Glow balls. Balls that glow.

In a dark room, with low video quality, they look really neat. The music was... unintentional and atmospheric, just what iTunes shuffle had up at the time, but I left it in because
a) it actually works pretty well, and
b) I'm a lazy horse-stealin' sonuvabitch.

2:31 am counts as Christmas morning

I am really bad about giving presents. Really bad. I just don't think of it. Couple that with the fact that I don't have enough money to buy myself a pack of winterfresh gum, and I am in a bit of a holiday pickle. Fortunately I have excellent last-minute oh-shit abilities to pull something together that just barely fulfills the necessary requirements (see my Vassar transcript for details) and so on the evening of December 24th I managed to make things for my brother and sister that I'm actually pretty proud of.

For my sister, I made a goofy-looking comic-book cover of her musician self, Sticklips (who you can hear on MySpace, and is really quite good). For my brother, I made an expansion set to the board game Ashlyn and I made for him last year, in which you play an embattled team of elves trying to keep zombies out of Santa's workshop. I WOULD put up pictures, but I think that might cheapen it a bit since they were intended as gifts, not for me to show off.

Instead, you can have THIS little tidbit. I really can't imagine what these gentlemen could be talking about.

Christmas gift update: I got a box of chocolate liqueur cherries! Chocolate AND alcohol in tiny delicious packages. I am already delightfully allergically buzzed from just two. What a fantastic holiday.

Olives make an excellent sausage substitute on pizzas. (edited post)

Preamble (does anything other than the US Constitution have a Preamble? That's definitely the only place I've ever heard the word used):

Off to your right, behind the capital building, you can see a lovely picture of a dolphin slumming around in the deeps. I am rather fond of this dolphin. Now, to your Slightly-Down-The-Page, you'll see several paragraphs of dreamy keyboard vomit documenting postmortem hallucination. I am also rather fond of these paragraphs. But unfortunately, I really don't like them together and next to each other. But nevertheless, here they are.

And now on to the aforementioned hallucinogenic fiction. If verbose nonsense was mops and I was an elementary school janitor, man would I be set to clean up some vomit.
--

After he fell down the well, he barely remembered the suffocation of submersion at all. His frenzied panic plunged everything beyond the first burning breath of water out of his mind. Instead, the thing he remembered was the cat. The buzz in his drowning ears lowered in pitch as his waterlogged brain slowed, becoming a rumbling purr. He looked up and saw the cat, ethereal as any ever encountered by Alice, sitting on a pebble-strewn shore and watching him patiently. He stood up in the surf, dragged his heavy, watery clothes up with him onto the beach, and reached out for it. The well had gone, and there was no explanation offered or necessary. Here he was, and here was the cat.

It shook its head, ringing the bell on its collar. And then there were more. Out of the waves, out of the pebbles, climbed hundreds upon hundreds of lithe ghostly felines. They ringed him, walking head-to-tail in concentric circles, a sea of shifting ghostly fur and twinkling, tingling chimes. He tried to speak, but his senses gave in to the vertigo of their hypnotic pacing. And then the aural seascape of jingling collars shifted again, to the pattering of rain on the endless South Carolina hills he used to know.

He opened his eyes to gray skies and a warm summer wind, the rain soaking him and warming his spirit. The rustling rain through dogwood and magnolia found his ears, and the rich smell of the Southern soil drifted lazily up to him. He lifted his arms and stripped his shirt off, inhaling this perfect world. A flash of brown drew his eyes to the trees nearby, and he watched the flicker of a white tail bound away through the brush. He chased gladly after it, unsure of whether it was a deer or a cat leaping through the wilds of his afterlife, but joyful regardless. The water closed in one final time, and all was nothingness.

where do you get a green bowtie?

I have three plastic bottles on my desk: a life water I stole from a pizza place, a diet coke I received free from a job interview at "TOMB" a sort of live-action Legends of the Hidden Temple dungeoncrawl in Boston, and a seltzer bottle I bought on the drive up from Vassar on Tuesday to mix with the leftover gin we salvaged from Port Ewen. There's some kind of symbolic trinity there if I want to look for it. Fortunately for you, I don't.

I recently picked up an "Employment Guide" from a free newspaper machine somewhere out and about in Boston, and its contents really confuse me. There were almost no actual job listings within. Rather, it was filled with opportunities for me to go back to school or receive specialized training to become a medical assistant, trucker, or nuclear inspector. My favorite is a colorful panel with the heading "Attention Shooting Sports Enthusiasts! Motivated telemarketers needed to fill immediate openings!"

What?

A note on the walrus above: I owed one to Sasha, but I figured I'd just make it public property. But it's technically Sasha's walrus, so if it gets up to anything unsavory, you can direct complaints over to our lady in Amsterdam.

It is, more or less, ok.

There is, in evolutionary theory, an idea that within a society, some genotypes may be selected not because of their ability to survive and reproduce but because their behavior, while individually detrimental, benefits the entire population and thus is worth keeping around. I believe the millions of people who are dumb enough to leave unsecured wireless networks named "Linksys" lying around fall under this category, and I love them for it. Without them, this post would not be possible.

In fact, neither would any kind of internet access from our new Bostonian den, which is still mostly made of cardboard boxes and uncertain financial forecasting. Don't misunderstand, it's a very nice apartment. We just need to make the transition from "corrugated hairball hacked up by a U-Haul truck" to "legitimate residence".

For those who don't know or don't care, there is a new World of Warcraft expansion out. I haven't played much of it, but there's a very strong sense that if I want to keep playing WoW, I'll need to spend some very serious time with it very soon, since all our internet friends are already at level awesome and I'm still level... not. As Penny Arcade put it, "if I wait too long it'll be like going to high school with an older brother who refuses to recognize you in the hall." But maybe that's a good thing.

It is noon. It is now time to unpack the kitchen. Tally ho.

well hello again

So. I "dressed up" as the Corinthian for Halloween, a man with an excess of teeth. Ironically, I actually ended the night with fewer teeth than I'd set out with, thanks to a high-impact dental brawl with a candy apple whose shiny sugary coating would have challenged most bunker-buster warheads. But $250 and a pleasant half hour of drilling later, my tooth is back in business. Better yet it's artificial, which I've just realized qualifies me as a cyborg. You humans can go back to your smoking blue-soundstage hovels; I've got lasers to calibrate.

By this point we've all voted. Bully for us. Mother suggested this morning that it might be worth it to save Obama paraphernalia so we can later dig it out of our musty horrible old man attics and wave it at our uncaring grandchildren as they sit in their virtu-pods- so we can tell them We Were There. It's a neat idea to think that this might be a major historic event, but I think I'm too cynical to believe that the kind of change people predict will really happen. The issue to me is that Americans are still slothful, ignorant, religious wump-bugglers who don't know what they want, and the political system is designed to make change slow and gradual. I will not tirade here though: I am not well-enough informed to make my particular brand of wump-buggling stand out as anything special, so there's no reason to inflict it on my (future) self or anyone else. That said... I'm just as fingers-crossed hoping-with-bated-breath anxious about this election as everyone else. God dammit I hope he wins.

Tomorrow I will make a pretty picture. Today I will not. In its place, I give you permission to picture an alto sax wrestling Al Pacino on the inside of a tube sock.

coolant toobs inclooded

My computer's dead, I'll get it back in a week. Probably won't update before then. They're replacing literally everything except the monitor. The most exciting part is this: because of the sinister machine's overheating, some of the silver paint on the part where my wrist sits had rubbed off. I didn't think that was a big deal. Turns out, there is no paint on that part of the laptop, and the heat actually caused the aluminum to oxidize into my skin. I don't think that will have any ill effects, except apparently an overenthusiastic use of italics.

Also, I've added something to the "Collaborative Fiction Project" Tim started a few weeks ago. The theory here is to use a line from a poem Karen wrote as the first line and jumping-off-point for a poem of your own. So here is my offering, double-posted because I am too lazy to write something else here today. I think the poem works better in the semi-ironic context of everything else up on the other blog so far... but it is what it is. Not like we're getting paid for this shite. Mayhap I shall illustrate when I have my tablet back.

I've sewed my butterfly chest all together
with straps made entirely of soup-stewed shoe leather
butterfly patches and butterfly stitches
the scars are still burning, the rotten flesh itches

To creak my neck forward sends head-spinning pain
through cold coils of copper I've hooked in my brain
I look down my body through eyes dried and wired
and electrically flex muscles long since expired

One leg's from a dead man; one leg is a wheel.
I've a cranial disc made of thrice-folded steel.
I've no nose to speak of, but that's just as well,
since I'm made of cadavers I've no wish to smell.

A mortal no longer, I've shed my old skin
passed through death and returned, transcending my sins
the police, when they killed me, my spirit unfettered
and thus I return, all the stronger and better.

I lurch down the stairs, my sucking chest heaving
to wish all the village a... memorable evening.

ten fifteens thrown to the halfwinds

The rocks were cold and wet; his feet slipped treacherously. Already there was a lightning-fork of blood running from just below his knee, and he knew his shins would be swollen soon, bruised by the uneven vertical stones. But he was higher than he had been a moment before, and though he couldn't see the top of the slope through the downpour, he knew it lay somewhere above, and on it, the lighthouse. To reach it was the only option now; to climb down these rocks would be even more difficult than the trip up had been. Somewhere below, the tide was rising, a slow and steady pursuer to his climb. The boy raised his bloody knuckles and reached for the next rain-slick rock.

Seventeen homeless men in seventeen cities reach simultaneously for seventeen stray dogs, offering their hands as if to say, "it's all right, we're both still here aren't we?" Fifteen of them are bitten.

There is a mote of gold in everything she says, if you can find it. Like the princesses who spoke in diamonds and frogs, she creates matter from words, and in parsing and panning we can become the tiniest bit richer.

The truck can still find you.
Look the part and get the man.
Shopping carts are no safety.
Six pence for a tie.

Look the part and get the man.
Lurk the unders; man the drains.
Six pence for a tie.
But the filth can cling on the inside.

Lurk the unders; man the drains.
Hold your bag of seeds close, and save it.
But the filth can cling on the inside.
Breathe it out when the cities are ashes.

Hold your bag of seeds close, and save it.
Shopping carts are no safety
Breathe it out when the cities are ashes,
The truck can still find you.

*snark taco sauces, this is the end*

Thirty-five stories above, Howard clapped the top back onto the mayonnaise. He didn't see the shadowy thing grinning behind the refrigerator door. If he had, he would never have seen anything else.

cranberries

Devastation and flooding rocked the delta today.

The ten-day intensive circus training time is gone, taking with it any hope that any of us will be genuinely productive for more than a few hours a day. While it was running, we kept a schedule of what we were supposed to do, hour by hour. Over the past few days I've tried to keep a similar solo schedule for myself, but realistically it might as well read

11 am- eat a soup, check webcomics
12 pm- watch the daily show
1 pm- think about cats

Ashlyn and I have recently burned through all 26 episodes of The Vision of Escaflowne, a disgusting blend of starry-eyed-romance girl anime and giant-robot-smashing boy anime, whose soundtrack primarily consists of a chorus of Japanese men singing the title over and over in Gregorian baritone. That, combined with the usual bullshit Japanese philosophy, reminds me why I hate anime. The theme song, seen here... reminds me why I love it.



Wow, it's almost 1 pm... I should probably get started on cat-thinking. I'm really glad the world isn't covered five feet deep in them. Really, really glad.

my car punched itself in the face

Still here. The A Different Spin training time is becoming less super-intense as we get better at what we're doing, but I suspect the dropoff also has something to do with the fact that we've been at it for 5 days now. It starts at 10 am, give or take cooking time of a bagel, and ends at 10 pm, give or take when we run out of lamp oil and muscular integrity. But it's jolly good fun, and we're all getting a lot better at everything we do. I have every faith that both the shows we're working on will end up ravishingly fabulous. The fire show is great; the daytime show will be great as soon as we can write some decent patter instead of shouting profanity at Tim and gibbering on about cranberries.

make your hadron last for hours with natural male enhancement

The Large Hadron Collider is not going to destroy the world; unfortunately that's about all anyone seems to know about it. To remedy this, the scientists behind it (who all appear to be attractive, intelligent, 20-something-year-old women) have released a rap video to help explain the purpose and workings of their rather arcane ten billion dollar project.

Science... is awesome. The fact that we're exploring our world and figuring out how the whole game works is great, and it makes me sort of abstractly sad that my life isn't on any kind of track to contribute to that great work.

edit/addendum: yes, of course anyone working on the LHC is intelligent, and it doesn't take a video to show me that... my particular combination of adjectives was just born from the fact that smart girls who rap about their giant underground particle accelerators are automatically members of the hottest branch of femininity: brilliant women with a sense of humor. Yes, the video is too pixelated for me to see how attractive they are. The point is, it's irrelevant.

Whatever, it's my birthday, I'm drunk. I'm excused.

Ricky tells me that those girls probably weren't really the scientists involved. I am unwilling to accept this hypothesis. Leave me my dreams.

Good morning, me.

It's my birthday. And so, at midnight, I put on the gas mask, fishnets, and dance belt (for Tim and Ricky's sakes) and lay in the tub for several minutes with the shower running cold, drinking a teacup of rum and cackling gleefully. I then went out to the living room, turned off all the lights, and juggled glow clubs while wearing an eye patch just to see if I could do it. When there are no parties to be had, one must resort to madness.

And now it's bedtime; tomorrow begins the great odyssey of A Different Spin.

Nothing to be done.

The Art Nouveau Philadelphia Society for Beckett in the Nude will have its first public exhibition this Saturday in the chapel at 7th and Hildebrandt. Formal dress is encouraged for audience members; Friends of the Society displaying badges will be admitted free of charge. Questions and concerns should be addressed to director Oliver McKittish, especially regarding the media coverage of the May 23rd shutdown of metro stations in the Glasgow area for tech night and dress rehearsals.

We hope to see you there!

I draw a thing, then I write a thing. Who knows.

When Captain Ferrier first invited us on the cruise I thought it would serve as nothing more than a lark, a flippant getaway to the skies aboard the most modern of airship luxuries. I was unaware at the time of the workings of such crafts, and thought them merely another item on the daunting list of things that would never be relevant to my own life, and therefore never worthy of serious research. Leave the baking to the bakers, the shoemaking to the cobblers, and the workings of highly inflammable airborne dirigibles to the obscenely rich, I thought.
However, when Melinda and I boarded the craft in person, I knew there was something here beyond mere goggle-sporting hobbery. There was a majesty to the swelling canvas balloon above; a regal air described even in the rudder fins on either side of the humming turbines on the rear of the ship, ready to carve the sky and cut wisping trails through the clouds. It was a commanding craft; I had never seen anything so grand.
But beneath the magnificent blimp there was an element that struck me as out-of-place. The entire "crew" of the ship seemed to consist of one squat, unpleasant mechanical man who, presumably due to his lack of a visible mouth, never said a word to myself, Melinda, or the captain during the entirety of our voyage. It clunked about on oversized mechanical feet, performing tasks which I, as an admitted aeronautical novice, can only assume were vital to the maintenance of our flight. At one point as we drifted above the Melbingian Sea, the automaton actually approached me, looking distressed, and would not leave until I gave it my pocket watch. The creature stared at the watch for no less than two full minutes before handing it back to me silently and clanking onward about its duties. I suspect I shall never know the meaning of this behavior, and it troubles me somewhat.
Perhaps when I have returned to the university I shall read up on these matters. Airships and mechanical men. I cannot name the curiosity this voyage has awoken in me, but somehow it feels truer than any previous pursuit I have undertaken.

turkey goes bad surprisingly quickly

Someday I actually need to learn Photoshop. But not tonight.

At least I'm not reading webcomics.

New things

First off... I added Stuff to the top of the page, and to the borders as well. Please tell me if they aren't working or if it all looks horrible, so I can change it to be more browser-compatible. Obviously I only see the internet through a wide-screen Firefox lens.

Secondly, I edited together a new A Different Spin promo. It looks like this:

again the text and picture are unrelated both to my life and to each other

He assumed he would need all fifteen of them eventually. There were social dinners, rain storms, and possible mining ventures in his predictable future, to name merely a few of the more probable scenarios in which a man might find himself wanting a very specific hat. One could never be too prepared. Plus, they were on sale.

it was his only friend

I've been waking up most mornings and writing. It feels nice to have a creative flow going, a forced, set time for world creation. Like D&D, but without having to have friends around.

The vaguelyamazing.com domain is expiring, and we don't especially want to re-up it. So we won't. Which means all my image hosting will go down the tube, and I'll need to go back and fix all the links that will break on the old bloggums. The Flash token you see above is hosted on FileDen, which is an ulcerous skank of a website, with popups, advertisements, click-through promotions, and other horrors of the plebeian web. They're the only file dump I found that allows direct linking though, and it's free. I guess beggars can't be choosers, and I'm glad there are services like that.

World of Warcraft. It still has me. I still love spending hours cuddled up with it, projecting consciousness into the little glowy screen as my sweaty wrists erode the paint around the keyboard and the cookies in my stomach bolster their fortifications of gut tubbery. An elegant mess indeed.

SAVORY CHEESES!

friends are for censoring

There are wasps, sometimes, that climb into my room on some grand mission of insect exploration. The screen on my window doesn't quite cover the whole area, and apparently there's a wasp nest somewhere outside on the wall of the apartment.

None of said wasps have expressed any kind of hostility yet; mostly they've just died quietly behind one of the other window panes or in the long-ago-forgotten and slightly-less-long-ago-encrusted soup bowl on the back of my desk. I think it will take at least five more of these intrepid little fools before I call any kind of maintenance people to Deal With It.

There is an online dating site catering specifically to World of Warcraft players. I, being both a World of Warcraft player and an internet sex fiend, decided to investigate. What I found was more of a networking site, a facebook kind of thing with its own friend networks and message boards and the like, where people leave almost-suave messages on the walls of everything with a vagina within 200 miles of their den. But that's typical internet. The thing that strikes me is that this is an online community dedicated to people who live in an online community. Recursive nerddom. But it goes even further. There is a guild in World of Warcraft (on Lightninghoof, a word whose uttering awakens an Ancient Wrath in Tim Ellis) dedicated to people who network on the site. So. A true supplicant in the church of e-poon spends time on World of Warcraft, sets aside time within his WoW time to go play specifically on the realm of the dating site, and spends time on the dating site discussing the time spent on the realm dedicated to the dating site. Goddamn I hope these people are having amazing WoW sex for all their efforts.

The site is called Datecraft if you want to see it for yourself.

And now, the end-of-post semi-creativity, courtesy of Sally Slade's endless patience in putting up with me: This worked a lot better when I was frantically stream of consciousness typing and with the unexpected google image search at the end. Reading it in this form sort of has the punchline spoiled.

But I trust you all to use your imaginations.

The rain in spain is spiky like cocaine

Being wet is nice.

There are lakes and pools and rainstorms and all of them instantly make me feel elevated and loosely immortal. They're also a great way to get exercise without sweating all over yourself...

Dungeons and Dragons is still the greatest possible use of time in the world: Cooperative storytelling and going into a world with your friends that you are creating together is the definition of "team-building exercise". Maybe I could take that show on the road... "Dear Corporate Overlords: bring your cubicled minion bonnies out for a few hours of escapism and shared hallucination. You don't need True Strike to know it'll be a guaranteed hit!" If only I could turn the storytelling skills of D&D into actual, publishable trash.

This is the protagonist of a fine little bit of nonsense Mike, Ricky, and I wrote this morning while making crepes.

...his initials are FAG... that really is too bad.

to clarify: every so often Mooch gets an email from someone with a name, request, and email address that is clearly nonsense and scammery. Every time such events transpire, there will be one of these posts. They will never be relevant. But reading the first one first will make more sense.



Hesitantly, but with infinite patience and the hope for a better tomorrow, Fernando Alvero Gomez picked up the phone. Ever since Kofi Mbambaa disappeared, Fernando had been assaulted by a neverending stream of desperate men trying to wire their questionable third-world finances through his telephone and email. But perhaps this would not be such a call, he thought. Perhaps it would be a friendly socialite, or a long-lost love.

It wasn't. All the bright hopes and uncertainties vanished with the first pathetic whine from the voice from the other end of the telephone.

"The account owner is late Fernando, I am heard you are the one to contact."

Fernando gritted his teeth. "Is this a solicitation call, my dear and grammaticaly destitute friend? Perhaps a need for some kind of money transfer?"

"My reaching for an American is underway, an unknown player who the account owner can claim as next of kin. J10million unclaimed is an amount no reasonable man could pass up, and if an American like you will just respond to my fabulous offer."

There was complete silence from Fernando's end of the line. The solicitor took it for consideration; it was not. It was the silence of unfathomable rage, drilled from depths of the human soul that no man previous had dared to glimpse, let alone attempt to harness. Fernando Alvero Gomez, in that moment, tapped such depths and found himself the stronger for it.

The solicitor, a shockingly Anglican-named man called Peter Henry, was still wet behind the ears when it came to dealing with dangerous men on the telephone; his preferred medium was e-mail. It would be his undoing, as well as, ultimately, the undoing of all life on earth. He had no inkling of the repercussions of his actions, and so drove on undeferred.

"J10 million unclaimed!" he announced again. "I am seeking for your cooperation and understanding to enable us claim the fund from the bank. Once the money is moved any lucrative business in your country. So as to enable me decides on what to do next."

Peter Henry heard a crunch through the telephone. He thought it sounded like cereal. A more informed person might have recognized it for what it was: the screeching peel of telephone handset plastic crushed in a fist of rage, splintered and shuddering through the telecommunicative wires it once protected.

Halfway across the world in a tiny apartment in Paraguay, the fire alarm went off. Fernando Alvero Gomez stood steaming, his very clothes cooked off of his flesh by the heat of his foolishly-wakened wrath, cackling in the insipid shower of the apartment's automatic sprinkler system.

Fernando's briefcase was not a heavy thing, easily lifted onto the bed and opened with three simple, practiced twists on three complex, intricate latches. Inside, the laptop sprung to life. "Good morning Mister Gomez," the cheery AI intoned through the pouring sprinkler system, "would you like to end it all?"

Fernando nodded, took a breath, and prepared himself for the void. He input the line of code, looked to the sky, and went to make a cup of lemonade while he waited for the missiles to fall. There would be no more telesolicitations. Not a god-damned one.

smarmy nightlings

It’s been a bad night. The kind of night when the howling psychopathy is calling, when the calling blacklingness wants me. Giggling and tapping at the windows, it is asking me to come play with it. It tells me things will always be different out on the mad road; that we can have everything we need from everyone who doesn’t need it as much. Kill and take, it says: slash the walls, burn the bills, and sow the kind of terrorific seeds that chill through the minds of everyone who hears. Never look back, never face consequences; if you have no pattern or motive you cannot be beaten, and if you're going to be alone in the world anyway, why bother? In a world of cooperative people, the individual willing to be the unspeakable cheat comes out on top.

Emo emo emo. Yeesh. No... I’m still good, I still don’t want that. But it’s there, and every so often when life gets tiresome, it comes out to say its leering, tongue-waggling hello. I suppose it’s better than its predecessor, horrific depression. Maybe. Why would I post this? Jesus I need something to do. I'm chewing a dollar bill. That could probably give a man unpleasant diseases. I should be working on any number of things; tomorrow I will be more productive and call more colleges and offices and such. I only got one confirmed show today, and it's a small daytime gig up in the midst of nowhereland, Maine. Things need to pick up. But I truly believe that they will. I just need to find some more money in the meantime. And more importantly, I need to make games, run through the woods, make music and art, and generally remember all the reasons that life is worth celebrating.

It's just been one of those nights.

It has not been 21 days

or anywhere near that. I suspect it has actually been closer to... three. Days are easier to keep track of when the numbers are smaller. But it is good to be keeping this monstrosity alive again. I think it has to do with unemployment.

Stacey wants to play Final Fantasy VII. I am not sure that I want to play Final Fantasy VII again, but I would like to have the recent experience in my mind. 60 hours seems a bit much to devote to such an endeavor, but it WOULD be nice to have fresh memories of subquests, airships, horrific chocobo inbreeding experiments, and a certain attractive jailbait materia ninja fresh in my mind once again. The last time I saw such things was middle school. These are dire straits, and should be navigated.

...maybe I'll just be productive while she plays, and juggle unobtrusively while she gets wtfpwned by the secret boss you have to kill to unlock Vincent. No, Stacey, I'm not telling you how to beat him.

There is a bear, sometimes. There is bad drawing, sometimes. Sometimes, these times overlap at the same time.

off-topical cream

I don't think I have Lyme Disease. I had a bizarre rash on the back of my leg which could -with a little imagination and squinting- be described as bullseye. Fortunately the rash itches from time to time, which the internet assures me is a good indicator that what I have is not Lyme disease, but is rather some kind of random flora- or fauna-inflicted skin condition that it would really be better if I kept to myself. And so, of course, I'm telling you all about it. Rational thought wins again.

Anyway, I think I dodged the lyme disease bullet (I just noticed that every time I've written that, I've capitalized it less than the time before). But it got me thinking: it's very possible that I could develop some horrible debilitating neurological condition, and with no money or insurance, there's not a hell of a lot I could do about it. My immediate reaction is sort of worrisome... I think if something like that were to happen, it would just mean it's time to go off and live la vida loca with the little time I had left, rather than try to scrape money together or beg friends and family, despite the fact that I know they'd be willing to help. I'm way too passive in terms of just playing the cards I'm dealt. I would do something about that... but to do so would be paradoxical.

A Different Spin: East Coast Edition slowly sloughs forward, and other opportunities are presenting themselves. Nothing worth writing about... I think that's why I've stopped writing; nothing noteworthy is going on.

But enough whining and personal business and actual blogging. Here is a picture of a man and an octopus high-fiving in a peach orchard. And isn't that what life is all about, really?

roosinetes

"It was a pleasant and breezy night, and the four horses each had a delicious bucket of bones. Mouthwash the Soporific, Malaise the Solipsistic, Moliere the Solecistic, and Harold the Bland gnawed gleefully and chilled the fuck out."

Fernando Alvero Gomez sighed and shut the laptop. Kofi Mbambaa, the lawyer, was at the door. His normally slick Colombia 'do was matted sloppily across his forehead, and there was evidence of some sort of rodent's recent habitation therein. Kofi took a bottle of pills from his suit coat, drank it in its entirety, and began his daily lament.

"Without our America backers, we will never to be able to transfer the money from the fifth princess Dubai, and the empire will be ruins! You must send out more of our desperate plea to the Americans if we are ever to regain our fortunes."

Fernando slumped in his chair. He thought about the handgun in his top desk drawer; how easy it would be to pull it out, kill Kofi Mbambaa where he stood, extricate his kidneys and profitable vitals, and continue his simple life undistubed for at least a few months more, courtesy of the black market transplant cartel. But he had promised the sweaty little man that he would finish the contract, and he had every intention of seeing it through. Even if it meant his novel would have to stay quietly seething on the back burner of his agenda. As a private problem solver, the customer had to come first.

"Kofi," he said patiently, "your princess is two provinces away. I can almost piss across the border. You have the money, the guns, and the total lack of moral scruples to get her out. Blasting in there with a tank and two hundred men would cost you what, two hundred thousand plus the assassins' contracts afterward?" (Killing the families of the dead was cheaper than paying widow and orphan benefits, by Fernando's math) "You lose more than that every day she stays in her father's castle. Kill the old fuck, steal his daughter, make your marriage happen, get your shitty little ducks in a row, and for god's sake work on your english."

Kofi's lower lip started to wobble. "But the Americans. Our email correspondence, we are making such progress and friendship..." His eyes began to tear.

Fernando saw it, and in one easy motion slid the drawer open. The silencer worked; with a tiny squeal Kofi crumpled backward and expired unhappily. Fernando walked across the room, closed the door, and went back to his computer.

"Mouthwash the Soporific, Malaise the Solipsistic, Moliere the Solecistic, and Harold the Bland gnawed gleefully and chilled the fuck out. Their riders would be home soon, and then there would be housecleaning to do."

giant birds

So far as we know, they don't exist. If they did, they would have been picked up on radar by now, or spotted by some wildlife enthusiast. Unless they are invisible, as some die-hard alternate reality lunatics postulate dragons to be... invisibly curled up in forgotten corners of the world or perhaps under our very noses, pining for their forgotten heyday sailing the blazing skies and devouring virgin maidens and fearless knights alike.

Fuck those hippies.

So ten days since last post. That's longer than I've gone before. Slowly I slip back to the old habits, under whose slothful intolerance no endeavor can survive.

I have ordered fifty feet of electroluminescent wire. With this wire, I plan to lace and line myself an Outfit, and hit up the 4th of July festivities in westchester county armed with glow toys and business cards. If that doesn't get birthday party and private lesson bookings, I don't know what will.

Here is Anton Chekhov, not wearing pants.

Ricky did one, so I did one.

Been sitting around doing a lot of nothing. A whole lot. Here is an over-photoshopped scratchboard WoW character sketch. Because WoW is all we've been doing. God dammit.

whiteboards get harder to erase, over time.

Senior week at Vassar, culminating in a fabulous graduation ceremony I didn't see. Here's the quick rundown, for those who weren't there and for me, later in life when I look back (from my yacht) and read over my youthful foolishness:

The week was scattered; there was no set place or group of people that was Home. One night was in Kingston, one was in the main suite, a few in the THs, a few in the TAs. One splendid afternoon was palooza'd away at Chuck E Cheese's, where a kid can be a kid and a wandering twenty-something can steal pizza, break the whack-a-mole machine, and climb inside the soccer game questing after wayward sandals. They sell beer there. We didn't buy any. I must have been ill in the mind.

I went to the bonfire, in a semi-impromptu disguise of a wig and empty-frame glasses. While there, I also discovered that cardboard serves as remarkable heat protection. Strap a tiny piece to your forearm and hold it up in front of your face like a 300 extra, and you can get within a few steps of a raging Vassar bonfire. I had no idea. It really works; powerful voodoo. Powerful voodoo a smart man would not have attempted while trying to keep a low profile. Oh well. Fuck em.

Life really does improve if you leave your laptop at home for a few days and just go find something to do. The computer is a vicious virtual novelty pit, and I'm seriously considering a shock collar for myself, to be activated every time I sit down in front of it. The part of senior week when I didn't have the computer turned out a lot more memorable than the first part. Forcing the issue of "and now we find something else to do" is incredibly important, as I'm sure we all know.

And now it's over, and people have moved on. Some will be seen again, others will not. All will spread through the world and find places to go and things to do. And I shall try to keep in touch. There are now more couches to be crashed on throughout the country. And now there's a horrible noise coming from below the apartment in Kingston, as though someone is sawing through the support pillars holding up my house. It really is worrisome.

It is late. I wish to orlop down to sea level and delicately consume a platter of jello jigglers by dangling them above my mouth and dropping them, shape by delicious shape, into my waiting maw of obesity.

expensive whiskey doesn't taste any different.

There once was a baker from Boston
who found kids in his shop quite exhausting
so he baked up with glee
a pink cake that said "FREE!"
and had cyanide baked in the frosting.

Stacey and I made a dollar store board game about frogs. They need to enlist the aid of Community Helpers like firemen, nurses, and telephone repairmen (from a Community Helper hearts deck) to overcome challenges like Ravening Hobos, Travis Craw, and Grandpa's War Stories and win gold coins. These challenges are hidden deep within five thematic zones on the board: the City, the Sea, Space, the Volcano, and Inside a Third Grader. It's a spectacular drinking game of absolute nonsense. I just wish I had a constant posse of people to help play, make, and test games. Board games, RPGs, Flash games... I want to try the Alternate Reality Game thing, fishing around in the web and across cities to find clues and race other players to uncover something that doesn't actually exist. Except that it does.

Forgive my nonsense; I haven't had a vegetable today.

more whining

On break for 2 weeks after an incredibly intense NCP program. Getting a show together involving 190 children, including two special ed classes, takes the life out of you. But on the other hand, getting it done and emerging the other side left me with a vibrant energy and a feeling of competence and purpose. But I let myself slide back to a few days of doing nothing and lounging around on the computer, and now it's gone. It's hard to even force myself to spend 30 seconds drawing something and write a paragraph or two for the bloggums. Being entertaining is out of the question for now.

There are some shoes in the world that look like they could serve as excellent vehicles . In the sprawling fourth grade games of action figure capture-the-flag shoes were always tanks, capable of mighty airborne leaps and crushingly awesome landings. How they were propelled or why they were stylized with laces and logos was irrelevant. They were powerful machines of terror on the battlefield. Those were the goddamn days.

he doesn't even need a suit.

For the past two days I've come home from work and not been productive, so today I promised it wouldn't happen again. And so I give you the result of approximately 200 minutes of work, and exactly zero minutes of rational thought.

Enjoy.

The truth is, I just wanted an excuse to meow into my computer microphone.

pots and pants and blowsifh

In space, as it turns out, popsicles don't taste as good.

The boy was afraid to leave his house. Without clean socks, it couldn't be done. He wasn't about to put on the dirty, crusty ones, and walking barefoot was out of the question. And so he starved.

Kangaroo pouches are not warm and fuzzy. They are external incarnations of the womb. They are sticky and amniotic. You'll never look at Kanga the same.

If confronted with all the cardboard we have consumed in our lives, we could produce extremely functional shelters, sprawling and leaning in a corrugated shanty town. If confronted with all the plastic we have consumed, we could waterproof it.

If confronted with all the dogs we have ever seen, we would be buried in dogs.

What did chickens look like before we domesticated them? Were they bigger? Are they a species new to the world and created by humanity, like Dachshunds and Furby™s?

When she made him the scarf, she had been afraid he wouldn't like it. Or that he would say his proper thank yous and give her a hug, then leave it in an unceremonious heap in the back of the closet. She wasn't sure if men wore scarves, or at least, if he did. She still knitted it though, and every hour she worked she held him in her mind. The scarf she gave him was warm and wooly, and full of life.

A single toaster strudel, left unattended, is capable of burning down your entire block.

the novelty of this is wearing off.

Again with the computer. As real life picks up, my need for blogging drops down. I do like the image-a-day (that I haven't been doing), forcing oneself to be productive. I miss webcomic format though, having something almost continuous, drawing and text bubbling and building on itself episode after episode. I just have limited need of Bloggery anymore. I want to move on and create instead of just recording. The blog was about a transitional period. Everyone knows what I'm doing with my life. Everyone knows how I generally feel about things, and how I generally work. I want to move away from the blogging and toward the creative output. Vaguely Amazing 2.0?

but seriously, enough soup ads.

Commercialism has gotten to me. I finally understand the purpose of ads, and their real ability to permeate the human subconscious and implant their cargo of insidious capitalism. It's dependent on the TV being constantly on.

Al watches a lot of TV, sort of. The TV is always on in the background, clamoring flickerously for a place in the spotlight of conscious attention. I mostly ignore it, but this media-vomit of sci fi channel and Miley Cyrus pseudo-boobies still assaults me with the same lineup of happy, jingly advertisements, dancing around the hotel air, probably twenty or more times per day. And so, I get the indie-sounding new Subway™ song stuck in my head while I'm walking around the park... and I keep buying five-dollar footlongs when dinner time rolls around. The model works. Blast the same crappy ad enough times, and people will open up to it.

I wish I could take a college class again. Ironically, now that I've been out of school for a while, I think a lot more clearly, and I remember and learn things a lot better. I have a drive for knowledge that I never had when I was at Vassar. I especially wish I'd paid more attention in my developmental and abnormal psych classes, since now I work with kids with autism and learning disabilities in my day-to-day work. But then again, maybe I should just learn by Doing and interacting instead of through academia... I tried to listen to an audiobook lecture on consciousness while I drove up here and ended up falling asleep at the wheel. Don't learn and drive, kids. Don't learn and drive.

To switch over from learning and productivity to its complete opposite... I've landed in a pickup Shadowrun game tomorrow at the local gaming store. I stopped in tonight on my exploratory run around town, lured in by a Munchkin window display, and found a group of friendly, stereotypical dorks making character sheets. So tomorrow I'm in for some classic cyberpunk/fantasy Shadowrunning. I'm-a get me some 9 mm pistols, a Rat totem, and a SmartLink system that runs on epinephrine.

...just like in 7th grade.

Shang Tsung can turn into anyone.

I was watching Limit videos today, and reading the comments on them. I wonder who the commenters (commentators?) are and how they found the videos. One of them apparently is someone's younger sibling, and one of them was a visitor to the college researching their academic future. I guess the Limit must turn up when you search YouTube for Vassar. Good to know we're presenting a solid front of hobos and jelly sandwiches to the next generation of pilgrims on their way to the Ivory Tower. Also, thanks to "The Game", my nipples are on YouTube, free for the world to view.

...hooray for friends.

This week I'm in Livonia, NY, a rather linear little town with a fantastic lake. I spend my afternoons wandering around said lake, juggling in the grass and sleeping under the trees. I do this because my hotel room is occupied by a Puerto Rican clown who starts drinking at 2 pm and is, at this moment, watching Ultimate Fighting Championship (he was a kung fu tournament fighter in his youth). I've made friends with the old man who works at Arby's, and the pretty girl who works at the receptionist desk in the hotel. I have a cooler full of strawberries, spinach, and beer. Every day at 10:30 am I eat a hearty brunch courtesy of the school cafeteria. Today was mashed potatos, turkey, and grape juice in a plastic bowl. All of these factoids serve no larger purpose, but they are a snapshot of life, and that is, after all, one of the purposes of my little bloggerydingo. Which is unlike a regular dingo in that it is not a quadruped, but like a dingo in that it eats unattended Australian children.

I do wish I had a refrigerator or a means of cooking so that I could live a little more cheaply. Also, all the fire sword fights on YouTube still suck.

an iPod is a friend sometimes

Nothing especially brilliant to write about; just putting up an image. Didn't get to do one yesterday because I was in Hastings sans graphics tablet, and because my internal defensive militia had conscripted all available body energy to fight off some kind of bizarre sleep sickness that knocked me out for the entire evening. Lament lament lament.

I feel a research paper coming on. I'm intrigued by the beautiful masqueradey world of Dave McKean and cirque du soleil, the world of gangly imp-like dancers and twisting dreamscape sorcerers, and I want to see how old it is, where it comes from, etc. Comedia del arte? Greek drama? As I try to come up with a performer persona for myself, I keep finding myself drawn back to that style of costume and demeanor, the masked trickster shaman archetype. Not that it's especially practical for working with kids, but it's definitely something worth keeping in mind if I want to do my own (our own) stuff. The people here don't do it at all. Most everyone in the NCP is from the Barnum & Bailey All-American-Clown school of thought, or in the case of my partner this week, the loud, boisterous comedy club juggler school. It's a very cool culture, and it's awesome to learn from it and make pieces of it my own, but it's not the place in the entertainment universe I want to stay.

Or maybe I'm getting things confused. I'm reading all this non-empirical spirituality and psychological mentalism stuff, and my head and philosophy are going to weird places. Not that I'm going all new agey: Science Is Our Friend. Maybe I'm just trying to mix and match everything I'm interested in. But maybe there's nothing wrong with that. Not enough hours in the day. Not enough friends around to DO things with.

like a street urchin but pointy

I am not buying a Nintendo Wii... yet.

Spent the day reading and writing clown/performer routines. It feels uncannily like writing a research paper and a Limit sketch at the same time. I also logged onto facebook last night and did a small bit of profile updating, for the first time in probably two years. I don't know that I care about facebook, but I suppose one's internet presence should get a shave and a haircut every now and then. I can't decide whether to change the Power Rangers picture or not. I do love it. I really do.

Having money in my bank account is leading to an increase in tiny expenses that would have been a big deal before, and that SHOULD be a big deal now. I can afford to eat out, I can afford to grab a candy bar or a soda when I stop to get gas, I can afford to keep a bottle of fucking Vitamin Water in the room on the off chance I feel peckish for a slurp of citrus. Of course all of this is an illusion, and I can't actually afford it, but I just don't notice tiny expenses anymore, which is very dangerous as I nickle and dime away my daily cash dollars. Suddenly I can see how people with real jobs shop at malls, a phenomenon that has always baffled. I should probably just accept that a healthy lifestyle involves spending money; stop worrying and love the dollar.



Why are my google ads still about soup? There wasn't even anything in the soup-titled post about soup. Simply by writing THIS I have created more soupLinks than anything that has come before.

Sunday night bedtime

I decided to try the whole "low opacity photoshop" thing that has worked so well for Ricky, so I drawred this for the daily shitty image (I know, the "daily" part of that hasn't been on, but I'll try to get back on it).

I have my own room in the clown house this week, for the first time. That's exciting. I can close the door and have my own space. I brought down the glow staff to play with, and apparently the equipment manager here is amazing at staff-spinning and told me he'd show me some things in exchange for my help editing the manuscript of his book. Sounds fair.

The Vassar weekend reminded me of everything that is good in life: late nights, lots of running, shameless flirtation with beautiful exotic people, and that breathtaking sense of standing in front of a crowd with enormous speakers, fading twilight, and glow toys. That scene and sense that something special is about to Happen, and you are a part of it. The festival.

Absolutely stellar.

You Suck Pronto

I have cans of soup but no bowls.

Fishcoat was a mustachio'd gentleman of the upper class who was never seen out and about without nine flavors of monocle, all of which were bitter and horrid. He liked to lick at least one around 4 pm, as an afternoon tide-me-over sort of snack between luncheon and supper. He never wore the same suit of clothes twice, and had never once been late for an appointment. Such was the world of Fishcoat. I am going to tell you how he died.

It happened the day the lollipop girl appeared on the doorstep. Fishcoat, who was enjoying his daily operatic in the bathtub, was most perturbed at the interrupting chime of the doorbell, which cut short his warbling rendition of the Barber of Seville. Fishcoat stood, his sudsy fat rolls bouncing soapily out of the tub and into a towel. He made his way down the stairs and opened the door.

A tiny waif confronted him, wielding a bushel of crystallized sugar-pops on a bushel of wrapped paper sticks. "BUY A LOLLIPOP!" she enthused. Fishcoat gasped. He did not know how one deals with children, especially when one is clad in a towel. He slammed the door in abject terror, and ran back to his suite. He opened the window, and peered down below. The tot was still present, still waiting patiently at the door. He withdrew his bulbous head, and assured himself that the lollipopper would inevitably disappear.

Five minutes passed. Fishcoat had clothed himself in a new suit, regained his composure, and poured himself a flagon of tequila. Such was life. But as he steeled himself for the impending floodtide of alcohol, he was snatched up in the hooks of a sudden and irresistable urge to go have a gander once again out the window. He looked. The lollipop girl was gone. No sweet candy vendor stood on his doorstep. Fishcoat smiled, closed the window, and blissfully quaffed his pint of pick-me-up, which immediately knocked him into unconsciousness.

In the terrifyingly pristine corridors of his upper-class mind, Fishcoat drifted. Behind his senses he heard a rumbling with a backbone of mariachi cornet. His mind flopped tequilishly around to confront this intruder. Juaxtango, he cactus loa of the wastes, loomed into his vision, his ectoplasmic tango shutting down all possibility of resistance. Fishcoat's will jellied. Juaxtango bellowed a psionic roar of maraca that carried one simple demand: BUY A FUCKING LOLLIPOP!

Fishcoat awoke with a wide-eyed howl, his pristine mustachios curled perplexingly upward. He leapt to his feet, grabbed his overstuffed wallet, and bowled down the stairs, flutting money unceremoniously in his path. The door, painted and bevelled in the most urbane style, was shattered by the barreling corpulent missile of Fishcoat's bulk. Unimpeded, the fat man ran on.

He ran as only a man recently confronted by a sombrero'd mexican tequila spirit can run, careening forth in search of the tiny fundraising lollipop vendor. Three blocks down the road, after trampling a bulldog and traumatizing its aged master forever, he found the wee tyke. Foaming and wild-eyed, he demanded a candy.

"one dollar and fifty cents!" she exclaimed, holding up one of the tasties to Fishcoat's flaring, fur-lined nose. The heaving rotundus snatched the offered sweet, and dug through its wallet for a bill of such small denomination. Having found none, he threw a hundred at the girl and bowed graciously before sticking the lollipop in his mouth and descending in a torrent of bottom-first fat rolls onto the curb.

The sweetness was overwhelming. Fishcoat closed his eyes and Juaxtango appeared behind them, cackling and backed up by a quartet of sombrero'd mexican towel boys sporting mustachios every bit as impressive as Fishcoat's. They handed the drunk and sugared fat man a mouth harp, and faded blissfully into the tequila-lollipop sunset of Mariachi Voodoo Hell.

a manly scrubdown

I have taken a shower, and am now clean. This alone is a rare enough event to be newsworthy, but tonight it is not the top story. On the shower rack, nestled in with the Head and Shoulders (which I forever associate with the movie Evolution) I found a marvel of modern marketing that I'm still struggling to fully get: Axe "Snake Peel" Shower Gel. I went to the Axe website to try to get a picture of this manfully bottled scrubble, but then gave up on the mission when confronted with a loading bar that informed me that my "mojo" was loading. But here's their product description:

Feeling more than a little dirty? Axe Snake Peel Shower Scrub with desert minerals + cactus oil deep cleans and exfoliates to remove dirt and dry skin. Use daily to scrub the slate clean.

Normally in ads you hear the word "exfoliate" as a flurry of rose petals wisp across a silky white backdrop, to mask the word's actual meaning: scraping the fucking skin off your body. To be perfectly honest I've always thought the concept was pretty badass, but I think having an "exfoliating" product in your bathroom without an accompanying double-X chromosome setup is a good way to get your ass kicked. By Tiny, the 300-pound bulldog-man whose only joy in life comes from looking through people's bathroom cabinet for sissy bath products and beating the living Loofah out of them.

But I digress. Cactus oil? Snake Peel? Getting men to worry and stress about keeping our skin delicate and fresh by conjuring up the dusty rugged desert? It's twisted, it's absurd, and for some reason it's stuck in my head enough to write two hundred ninety-two words on the topic and invent a hulking fictional bathroom snoop.

Anyway. My man-parts have been exfoliated by cactus oil. I thought you'd all like to know.

Everything, with extra sausage

My technology is breaking again. The computer's battery is dead, the fans are overworking themselves, and the CD burner seems to have cooked itself. I still have AppleCare for almost a year, so I might need to go harass, threaten, and politely request my way into a new computer at the Apple Store, since this isn't the first time it's made an attempt on its own life. Last time they gave me a new motherboard and swore the problems would never return. They were right, for about two weeks.

It's funny how whatever you're doing with your life, whatever you've done with the past few days, becomes what you're used to doing, and what feels normal. We are compulsive little animals of habit! Waking up with a day of nothing to do, at the parents' house, feels foreign now. Of course, I'm sure if I spent today and tomorrow lounging around playing WoW, by Sunday night that would feel natural, and I would resent having to go back to ClownTown in time for Monday morning.

And now... things that have been on my mind:

•We can work together in the future on some grand manifestive dig into the strobe-painted catacombs of subculture. There's no rush; we've got plenty of time.

•Toward this end, motherfuckers need to update blogs, send emails, comment, and generally stay in touch better.

•Mentalism, hypnosis, and unconscious are amazing. The more I read about them, the more I want them and love them. This is what I wish my Psych major had been.

•I need suggestions for how to attend Founder's Day. The alternative is unthinkable.

•I would hang out at skate parks more if this happened more often:



Google ads today:
Online Bible Study
Life of Christ
Bible
God

Good to see my internet reverend status is still strong.

go read Transmetropolitan.

the circus is keeping me busy, and there's not much to tell. I don't have my scanner or my graphics tablet, so the daily drawings have stopped too. This is a tragic state of affairs, and as soon as I can remedy it (by buying a new graphics pen) it shall be remedied. In the meantime, it's high time for an update.

I am learning. This week I'm paired with this guy who doesn't talk at all in his act. Which means I had to MC an entire 45-minute show, and do all the talking acts (including club and ball juggling). My patter is about as fresh as the cancerous muskrat that fell into the well three weeks ago. But it's mostly good enough for the younglings, and I'm learning what I need to improve.

I want to do a fire sword fight. Ricky, I'm talking to you. We need to get flamingswordfights.gay off the ground and into the airy dew-speckled dreamSky.

I tried to buy food today. That is to say, I succeeded in buying food, brought it home to Clown Haüs, and discovered that there is no room in the refrigerator. There is a towering, haphazardly stacked cityscape of leftovers that brings to mind a cyberpunk neo-York slum, complete with unexplained colorful oozes and territorial scrawl unintelligably Sharpied on the walls. There are three containers of cucumber dip. When I try to comprehend this or its possible explanations, my neocortex simply shuts down.

Neeeeoooocorrrteeeexx.

There are no visual words in this.

Sheldon DeLoach had never played basketball before. Nevertheless, he stepped onto the court prepared to do his best, and confident that he could succeed at anything he put his mind to and eager to defend his honor in the heartless arena of before-school one-on-one.

Martel Guapo had also never played basketball before. But he had a name that meant "the Handsome Hammer," which is really difficult to top. The bets were taken, the court arranged.

The ball went up. It should have come down and been snatched by the grubby, unskilled fingers of one of the two boys, launching a riveting game of fumbling, rolling basketball in the 7 am mists. The other kids should have cheered as the hopeless lads bungled shot after painfully easy shot. All this and more would have unfolded that day, if only Martel Guapo had closed the garden gate.

Alas, Martel Guapo had not closed the garden gate, and so had been followed all the way down to the school by the enormous lizard who had taken up residence beside his mother's parsley. Thus, as the ball came down it was snatched not by Sheldon and not by Martel, but rather by a joyful airborne predatory reptile. The beast sailed across the court, hit the ground, and savaged the rubbery sphere in ways that would almost certainly have traumatized the surrounding middle-schoolers had the ball possessed innards, guts, or other such gore-covered tasties. The carnivore lizard, who had been expecting no less, was quite put out.

Children screamed. The lizard panicked. These events, as they continued, formed what a Thinking Person might call a positive feedback loop. Sheldon DeLoach did so in his head -he was an intelligent lad- as he watched children and lizard whip one another into an elaborate frenzy of shrieking and flailing adolescent/reptilian abandon. It shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone that the panicking lizard dropped the ball and ran.

What did come as a surprise, particularly to a certain Marian Brubbles, who held the second clarinet seat in the middle school band, was that the lizard dropped the ball and ran toward her. It hit her at the knee-caps, and sent her face-first into the asphalt before vanishing into the woods. She chipped a tooth, and after the full story came out later that day, vowed never to speak to Martel Guapo again. Had there been no lizard incident that day, things might have turned out differently between them. In fact I can say with the greatest assurance that they would have lived happily ever after, somewhere in the Netherlands. But they will never know.

And that is why basketball has been banned from the county of Hamshap since 1987.

snakes driven from ireland

Ricky had the stupendous idea of watching Boondock Saints and drinking Guinness. It went well. I would rather have been covered in green body paint and surrounded by celebratory naked people with lots of piercings, but we can't have everything, now can we?

I can't seem to get .swf files to embed properly, so this madness too will have to be linked. The nonsense that can be accomplished within 10 minutes of sitting down at the computer never ceases to amaze.

hambone. bone from a ham.

First week of the circus job:

I have to get a lot better at a lot of things, a lot fast. But I basically knew that. It's like I'll be putting on a Barefoot Monkey show every week, with only one other person. That means there's no reliance on lines of choreographed moves to fall back on, just patter, music, and dazzling arrays of circus savvy. I've got to expand(refine) my music library, get at least a few acts solidly choreographed, memorized and performable, and of course learn to teach and control a gym full of 80 or more screaming children.

And it's that last part that's the hardest. All the circus skills are things that need to be personally taught, and yet my job is to teach five different grade levels five different skill levels, tailored to their cognitive and motor development, culminating in a show put on by the fifth-graders at the end of the week. I have to make a show, with discrete acts and spotlighting every kid in the fifth grade, in five days. Really challenging, but really rewarding when you pull it off.

The biggest difference between this and anything else I've ever done: you can't miss a day. Calling in sick, or really bungling a week, or even an act, can make a huge difference for these kids. I'll be putting these things together every week, but they only get to do it once, and most of them are incredibly excited to get the chance do spin a diabolo (or whatever) in front of their parents.

Thankfully the company doesn't completely throw me in unprepared. They're professionals, and they're only pairing me with people who've been in the business for a while, so they can pick up the slack while I learn the ropes. Ha. Two rope metaphors in one sentence. Continuity reigns!

The bottom line is this: its a professional performance job, and a professional teaching job, and I'm not QUITE qualified for either. But I'm being given the chance to work my ass off and get there, to work with international-level performers and getter done. I'm incredibly lucky to have landed it.

media platform

Most of us have no idea what is inside our pillows. We never look; we will never see what's in there. We will never even consider it. We trust that there is some sort of foamy faux-birdStuff substance on which we rest our heads, but there could be anything, as long as its texture kept up the illusion and it never strayed far enough from our scripted Pillow Expectancy Parameters to warrant attention from our conscious parts. Every night you sleep on something whose innards you do not know the color of. Whose innards' color you do not know. Then again I suppose I don't know the color of most of my own innards, and I get along pretty much alright. Still. Astounding some of the things we never think about. There are so many completely irrelevant, show-stoppingly useless things that one could think about if one chose to, but which are so stupendously unworthy of any cognitive attention that even thinking about their stupendous unworthiness is a waste of perfectly good neural traffic. This is getting recursive. Time to move on.

I have done all of my crappy five-minute image-a-days in photoshoop, with the drawing tablet, and I realized I need to stop doing that all the time. Drawing there has a very specific look to it, and it's hard to draw well on a tablet or, god forbid, a mouse (see exhibit A, below). Pencil sketches are fun, and they feel more satisfying to do. I don't claim to be a good artist, but I do draw BETTER on paper than on a tablet.

exhibit A (mouse-drawn)


I miss having parties.

wenus

god I hate that fucking word. Who the hell calls the skin on your elbow your wenus? Seriously who the fuck thought that up? I'd like to stuff ham under his skin and leave him out for a pack of starved dachshunds with crow-bars and sand paper. Of course, I wouldn't starve them myself. Who starves a dachshund? They're adorable little vacant-eyed balls of uncomprehending love. If someone's starving them, I'll punch the sick bastard. Right in the wenus.

And why doesn't the dishwasher ever clean that last goddamn bowl in the back row? FURIOUS

I shaved Hillary Clinton's head and put it in a robot. Why? Because this is America, and we're allowed to do that kind of thing here. God bless it.


Not that I have anything against the lady. I'm pro-Obama, but that has more to do with xkcd's endorsement of him than any real awareness. God dammit, I'm a fucking politics-linking blogger. I'm gonna go introduce a fork to my cornea and/or wenus. Fuck.

dressup time

This doesn't really... CAN'T really have explanation. You can click the clothes to move them.

Here we are in the wee hours of the morning again, and I'm torn as usual. On the one (rational) hand, there's the desire for that really satisfying feeling of curling up under an unreasonably large pile of blankets and going away for several hours. On the other hand, I'm completely awake, and enjoying being productive. If only I can find some way to force this feeling of productivity during the day. Maybe it's isolation that does it, other people having gone to bed. Or maybe some sense that the day is done and I can do whatever I want now... I definitely have a psychological work-delaying mechanism that keeps me putting off useful things through the day with the logic of "if I have fun now, I'll still have time to do the work later" that inevitably leads to me NOT doing work and NOT enjoying the procrastinative fun because of the looming snowballing pile of responsibility I'm so vigorously ignoring.

And so I end up in the wee hours, making bizarre little flash beasties. Clickyclicky. (same link as above)

dreams

Last night's dreams were clear and narrative enough that I thought them sharing-worthy. However, they're also a rather long read, so in the interest of space I'll just link to them.

licking blenderblades: safe? sanitary?

I have a tablet again, and I'm not doing anything with it. With it or anything else. A bright and creative future may come in the nearlybies, but she is not here yet. Yes... yes, I still suck at things.

Water tension is neat; I will always be hypnotized by watching a liquid refuse to leave its container and snake over the brim and down the side of a cup when you hold it at just the right angle. Welcome back to third grade science. As the hours get later my mental age gets smaller, evidently.

Watching my google ads change is an enjoyable pastime, and a whole new reason to update this monstrosity. Honduras! Unmentionable buboes! Republican primary candidates for the liberation of jamFetus07! Walk the walk google wordSnatchers; for my talking is stuperfundous inevitable.

two kinds of ice cream

I seem to have done it.

I seem to have found work that will actually be fun, and pay ridiculously good money. The circus thing today went phenomenally well; I got to teach kids diabolo, plate-spinning, and juggling, and the director is really excited to hire me. So I'll be doing shows and leading workshops in schools all over New York. Unfortunately, 50% or more of these shows will be in the NYC/Long Island area, which is, significantly, Not Ulster County.

In fact, its really fucking far from Ulster County. If my parents didn't already live in Westchester (45 min or so from the National Circus Project home base) taking this job would be unthinkable. As it is, it will probably mean spending most of my time either at the Familial Residence or sleeping in the NCP building (they have international guest performers, and apparently have several guest rooms and showers for people who need to stay in the area for up to a week) between days of a show. Fortunately I've never had a sense of one particular place as "home" and so I should be fine.

On the topic of things I've never had... this also means I might suddenly have A Lot of Money. And I need to decide what to do with that. Savings account? Tattoos? Gas-efficient motorcycle for all this commuting? First I suppose there are loans to pay off. Ick.

Well that's the life update. I'll be back in Port Ewen tomorrow probably, where I have a drawing tablet and can get back to the image a day plan. I really like doing that, and keeping creative/nonsensical postings forthcoming here. I don't claim they're all good, or worth reading. That's not the point. The point is to create at all, because discipline is not a skill I put a lot of points in when I was making this character.

Baffling. Waffling.

old habits

played a lot of WoW today. More than I meant to, as always. Self-discipline is my downfall. Given endless hours in a day, freed from the office, I cower from more than a few hours of juggling practice and end up tanking heroic dungeons and farming materials to get fire resistance plate armor to tank the Flames of Azzinoth.

...awesome.

WoW is not the problem. If it wasn't WoW I'd be reading graphic novels, or torrenting massive archives of Bruce Willis movies and tentacle porn, or updating this. The problem, as usual, is that I'm afraid to look myself in the eye and say "I'm going to do my best at this, and I'm not going to fail." And that's the only way I'm going to get to keep this circus job.

I always hated people who used musical quotes in their blog, but good ol Eminem's Lose Yourself came on in the car the other day when I was driving, and the words he told me were the god given truth. This is the chance to "seize everything I ever wanted" and I'm gonna be pissed if I just let it slip by.

Post is getting on toward "too long; didn't read". No more whining.

There are days when I shouldn't even post these

McShaman

I have somehow become addicted to the Japanese Ronald McDonald insanity video. Couple that with a long Friday of unemployment, and this is what we get. I'm probably ripping off American Gods... but I never read it:




she slurps the air and ice at the bottom of her Mountain Dew™
and paints on another coat of watery ketchup lipstick.
Totem aspects must be observed after all.
She grounds her will, drawing on and merging with
billions and billons served.
The candle bursts to life,
and she's lovin it.

neckties in the morning

I am once again unemployed. The feeling of quitting a job at will is a good one. My supervisors and I were having regular tense discussions about my database projects and the viability of working at home... the kind of discussion where everyone throws in a "heh" after every other line because without them an observer might think you were really angry at each other. To quote Neil Diamond, nine to five ain't takin' me where I'm bound. My hair is purple again, and I've got rent paid through next month. I'd rather wait tables two nights a week (making as much money as Americorps was paying me) and sit cackling on a street corner with a deck of Tarot cards and a bucket of glass.

But I may not have to. In a few weeks I've gotten me a provisional position with the National Circus Project, teaching kids circus skills in elementary schools. I like kids, I like the circus, and I like being done with work by 3 o clock. There is also a lot of money to be made in it. Hopefully everything will work out like it should and I'll have the perfect job; to forward this goal I'm devoting a lot of time this week to really buckling down and getting good at all those monkey skills I never quite got. Queue montage. I really do feel like I'm training for the championship.

As an addendum to this, and inspired by dear MPM, I'll probably be fucking up my sleep schedule just to see what works. I've noticed I get really sleepy around 3 pm; it was one of the things that made office life so impossible. So I think I'll be taking a nap around then for an hour, staying up until 4 or so, then sleeping til 7 or 9. One thing office/retail work has taught me is that I really do enjoy waking up early. So while I'm not trying anything as extreme as the Dymaxion schedule, I'll be playing around trying to find what gives me the most productive hours while still letting me feel rested and earning me that satisfying "going to bed" feeling at night.

today's hastily-created drawing (completely unrelated to the post, unlike yesterday's)

Sundown

and through those shattered streets I walked,
my batteries running grimly down as flesh fought to reclaim what technology had taken from it.
skin sloughs over subdermal titanium, scar tissue from insertion clumped in ridges healed and torn and healed again.
These eyes of mine, $5 million dollar eyes, scan restlessly for the inevitable, and I drag my feet forward, the slick trail of blood and engine fluid (shouldn't we have made them the same word by now) as forgotten and irrelevant as everything else behind me.
The scuff of a boot in the shadows is what tips me off; all the sensory augs I've got and its my ears, all-natural and God-given, functional but for the years of damage done by hammering gunfire, that let me know the bastards are there.
Five of them stumble out of the building, and the shrieking starts, wet-throated guttural wrath, choked on bile and foam. The hydraulics where my biceps used to be scream to life to match them, groaning for want of oil as they lift the four-foot barrel of the Piper up to sing its favorite song. I shrug the belt off my shoulders; it crashes to the ground in a slinking ammunition coil, stirring gray dust and forlorn newspaper shreddings. The Piper plays its keening pitch, gathering higher toward the minor key of twenty-five rounds per second. The others start to dance, ripped into jerking marionette frenzy by the joyful overture of violence before falling backward finally to slump in their already-congealed deathblood. The gun's neural linkup sends its software message down, <"stop;"> and the finger twitch release sends the whirring whine slowly to sleep. I pick up the belt and sling it back.

Motherfucking zombies.

opportunity knocks?

So. I just got an email from the national circus project saying they're interested in an interview. Progress toward a life I want! Huzzah! Let the conditional, preliminary good news ring out over hill and dale, echoing off the mountain peaks and causing tumultuous avalanches of furious unwarranted optimism! And let these rumbling snowy warlords wakened wrath rain upon the heads of the tiny nesting chickens, counted long before they hatch.

no rly... this is cool. I wants it.

pining for apples

I dread going to work tomorrow, and there's no reason for it. I'm giving a presentation on Food Webs to a class in Beacon. Important people in Suits will be there watching, and will be deciding whether or not to give Scenic Hudson a grant based on what they see. It will probably be a lot of fun. But still I just don't want to drive into the office.

Today I didn't go in, because I woke up and discovered my car wouldn't start. Jumper cables failed; Triple-A was called. And now the car starts, and all's right with the world. I could have gone in for the afternoon. I did not. Why? I have no idea.

I just want to do things like THIS with my days.