had a single solitary hair on my chin that was actually long enough to twirl around my finger in contemplation.  I called him Moe.  At the risk of sounding too Vasquez-esque, I loved me that little hair- I loved him GOOD.

He broke off yesterday afternoon, after a long, tiring period of contemplating exactly how meaningless my life is at this point in time.  It compounded my stupid regression into teenage angst by making me feel naked and lost without it.  It’s like that weird feeling you get after wearing a ring or a watch or something for five or six years and then losing it for some horrible reason.  You just go through your day with that uneasy feeling that something is missing from your body; an item amputee, if you will.  That’s how I feel without Moe.

He’ll grow back.  That’s the nature of hair.  Till then, I anxiously await the second coming of Moe.

(God my life is retarded.)

SYSTEMIC FAILURE.

Sept. 18, 2011
6:47pm

So, clearly my determination to write something related to this project every day splattered into the ground with astounding force and velocity after I got to a certain point.  I spent a lot of time in those few nasty little days around 9/11 reading and re-reading through the Old Shit, and (outside of being disgusted with my teenage writing style) it started to really fuck with my head to plunge myself back into all the craziness with such vigor.  I felt myself really starting to slip down the rabbit hole again and, as important as I feel it might be to the creative process to really connect with some of those old times again, my state of sanity just wasn’t having it.  My balance was going awry.

I almost shat my creative pants on that project completely and decided that if “SURPRISE!” was going to happen at all, it would probably take years and I shouldn’t force myself lest I psychologically self-combust in some unspeakable manner.  I took a lot of mental health days working on some of my other projects (The RapeMoth series, a one-shot bit called Tarragon and some unrelated doodles and squigglings if you’re that curious.)

The repellent power of one’s own past is pretty amazing, if you ask me.  At first I thought I’d really have a lot of fun with it, going back and extracting all the really crazy and ridiculous and funny things that have happened in my life and put them on page with ease, but I’m finding that less and less of it than I thought was actually fun.  Most of it was pretty horrifying and hard to think about.  Maybe I really should treat it less like a comedy, maybe with the occasional comic relief but altogether a drama, a dark comedy at best?  The aim here is to portray it as honestly as possible, and if I go out of my way to set the wrong tone in the interest of marketability, then it’s all for naught.  I just don’t want people to think I’m taking it TOO seriously.  That’s when you lose your audience.

Well, one way or another, I’ve decided to be okay with the fact that my first book will probably not make a whole lot of sense, but if nothing else I would at least like to have fun doing it.  That’s the sort of thing that shines through on the page- if you had fun creating it, then other people will have fun reading it, and that’s the important thing.  So I’m going to pick some disjointed incidents, exciting and enjoyable ones, squinch my eyes shut, throw some ink at the page, and hope for the best.

Defying Chronology.

Sept 9, 2011
7:28pm

I think the hardest thing about trying to script a story like mine is knowing where to start.

So many people would probably just stick their thumbs up their asses with that dopey-clever sly sideways glance they always get when they’re about to use a catch phrase and spout, “Why don’t you just start from the beginning,” after which they’d probably get that stunned-horrified look they always get after receiving a gaping chest wound from a protractor.  The problem (at the risk of giving away too much) is that my story just DOESN’T start from the beginning.  When you grow up with repressed memories, FINDING your beginning is really what most of the saga is about.

So many of the choices I made, based on the thoughts and theories I pursued, and the winding paths that my psychosis took, just wouldn’t make sense if I’d known all along what my beginning was.  A lot of the delusional behaviour came from not knowing which end was up, barking up all the wrong trees, and searching for (and finding!) the answers- just all the wrong ones.  Somehow it seems like my readers would be a lot more confused about my life if I told it from front to back- I didn’t find my beginning until around 2009, two short years ago, so really the beginning is closer to the end for me.  I made the decision long ago that not all would be revealed about my past until later books.

Unfortunately that will cast a lot of strange perceptions on my current image, but that’s the sacrifice you make in the name of a good story.  This isn’t about establishing my current boring identity with a fanbase.  This is about bringing people along on my journey and introducing them to the people they deserve to know.

So we come to the point- I know the start of my story is really somewhere closer to the middle (I considered telling it backwards, which would be kind of neat but would honestly make even less sense).  If you’re at all familiar with the Saw series, you know that each movie actually reaches a little further forward and backwards in time simultaneously, kind of like concentric time rings.  That’s one of the only ways I’ve ever been able to conceive of telling my story, so the big question is figuring out just where in the pond of my life the stone dropped.

Instinctively, I want to start it at my mother’s funeral.  That was the big turning point in my life, where my old way of life (the homeschooling, the abuse etc.) died, the repression lifted and I started hearing from the people inside my head.  Abnormal activity just exploded from that moment forward.  But really, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either, particularly from an entertainment standpoint.

For one, I want to approach this with humor.  I’ve looked at it from one angle and another, stretched it this way and that, analyzed it and it’s time to face the facts- there is just no funny way to write about my mom’s funeral.  Sure, corpses are funny and all that, and you’ll come to realize that dying was one of the best things my mom ever did for me, but there was just nothing all that hilarious about that day.  Relevant?  Sure.  Moving?  Certainly.  Mysterious?  That was the whole tone of the day, you’ll come to see.  The problem is that it sets all the wrong tone and will turn a lot of people away with a bad taste in their mouths.

Furthermore, from that point forward it’s years before you hear from some of the more intriguing and… “lovable” characters.  At that point it’s still just exposition, a lot of confusing and seemingly disjointed moments strung together leading up to where things start to come together and the real Story part starts to happen.  I do intend to tell that part of my life, because it is important, but to start with it would leave me with one very weak opening novel and no character interest.

What I really want to do is start somewhere around Senior Year, where my life was a carnival funhouse kaleidoscope of terrors.  I was splitting time with the Big Seven and my days consisted of trying to appease this one, defeat the other, work with another, figure out this one and clean up the consequences of another’s actions.  Fun days those were, and by that I mean I’m surprised that anyone who came in contact with me during those days survived.  I almost died too many times.  I take that back, I’m pretty sure I did die at one point, but let’s not get into that now.

But starting there would be like being thrown into the ocean during a hurricane as your first swimming lesson.  I’m afraid too much going on at once without enough back story will be confusing and off-putting as well.

The important thing is that I want to acquaint you with Lex and Jack in a semi-casual setting, without information overload, and give you the opportunity to get attached to the characters before you get distracted and decide that there are better things to read.

The other logical point would be to start on the day of the 42 Page Manuscript, a shorthand memoir I once haphazardly typed over the course of 23 hours with my right hand while holding a screaming pillow with the other.  I was really in the thick of the delusion at that point, convinced that a certain person would die if I let go of that dumb pillow; the hallucinations were rife and it was that moment that I really realized I was in over my head and should probably get to a doctor.

But once again, it seems like the nonsensical nature of it, especially without any prior explanation, would (AGAIN) be offputting.  I look at that paragraph and see how little it really makes sense.

This is a challenge.  But I’m thinking to myself, I have all these stories and memories, things are spilling out and coming to light, I have all of them ready to go and I’m sure they’ll all queue themselves up on page once I pick a place to start.  And I can always rearrange things if I don’t like my starting point, that’s the beauty of the creative process.

Just pick a point and… go.

Terrible Writing; Four Standards.

Sept 9, 2011
11:03am

Lately I’ve been going through all my old writings, trying to wrangle some sense out of my past, put together a coherent timeline, get some clear portraits.  I’ve got reams and reams of documents dating back over the last ten years, old journals, blogs, things written by me and not by me.  I’ve barely scratched the surface in the last week.  I have to say I’m really glad I had such a drive to document my life in those days, because things are coming to the surface that I was all too eager to forget in my pursuit of a “normal” life.  But if there’s one thing that’s becoming painfully apparent, it’s this.

I was a really insufferably, delusionally egotistical little brat in those teenage years.  I mean, who wasn’t, but COME ON.

Sure, some of the shit I wrote has a glimmer of good to it.  Maybe 1 percent of it, I can even use as raw material without having to rehash.  But so much of it was so obviously a monument to the I.Q. that I THOUGHT I had, riddled with ten dollar words and overly melodramatic prose with the intent to wow and intimidate rather than just tell it like it was.  It’s painful and embarrassing to see these sorts of things in your past.

Who did I think I was trying to impress, anyway?  Nobody.  I’m trying to break into the entertainment industry with this, so as far as that goes, it doesn’t matter what you have to say if it’s not at least marginally entertaining, and it WASN’T.  It was pretentious and ridiculous and embarrassing.  There are a LOT of teenagers out there with mental issues, and who wants to read about yet another one, unless it’s actually an enjoyable experience?  I’ve lived an unusual life, but that should be able to stand on its own- I don’t want to make my readers fight through a facade of frills and bullshit that will make it taste fake, a froth of word lace designed only to make my experience look more impressive than it really was.  So much of my life really WAS funny, powerful, depressing, potent, incredible, scary, without unnecessary fluffing.

I’m making a determination here and now- nothing goes into my book unless it:

a) is straightforward and to the point,
b) makes you laugh, cry, or touches on some sort of pleasing emotional reaction,
c) is relevant to moving the plot forward, and
d) is honest- painfully honest.

Sure, everything I wrote did indeed happen.  But it could have been told more honestly.  The words I reached for could have been meaningful, instead of pretty.  I could have told it more powerfully by looking you in the eye and saying it point blank than by dancing around on stage with elaborate costume design and musical scoring to complicate things and make your head spin.  I feel like I wrote my past in the style of a hollywood blockbuster when it could have been told like “Our Town”.

If I keep to those four standards, maybe I can make this work.

Directions.

Sept 9, 2011
7:15am

The exact directions I do NOT want to go with this project are:

a) self-worshipping,
b) overdramatic,
c) overcomplicated.

The directions I DO want to go are:

a) humorous,
b) self-deprecating,
c) believable,
d) sympathetic,
e) fascinating character study.

I have to keep in mind that the main mission with this project is finally giving life and memoriam to certain people, good people, who this world would otherwise not know existed.  They deserve that, if for no reason other than I never held up my end of the deal (to get them into bodies of their own.  Science hasn’t come that far yet.)

And for that deserved recognition to happen, the audience really needs to be able to connect with the “characters”.  If I turn them away with an offputting wash of self-serving “look how much more Weird and awesome I am than you,” that’s never going to happen.  It’s an awkward line to walk when you’re writing an autobiography.

I’ll be the first to admit that, on my own, I’m really not that interesting of a person.  I enjoy classic rock and sushi and I have some weird phobic quirks about the textures of certain fabrics, shit like that.  I have a weird sleeping pattern.  Fucking EVERYONE YOU KNOW has a weird sleeping pattern.  I remember one time I ran into someone with a “normal” sleeping pattern, and I thought that was weird.  Everyone has quirks and they’re dying to share them with you.

So when you strip away all the bizarre things that have happened to me, the circumstances I’ve been thrown into, and the people I share my head with, I’m probably just about as interesting as your mom or dad (I’m working on the assumption your parents are boring people, so if your dad’s an astronaut, shoo.)

No, the truly incredible people I really want to connect you with, I can’t take any credit for other than being the person who knows them.  You want to get to know Jack and Lex, and all the other Passengers who have hitchhiked in my car.

THAT’S what this is about- giving recognition to the Extraordinary people who, among other things, have saved my life, time and time again.  (There were some other Extraordinary people who tried to kill me, too, and others who I don’t know what the hell, but let’s not get into that one quite yet.)

First Pathetic Mutterings.

Sept 08, 2011
10:17pm

Some days I feel like there must be people out there with more drive and dedication to their art in their pinky toe than I have in my whole body.  Every day that I become distracted, get caught up in the people in my world, have to rescue someone from a crisis, or hell, even watch a movie, I feel like I’m turning my back on whatever twisted entity gave me my allotted minutes on this planet and a story to tell.

I feel like I don’t deserve the mote of talent I was given, that I should move over and let someone more desperate to create have it.  There are people who obsessively read comics growing up (heck, at least BOUGHT books), familiarized themselves with the names of the industry, practiced drawing every day compulsively, followed their heroes, chased their dreams.  Me?  I’m new to this whole comic thing.

Animation- I pursued it for several years before losing the fire;
film- I took classes, made a couple student films, wrote some scripts;
theatre- I involved myself at the Academy, set design, stage hand, acting, stage manager, costume design, played around a lot;
writing- THAT I’ve been doing for years, for the sheer pleasure;
art as a whole- painting, drawing, sculpting, dabbling for ages with no real direction…

But as a medium for the particular things I wanted to say, I’d never considered comics, which is weird because it’s the best of a lot of things I enjoy doing.  Don’t know why I never did.  I guess I was thinking Spider-Man.  Now that I’m looking at it, I couldn’t think of a better medium.

I knew I had a story I wanted to tell the world.  I thought for the longest time it’d be in the form of a movie, or a book.  I even briefly toyed with the idea of making it a musical.  Those were a terrifying few minutes.

Sure, this is what my whole life has been building up to, the story I’ve wanted to tell ever since it began to unwind and I realized I was living an Extraordinary life.  Sure, I’d be far happier producing my own work than working at a Food Bank, but who wouldn’t?  Where I’m falling short is the personal organization to make comic booking the biggest part of my day, and the common thread I’m seeing in the people who “make it big” are the people who stay up nights and days, lock themselves away, beg, borrow, steal and starve until they get that lucky break with the right publishers, and me?  So far, I’m just fitting it in where it’s convenient.  I make me sick.

Sure, I feel like if I wound up on my death bed and realized I didn’t get these things out of my head and onto paper, then I’ll die in a panic realizing I’ve lived a wasted life.  But I think a lot of people feel that way, and then what do they do?  Play GTA, that’s what.  I remain convinced that the only thing that really makes an artist different from the billions of people out there with a story to tell is the dedication and commitment to telling it.

I’ve recently shared my head with one heck of an unusual inhabitant, and the thing that really amazed me the most about him (despite his more… unsavory qualities) was HIS drive and passion.  In two of the months he lived with me, he kept a diary that thickened to a total of 162 pages.  While splitting time with someone who worked 40 hour weeks.  Much of it written in the middle of the night, around 1 or 2 am.  The rest of it written on lonely, isolated afternoons cramped in the bedroom.  And this was a document he never intended to share, with ANYONE.  That’s admirable.

If I had half the creative drive that he had, I’d have it made.

It seems like he wrote, every day, come rain come shine, whether he wanted to or not, separating himself from ANY people or distractions (granted, he really wasn’t fond of people anyway but that’s beside the point), always clacking, always obsessively looking for the next moment he could be at a keyboard, for no discernable reason (except maybe to keep his sanity).  He didn’t stop to consider whether what he was doing was marketable, or a waste of time, or even logical.  He just did it.  Maybe it was necessary, a channel for his frustrated energy to flow other than stabbing people in the face.  Maybe his situation was completely irrelevant to mine.  Nevermind.

The point is, I guess this journal is my attempt to follow in his footsteps.  He had it figured out- NOTHING got in the way of his creative processes, and I’ll be damned if I’m outdone by an alter who wasn’t even focused on doing it as a living.  Even if I’m not working on scripting, character/set design sketches, layout, etc., I’d like to at least produce something related to “SURPRISE!” every day.  I’ve already set up my bedroom with the little desk and lamp and made it my studio, I’ve got the time now that I’m working part time, and I just need to really start treating it like a job.

“Wanna watch a movie?”  No, I’m too busy building my own world to get wrapped up gawking at someone else’s.  “Wanna go out?”  Nope, staying in today, I’ve got work.  “Can I come over?”  Only if you don’t mind being drawn at all day.  “I’m trying to have a conversation with you!”  Oh I’m sorry, it’s really hard to write and listen to your inane drivel at the same time.  “This is the paramedic, that was a really nasty wreck and it’s a miracle you survi-” Okay, I don’t think I have a whippy comeback for that one.  The point is, I’m not allowing myself excuses to not create any more.

Time doesn’t stretch forward from now into infinity.  Time stretches backwards from the point where you die until now.  And it only gets shorter from this end.  There’s no way to extend that ultimate deadline.  When you look at it that way, you can really hear the clock ticking, and you realize that you really DON’T have time to watch that Ultimate Lord of the Rings marathon with your buds.  There’s something more important brewing here.

Ten years ago tonight, my mom died.  That’s as good a turning point as any.  Tonight is the night a new era starts.  From here forward, I make my living with my art.  And the only way to do that is by treating it like a true living.

Here goes…