Cranial Stomp Comix

Cat and Mouse

2012-02-14T23:59:00.001-06:00

I trapped a cat this week. My wife trapped a mouse. There might be some Valentine's Day implications here, but probably nothing good.

Desk of Doom

2012-02-14T23:52:00.000-06:00

I like to think the ludicrous shamble of my desk at work is some kind of compost heap of ideas. But maybe it's just a shame.

Video Retrospective

2012-02-11T10:28:00.007-06:00

Two college-days classics, plus my two touching Xtranormal cartoon dramas, indexed chronologically for the nonsense completist.

Classics of Talking to My Mom
by: floppycrow
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Easter Debate--Georgia & Raleigh
by: floppycrow

Satan Repackaged

2012-02-09T00:09:00.001-06:00

Celebrating two of my favorite Satans, Chernebog from Fantasia, and Venger from Dungeons and Dragons.

In retrospect, kudos to the creators at Disney and Marvel Studios, for these revamped Satans of childhood. Not only are they fresher than just going with "Satan" or "the Devil," but it was probably the only way to get project approval. I'm sure there are others—the Marvel Universe always used "Mephisto," for instance.

It's not easy being the embodiment of evil in a G-rated world.

Crossings at the River Styx

2012-02-07T00:16:00.000-06:00


watch me change from pencil to ink in two easy steps

After a previous print and a few drawings of "underworld" subjects, I realized it must be time for a series. At the rate I work, it could take years. And of course, at the rate of damnation inherent in even imaginary people, it could take a lot of years to show a representative sampling of what crosses into the next world.

Birth of an E-book

2012-02-03T22:13:00.000-06:00


Buy me for a dollar!

After repeated failure to upload the comic book version of "The Monkey and the Ghost Ship" to the Amazon/Kindle store, I backed up one technical level and e-published the storybook from whence it spewed. As it turns out, Kindle Direct Publishing is much more tolerant of text files than of graphics. Still, I managed to include a cover (above) and a few illustrations.

With minimal effort, the book can be read on almost any device. I do not own a Kindle, but I downloaded the Kindle App to my iPhone and can now reap colossal rewards. Another cool bonus is that you can get quite a few classic books for free—I got "The Three Musketeers" and "The Mysterious Stranger," even though I prefer not to read on a tiny screen. Good backup entertainment for when I get stuck in waiting rooms or fall down a well.

No reviews yet—I gave the book file away to most of the people who would ever have bothered to review it, and I'm not sure if the site will take reviews from people who have not bought it.

Superclassic

2012-01-30T22:50:00.000-06:00

This one-page comic, done in haste for Eric Pervukhin's comic class in 1996, became a comedy hit a few years later on the University of Florida campus. Letters were written to the campus paper demanding that more comics in this vein be printed. Alas, such lightning strikes but once. Nothing else in my stable of pages has ever quite equaled it.

Skunky

2012-01-22T14:35:00.002-06:00

Around dusk on Friday, I smelled skunk. Not uncommon where I work, and I'd smelled it a few times lately. I figured it was on Dummy, the black cat that hangs around my shop. Well, the smell got bastard strong. I saw nothing at first, but turned on some lights and found the skunk, slumped by a mower.

Oddly sleepy skunk, seemed sick or dying.

Before approaching this close with the camera, I rolled a round ball at it, under the length of a flatbed trailer. It seemed barely alert, but the ball did make it stand up and raise its tail a bit. Then it just lay there. I threw half a hot-dog bun at it, another crack shot that nudged right up to the skunk's head. Little effect. I think it finally sniffed the bun.


In this enhanced photo: weird skunk behavior, ball and bun in background	.

Well, it was time to go home. I had planned on ordering Chinese food, but I forgot about that. The smell was quite bad, getting into my office even with the door closed. I finally chased the cat away, so he wouldn't block the skunk from leaving. Then I thought I had a good idea: leaf blower. Lots of dirt and sawdust on the floor would make it an unpleasant whirlwind that might drive the skunk out.

Well, it did make the skunk move. She just scooted under my mower and curled up. I poked the blower nozzle right near the mower deck, but she just hunkered. I just had to leave, but I left the garage door propped up on a brick so she could get out.

Saturday afternoon I checked. She seemed to be gone. But a more thorough search revealed her tucked under a shelf in the next room, right where I have to walk to open the bathroom door.

Well, I have a new roommate. New strategies for the coming week: water hose, lemon juice in squirt gun, hedge-apples rolled into corners, poison, maybe lasso training.

I also might need to get rid of the 20+ gallons of stale popcorn on the floor in a bag that I had been feeding to Dummy.

List Week Sputters Out

2012-01-14T00:00:00.001-06:00

Good words to say in 2012:
“Punkbag”
“dicey”
“manticore”
“crotchy”
“avuncular”
“bilk”
“niggardly” (thrill-seekers only)

Please avoid in 2012:
"FYI"
“Lock-n-load”
“handheld” (as a noun)
“asap”
portmanteaus in general

List Week Drifts Toward its Doom

2012-01-12T21:53:00.001-06:00

Pirate Ship Names Concocted to Encourage Heterosexuality Among the Crew

1. The Buxom Mermaid
2. Sodomy Sinks Ships
3. The Orphan Boy’s Had Enough
4. Hef's Wife: "She's Ballasted with Playboys"
5. The Wet Gal
6. Remember Tits?
7. Th' Bride’s Plunder
8. The Delirious Whore of the Sargasso Sea
9. Calypso’s Knockers
10. The Slave Girl’s Pearl Necklace
11. The Indecent Strumpet with a Penchant for Rough, Salty Pounding
12. The Talented Lady Parts
13. The Adventurous Female

List Week Hump Day

2012-01-11T22:35:00.001-06:00

I saw a DVD of 9 Dungeons & Dragons cartoons for only 2.50 at Walmart. I talked myself out of getting it, but now I'm missing it. Hence, this list.

Spectrum of D&D character alignments, with celebrity examples
1. Lawful good (Jackie Chan)
2. Lawful neutral (The clock-punching sheepdog from old Warner Bros. cartoons)
3. Lawful evil (Newt Gingrich)
4. Perniciously gay (Simon Cowell)
5. Bashful (J. D. Salinger)
6. Ripping Drunk (Mel Gibson)
7. Neutral Good (David Letterman)
8. Neutrally Delicious (the California Raisins)
9. Chaotic good (The A-Team)
10. Chaotic evil (Octomom)
11. Chaotic stupid (Fla-vor Flav, The Noid)
12. Neutral Neutral (comedian Steven Wright)

List Week Drags On

2012-01-10T22:09:00.000-06:00

List #2

Best ninja attacks, by rising difficulty level

1. Smoke bomb
2. Spiky metal puncture-pretzels (jacks?) tossed on footpath
3. Blindness salts
4. Nickel glued to floor, coated with contact poison
5. Celestial Monkey's Rape Simulation
6. Clothes pinned to the wall by throwing stars
7. Identity theft
8. Indoor Corn Maze
9. Stealth installation of faulty penile implant
10. Colitis Punch (creates or cures colitis, according to taste)

List Week

2012-01-09T22:58:00.001-06:00

List #1
Little House Standards by rising emotional impact

1. Caroline must accept a stingy price for her eggs from Harriet Oleson
2. Pa breaks out the fiddle and plays joyously
3. Mary goes blind
4. Pa sets out on an arduous search for employment
5. Neighbors die of a disease while Half-Pint selfishly eats their peppermints
6. Apocalyptic blizzard
7. Pa must slaughter the runt piglet in secret
8. Albert screams his way through a morphine addiction
9. Nellie Oleson tricks Willie into suicide
10. Pa looks tearfully to heaven in search of the Lord’s grace

Dental Synchronicity

2012-01-06T23:19:00.000-06:00

Just as women who work together sometimes develop sympathetic menstrual timing, my wife and I have apparently been married long enough that our dental cycles are syncing up. Independently, and at two unrelated dentists, we will both be in the chair this May 22. Open a new X-File, Mulder.

To hold your appointment card to the fridge, we recommend a photo-magnet featuring your top moment of dental squirreliness.

Lunchoids #1

2011-12-29T22:04:00.000-06:00

Tangerine as Anglerfish!


quite a bit cuter than the real anglerfish

Monkey Stuff

2011-12-28T22:15:00.000-06:00

Trying to come up with a cover for the comic, "The Monkey and the Ghost Ship."

watercolor on plywood

paper cut-out shadow puppetry, with cardboard strip

Writers @ Florida Intro #3

2011-12-26T13:35:00.000-06:00

Ok, I was really out in the wilderness on this one. I don't think I had even had a conversation with Oz, so I was basically introducing a total stranger. I solicited a few personal facts from her by email, but, as you will see, I didn't even see how "Oz" was derived from "Astrid." (pronounced "AHH-strid," not "ASS-trid.") Oz was in the fiction-writing track, not in the poetry group with me, so I didn't know her work, her voice, anything. Hence the random plate-spinning horseplay of this intro. To draw attention away from my ignorance, I made a prop cereal box where her name was the brand—something like "Astrid O'z." She must have like that part, because she wanted to keep the box after the reading.

Oz Spies

"Oz Spies, Oz Spies, Oz Spies, Oz Spies"—if you say it enough times, does it start to make sense?

I don’t get Oz Spies yet. When she gave me some stuff to say about her, she told me, “feel free to embellish or lie as much as necessary to make me sound exciting.” Oh Oz, you are exciting.

Oz’s real name is Astrid. I heard Dr. Losano won’t call her Oz, so I guess he’s left with either Astrid or Ms. Spies. The exciting thing about this is not that one name is weird, or that the other name is weird, but that she changed from one name I’ve never known to another I’ve never known, WITH ABSOLUTELY NO CONNECTION BETWEEN THE TWO. It’s like putting bread in the toaster and getting back a warm TV Guide.

As far as I know, the only thing I have in common with Oz Spies is that she was raised in Littleton, CO, and I wore a black trenchcoat in high school. She’s lived in Seattle, Portland, New Jersey, and Colorado. She’s worked as a law office secretary, a dance instructor, a choreographer, and as an extra in Ernie Bushmiller’s classic NANCY comic strips. After combing through miles of microfilm, I found some of her finest work. Here she is in the selfless role of Miss Cream, always letting the comedic glory go to that gosh-darn prickle-headed ham, Nancy.

Excited yet? You don’t know the half of it. Oz Spies’s name contains the name of one of America’s most beloved traditional desserts, the pie.

Oz Spies occuPIEs the 76th position on the periodic table and is thankfully among the roughly 100 naturally occurring elements. Typically there are more protons than neutrons in Oz Spies.

Oz Spies can ALWAYS hear the ice-cream truck coming up the road, and can identify over 900 distinct ice cream flavors blindfolded.

Oz Spies operates on an apparent solar day of 24 hours, and her equinoxes precess 360 degrees every 26,000 years. One teaspoon of Oz Spies weighs in excess of 12 billion tons.

And if that’s not enough, have you guys tried this cereal? (hold up cereal box)

Mighty d12 Perfected

2011-12-22T21:58:00.000-06:00

Although d20 still mocks my constitution and evades my craft, the soccer-ball-sized d12 is now complete. Here it dwells in adventurous environs, awaiting the toss of fate.

Complete with recessed numerals. Skull = "1"


Is it geometrically precise? No. But it weighs six pounds.

Woodcut in Progress

2011-12-13T21:54:00.001-06:00

Because this woodcut has been a drawing for a long time, and it's technically demanding, I took some pictures at a few stages, mostly because I worried I'd screw something up. So far, I haven't really blown it, but I'm not finished yet.


Nearly finalized drawing. Rarely do I go beyond pencil on the block, but this one seemed intimidating.


Started cutting. Added bird in upper right.

Cut most of the trickiest stuff. Adding some black to give more punch and ink-roll support. Decided against weird marsupial and carved him out.

Test print of upper portion. Mostly delivering the desired effect.

Whittled down a few of the branches. Tried wavy lines through the hips to boost the translucency idea. All the lower vegetation was easy, especially the white-on-black wintercreeper leaves.

Prints nice in first few tries, on my salvaged file folders. The background fell into place with some of the simplest vertical nicks and dots. Only thing I'm not sure about is this sharp "chin-strap" line on the jaw. It made sense in the drawing stage, but not so much now.

The Case for Bookstores, Part 2

2011-12-12T22:26:00.003-06:00

MR. CONTROVERSY

For some time, my Book Rack visits often coincided with those of a guy I named Mr. Controversy. He was an uber-talkative, gregarious fellow with a scruffy beard and 2-3 extra humans worth of heft, mostly around the mid-section. Pretty sturdy, though—closer to Hacksaw Jim Duggan than pre-subway Jared. He took it on himself at least twice to help Doug clean up and organize a section of books, which was nice, but it also planted him firmly in the mix for hours at a time. He specialized in un-PC, contrarian statements, such as, "Everyone in government should be lined up and shot, and I'm NOT kidding." Also in the business of sexist statements, he made comments only memorable because they made me respond with such uncharacteristic drivel as, "Well, let's just be glad my wife's not here for that one." He was the sort of guy who has a quick, semi-witty answer to everything, and he seems entertaining at first, but after five minutes, you realize he's a classic bullshitter. A jolly, helpful guy in some ways, but full of it, and full of being full of it.

Mr. Controversy was apparently pro- recent Frank Miller but anti- recent Grant Morrison. Specifically, he claimed to love Miller's All-Star Batman for it's ridiculous abusive violence, but hated Morrison for killing off the first Batman, etc. I don't think there was any real reason for his opinions, other than to disagree with me, and gleefully stir the turd. Actually, Turd Stirrer might be a better name for him. Christian Turd-Stirrer, because one day we got into a conversation that ended with him telling me, in all sincerity, that I should try talking to God.

I should have known better. He sucked me in by telling Doug, as I was checking out, that there was no way for a person to have morals—or be much better than an animal—without believing in God. This argument is sort of a pet peeve of mine, since it is one of the stupidest, cheapest views of humanity available, the same as saying that you'll only do right if you think there's some omniscient Superdad who will reward you or punish you accordingly. I think Doug was just looking at his computer and absent-mindedly saying "u-huh." So, I had to say something in defense of non-believers. I'd like to think I might defend them even if I were a believer, because I'm AMERICAN enough to know that you don't have to be a monotheist to be moral. So I pointed out that I fixed the roof of the Book Rack once, for no money, just to be helpful. Doug said, "Yeah, that's right," with just enough emphasis to suggest that he was either on my side, or re-thanking me for the repair, or sick of Mr. Controversy yapping all the time. Unfortunately, it led to that mild proselytizing we've come to expect from Christians. Not the loathsome kind from yesteryear, but still enough to goad me into fueling the argument with a few personal details. Finally, he asked me if I ever tried talking to God, which is a disarming move. I said, if I had, it had been many years—maybe as a kid. He said I should try it. I said something conciliatory, like, "Maybe." Then he went back to insulting women or something. When I left, he jokingly said, "Bye, and God Bless You."

The funniest part of these situations is Doug. He knows he needs to stay out of it, since he could lose customers by taking a side. So he gets a little nervous and stays pretty quiet. I've noticed a few times, pointing out, "Doug really loves it when these debates sprout up." He gets a nervous grin and says, "You're not supposed to talk about that stuff here. Just talk about Batman or TV shows."

This may seem like an argument against bookstores, but even when people annoy me, I think it can be a good test of will, and a good source for stories (and isn't that what a bookstore should be?). That said, I learned to ID the guy's vehicle so I wouldn't have to go in if I didn't feel like bantering on that level. One day I saw it and just drove on by.

Writers @ Florida Intro #2

2011-12-09T22:39:00.000-06:00

A fine example of pushing bullshit to its limits in lieu of actually reporting on anything. I never quite delineated Molly's role in the following creation myth. Hopefully it went without saying, that she would take the job of the Moon in this primordial cosmos.

Molly Kugel

Before the tide of time swelled, before the sun and moon were boiled from the sea, there was only water and darkness. There came to be a stick floating upon the water, and the stick grew into a great tree that lashed out with roots reaching to the bottom of the sea, pulling up mud to make places to stand. In every place to stand, there sprouted a tiny Burt Reynolds, and soon there were countless miniature Burt Reynoldses standing around in the dark crying like a bunch of babies. The big tree mentioned earlier got sick of the crying Burts and tried to find something to feed them. But since there was only mud and water, the Burts starved, cried, and died in massive numbers, creating a rich soil capable of sustaining crops, which still could not grow because of the total darkness.

Luckily, about this time, the roots of the tree poked into a buried egg that broke open to release a ball of fire that rose up and burned the shit out of the One Tree as it became the Sun. All the remaining Burts laughed, because they were jerks, but they were good with their hands. They made a dugout canoe from the scorched tree trunk. Soon they were all going around in this big canoe, from island to island, harvesting the crops that now flourished in the fertile sun and Burt-dirt. Lucky for them, the dominant crop was a primitive form of organic corndog, exactly what they liked to eat. But the sun was always up, so all the Burts got bad sunburns and cried again like wussies.

Finally, an ethereal, New-Age-type voice came from above, saying, “Shut up, you guys” and “Why don’t you kill yourselves?” But they didn’t listen. Some grew bigger than others. Bigger ones ate littler ones until there was one solid 12-mile-tall sunburned crying Burt Reynolds eating handfuls of minuscule corndogs. The New-Age-type voice took earthly form and turned out to be Molly Kugel with a gun. Molly shot Big Burt and made his body into the mountains, and his blood became rivers. She said in her New-Age voice, leave some of those corndogs for me.” She also said, “I wish I would have given Chad Woody some bio information before he wrote this hogwash.” She used the word hogwash because she once lived with the Amish.

I also understand she can “do your colors,” whatever the hell that is, so any of my students here for extra credit, if you can get Molly to do your colors, write them down and you don’t have to write the half-page review.

Folks, it’s Molly!

Writers @ Florida Reading Series Intros

2011-12-06T23:58:00.001-06:00

"Psychedelic Sluggo," one possible interpretation of Benjamin's ethos.

Twelve years ago, midway through grad school in Gainesville, FL, I inherited the mantle of MC for the reading series where we grad students read our work to an audience of mostly ourselves and our students, coerced by extra credit into being there. The torch was passed to me by the great William Bowers, whose previous year's introductions had been sublimely mindbending. He seemed insistent that I must be his successor, if for no other reason than my willingness to laugh at unjustifiable references to ninjas, and a critical exploration of the word "shitass." He also sensed that if I did not take the job, audiences might be doomed to endure blandly serious intros dripping with quid pro quo displays of quasi-respect.

Since many of my poems from those days are steadily self-demoting into juvenilia, these intros may be the best slab of my Florida legacy. If nothing else, I got away with a lot of squirrely hokum. People seemed to actually look forward to it.

*Lost Bonus Material*
In the tradition of William Bowers—as well as Carrot Top, who also attended UF—many intros were accompanied by props, maps, graphs, puppet shows, etc. This particular intro was accompanied by a visual display, which was an undershirt I stripped down to, showing a map of the south with some sort of comedic distortion, drawn on with Sharpie. I can't remember the details, but it illustrated the South as bloated until it took up most of the country... something to do with me not knowing the difference between Asheville, NC and Nashville, TN.

Reading #1: Benjamin Pryor

Several weeks ago, I told one of my roommates, “I find myself wishing for some kind of serious asshole among the new MFAs—some shitass who’ll just come in and piss everybody off and start fights in workshop.” He told me I should take the position myself, not to expect anybody else to do what I wanted done. I knew that wouldn’t work, knowing myself to be more of a cowardly, lurking sort of evil than a slam-dunk, spit-in-the-face, out-loud dickhead sort of evil, which is what we sorely lacked in the program.

When the new MFA kids showed up, I was disappointed. Though there were a few more-than-functional mouths among them, none were the goon I’d hoped for. For one swell moment, Benjamin Pryor showed promise. I saw him roll a cigarette, saw in him the same already-sick-of-this-place sentiments I’d developed this time last year, caught a James Dean vibe or two, and noted his all-around strapping good health and “air of the scrapper.” Problem was, he wasn’t an asshole, a prick, or even a son-of-a-bitch. When I heard he had a hearty thirst for spirits, I rubbed my hands together and hoped for a mean drunk, but legend says the man who drinks with Pryor drinks with a sincere mountain man with a penchant for invitations for adventure—”LET’S GO!” he says—to rivers, miniature golf courses, slaughterhouses and ass-kickings.

Mr Pryor was born in Chicago, but is now more Duke Boy than Elliot Ness or El Train. This is the western North Carolina mountains talking—Maggie Valley, Haywood County, where his Cherokee bits originate, all polished off at UNC Greensboro with a 1995 BA in English.

Other Benjamin highlights:
    • worked as a dishwasher, a blacksmith’s apprentice, a banquet server
    • has a 4-year-old son named Ibai, which means “river” in Basque
    (hanging out with Basques: another reason to expect trouble from this guy)
    • played with such experimental bands as Heated Pony, Plank Franklin, Jerry’s Finger, and STUB

Finally, I believe he accidentally told me his philosophy for writing and more when he said (to my query concerning this introduction’s content), “Use whatever works for you. If you want to make up mutated or exalted things, that’s fine. No gondiddy. Adiboo mongobby. A beedesign. Peace.”

Please welcome Benjamin Pryor…

A Dream

2011-12-04T11:36:00.000-06:00

Thanks for the Pancakes

I was pursued deep into a labyrinthine university structure. Down in a basement, among failed boilers, I found an unbreakable plexiglass pyramid containing coins and small toys from my grandmother's house. A gang of shambling, soulless assailants surrounded me. Smashing past them with the pyramid, I lost them deeper in the labyrinth but knew I couldn't go back, where they were in control. Complete darkness, then a glimmer of sun. Up a long, slanted stone shaft I crawled, to a rusted grate. My head and hands poked through into a bright porch floor where a small girl brought me pancakes to share with her pet rabbit. I knew this was the end of the line--going back was too dark and too dangerous. I would climb no higher on the ladder of contentment.

The Case for Bookstores, Part 1

2011-12-02T22:26:00.001-06:00

Christmas Cookies for Doug


Is Doug streaming Dr. Who or researching genealogy? You decide.

Amazon.com may have a bigger selection, but your local bookstore can deliver a more fully immersive literary acquirement experience. Especially The Book Rack, because its precarious stacks of books could very well entomb the customer, given the proper nudge.

The following shall be a mini-history of The Book Rack from my viewpoint, IN REVERSE CHRONOLOGY, as well as an argument for the awesomeness of the non-corporate bookstore experience. But first you must grok the spirit of Doug, the owner and sole operator of this store. Yes, years ago, his mom helped out occasionally, but you can tell by the state of the store that a woman's hand no longer enters the equation. In fact, the last time an outsider had any influence on The Book Rack was when a fire marshal ordered Doug to move some books and clear some aisles, or he'd be shut down the following week. Compliance happened, but The Book Rack is a high-entropy vortex to say the least, and the books always rise again.

Now, let us take a trip in a book-powered Wayback Machine.

Last weekend, while gearing up for a Book Rack run, I laughed out loud at a new idea. Naturally, my wife wanted to know why I laughed, because that's how we get each other's attention. I said, "It would be sweet if I could create a secret Facebook campaign, powered mainly by pictures of Doug looking cold and downtrodden in his messy store, where the outcome would be that Doug gets inundated with Christmas cookies." My wife has been there just enough to know what would make the idea even better: "If you could get a picture of him wearing his old yarn shawl, that would be best." It was the perfect image: in the winter, Doug settles in at his computer and often hunkers under a brown, knitted shawl for warmth. Yes, people might respond to that with Christmas cookies! I took my iPhone with me. Unfortunately, the shawl was not in play, but almost as good, the gray sweater with moth-holes, as seen above. Also, the random bags, the window unit insulated with big bag, the trash-bag as shield for roof leaks, and the general lack of glory.

NEXT: Meet the nutbags!

Coming Soon: Wonder Girl in Monster Land

2011-11-29T23:16:00.000-06:00

A grad-school classmate had me do some illustrations for her book. To top it off, a frame for an old-time "List of Illustrations."

Featuring "skull thistles," which do not appear in the book.

Penny Racer

2011-11-28T20:27:00.001-06:00

How many pennies does it take to cover a passenger car? Only the depressed-looking Hispanic dude in this awesome ride knows for sure.

Also, nickels for trim, gringo!

Products You Never Knew Existed

2011-11-22T23:00:00.000-06:00

You may find a thing that reminds you that, No, you haven't seen everything yet, not by a long shot.

It's just odd when such a peculiarity has clawed its way up to being a full-fledged commodity, complete with its own bar-code.

Occupy the Ozarks

2011-11-19T14:27:00.001-06:00

I got an email saying there would be an Occupy Wall Street gathering in Springfield, in front of the office of Senator Roy Blunt on East Sunshine St. It was late in the day on Thursday, so I decided to go. I made two signs, one nicer and one harsher, summing up my current biggest concern that others should worry about, too: big money co-opting democracy. I also stopped at the store, bought a ready-made "For Sale" sign, and wrote "AMERICA" in the slot under FOR SALE, an idea I stole from the internet.

Remember "Mr Yuk," poison's greatest spokesman?

I arrived 30 minutes after the 4:00 start time. Though fairly small and uneventful, the gathering was quite visible from the road. About 40-50 people stood waving signs along the curb along the busy street. A wide range of signs and folks, but unfortunately, many or most of the signs were impossible to read from a distance. The worst was a whole sheet of posterboard plastered front and back with magazine pages, all from a FORTUNE magazine article about jobs leaving America. While I’m sure the information was relevant, I couldn’t even really read it, and I was standing 10 feet away. Some others said, basically, “Don’t Cut Medicare,” “Preventive care equals healthy families,” and “Jobs, Health Care, Education.”


Not one of Springfield's premier singles markets, though you may notice one pair of overly tight jeans.

A couple of reporters showed up and did some minor interviews, both for radio and TV. A woman walked up and down the other side of the street gently swishing a big American flag. No response came from Senator Blunt's office as far as I know, but his neighbor, a lady lawyer, came out and complained that we were standing in front of her place, and she didn't want people to think she was being protested. Kinda dumb, but we scooched down 20 feet to appease her. The best part was that it angered this old classic Vietnam-era hippie man who kept saying he wasn’t going to move, fuck her, we needed to get more militant, but the calm young Euro-style hipster who seemed to be in charge kept cooling him down and arguing against using the word "militant," with which I nodded agreement. I didn’t really talk much. The stocky, hispanic-looking guy to my right was getting cold. Most of the people were underdressed for the chill: it was a decent day, until you stood still.

There were many flip-offs and mad faces from the traffic even though the signs were no more extreme than "We are the 99%" and "No War in Iran". I never even used my "Plutocracy is for Assholes" one, because of the overall positivity/non-militancy of the gathering. But there were easily three times as many good responses, if honking can be reliably counted as supportive. I talked a little to the guy to my left, with “We are the 99%” on an orange sheet of paper on a clipboard. We got a few laughs out of the number of women who flipped us off. “There’s a lot of hate out there,” he said. But we agreed that the response was mostly good, especially for Springfield, which is relatively conservative and repressed. He said he was from Chicago, where there was more protesting, and that sometimes if he was supposed to write his race down on paper, he wrote “Chicagoan.” He wasn’t as funny as he wanted to be, but I guess I liked him.

After I’d been there for an hour, everybody started getting cold and going home. I went back to work. I didn’t expect any real payoff to come from this. Springfield is home to nothing, in the world of big finance or big government, but at least Roy Blunt should know that we’re here, even here. I’m sure he could give two shits about any of it. He’s a long-time Washington fixture, bought and sold long ago. Now he’s like an anti-Obi-Wan: if we strike him down by voting, he’ll just come back more powerful than before, as one of the Sith lobbyists he takes payola from now.

Halloween 2

2011-11-06T09:09:00.001-06:00


IMG #1666 from my iPhone: Potato Devil roasting a potato victim

The neighbor dogs popped some kind of ball.

Sophie, a little camera shy, will paw through your arm skin with her carborundum paws.

Upon closer inspection, it seemed to be a skull decoration for Halloween.

Good job, Sophie!

Halloween Report

2011-11-02T01:22:00.000-05:00

On the shopping trip where we bought candy, nothing Halloween-related measured up in grisly intent the way these cat treats did:


Is this a feline fantasy, as filtered through the consumer's surrogate desires?


Oh, the carnage.

Our neighborhood has lackluster Halloween gumption, but there are always a handful of trick-or-treaters willing to give it a go. This year I decided to force more vigorous interaction by making a game show effort. I deployed a couple of decorations, along with my 12-sided lawn die, and a chart of corresponding prizes.

The die-rolling turned out to be a good move. After the initial confusion, most kids got into it, and were impressed with my homemade die. I should have told them I made it with a chainsaw—not only true, but it would have added some Halloween terror-craft. Parents liked the oddball spectacle it provided, except for those parents waiting in their car, who found it a waste of time and gasoline.

A Hispanic dad character got especially excited about the game, commanding about nine kids (doubt they were all his own) to line up to roll, and then he did it at the end, which was good—he earned it.

A kid dressed like Darth Vader dropped the die on my door threshold, almost on his foot, possibly because of complications from his mask. Only one semi-clever teen tried to walk off with the die, perhaps absent-mindedly, although it's hard not to realize you have a basketball-sized wooden dodecahedron in your hands.

I had a bunch of little LED keychains left behind in an office I had to clean out, so this was a good chance to get rid of them. They are actually a dream treat item, as they also contain a small compass and a whistle. I would have been blown away to get such a thing as a kid, though I might have scraped off the Allstate logo and replaced it with a sticker or drawing.

Devil's Roll-Call

2011-10-27T20:38:00.000-05:00

Puckishly purloined for your pleasure from the internet's rich inventories: A verbal fiend folio, for the run up to Halloween:

What a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years ago and upwards, to those chosen few who had the good luck to be born on the eve of this festival of all festivals; when the whole earth was so overrun with ghosts, boggles, bloody-bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui, brownies, bugbears, black dogs, specters, shellycoats, scarecrows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-Goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbies, hob-thrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mum-pokers, Jemmy-burties, urchins, satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs, calcars, nymphs, imps, incubuses, spoorns, men-in-the-oak, hell-wains, fire-drakes, kit-a-can-sticks, Tom-tumblers, melch-dicks, larrs, kitty-witches, hobby-lanthorns, Dick-a-Tuesdays, Elf-fires, Gyl-burnt-tales, knockers, elves, rawheads, Meg-with-the-wads, old-shocks, ouphs, pad-foots, pixies, pictrees, giants, dwarfs, Tom-pokers, tutgots, snapdragons, sprets, spunks, conjurers, thurses, spurns, tantarrabobs, swaithes, tints, tod-lowries, Jack-in-the-Wads, mormos, changelings, redcaps, yeth-hounds, colt-pixies, Tom-thumbs, black-bugs, boggarts, scar-bugs, shag-foals, hodge-pochers, hob-thrushes, bugs, bull-beggars, bygorns, bolls, caddies, bomen, brags, wraiths, waffs, flay-boggarts, fiends, gallytrots, imps, gytrashes, patches, hob-and-lanthorns, gringes, boguests, bonelesses, Peg-powlers, pucks, fays, kidnappers, gallybeggars, hudskins, nickers, madcaps, trolls, robinets, friars' lanthorns, silkies, cauld-lads, death-hearses, goblins, hob-headlesses, bugaboos, kows, or cowes, nickies, nacks [necks], waiths, miffies, buckies, ghouls, sylphs, guests, swarths, freiths, freits, gy-carlins [Gyre-carling], pigmies, chittifaces, nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men, cowies, dunnies, wirrikows, alholdes, mannikins, follets, korreds, lubberkins, cluricauns, kobolds, leprechauns, kors, mares, korreds, puckles korigans, sylvans, succubuses, blackmen, shadows, banshees, lian-hanshees, clabbernappers, Gabriel-hounds, mawkins, doubles, corpse lights or candles, scrats, mahounds, trows, gnomes, sprites, fates, fiends, sibyls, nicknevins, whitewomen, fairies, thrummy-caps, cutties, and nisses, and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description, that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost.

Nay, every lone tenement, castle, or mansion-house, which could boast of any antiquity had its bogle, its specter, or its knocker. The churches, churchyards, and crossroads were all haunted. Every green lane had its boulder-stone on which an apparition kept watch at night. Every common had its circle of fairies belonging to it. And there was scarcely a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit!

The Isolator

2011-10-23T22:13:00.000-05:00

Okay, I'm going to need this. There's finally something on my Christmas list.

Thanks to Edward Bolman for unearthing this desirable technology.

DICE!

2011-10-22T23:48:00.000-05:00

Dice are cool. I used to have a bunch of dice for Dungeons and Dragons, including a 50-sided die about the size of a golf ball. I would have assumed that D&D got me into dice, but now I'm thinking maybe dice were the reason I was interested in role playing games. Because of limited access to friends, I mostly just sat around rolling dice to generate characters and such, after reading all the entries in the Fiend Folio and the Monster Manual. I wish I knew where my old dice were. I had at least two sets.

Lately I've been making unusual dice. It started with big, ogre-sized dice. I chainsawed a d12 from a pine log. It doesn't roll perfectly true, but it's pretty nice. I played "21" against some teenagers with it. "7" came up a lot more than it should have.

d12 before the numerals

Then I bent a slightly jumbo d6 from a single length of wire. It rolls well--random within trials of maybe ten rolls. I tried to make a wire d8 but it's no damn good.

I figured this existed already, but a google search revealed only a design for a 3D printer. But the materials extruded by the 3D printer were not strong enough for such a design, so mine is the only one in use, as far as the internet is concerned. However, it also revealed new varieties of intricate dice that I can't really compete with, possible only with either new fabrication technology or arcane crafting techniques.

"Lawn dice" are available from multiple online retailers. Still, they are a nice size, and d6 (cube) is so easy to make, I started making a set of "farkle dice." Still trying to decide what my "farkle" icon will be.

Commemorative Pregnancy Figure

2011-10-22T23:05:00.001-05:00

Watch out, Franklin Mint--I'm entering the figurine market.

Conversation by text:

ME: "Is this what pregnancy felt like?"

MY SISTER: "Absolutely and I'm not kidding."

Shoes for Fools

2011-10-09T22:15:00.000-05:00

Long story short: these made me fall down.

Manifesting an unhealthy envy of cartoon physics.

I guess it was all just a dumb ol' dream.

Logical Progression of Movie Post-Apocalypses

2011-10-06T22:09:00.000-05:00

In case you've been wondering how we'll get from here to total Shitsville...

The Day After

If you're lucky, Ronald Reagan will clean this mess up.

Escape from New York

Nefarious but retaining a touch of whimsy

Soylent Green

Tediously hilarious as long as it's not happening to you.

Mad Max Trilogy


Misery punctuated by rockin' gear, snuff rape, and pet loyalty. Still something to fight for.

The Road

Goddamn. Just goddamn.

Class of 1991 Willard High 20-year Reunion

2011-10-05T00:08:00.000-05:00

Part 3—Picnic and School Tour

Arriving at the picnic building mid-heatwave, we saw that it was across the parking lot from Willard’s swimming pool. We thought people might need to arrive with their kids blindfolded to avoid rebellion, but I guess the savvy parents know they can just say, “Oops, we didn’t bring our swimming suits!” Lugging in our drinks and fruit salad, we found quite a kitchen, complete with a giant commercial ice machine—just what we needed for all that warm pop. Willard’s ultramodern infrastructure triumphs again.

The day before, I’d bought a fruit-salad bowl imprinted around the inside with a panoramic photo of vibrant fruit salad. Maybe it would have been funny to just put it out empty and let everybody think that my depth perception was totally shot, but I went ahead and decided to fill it with fruit salad having both volume and mass (this joke’s for Mary Ellen Butler). Actually, I intended to make it just like the salad pictured on the bowl, but as Brad, Heather, and I walked around Dillons, we disagreed about which fruits we remembered in the photo. Finally we made it missing only blackberries, and maybe a different color of grape. Luckily, chopping up fruit into a bowl is right at my level of cooking ability, so I was able to make it without even adding any pieces of my fingers, except maybe on the molecular level (Dick Summers, this joke’s for you).

Tony arrived with a pan of baked beans and got immediately disgusted when he sat them next to a lot of other beans, saying, “Okay, this is why we took so long getting here, waiting on these beans.” Then he looked around as if to find whoever the hell made his beans so redundant. I think I ate from only one of the bean-pans, so I can’t really say if Tony’s bean time paid off, but let’s just assume that those were some champion beans, T-Bird.

I was keeping an eye out for any new faces, especially Stacy Kuhn (for her wrath) or Mr. Rhoden, who Scott Gayer said might attend. If Mr. Rhoden showed, there was going to be a big revelation—we would finally tell him, after 20 years, who was responsible for what had to be the greatest, harshest, most ball-busting prank he or any other Willard teacher survived.

The main point about the picnic is that not very many people came, but since the ones who did mostly brought their kids, the crowd beefed up and the room seemed energetically populated. In fact, I’m a poor receptor of kids in the casual sense. They have to do something weird or outstanding for me to commit brain cells to recalling them. Here is all I remember:

--The Carlyn Jarvis family provided what seemed the majority of the event’s children. This was especially nice, because then our caffeinated drinks were safe, and we didn’t run out of Mountain Dew. Also, we need to bring back those heartwarming commercials where Mormons do a kindness, and then it says, “This message brought to you by The Church of Latter-Day Saints—the Mormons!” and film one where they keep having kids, until the town is up to its armpits in helpful, sensibly disposed children. But nowadays the commercials could end with, “But not the Warren Jeffs sort of Latter-Day Saints. Remember, lots of kids, but just one wife—and no kidnapping!” Since Oldsmobile went out of business, maybe we could modify their old slogan: “We’re not your grandfather’s Mormons.” I haven’t even seen that Book of Mormon play yet. Carlyn, when it comes to town, I will buy you a ticket, to make up for all my jokes. But I can’t afford tickets for your entire family.

--Brad and my wife both seemed thoroughly impressed by Mike West’s son’s cuteness.

--Marcus Wolfe’s tiny tot kept dropping little morsels as a result of finger-to-lip dexterity errors. Maybe Marcus gives her snack cereals specially designed to predispose one’s physiology to future woodwind playing. I should have asked, but when I pointed out her fumbles, Marcus said that at home their dog takes care of it, which somehow led to talk of sweaters for dogs. Only in America! Later, my wife seemed haunted by Marcus’s supernatural level of eye contact. I didn’t really notice, because of my super lack of eye contact. Now that I’ve given it some thought, I think Marcus’s hypno-gaze may result from a visual addiction to callipygian women.*

--Shawn Freeman kept carrying around his daughter while wearing the Red Rogue shirt I awarded him for mentioning Red Rogue the night before. Good recipient. We also learned that Shawn becomes unreasonable when he is hungry, like a hunger Hulk. My wife took this as a sort of justification for her own “Hungrietta” persona. But trust me, there is no justification.

--My wife had a kid-crush on Rick Winburn’s daughter Emma. One of those things where Emma was getting suspicious, looking around as if to say, “Why is this lady trying so hard to be my friend?” She was really cute, and not tantrum-y or intolerable, and she’s the only kid whose name I recall (hopefully correctly) so I guess our unofficial Willard Offspring Award goes to Emma Winburn. Don’t get a big head, Emma.

Some Christian made us pray, and then we went at the food. I prefer not to pray, but I try not to be a dick about it, especially if the prayerful people are also good cooks, which they usually are. Someone should study this. Maybe there could be a link between religious behavior and weight gain, because I know I have eaten some devastating desserts and casseroles in churchy settings. Some religions offset this with occasional fasting.

At some point, Scott G. told us that Mr. Rhoden could not come, so there would be no big reveal. It would have been extra fun, because we know Rhoden wants to know. He’s needled Tony to tell him for years, and somehow Tony has kept the secret. However, Eric Poland, by pure dumb luck, got burned by blowback from the same prank, so we decided to tell him.

To appreciate the tale, you need to know some history—pun intended, because history films on VHS were where this prank played out. It happened something like this: Brad and I had Rhoden’s geography class together, first period of sophomore year I believe. Brad was in his classic Sex Pistols punk phase, which seemed to rub Rhoden wrong. He liked to make sneering fun of Brad’s hair and clothes, etc. I flew under the radar as usual, which was a great power when I wanted to be a vengeful creep. Since we both made “A”s and did not make public sport of Rhoden’s physique, Brad felt wronged. We both simmered for a while. Eventually, I realized I was sitting every day within feet of Big R’s videotape library—a couple of flat boxes full of VHS tapes on historical subjects. I always wore a trenchcoat anyway, so one day I pocketed two of the tapes. Now all we needed was hardcore porn and two VCRs.

I really can’t remember whose master plan it was—possibly a group effort—but it was diabolical and ahead of the curve. It required a miniature A-Team effort, just short of welding armor plates on a van. My parents were going to a horse show for the weekend, so I rented an extra VCR for five bucks at Mike’s Video Bug. Delozier finagled a porno, which he said came from Matt Schwenn. This alone was something, because that was ancient times, long before porn spilled by the gigabyte from every device.

We set up shop. I don’t think Rhoden even had the tabs broken off his tapes, but even if he did, we just put scotch tape on the holes. One thing I remember clearly is planning the timing of the porn bits. We knew Big R had a way of pointing the monitor at us and paying no attention to the movie, so we figured we’d go at least 20 minutes in to the tape for maximum complacency. Then, just a flash or two to wake people up. Then, full-on filth.

We replaced the tapes knowing it might be months before the tapes were played, if at all. We might not even be there to witness our revenge. Weeks or months did pass, and finally it happened. Word came down the hallway one day, with big-eyed expressions of mean glee. Someone said they had “never seen a fat man move so fast” trying to turn the TV off. Someone else said he broke a desk scrambling to reach the controls. Some of you may have been in the room when the prank blew up. I’m betting you saw full penetration.

We knew Rhoden would either have to watch every tape or throw them all out, and we knew he’d sweat bullets for a while. Luckily he didn’t get fired or anything. The biggest surprise came when we heard Eric Poland got interrogated about it. Apparently Eric had been legitimately borrowing volumes from the Rhoden library, so he was ostensibly the only one besides Rhoden to handle the tapes. Who knew?

Chris, Brad, and I were all back together for the picnic. After I brought it up for the second time, Chris just turned to Eric at the lunch table and busted the topic wide. “Hey Juice, do you remember if you ever got in trouble for that porno on Mr. Rhoden’s history tapes?” Eric smiled, barely remembering. He said he didn’t get in trouble, but sort of recalled being asked about it. Twenty years on, the whole thing seems smaller, but still good for a laugh.

In sort of a weird moment, Stephanie Long was suddenly standing up on a table telling everyone what to do. This seemed both surreal and entirely natural. Natural because she was teacherly material ever since the days when she was Mrs. Hampton’s top gun/Trump apprentice; surreal because it was like one of those dreams where you’re back in school, but the building is different and you can’t get your shit together. Stephanie was shouting out some facts about the tour we could take of the new high school. We could go in two groups, at two different times. Pretty much everyone wanted to go. We put our hands up for the first tour, and Stephanie made it so. Also, even though she looked about the same as she did in high school, she did not fall from the top of the formation and break her arm.

So we toured the new school. If you haven’t seen it, just hang on to your hat. It’s 24 million dollars worth of whole different world. It’s full of computers and polished surfaces and natural light. It’s climate controlled, ergonomic and surveilled by 84 interior video cameras. There are flags from the home nations of each foreign exchange student it has hosted. It’s got a damn coffee shop. The place was so spectacular, I didn’t even notice Stacy Kuhn had arrived. No worries—she proved non-violent, and even amiable. It was, as Brad said, as if Willard’s only viable industry is education, because no other part of the town has grown, really, but then there is this massive school.

Stuart Pratt, just an upstart teacher in our time, is now a principal-type. He guided us around with encyclopedic knowledge of the facility. Room after collegiate room, along with news that some of the old timers like Mr Summers and Mr Davis are still around or just retiring. One thing that looked about the same was the wood shop. The rest was kick-in-the-pants epic. He said the shop kids recently built a house—you can see it from the road. They didn’t do the electrical or all of the mechanical, but they BUILT A HOUSE. When I took shop, I made a key fob and one of those toy cars that shoots forward when you put a CO2 cartridge in it.

Down a long, long Willard Sports Hall of Fame, we scanned for familiar faces. Chris Delozier’s long jump record was long gone, but Mike West, Larry Hillhouse and company still held a relay record, and my sister’s dead friend Mitzy Abney still had a photo in the gallery. We marveled at a cavernous band room lined with showcase after showcase of awards—mostly those big ones with triumphant gold angels on the top.

We entered an auditorium/movie theater something like MSU's Carrington Auditorium, except new and more deluxe. Pratt was talking about how there was land for expansion on the ends of the wings, and award-winning plays were being performed here. I was thinking about this creepy band storage room behind the old cafeteria where we used to monitor the decomposition of a tuna-sandwich-half someone stuck to the wall. I think we even named it. Caught up in the architectural marvel of it all, I said something like, “it’s tough to be a teen these days.” But then that wise old rebel Bobby Tate pointed out the totalitarianism inherent in a place such as this. He told a story about a kid (one of his? can’t remember) who was handed an uninvited baggie of pot in the hallway here, and threw it away immediately. A camera recorded him holding it, so he was kicked out of school. Following this line of thinking very far does disappoint, in a free-will sense. If we played Dungeons and Dragons again, the old school would have been “chaotic neutral,” while the new building appears to be “lawful good.” There was never much fun in playing a lawful good character. Obviously and conversely, such law and order eases the parental worry cortex, especially if it does eliminate meth transactions and glue huffing in the locker room. The benefits are clearer than the losses, but I think I’m seeing the bend in the road where adolescent aggression turned away from hallway shoves and into the camera-blind territory of social media taunting.

I’m also trying to figure out how I could have gotten away with any good pranks in this fortress of plenitude, and I’m coming up with a near-total collapse of my best high-school memories. There are certain advantages in deprivation.

That was it. We drove out of there with a Jim Catron-customized monster truck on our tail. He coulda crushed my Yaris like a bug, but thankfully Jim chooses life, and kittens.

*Yes, Marcus Wolfe, I looked it up. I definitely approve. Have some serious catching up to do with this word.

Nuts are GO!

2011-09-27T22:40:00.000-05:00

Probably the best thing that's ever been drawn in history, and I drew it. Shut down the art schools, losers.

Pets of My Youth, by Lifespan

2011-09-12T22:28:00.000-05:00

Jumping bean
Hermit crab
Newt
Angus steer
Anole
Pigeon
Goose
Great Dane
Doberman
Cats in general
Pet Rock (undetermined)

Grandma Hanging in There

2011-09-06T23:01:00.001-05:00

My wife's grandma, like the kitten in the famous library poster, is still hanging in there. Don't ask her how she is, because it won't be pretty. 2010 was the year of saying, "This old gray mare ain't what she used to be." So far 2011 has been more about sitting in pain next to the pain pills she should have taken four hours earlier.

Last weekend, she let us take her picture with the Billing Fair booklet, open to the page where her ad is printed. She lets them use the same ad every year, in the same font: "Let's make this a good fair! —Rose Mary Johansen" I think the ad has repeated enough times now that it can be read as a miffed complaint about the past fairs, as in, "Let's make THIS a good fair (finally)!"

"I'm missing the Cardinals because of this tomfoolery."

On a trip to Grandma's bathroom, I think I may have discovered the source of some of her woes. It looks like Avon sent her the wrong product.

Vandalizing an old lady's stuff, to test her acuity.

Why Does She Love Him?

2011-09-02T19:48:00.000-05:00

Answer the question to my satisfaction, and win a prize!

Class of 1991 Willard High 20-year Reunion

2011-08-31T01:09:00.000-05:00

Part 2

Beth Moore Siegfried has been a champion of not only showing up at the reunions, but driving in from Colorado and then being vocally emphatic about how great it is to be here to see everyone. Upon seeing her, one may have a hard time distinguishing Beth’s road delirium from certain aspects of her personality, which has always contained a dash of Pollyanna heroically staring down a motorized army out of The Road Warrior. Ten years ago, as if to prove that it is possible to be high on hardship, she busted out the 15-hour drive immediately after her dog died. This time, she brought her husband, plus renewed zeal about her job as an EMT. Even more refreshing and remarkable, Beth seemed to be cussing freely and casually.

Maybe it says something weird about me, that I considered Beth’s swearing to be a good sign, almost a positive indicator of mental health. I mean, some people just swear meaninglessly, and some others avoid it scrupulously; this doesn’t always carry great meaning. While I was an early adopter of profanity, Beth kept a tidy vocabulary all through school—one that surely made her grandmother proud just as it contributed to her anachronistic, Little-House flair. Whatever changed, I like to see it as an indicator of modernity, even if only to “do as the Romans do.” One thing I know now that I did not know then (although it was always on display): the way one speaks is the greatest factor in how one is judged.

An openness to cussing facilitated a major topic of conversation with Beth, in which I was forced to set her straight about how mean I was to her, at least in grades 4-6. Whether through resiliency or blindness, she claimed to think I was always nice to her. She was just being ridiculously generous, as per her personality. As per mine, I had to be brutally honest, saying, “No I wasn’t, Beth, I was pretty much an asshole.” To illustrate, I retold a story I’d already told once that day, to get at the characters of both Beth and Chris Delozier.

“Don’t you remember the reading contest in 6th Grade, Beth? We had Mrs. Blaze, and every time you finished a book report, you got another footprint on the wall. You had footprints halfway around the room, after diligently turning in a report every week. No one else was even close. Then about a week before the end of the contest, Chris and I hatched a plan: “WE GOTTA BEAT BETH.” We each had some Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, and we checked some out of the library. We just read one adventure out of each book, which probably took ten minutes each, and then wrote half-ass reports on them. We turned them all in at the very end, with just enough to win, so you came in third.” Just as in 6th grade, Beth took it in stride. We probably rubbed her face in it and teased her about it; she probably included us in her prayers that night.

I mean, it’s not like we burned her house down or dumped pig’s blood on her, but it was bad enough that Beth comes to mind during the Kevin Bacon part of Flatliners (warning: this movie is not as good as you remember it). The only other stuff I remember doing to Beth is writing “minus 0, you bedwetter” on one of her papers, and participating in some vague, peabrained consensus of disapproval—of which I’m sure there were many, but Beth’s raw deal was more raw than most.

Luckily, by the time high school rolled around, my burgeoning conscience—perhaps acne-activated— forced me to realign with underdogs everywhere. Beth was shuffled into a category of near-benevolent neutrality with a touch of guilt, but I still doubt I was ever noticeably nice to her. She was playing the long game, though. Having finally arrived at an (arguably) adult point of view, I now say if I were the teacher, I’d strive to crush the scheme of young Woody and Delozier. The shitasses!

Most people seemed to be enjoying the bios—if not their own, then other people’s. Travis Miller was sitting by Barry Henderson. Not only was it nostalgic to see such a classic pairing of school buddies, but they were tickled to the max (bonus ‘90s lingo) over the bio for Jeff Davidson. He’d always reminded me of Barney Rubble, and I’m pretty sure that cat was out of the bag before graduation, but I don’t think he really appreciated my jest. Travis did, though. I think that’s the sort of thing you might as well just roll with. Just be the best reincarnation of Barney Rubble you can be. Similar to how I will soon have to come to grips with baldness, and either join Hair Club for Men or just shave my damn head so I can really own it.

I spoke to Julie Douglas’s boyfriend about some common employers, and that was my best claim to meeting someone new. Other than that, I mainly failed to mix at the mixer. I think it was a common problem, as ancient boundaries still divided some from others. Later I would feel socially puny for having zero knowledge about Travis Shearmeyer, the most rock-n-roll guy in the room. At least I learned to ID him when he stood for his award.

The awards ballots came in and my wife helped me tally them. She is good at such rapid tasks, so it went pretty quick. The only bump came when two gals turned in their ballots halfway through the tally, giving Heather a momentary meltdown where she cried out, “What? No, fuck it, it’s too late!” This made me laugh, but some heads turned. I went ahead and counted them, but they made no difference in the winners, which were:

Least changed--Shawn Freeman, Scott Gayer
Most changed--Matt Farmer
Least disappointing--Eric “Juice” Poland
Most rock-n-roll--Travis Shearmeyer
Feel-good champion--Tony Gray
Most surprising absence—Chris Hampton

There were quizzical looks over categories such as “least disappointing,” if only because it implied that there might also be a “most disappointing.” Brad Jones voted a straight “Juice” ticket. Tony announced the winners, and reveled in his new title. At the last moment I added the write-in category “Couples Tanning,” and awarded it to Tony and Stacy Gray. This joke amused Stacy at the table, but she was already sick of it by the time I announced it over the mic—valuable lesson about the half-life of jokes. Some other people laughed. Unfortunately, I soon found out that the Gayers were probably more deserving of the award. Sorry, Gayers. Your rich, Ricardo Montalban tans will have to be their own reward.

At some point I realized there weren’t many pictures being taken. Fortunately, a personably tipsy Amy Robinson was given a camera and a mandate to snap photos, assuring a supply of images for later Facebooking. Thanks, Amy!

As the evening rolled on, drunkenness made for not only red faces, but Red Rogue appreciation. Adam Wade came over from the bar area and gave us a second wind, conversationally. He gave Brad and me a big compliment, something like, “Out of everybody here, I’m most curious to know what YOU TWO have been up to!” Brad immediately lanced the boil of our pride by joking, “We’re lovers!” Adam had built up a head of nostalgic steam about our comics, so I was either “least disappointing” when I reported that I still draw comics, or “most disappointing” when I had to admit that most of our creative efforts wallow in relative obscurity. Still, for 20 minutes or so, we were rising American geniuses to Adam. Ah, the power of liquor.

Over at the bar area, I saw Chris Hill, Bobby Tate, and Mark Herman. I talked to Chris for a while. I’d heard he’d been to prison, but I didn’t really know. I didn’t bring it up, and he didn’t either. We had a rather disjointed conversation about tigers hunting and killing people. He was kind of wired and intense, but did nothing worthy of incarceration. Brad talked to Bobby about skateboarding, because that’s what happens when you used to skateboard. Apparently, there are many sizes of boards to discuss. I also know that the wheels are called “trucks.”

At some point, Delozier, mid-conversation, asked me about the kind of pen he used to love writing with. “FLAIR,” I said, “which I think you only liked because you loved the wrestler Ric Flair,” and he laughed his wacky infectious laugh. Doz used to eat and breathe pro wrestling. Whatever else we talked about, it was enough to give my wife a new zest for Delozier tales. Her favorite is how he would say “WHAAAAT?” loudly and harshly from his room if his dad or sister called to him for any reason, as if they were violating his only demand. Later, Brad and I told some powerful Doz stories, and we looked him up in a tenth grade yearbook where he was wearing sunglasses, looking like a Miami Vice or CHiPs drug-runner when some of us still looked like children. He always had advanced comedic abilities, as well as the power to crush you both physically and psychically. Brad used to take beatings when Doz and Jason Craig teamed up in neighborhood play. I’d been on the shit-end of that stick a few times myself—once literally, when, in the middle of what I thought was a water-balloon fight, I turned my head into Jason smashing a huge handful of fresh cow shit into my face, filling all the space between my glasses and my eyes. Knowing that Chris was staying with Tony and Stacy, we wondered later if he was pushing Stacy’s buttons over at their house. I imagined him wearing a bathrobe and sunglasses while raiding their fridge.

We sat by Dr. Shawn Freeman, discussing the pantheon of coaches: legends of Grasdorf, Berry, and Gould. Brad retold the tale of Rueben Berry crushing our spirits when he took one of our comics away from some dolt who was reading it in the weight room, then threw it in the trash and said it was garbage. Grasdorf was huge, like a giant in a Ren & Stimpy cartoon, and his paleolithic tactics made kids quiver. Most vividly, Shawn did some lively and outstanding imitations of Mr. Gould—grading Jimmy Poindexter’s tests dramatically in front of everyone, drawing crazy maps on the board, flipping off Coach Davis through the air vent in his classroom door. I believe if Willard were expanded to fill America, Shawn could easily take his one-man Gould show on the road, as Hal Holbrook did with Mark Twain.

Quite a few people were disappearing as the time approached when we had to clear out. Brad pointed out that Mike West had a bad-ass comprehensive Memories Book, and lo, it was so. It was almost a Memories Encyclopedia. Mike could take that thing on a Martha Stewart show and be like, “Martha, get your weakling Memories Book out of my face. This is what a real Memories Book looks like!” Such a tome proves without a doubt that Mike is the once and future Class President. He can’t escape his destiny, as long as that book exists. It turned out that he had Brad & Chad items that we haven’t seen in years. I wonder if he has my lost birth certificate in there.

As if Mike’s archive wasn’t enough, Jennifer Elbert had a milk crate full of yearbooks. She appeared to have a complete K-12 Willarko set, which I had never seen in one place before. If I remember right, Heather and I started pawing through them without permission, to behold their wonders. I had fun breaking it to Jennifer that, despite her “real” bio arriving in time for the booklet, she still made a cameo appearance in the entry I wrote for Jason Kelly, where he played Frankenberry and she played Booberry in a stage play. She made a priceless “what is wrong with you?” face, while also playing along enough to be a good sport. From that point on, if I had to indicate Jennifer in conversation with my wife, we just used her Monsters Cereal moniker. Jennifer is, I still believe, the right choice to play Booberry. She was my first-grade crush, and first grade was probably when I really wanted that cereal. Scandalous! As for Jason Kelly being Frankenberry, well, the man’s a genius in any role.

As if to mastermind an awkward moment while pretending not to, Melanie Gugel put me on the spot by asking, with a nod to my wife, “Chad, maybe I shouldn’t ask in front of your wife, but did you have a crush on Melissa Fielder?” This did catch me off guard, but more because Melanie spoke to me than for any potential marital friction. Little did she know that Heather and I scout crushes for each other, both celebrity and non (celebrities are easier, since you can clip-n-save their pictures). This arose from the Melissa Fielder bio: “Dang, she was cute.” I think I said something slick like, “Um, yeah, I guess.” The bio, in turn, arose from a basic physical truth, but also from the fact that I knew nothing else about the girl, ever. She was not in my karass, so her cuteness was all I could think of. I also vaguely remember overhearing her, maybe senior year, saying in a gossip circle, “Chad Woody—didn’t he used to be smart?” Maybe I’d just completed a very stupid act. It’s also very possible that I’ve been in a “Flowers for Algernon” IQ decline for about 22 years now.

Mostly, though, Melanie’s question somehow illuminates the instinctive intractability that dwells in the sub-rational space between we two ex-Pioneers. Whatever it is, it is deep and it is murky and it is everlasting, like one of those peat bogs where they find mummified ancients. But it also has a distant, faintly numinous soundtrack by some version of The Alan Parsons Project.

Finally the cash bar was shuttered and the party was over, at least for the sensible people. Somewhere else, the drinkers were rallying to some new frontier. We drove back to my house and looked at some yearbook pictures, trying to figure out how much we’d forgotten. All I know is, nothing beats that shot of Mike Schultz gleefully preparing a raw chicken in home ec.

Next—the Picnic! Who will show up? Whose kids will be the spazziest? Why is Tony so upset by abundant beans? Find out in Episode 3: The Third Part.

Things in My Handwriting Which I Have No Memory of Writing

2011-08-28T22:40:00.000-05:00

Exhibit A

It's Me, Playing the Saxophone

2011-08-18T23:19:00.000-05:00

On the wall of Hoover Music in downtown Springfield, there is a spectacularly ham-handed, doofussy, forever unfinished mural that should make you laugh. Any time I'm there with my wife, she laughs and says, "There's Chad Woody playing a saxophone."


Before music lessons/ After music lessons

I mean, it's the right size and approximate build. Otherwise, it doesn't look like me, and yet for some reason it demands to be equated with me. Maybe I looked like that when my drawing skills were that weak. Oh well. Maybe he looks the way I feel. (Idiotic.)

Class of 1991 Willard High 20-year Reunion

2011-08-12T22:14:00.000-05:00

PART 1

Every ten years, I get roped into auxiliary duty on the Class Reunion crew. This never fails to puzzle, since my Tiger Pride is a muscle that has never been used, but then, it’s hard to say No to Tony Gray. Tony operates as some sort of central cog in the Willard social machine. He knows everybody, and lives to rile it up. While Mike West is the Class President and only student council member still on duty, Tony is sort of an honorary chieftain. If Willard were a desert province in the Congo, Tony would be the local warlord. Therefore, if you want to stage a reunion, you need access to Tony’s Facebook account.

Once we decided on a time and a place, recruiting came next. Twenty years out of high school, you have to decide if your curiosity about your classmates is greater than your apathy, your residual resentment, or your habitual inertia. The rise of Facebook made it easy to reach more people than ten years earlier, but we were having a tough time getting attendance up to the desired level. Scott Gayer became the catering lieutenant, and 75 people was what we needed to fill the bill and break even. We set up a Facebook Group and a Paypal account. The price was 20 bucks per person, which was a good deal considering that 20 bucks had been the price a decade earlier, and we were doing more this time. Still, this seemed a sticking point for some people. Being a table full of guys, we gave ourselves free rein to be dicks about stuff at the meetings. I said something like, “If somebody can’t afford $20 at this point, they have bigger worries than this reunion, like survival, so forget it.” As usual, Tony had the best quote when it came to people who kept asking how much it would be if they just came to the daytime picnic rather than the evening mixer: “That depends--if you’re just trying to get out of the 20 bucks, then it’s 20 bucks.” After assorted profanity, we finally decided that bringing food to the picnic would be admission enough.

We didn’t really know what we were doing in the party-throwing department, so Tony sent Stephanie Long a cussing text to come over and help us. This was nice because, as he pointed out, Stephanie likes to keep things G-rated. She had decorated the previous reunion, as well as making up some activities. But we were out of luck; she was busy to the max and would be lucky even to attend. Thus began a tradition of us beating our heads on the table each meeting, wondering why we could push none of this off on a female classmate. Eventually we did get some essential help from Tamara Botsford and Julie Douglas, but this did not diminish the moaning and groaning over our AWOL student council gals.
…

My wife’s excitement for my class reunion was growing with each day, as it drew close enough for her to plan things like what we would wear, what food to take, and which hat might best protect my baldness. Also, my friend Brad Jones was coming from Chicago and staying at our house, so we made sleepover jokes, decorating the door to the guest room with a Star Wars poster and a sign that said “Brad’s Room.” She also kept telling me how much fun it would be for Brad and I to sleep together, slumber-party style. It also might have been another in a long line of her “you are secretly gay with your friends” jokes, which need their own brand-name at this point, and say more about her deviance than mine.

We’d also entered a new phase of history, where Heather (my wife) was now decidedly pro-reunion. She’d had her 20th reunion a year before, shifting her out of a longstanding stance of “I’m so over those people from high school. They all stayed in Billings and just bumble around in their chump galoshes. (my paraphrase)” I remember this because she used to emphasize it hard enough that I felt self-conscious talking to Tony or Brad or anybody from Willard. I told her of my basically positive experience at my 10th reunion, but she still kind of dumped attitude on it—UNTIL, she found herself roped into an effort to reunite her Billings class. Theirs was only a group of maybe 40 people, so you’d think that would be an easy group to gang. Nope, they had the same problems we’ve always had—no one can agree on where to have it, how much to spend, etc. In the end, she had fun. Then I found the tables had turned, and she was gushing reunion love while I was like, “yeah, I guess I gotta go.”

Just three days before the date, I realized that Jana Long, a classmate I sometimes see at work, was not on the Facebook list. Jana is very old-school—maybe not quite a Jamestown Pilgrim or even Amish, but easily Eisenhower-Administration old-school. It is not shocking that Facebook might not reach her, because she quite literally sews her own clothes. I point this out mainly for the eye-opening, character-building light it sheds on her character, though I’m aware that sewing one’s own clothes is macroeconomically uncool unless you’re selling it on Etsy. Anyway, Jana will have the last laugh when China finally stops sending us cheap textiles by the cubic acre. Though I never really knew her, I felt this momentary protective, instinctive agape, like “oh no, we can’t leave her out!” I took a note about it over to the sewing-shop lady who knows Jana. She said that Jana did know about it, and planned on going with Carlyn Jarvis. BUT, she said Jana was scared that she wouldn’t know how to talk to anyone, and might cry if Carlyn left her alone while talking to other people. I found this a bit of a shock. Then, as if to illustrate to us all the old-school world Jana lives in, the lady, Lucinda, who once taught at our grade school, said, “You know, Jana is so bashful.” I almost went back in time when I heard the word “bashful.”

I tried giving Lucinda some of my “reunion theory” to pass along to Jana, built on my memories of the one ten years earlier: That those who attend will tend to be level and amiable so there's little to fear; that the real outliers—the very successful and the truly defeated—probably won’t be there because they aren’t so compatible with such a relatively mundane event; most importantly, the passing decades have a way of making us more different in looks and experiences but essentially the same in context—we all get squeezed through most of the same Play-Doh Fun Factory templates over time: school, work, taxes, kids, bills, yardwork, etc. I told her in less fanciful terms, but she agreed and said she had really encouraged Jana to go.

If nothing else, someone needed to warn Jana about Lady Gaga.

I was set to pick up Brad from the bus station on the eve of the reunion, but after various delays, it was well after midnight. Some guy had collapsed on his bus and had to be picked up by paramedics near Rolla. Luckily, there had been a nurse on the bus; unfortunately, she’d used her heroic nurse cred as leverage to use the bus bathroom as her personal smoker’s lounge. It would all be worth it when my wife became the second person to tell him he could have flown into Branson cheaper than riding the bus. As a bonus, we saw a man in a stupor splayed out on a bench on west Kearney. Whatever sort of intoxicant he’d taken on, his end result was something near the exact opposite of “the quickening” from The Highlander.

Finally, we arrived at the mixer. Right from the start, Mike West and Scott Gayer began building up the “bio scare,” in which they seemed worried about the blowback that was sure to come when certain people read the bios I wrote for them. Worried for me, that is. I had worries about a couple of those. I was thinking Melissa Richter might be displeased to learn of her numerous sex changes, but for some reason Mike and Scott seemed to think Stacy Kuhn was the one I should fear. I was like, “What did I write again?” All I could remember was an over-the-top jibe about her abandoning her student council office’s LIFE-LONG duties, but they were so worked up that I started to worry. Also, my image of Stacy Kuhn as a sweetheart-type was now in doubt.

I had some Senior Video DVDs to deliver. Only two, to Michelle Cathey Maggard and Amy Robinson Balog. I handed them off and failed in my usual way to strike up any conversation, but I didn’t get slapped or anything. So far, so good.

Right off the bat I was failing to introduce my wife to anyone, because I can only hold one thing in my brain at a time. Brad even warned me that Heather wanted to be introduced and I wasn’t doing it, but still I forgot every time. It’s what you call social retardation, or interpersonal Down’s—not to be confused with any medically recognized thing. Well, it was just my own shortcoming. Heather is actually my only credential that matters.

Brad had a different problem. He couldn’t recognize many people. He knew Tony and Chris Delozier; after that, it got tougher. He picked it up after a while, but even after I told him some, he’d do double takes: “That’s LeAnn Helton,” I’d say. “Really?” he’d say, concentrating. I was thinking Brad drank too much booze after he quit being straightedge in college.

I also told Brad to keep an eye on Jana Long to make sure she was having fun. I know we saw her talking like a champ to Jennifer Elbert and someone else. She was upright, mobile, and smiling. If she claims she had no fun, then she’s being a false and tricksy Hobbit. We saw you having fun, Jana. Don’t deny it.

Now imagine there’s an asterisk between every paragraph here, and every asterisk refers to the same footnote: Eric “Juice” Poland is bigger than life. The all-new, all-daring Juice has his own gravitational pull. We just can’t get over his majestic enormity. Plus, as if Texas were some scaled-up other dimension, he’s accompanied by a perfect fit of a wife, on the exact same scale. They are careful not to crush mortals, fortunately. Maybe this is the secret behind Eric’s desire for Texas to secede—we’re just too tiny to be taken seriously as countrymen.

Tony was getting his wisecracks in order, and his wife Stacy already seemed somewhat over it. She had a flask full of something to help dull the pain of fending off so many Willard grads. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if she is pleased or not by Tony being a loose cannon. They also brought Chris Delozier. Maybe those two have been revved up all day. I know they played golf already, and had a pool party where Tony got thrown—phone included—into the pool by Bobby Tate.

Aaron Goddard appeared up with his wife Linda, which is awesome because it is hard to get them both in the same public appearance. Linda said she was my biggest fan, which may be true because they have more of my original drawings than anyone else, besides me. Unless each time they buy one, they throw the old one away to make room for a freshy. I was supposed to draw Linda’s family crest on a napkin, but I failed. Aaron was one of a few people with a sibling my sister’s age, a group that just had their 25th reunion. My sister said that one of her classmates had a sex change and was at the reunion with another classmate as a mate. I keep forgetting which sex was the “before” and which the “after.” Aaron didn’t know, either.

While eating dinner, I got Matt Farmer to retell a classic story from Springfield PD adventures. I always forget the zestiest details, but in a nutshell: A domestic disturbance call takes them to the home of septuagenarian Ruby, whose 30-something boyfriend, Dakota, yelled and threw a plate of peanut-butter-and-jelly “sammiches” at her. The plate broke the big picture window in the front wall; ruckus achieved, but not alleviated. Parts of “sammiches” were still stuck to the curtains. They had to take him downtown. Something else happened later where Dakota got mad because Ruby kept smoking even though she was on oxygen, so he slapped her, maybe because she was on fire. One more ride in the cruiser. Request the whole tale from Officer Farmer if you run into him.

After the story, he and his wife Autumn—whose name I just looked up because for some reason I was remembering her as a “Zelda,” which seemed unlikely—said TV’s “Cops” was in Springfield right then. They said it would be good because they were riding with some officer who was nuttier and bigger than life. Stay tuned!

The Tall Bike Wins Hearts and Minds

2011-08-10T23:29:00.000-05:00

My wife's cousin made a tall bike. He brought it over for a tall bike conquering session. I put my gloves on for crash protection, and to complete my construction-worker look.

The special features of the tall bike: original paint from two lesser bikes, hard seat, lack of brakes, no way to get on (anti-theft feature).

It's not too hard. Once you get on, it's just another bike, though wobblier in turning, and scary at the moment of stopping. Push your shoe on the rear wheel to brake. Popping a wheelie, intentional or not, forces a quick dismount.

As it turns out, riding the tall bike is an instant win. Just two extra vertical feet under the seat make for a big change in both perspective and public opinion. Never have I seen the denizens of my neighborhood warm up to anything so quickly. In fact, the normal bristles of apathy and faint defensiveness characteristic to the locals fell away, revealing lots of waves, smiles, finger points, and, "Hey Honey"s. Kids stopped in their tracks and yelled, "awesome bike!" Shirtless porch folk migrated to the curb to take pictures. Aggressive motorists let off their accelerators for a muffler-easing moment.

If not for the legal risk, you could easily charge people around here a buck at a time to try the tall bike. But what would keep them from riding it away, to Kansas and beyond?

Old Man Ritter vs. Wildlife

2011-08-07T19:03:00.001-05:00

A walk at Ritter Springs Park will never be the same now that we’ve met “Old Man Ritter.” My wife saw him first. He sat on his golf-cart-like mower with a little canopy over the seat, looking at the lake in the middle of the park. I assumed he was just enjoying a quiet moment on a break from mowing, which seemed fresh around much of the park.

We came down the gravel road, and I stepped over a fat caterpillar the size of my ring finger. I stopped to take a picture of it, thus activating the old groundskeeper. Possibly to seem more official, he started his mower and drove it the 40 feet it took to reach us. I imagined him pulling up and parking right on the worm, but he stopped beside the road and stepped up, saying, “What is it?”

superstar larva

“Oh, just a big caterpillar,” I said.

“You should pick her up.” I sensed him thinking that I was too squeamish to touch it, but I got my picture and then picked it up, setting it off the road on the other side. “That’s a big one,” he said. Then our grand tour of the lake ecosystem began. He pointed out lots of turtles and carp, most of the time making yardstick hands to show their size, and guessing their weight. He had been watching one turtle in particular, when we walked up. I think it was a snapping turtle, but he also kept mentioning “soft shells.” This one was about 30 pounds, and had been burrowing into the opposite shore. He pointed out maybe halfway across the lake to a turtle floating near the surface. “See that old guy there? Man, he’s slick!”

Apparently, burrowing turtles are key to the power struggle between man and nature in Ritter Springs. He took us on a little tour of the banks, which were lumpy and collapsed. He said the turtles kept destroying the banks, which were once straight and generally a couple of feet above the water. “I used to drive my Grasshopper (the covered mower) all along this bank, but now I can’t get over it.” He walked us along a finger of land that was pretty dramatically eroding. He also said there was a muskrat that had just moved in to the area, and that the water was higher now since they adjusted the dam to raise it. He pointed out a hole which he said was an air hole going down to a turtle den like a chimney, so they could breathe better.

As we turned back, he saw some kind of shadow and kept looking for what made it. Then his stories started getting crazier, and he started sounding more like a turtle-obsessed version of Bill Murray in “Caddyshack.” He said the biggest snapper in the lake (50 pounds? I forget what he said) was real ornery, and it charged up out of the water at him when he was trimming on the other side of the lake. “I just spanked him with my weed-eater, I spanked him real good till he gave up and turned around.” Then I think he said he grabbed it by the tail and flipped it into the lake.

Pointing to some other distant point, he said, “When they dug in a water line over there, they went down about 8 feet with a bucket about as big as two pickup trucks, and when they lifted that bucket, there was more turtles and turtle eggs in there than you ever saw—it was just all turtles and eggs, so we dumped it out over there on the bank and just (lowering his arm in a crushing motion) mashed them all up.”

He also said something about geese, and he was trying to kill the muskrat—“That’s all we need around here, a muskrat”— and a story about kids at the day camp feeding bread to a turtle that came right up to them. My wife later pointed out that this story didn’t jive with his tales of battling the aggressive snappers, but maybe he meant the soft-shells.

“What do they do at the camp?” I asked.

“Oh, they fish, they cook out, they play games, all kinds of stuff. Their parents pay about 80 bucks a week for the camp. I just love all them kids.” Then he said the kids play over by the bridge, and he saw some copperheads over there under it, so he took rocks up on the bridge and threw them down to kill those copperheads. While I’m sure copperheads have appeared in the park, his tales seemed taller by the minute. I don’t think they gather by the water, and I doubted he could hit them and kill them with rocks dropped from the bridge. But anything is possible, for Old Man Ritter.

On the rail of the bridge

After our 10-minute tour, we parted ways. He got back on his Grasshopper and drove away. I immediately started calling him “Old Man Ritter.” We agreed that he was like an anti-park-ranger whose mission was not only mowing, but protecting the park from as much wildlife as possible.

Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll

2011-08-04T21:19:00.000-05:00

The cartoonist Joel Orff drew a years-running strip titled "Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll," in which he drew short true stories submitted by whoever sent them in. Once I finally sent one in, I learned how fun it is to tell someone else what to draw. I know I sent him some details about the looks of the people involved, but I was still impressed with how closely it ran to my recollections. Joel Orff, you rock!

Class-Reunion Simulator Poem

2011-08-01T22:23:00.000-05:00

Written a few years ago, this poem is deliberately vague in its avoidance of real-life people. Still, it seems almost uncannily close to home, in the wake of my 20-year high-school reunion. Note the usual veneer of foolishness crassly striving to camouflage blunt tragedy.

Childhood Friends

In the seasonal wash of “where are they now,”
heads are balding, cars evolving, babies
crawling stairs and chewing whole new foods

in a horror show of developmental antics; men
are fixing meals and cars and prices, women
changing jobs and diapers and husbands.

Weathery time scribbles on their faces
until every hat and belt and lipstick gives up
in disgust, saying you, my friend, are old:

getting soft, going gray, plumping out.
Men are growing tits while here and there
a woman loses one or two to cancer,

and bad as that is, it’s better than losing
the whole woman. There’s quite an array
of humans in play: some squiggle and yawn

through decades of furious fade; some scrimp
and save at the foot of a Matterhorn
of material want; some give out without

much fuss. One is dragged by her long hair
caveman-style down to the redneck depths
of an apple-orchard love; one is marching

in a slow parade of pets and ornaments;
another has given up on the past but still
hasn’t left its dark arcade of longing.

My first-grade crush is at this very moment
cleaning teeth and hoping the boy saying “AHH”
is not looking down her shirt or up her faint

librarian’s mustache, hoping for a sunny
weekend, hoping that I never think of her again.
There are others—they are everywhere,

and how soon they all go pear-shaped,
how quickly out to pasture, and by “they”
I mean “we,” and by “we” I mean “I,”

because I spend most of my time thinking
about myself and how far I have NOT gone:
how the girl in the passing car sees me

and thinks what I thought twenty years ago
when seeing one like me: nothing much.
I’d like to have more to report, folks:

to the genuine hippie princess I’d lie
about living in a hut behind a wildlife
sanctuary, how occasional giraffe heads

interrupt the sunsets; to the sagging
prom queen, maybe how I tattooed
this beautiful art-nouveau swirl on the hip

of a lingerie model. Oh, the lies
we could trade if I saw them all again,
their astonishing picnic of unfamiliar heads,

their zoo of improper bodies... if you could
corral them all, these men and women
you only ever knew as children, I know

you’d find an overwhelming belief in kids,
a few unhesitant certifiers of UFOs,
and a surprising number of them dead.

Ozark Empire Fair Art Show Highlights

2011-07-31T11:55:00.000-05:00


Goat boy doll

Dino-baby with quilts

Snow Battle featuring William's signature


Clowns of Great Influence

Sea Dragon with Victims and Moon

Most Violent of Show


Sorta Scary First of the "Professional Artist" category (see tag) Because she had the pizazz, the sheer audacity, to spill out over the mat You can't go wrong with a Pug Portrait Cheesus! Doubly sweet once you learn that it's "REBA"

Why it’s OK to like stupid crap like Transformers 3

2011-07-26T00:03:00.000-05:00

One thing that is often forgotten—especially by critics, English majors, etc—is that movies, like comic books, are actually visual forms before they are narrative forms (you can have wordless comics/movies, but not imageless ones). Unfortunately, most people judge movies and comics by the same limited criteria used for novels and short stories, ignoring the visual element, or even condemning it in a strange mutation of some lingering strain of cultural Puritanism: it's just pretty, it's eye candy, etc. These people deprive themselves of sensory nutrients that are pleasures as pure as any clever plot twist or great character development: a brilliant panel or page by Moebius or Jack Kirby, Quitely or Koike—hell, even Ernie Bushmiller. I suspect they're also unlikely to fully grok a gorgeous film shot by Tarkovsky or Kurosawa, although they will give it props because it has widely recognized intellectual cache.

In the name of this death-grip on traditional narrative, people walk out of movies like Tree of Life and The Fountain, or shift into that clownery that germinated in my generation’s high-school intellectual gutter: “You gotta be stoned to watch (or listen to) Pink Floyd: The Wall, man.” In other words, if you can’t box it up neatly in clear intellectual terms, it must be down the rabbit hole, in Stoner World. (Even though there’s nothing particularly difficult about deciphering the symbolism in The Wall—it's seminal, but not subtle.)

They forget that some things can't be conveyed in words. Yes, there are narratives implied in montage, and yeah, Transformers movies are dumbass attempts at regular narrative, but there's also pure joy in the brand of visual adventure that can't be had anywhere but a good, rollicking dorkfaced Hollywood blockbuster. The same goes for martial arts movies or amusement park rides. Thrills that tilt the senses and push us to project ourselves into new perspectives, unheard-of velocities, near-miracles of plummeting, skidding, rushing, sight-and-sound gluttony. Sure, it’s spoon-feeding for the imagination, and sure, it may overlap uncomfortably with the definition of pornography, but what are we, sensory ascetics?

Is this a jab at movies that tell substantial, literary stories about complex human characters? No way. Do I like all balls-to-the-wall special effects movies? Not even close—I don't bother with most of them. The John Cusack movie 2012 was hamhandedly weak, and The Golden Compass, which I wanted to like, was a CGI-varnished rough draft with no visual heft. Do I like all comics? Only a relative few, usually requiring both writing and art to be original and interesting. Does everything need intellectual content? Nope—not Nancy comic strips, not the landscape of Yellowstone, not Michael Bay. Sometimes I just get tired of all the pompous internet chatter complaining about how idiotic Transformers movies make America stupid—as if these people don’t wax poetic about food, dance, sex, or any number of other topics which are as intellectually indefensible as they are goldmines of sensory glee. Most armchair film critics also tend to spend way too much time evaluating actors acting, even though their commentary on cinematography was likely limited to one word, such as “beautiful,” or “sweeping.” It’s possible that they’re trying not to spoil the surprises in store for your eyes. It’s more likely that they’re drawn to movies by their cult-of-personality celebrity worship/jealousy. It’s just funny that criticism for a visual medium is so visually impoverished.

I just watched a documentary on PBS called Sweetgrass, which had no narration and no real thrust other than to follow cowboys as they herded sheep across Montana. There's actually nothing to it but landscape and lifestyle, plus some details of animal husbandry most folks will find harsh, but it's a brilliant pictorial account, and contains barely five ideas. But as a world, you can lose yourself in it.

That's my best defense of Transformers 3—I liked it so much, I may go see it again in 3D.

Potato Triumphant

2011-07-19T21:44:00.000-05:00

Hope this makes you feel better.

Then again, if potatoes were this active, we might feel really bad eating them.

Rogue Boweling

2011-07-16T13:23:00.000-05:00

Shit-and-runners prefer Angel Soft tissue

Why the persistence of human scat in my work zone? Twice in two weeks, in the exact same spot. This time I'm not cleaning it up. Maybe at least they'll step in it during the next dump. Take that, Mr. Rogue Boweling.

Etching plate like scratchboard

2011-07-12T23:34:00.000-05:00

"Lens of Wonder"

Robotech Theme, Galvanize Me

2011-07-11T23:33:00.001-05:00

It was approximately junior high, and it may have been the days of my mom’s second mental health catastrophe. My dad took long out-of-state trips to work cattle for big ranches. I had to wake up at 6:00 am to feed cattle and horses before school. It’s hard to remember much from those days, but I do remember that I usually watched the beginning of David Letterman (NBC) each night, and we didn’t own a VCR yet, so I was pretty wasted when 6 am rolled around.

The way I recall this, it was wintertime and still quite dark. After a while, I’d developed the anticipatory alarm kung-fu of waking up at 5:59 so I could shut off the buzzer the moment it rang. Still, I was pretty zonked and not remotely excited about going out in the cold to feed animals I didn’t really like. If there was one thing I’d learned, it was that cattle seemed to time their digestion to intersect with feeding time, so that the sight of me approaching with feed cranked a herd’s bowels into shitting unison. It was like, “Hey, here it comes, make room for more.”

I didn’t drink coffee, so I would turn on my little TV, as it was time for Robotech, one of the first anime shows to cross into America. As far as I could tell, it was three different shows, set in three different eras, sort of like if they ran original Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine all under one title. The first series, which I liked, focused on a soap opera romance with an Earth invasion backdrop; the second, which I didn’t care for, revolved around someone named Dana and giant aliens called Zentraedi; the third was my favorite—it was about a few resistance fighters coming back from a Mars colony to reclaim Earth from evil aliens called The Invid, which looked like giant armored crabs, sort of. The only thing you really need to know, though, is that Robotech had over-the-top theme music that gave me a little boost into will-to-live territory. Once the TV was on, I could soak up the energetic, martial tune, then get dressed. I can still visualize the fighter jet rotating at the opening of the show, the flashing anime graphics and glassy sound effects. After a minute or so, it helped me shake off my grogginess and get my ass out to do chores.

A couple of years later I had the music on vinyl, which absolutely cements my Robotech theme wake-ups as the pinnacle of my nerdhood, not to mention cementing junior high as the absolute peak of human misery. If ever there was a time that justified escapism, that was it.

When Fireworks Were King

2011-07-06T00:37:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, fireworks were the top thing in my life. From about second grade through fourth or fifth, I continuously smuggled a little mail-order fireworks catalog in my bookbag. I studied it every chance I got—on the bus, in class, at home. I wore the thing out. I knew all the names and prices. If I was lucky I would have about 20 bucks to spend by the time June rolled around, and I think I even sent cash in the mail once or twice, but my fireworks came.

Bottle Rockets (this was clearly how I learned how many are in a "gross." Ground Flower. Garden in Spring. Tanks. Bang Snaps. Starball Contribution. Why the hell was it called "contribution"? I wasn't really into fountains, but king of all the fireworks—the ones I could afford—was Friendship Pagoda. I always bought one, as the finale. It was the best.

Sometimes it didn't pop all the way up, so you might have to help it. You might burn your little fingers stretching it out, but when you were done—goddamn, it's a cool little building!

You just had to hope this didn't happen:

Budlandia

2011-06-30T22:11:00.001-05:00

to reproduce by budding was all the rage

When presenting nonsense, I have long chosen painstaking methods of expression. This here's a woodcut.

Novelism

2011-06-29T00:44:00.000-05:00

I'm 20,000 words in and no end in sight. I don't know why I'm writing a Western when I've never really read one. Two discoveries:

1) Historical research can be fun. At least, with the internet making it lazy-ass easy.
2) This will probably never sell to young readers, because all their books now look like this--

"If this doesn't get me diddled by a vampire, I don't know what will!"

Maybe I'll just have to sell my book to old people.

Chowder and Mort Go West

Chapter 1: Lightening the Load

Autumn came to 1897 in the form of a single cool breeze near the end of August. Chowder Crowder retired from the cattle drives of the Dakotas and said, “My bones are gettin’ crooked and all this ropin’ and ridin’ is really startin’ to hurt my fingers. I don’t think I can stand another winter up here.” He decided to ride west to California, where he heard the gold was all claimed but ladies walked around in their underwear all winter long. “Wouldn’t that be a sight, Mort?” Mort was his horse. Mort really didn’t care about anything Chowder said, as long as he got his oats. He would have said NO to California if he’d had any idea how far away it was.
...

Chowder sold his cattle for eleven dollars a head to Rawhide Johnson over in Sturgis. This was what they called a “friendly price”—the highest dollar you could ask without pointing a pistol. But Chowder had a few of the best looking cows in the county, because he knew a thing or two about not only cooking meat, but raising it. Rawhide had admired Chowder’s little herd for some time, so he was glad to acquire it.

His cabin had sold to a young couple just in from Ohio who wanted to raise a family on the frontier. Knowing this goal of theirs would be about as much fun as falling down a well, and as much hard work as climbing out, he threw in his chicken coop and three old chickens free of charge. “Those hens are almost as old as me anyhow,” he told them. “If you study hard on the eggs they lay, you see little fossils and such… feed them extra grain and they’ll knit you mittens.” The young man and woman just stared at him. “You see,” he prodded, “because knitting is something old ladies do….” They still didn’t laugh. Chowder decided it was because they were so scrawny—they were probably saving their strength. He shook their hands and hoped there was a richer market for jokes farther West.

    At last Chowder had his place cleaned out, the last of his belongings wrangled onto a squeaky old cart. He looped a rope around the load a few times and cinched everything together in the manner of trussing a beef roast. Even tying knots made the cart squeak. “Even if I thought this cart could make the trip, the squeaking would drive me to tears.”

    “I never did like pulling that cart,” Mort said. “If you let me, I’d love to kick it over a cliff, or maybe just kick it to pieces.”

    “Not till we get this last load to town. Hey, you need new shoes, buddy! Let’s get a wiggle on—we got lots to do in town before we hit the trail.”

    They pulled the rickety cart into Spearfish, loaded with the last of Chowder’s household. The cart was parked by the market while Mort stood under the big clock waiting for Bob Zipf, the local farrier, to finish pulling someone’s teeth. Spearfish wasn’t a very big town, so the farrier was also the dentist. This was handy because both required good grip, forearm strength, and a manly apron.

    Out the door came a gentleman with a mouthful of gauze and a red handful of uprooted teeth. Bob came out and waved him goodbye. “Don’t eat or drink till tomorrow, Sam. Keep those clots in, you don’t want dry sockets.”

    “Yull neber shee me agaim,” Sam said, holding his jaw.

    “I know. You don’t have any teeth left.” Bob turned to Mort. “What can we do fer ya, Mort?”

    “New shoes, I guess.”

    “It does look like you need to be shod. Step inside while I don my chaps.” Mort considered walking away so he wouldn’t have to get his feet scraped, tickled and prodded. Kicking a farrier was always a high goal for any horse, generally worth bragging rights among any horse except the most highfalutin foxtrotters, but Mort also knew Bob Zipf was a canny old character. He might have a sleeve full of tricks to stop any horse from besting him, not to mention that knocking down a farrier mid-job would leave you with one shoe on, one shoe off, and maybe a nail or two poking out of your foot. Best not to kick old Bob, at least not until the job was done.
...

Meantime, Chowder had his cartload of stuff to make sales out of. According to plan, it was Saturday Swap time, so the other ranchers and townsfolk gaggled around like geese with their goods and their dollars. Very little salesmanship was required, because everyone knew Chowder was leaving out. They would go out of their way to relieve him of his unwanted goods, and at fair market prices.

    Mrs. Goodwine had a linen-wrapped raisin bread which she gifted to him. He insisted she take something for it, and she finally went away with an iron ladle. Some extra rope went to Burl Jinkers, who loaned Chowder some rope once but felt like he never got it back, even though Chowder felt different. Chowder gave two sauerkraut crocks to Nathaniel Dimble for a half-dollar, and a black trivet to Cora Corielle for two pennies in a coin purse which she said would hold coins or dry medicines on a long trip. “Now, that there is a sound trivet,” he told her. “Chicago craftsmanship, with a little Art New-Vogh in the cast iron. Ain’t yet found a pot that it won’t shoulder.”

    A pretty decent oak rocking chair went for sixty cents to the home of Rex Turpentine, who carried it away on his back, the curved runners over his shoulders. He said his wife and children had full run of his current rocking chair, and sometimes he might like to rock for his own relaxation, so he planned on keeping it out in the barn for a long, slow refinishing job.

    Chowder traded a tarnished silver tray for a box of bullets, and threw a half-pint of molasses in on the deal. A shovel, a bucket, and a large skillet brought another quarter, another handshake from a rasp-callused palm. He traded a mallet for a sack of grits. He sold his hammer, but kept his hatchet for the trail. Finally, only the cart was left, and he’d seen most everyone he knew. He left it behind with a little sign that said, “Free Kindling.”

    He had better than 50 dollars now, and ten times that in the bank. All told, that was a terrible lot of money in those days, especially to sport around on a ride across the continent. In a lucky turn, the Bank of Spearfish now transferred dollars to banks far afield—mostly back in the Old States, but since the Gold Rush there were choices galore in California, several in San Francisco alone. For an exorbitantly high fee, Chowder could wire his money by Western Union’s “lightning line” and open an account far ahead of his actual arrival. He chose to do just that, but said, for the ten dollar fee, there best be a hot meal and a drink waiting for him when he caught up with his money. The Western Union clerk said he would see if that could be arranged.

    Time to pay for Mort’s new shoes, Chowder thought, and walked back toward the town square. He took to the shady side of the street, passing a site where men were building a bell tower, two hundred paces away, on the grounds of the new school. Within the scaffolding where stonemasons still assembled the sturdy walls, someone rang the bell. The deep tone thinned out to a shiver in the hot air; Chowder stood and listened for another strike, but none came. Was this the bell’s first ever use? He’d never heard it before. A wave of sadness came, filling Chowder up to the neck with the weight of water. Wherever he went from here, this town would grow, this bell would ring, and he would never hear it again. Still, he was glad he heard it once before heading out.
...

    Chowder returned to the farrier’s just in time to see a limp man come flying out the open door. The figure collapsed in a heap, as if every bone in its body broke.

    “Ye gods, Mort!” Chowder muttered as he prepared to empty his wallet for Bob Zipf’s doctor bill. But, even though the figure wore Bob’s clothes, it was not him.

    “That should tide you over, Mort!” said Bob’s voice from inside. It turned out Bob had a scarecrow he used for the purpose of a kicking decoy. Horses he did not trust would get a surprise dummy from the rear, sliding on a pulley line right into the sweetest kick-zone. Bob used it to root out the ornery kickers, saving himself a lot of pain. In this case, though, he’d made a deal with Mort—to let him kick it good, just for fun, once Bob finished the job.

    “It was okay,” Mort said. “It could use some bones or something that breaks when you kick it.” Chowder paid Bob double the going rate and told him he was the cleverest horse-shoeing dentist a man could ever hope to meet.

    After a stop at the General Store, Chowder packed the full complement of rations into his gear and they headed west with a full half-day to turn horizon into known miles.

    “Well, looks like we’ll miss our old town, huh Mort?”

    “Naw. This town wasn’t so special to me.”

    “Well, it coulda been worse to us.”

Before Spearfish was even behind them, they heard a familiar sound. Above the light curtain of noise from insects and birds came the squeak of the abandoned cart. They both paused and swore they heard the unmistakable sound, looking around for whatever was haunting them.

    “It can’t follow us, can it?” asked Mort. “If it does, I’ll stomp it to pieces.”

    “Naw—look!” Over a hill came Old Shad, the poorest, hardest-of-hearing old geezer in town, knees goring out his hillbilly pants, pulling the cart with a Christmas morning smile on his wrinkled face. “Old Shad’s struck gold."

Style Wars

2011-06-26T18:50:00.000-05:00

When I see footage of Mr. Khaddafi/Gaddafi, I get the feeling he wakes up thinking, "Am I having a Miami Vice Day, or a Star Wars Day?"


Sometimes you feel like a nut


Sometimes you don't

Maybe it's the same rule of flux that governs which spellings of his name he demands of foreign journalists.

Excerpts from an Actual Application Letter

2011-06-23T22:42:00.001-05:00

Or, why I will never be hired into the self-serious ranks of academia:

Now to the obligatory brag (self-promotion is not my strong suit, hence the hammy tone which we pray will endear more than annoy): I have the minimum requirements safely in the bag, with a bit of variety. I have the poetry MFA from a “Top 20” program. I have, in lieu of two years college teaching experience, six years of part-timing, including tech writing, composition at two levels, one half-semester of fill-in-for-Jacinda on maternity-leave fiction workshop, and at least eight sections of poetry at two levels. I have full command of ENG 203, but I’m bendy to whatever new pedagogical sorcery is in vogue.

Demonstrated record of excellence in teaching? Well, it gets pretty subjective here, but my two or three detractors have been drowned out by a chorus of positive reviews (yes, I’ve saved all my evaluation packets). I was “recruiter” for such current hopefuls as Jacob Helton and Ashley Watson, both featured in the latest Moon City Review*. Several students have testified, post-finals, that my class was “the best English class they’d had,” which may mean little or may mean lots, but always heartens, especially in the case of Paul Johns, a sixtyish English major who spoke thusly from his Santalike beard with grandfatherly authority. The gravitas of this sort of testimonial helps support the idea that I’m offering a quality product more convincingly than the all-caps “WOODY ROCKS!” that concludes one of my evaluation sheets, but I like that too. I also have Facebook contact with Brian Brown, one of my past students who now writes articles for the Springfield Free Press.

My legacy arrives in tidbits, and here’s the strangest one. Drive south on Highway 65. A few miles out of town, there is an Adopt-A-Highway sign under the name “ALPHA BATTLE DRAGON LORDS AGAINST FOREST FIRES,” a Dada-style group founded by two guys—Cody Walker and Rich Valerius—partially in protest of my departure from their fiction class when Jacinda Townsend returned. Unfortunately, their preference for me was so strong that they essentially heckled a pregnant woman in the emotional aftermath of childbirth, which I did not endorse. At semester’s end, my wife and I had dinner with Jacinda and family at Garbo’s, and she appeared undamaged. Cody teaches English at a local high school, and says he will soon write the whole story of the ABDLAFF. He also claims their adopted mile of 65 is “the dirtiest mile of highway in Missouri.”

Oh well. If you can't get a respectable job, you can always be a detestable slob.

Just kidding. I fixed a rooftop A/C unit today. I'm more of an indispensable slob.

Meet the Feeble

2011-06-21T23:26:00.000-05:00

OK, poor creature. Goblin McNugget. Luck Running Out. Needs a tiny action figure to ride it like Arzach.

"Plucky, you sorry bastard."

"On your mark, get set—"

"Squeeze!"

"Sleep, my child. Your mohawk delights me."

"Your gross sac-belly flexes every time you peep."

"I made you a new nest, now stay in it this time, dummy."

"Nature's coffin."

Fathers' Day 2011

2011-06-19T16:45:00.000-05:00

This year I'm giving my dad this bucket of bolts. This is the only sort of thing he wants.

Economic Might through Carrots

2011-06-17T20:58:00.000-05:00

By sheer American determination and grit, I have turned 79 cents worth of carrots seeds into a harvest that may eventually challenge the $2.00 mark in edible carrots.

As long as I don't factor in my labor, I'm golden. I can also consider digging out the carrots as entertainment: they're fun to unearth, and some of them come out looking like Pan's Labyrinth root babies, with little rooty appendages.

Emphasis on Bacon

2011-06-12T17:12:00.001-05:00

View of the night sky from Des Moines, Iowa

No, not Kevin Bacon—savory, salty, porktastic bacon. If you are a fan of bacon, Des Moines may be your mecca. I did not go there looking for bacon, but it seemed to hold great sway over the town. Restaurants featured various bacon-wrapped appetizers, and one restaurant in particular dedicated serious square-footage to celebrating bacon in its boundless greasy variety.

anon. at the entrance to The Machine Shed

The Machine Shed, a farm-themed restaurant on the outskirts of Des Moines, gives bacon its due. "Bacon is Meat Candy" t-shirts lead the way into a small shop's worth of bacon memorabilia and worship. In this place, one gets the idea that bacon does indeed have a world headquarters/command center, and that one is standing in it. Here are just a few of many bacon products you never knew existed.

the author demonstrates the use of the bacon band-aid

Superhero Chess, Checkers, and Rock-Paper-Scissors

2011-06-10T00:37:00.001-05:00

SPOILER ALERT: Crucial beans of X-Men: First Class are spilled

One of the great things about the new movie X-Men: First Class is that the story deftly engages in what I call, for lack of a better term, Mutant-Power Chess. Always a hallmark of good X-Men stories, MPC not only made for unpredictable plot twists and surprising victories, I’m sure it was key to Chris Claremont’s decades-long tenure as the writer of Uncanny X-Men. I’m sure of this because other aspects of Claremont’s writing could get pretty tiresome: every character in every story unleashing his or her canned phrase(s) such as “I’m the best at what I do, and what I do ain’t pretty” (Wolverine) or tidbits of other languages like “Mein Gott!” (Nightcrawler’s German) or “Bozshe moi!” (Colossus’s Russian). All this was pretty cool the first few times, and it’s how Claremont made most every issue accessible to new readers, but after years and years it did tend to make for stereotypical characters and predictable exposition. Still, it was the most successful franchise in comics for most of my youth, because Claremont and his artists overcame these weaknesses with raw inventiveness. Tons of mutants, many cool powers, excursions to alien planets, foreign countries, magic(k), technology—and of course, Mutant-Power Chess.

Mutant-Power Chess takes place in struggles between multiple mutants, and it is of course that special ingredient that made the X-Men, as a team, greater than they could be as a sum of individuals. They could augment each other in surprising ways and new combinations. Two factors made the X-Men champs of this complementary meshing: training together in the Danger Room, and the constant leadership by telepathic link—if not Professor X, then Jean Grey or Cyclops-via-Emma-Frost, or whoever. You pretty much gotta have a telepath.

Sure, other super teams work together: in the Fantastic Four, Sue is always making protective shield bubbles for the others, and Reed always has to hammock out to catch an extinguished Human Torch; Cap leads the Avengers with smart tactics, and maybe Iron Man figures out how to recharge with some of Thor’s lightning; the Justice League does whatever they do, which is pray to hell that Superman doesn’t get kryptonited while leaving Batman alone so he can come up with the kill-stroke plan. Actually, I have no idea how the Justice League operates, except for Wonder Twin powers, which are actually pretty analogous to Mutant-Power Chess: turn into a pail of water while your buddy turns into an eagle to carry the pail.

The simplest Mutant Chess tactics (Mutant Checkers?) were habitual and commonplace. Very few missions went by without Nightcrawler teleporting someone to safety, or Shadowcat phasing someone through a bunker wall. The name-brand move in my X-Men reading days (Claremont/Byrne, Claremont/Romita Jr.) was the “Fastball Special,” where Wolverine was thrown by Colossus so he could poke something extra hard while overcoming his usual lack of flight. The Fastball Special was extra cool if done while Wolverine was smoking a cigar or eating a banana. This was also the golden age of Rogue, a relatively new character at the time. Since Rogue’s power is to borrow other mutant powers, she often slurped up friend or foe to become a mega-mishmash of punching, flying, zapping, and talking like a waitress from Biloxi, Mississippi, sugah. She could have anything but Wolverine’s claws, which were non-transferable (aspects of a modified human, not a mutant talent). Although she was a favorite angsty character of mine in my angsty teenishness, wadding everything onto Rogue is pretty easy as a plot device*, so it’s another example of Mutant Checkers, maybe even Rock-Paper-Scissors**. Rogue-A-Plenty was great fun for the artists, though: build a hot chick out of organic steel, a blue devil tail, striped hair, marshmallows and whatnot, and have her finally trash Nimrod the super Sentinel. A power like Rogue’s, however, can be key to a good game of Mutant Chess. It was used cleverly in the first X-Men movie to fix her own grievous injuries by borrowing Wolverine’s healing factor.

So, the full-blown Mutant Chess game must be built on several mutant powers interacting in surprising synergy. Of course this is just a manifestation of the writer’s creative complexity, so it might be a multi-tiered process, or it may just be a really surprising use of a superpower***, or both. Again, any super-team tales require teamwork, but many times you just see heroes and villains pair off in combos like Strong Guy vs Tough Guy, Fire Guy vs. Ice Lady, or Grippy Guy vs Slippery Sir. Such counterpart scenarios are often resolved by swapping partners square-dance style, at which point we learn that Slippery Sir is greasy, thus highly flammable, etc.

Among X-Men stories, seemingly unstoppable foes tend to require complex battle tactics comparable to chess—different players move differently, have different vulnerabilities. Professor X is very like a king in that his crippled body limits his movement, but all the other pieces revolve around him, and are lost without him. Wolverine is very like a queen, in that he becomes the versatile favorite of most writers as well as fans, doing the lion’s share of the killing. Lesser characters, like pawns, fall and become guilt for the heroes, or rage for the villains. Juggernaut takedowns tend to accumulate the critical mass desired for a cool fight, which must be navigated with care, like ferrying a fox, a goose, and a sack of grain across a river two at a time. The foe is stronger than any X-Man, impervious to attack, and immune to psychic control. It takes no fewer than three mutant powers to beat him, and in the right order: Colossus to wrestle him while Wolverine pops the rivets on his helmet, thus opening him up to Professor X’s mind control.

Such is the challenge in First Class: Sebastian Shaw, who can absorb and redirect any energy, even nuclear, is the villain, and he’s already assembled a team of evil mutants who know what they’re doing and have a telepath of their own. You know you’re in trouble when the enemy has an evil red Nightcrawler who slaughters people wholesale by teleporting them into the sky and dropping them: elegantly brutal, plus kind of fun if you hate people. Shaw also has an anti-telepathy helmet, so there’s no easy out by way of Professor X. Every teammate’s power plays a role, even that usually dispensable bozo, Banshee. In the end, Shaw is executed in the grimmest of poetic justice, not just by Magneto’s “bullet,” but by Xavier’s psychic shackles. Most dreadful and fascinating of all, the low velocity of the kill—sidestepping kinetic energy that could feed Shaw’s power—that final inexorable sliding into checkmate.

*Not to mention that it violates one of the premises of the X-Men: mutant talents are inborn, but are controlled and optimized through discipline, experience, concentration, mental focus, and self-control. Rogue should not be able to do much with other people’s powers other than blow her own mind, but in most stories she used them as skillfully as the rightful owners did. To be fair, stolen powers did sometimes backfire on Rogue, or overload her.

**Examples of Rock-Paper-Scissors include: kryptonite beats Superman, Spidey's mockery beats Doc Ock's fragile self-esteem, and Galactus beats Aunt May. Yes, this last one is ripe for a No-Prize, True Believers!

***In the “surprising use of a superpower” category, it is impossible to beat the speculation of the mad genius Alejandro Jodorowsky, who once fantasized about having Mr. Fantastic’s powers for purposes of sex with his wife, The Invisible Woman. He went well beyond the obviously juvenile, proposing the most ecstatically profane intercourse of all time: penetration throughout the circulatory system, leading to ejaculation within the woman’s beating heart. Factor in her variable transparency, and that’s a superpower checkmate if I ever heard one.

Showdown with Nature #2367: Shrubbery Ripe with Babies

2011-06-08T22:41:00.000-05:00

When you have to trim about a linear mile of bushes at work, you mustn't pussyfoot around. Using powered hedge-trimmers is a must, and you don't have much time to think about all the feathered freeloaders who might be squatting in your demesne, especially when you are using electric plug-in shears that cut their own extension cord every time you drop your guard.

Luckily, a crazy burst of flapping mother bird will alert even the most preoccupied bush-groomer when the shit draws near to the fan. One day, a lady mallard went pounding the pavement when I clipped her roofing to a smooth crop. She was keeping neat house, so I hope she reclaimed her brood before traffic came on too heavy.

Just days later, steady clipping through the canopy of a long hedge brought a beady-eyed dove to frantic escapism. She arced to the asphalt in a dismaying flap—look, I must have severed her wing! But no, she was only putting on her clever injury show, and in the nick of time: there, just inches from my aborted cut, were two runty pabulum sacks just beaming with oblivious victimhood. I just pruned around the little barf-beggars and sure enough, mom got back in the saddle in time for lunch. Not a single knothead was lost.

classic mother-ploy narrowly averts disaster for these squirts

Heroic Tiny Mushroom Takes Top of Fence, Impresses Local Man

2011-06-08T22:00:00.002-05:00

Party Wife Rides the Celebrity Tsunami

2011-06-05T23:16:00.001-05:00

My wife's uncle, currently featured in a Kansas City stage production of The Odd Couple, just busted open the secret world of celebs and let my wife right in. After his play Saturday night, we were inserted directly into the celebrity vortex with George Wendt (Norm from Cheers) and Tim Kazurinsky (SNL). Funnelled backstage, we shook a few hands and my wife, ever prepared, got Tim K. to sign an old Saturday Night Live book after making him go find a pen. Then we drove around the corner to a saloony restaurant and snacked within chip-passing distance of the stars.

Heather, her uncle Herman, George Wendt, and cousin Cassandra

the cast celebrates a whole evening of no one yelling "Norm!"

These guys were pretty cool, but the big payoff was yet to come. By the uncanny observational powers of Party Wife, it was found we were in the room with another celebrity of more subtle fame. While my pedestrian eye identified a tall "sort of Adrian Brody looking guy," Heather steamed ahead with the full processing power of a 16-kilochannel TV brain. After a few minutes she had it: "He's the Meat Delivery Man from Strangers With Candy!" David Pasquesi is his name, and he was the secret bonus-round celebrity of the day.

yes, even the wily Meat Man can be lured into view

As for me, the only observation of consequence I produced was this: from my seat in Kansas City's New Theater, where lots of people ate lots of awesome food under a Vegas-style tiered ceiling of lights and speakers, I realized that this was exactly the sort of decadent venue that terrorists—at least, socioeconomically minded Hollywood terrorists—would blow up with righteous glee... and in some way, those watching the movie would say, "See, when you chow down like caesars and watch plays, that's when terrorists kill you."

Bio of a Potato Guy

2011-05-30T23:04:00.000-05:00

Cartoons allow all kinds of personification, which inevitably leads to confusion. For instance, the classic question, "If Mickey's a mouse, and Pluto's his dog, what's Goofy?"

In the case of my current "mini-graphic novel" project, I like taking human-world objects and using them in potato society: a penny becomes a discus, a cocktail sword can be wielded to fend off a rabbit, etc. But then things start getting weird, if you look too close. In the arcade where they play "Ring Toss" and a Pac-Man watch as stand-up arcade games, you see a small coin on the floor, and an Icee cup scaled down to fit the hand of a fruit-girl. Well, I guess sentient produce have attained modern manufacturing methods after all.

Joplin Found

2011-05-26T22:18:00.001-05:00

Sunday's tornado in Joplin, Missouri shredded, among other things, the records of St. John's Hospital. Soon they said x-rays from there were found up to 70 miles away. Well, today I found mine. This sort of debris has fallen on my workplace before, but this may be a distance record.

The back is spattered with pulpy insulation bits and fibers. In the close-up you can see the patient's name, hospital, date, and more.

I Forgot My Damn Juice!

2011-05-18T23:06:00.000-05:00

Realized when I got home, I forgot my fucking juice at Dollar General. Left it at the bagging carousel. The cashier said, "You have a wonderful evening" with what seemed like full sincerity, and I walked off with just one bag. No way is it worth driving back there for just that, so I'm hoping the same guy will be there tomorrow evening so I can ask about reclaiming the son-of-a-bitch. It was V8 Splash.

Cranial Stomp International

2011-05-16T00:36:00.002-05:00

What's more pointlessly fun than looking at one's blog stats? I like checking out the list of countries that I've had traffic from. None of it tells me anything, really, but I can speculate with abandon.

After the U.S. and the U.K., third in my all-time hits is Germany. I suspect this is because of my entry "Human Centipede Revisited," which expands the Human Centipede concept into the Muppets universe. While the movie is not German per se, I think the main actor is, and I put a link to my drawing on the Facebook pages of both Dieter Laser and Tom Six. This probably brought in my Dutch visitors as well.

Who knows why I have hits from Croatia, Slovenia, and Russia, but I do. My wife says it is because of the SLUTS. She has a slight but colorful obsession with Eastern Bloc women—she says they will do unethical things to my privates, come to America to seduce me into sham marriages, then kill me in my sleep. I think this is because I once wrote about entertaining myself on a "Russian Brides" website, which featured lots of impossibly hot photos. The Czech Republic seems to pump out more than its fair share of porn-worthy sluts, I'm guessing because lots of movies are filmed there now, so maybe hot girls flock there for job opportunities. In any case, I doubt I'm drawing much slut traffic, but it's fun to consider. That's why I mention the Czech Republic—I don't have them yet, but maybe I can attract them. Bring on the Eastern Bloc sluts!

In the past month, I've picked up a fan in Iran. Whoever it is, they've returned a few times, so they must have an interest in either beekeeping, cockleburs, frogs in pipes, or Easter candy. Or maybe they stand united with me in a universal loathing of Garfield.

Malaysia? Two hits. Your guess is as good as mine.

Canada is just good ol' Canada. Solid fourth in supporting Cranial Stomp. Could be this guy Brad Pine, a Red Rogue fan from way back.

My most-viewed page ever remains "Pirate Ship Name Generator," which is really just a plug for another site. Second is "World's Fattest Ferret," which is a lie because it's a picture of a cat—sure to enrage all the ferret-lovers who googled their way to what they hoped would be ferret fun-tasy.

Let's have some revealing comments, you foreigners! Especially if you are sluts.

Schadenfreude Pick-me-up

2011-05-09T01:28:00.000-05:00

Whenever I need a little mood booster, I just look at this picture. For some reason, it makes me feel better. Thank you, W. P. Armstrong.

Swarm!

2011-05-07T11:23:00.000-05:00

After two years humoring this bee colony in my building at work, they were starting to get me down. Twice last week they began swarming inside the hallway below, through some cracks in the wall apparently. I just had to show up and spray them all dead, which was gross because, not only did I end up with hundreds of dead bees, but they basically death-barfed honey everywhere. I guess when they prepare to swarm, they load up on honey for the journey, so they're like living honey bombs if you kill them.

After two rounds of exploring an area of ductwork and ceiling-to-wall joints where errant bees kept popping out of holes, I sealed all cracks with expanding foam and seemed to have them sealed outside again. The next day, I went on the roof to check on an air conditioner problem. Just 20 feet from the main hive, I found this pile of bees.

iPhone shadow converging on honeybee convention

Just a few days earlier, I'd seen this on the hive wall and called a beekeeper, but by the time he got there a few hours later, they were gone. He'd said he was going to spray them with sugar water and scoop them into a wooden crate, so I decided to try it myself. I had a jug of Sprite syrup from a soda fountain. I had kicked the habit of adding it to water to make a Sprite-flavored kool-aid drink, so this would be a good use for it. I mixed a spray bottle of around 4:1 water to syrup. I punched some air holes in a 5-gallon bucket lid. Then I put on a ski mask, hooded sweatshirt, and heavy gloves.

The sugar water was supposed to keep them from flying, which didn't really work. There were always a number of flyers whose job appeared to be air defense. I kept misting the pile and the flyers, but there was really no keeping them down. Luckily, most of them remained docile in the swarm heap. I started scooping them up with a plastic dustpan and dumping them into the bucket. Soon everything became sticky with Sprite. My shoes were sticking to the roof and I was trying not to step on bees. Every minute or so, the flyers would get more numerous and aggressive, so I'd mist them, back out, check myself for mad bees, and start again.

Soon I had about 90% of them in the bucket. I sent a picture to the beekeeper and told him I was catching them. I put the lid on the bucket so they wouldn't fly out, but for the most part they just sat in there regardless of what I did. I took the bucket down to the ground, then got a small cardboard box and put the last few hundred bees in it. The beekeeper said he would come get them in a couple hours, and said I should put the bucket out of the sun, so I did.

is the queen in here?

inside the bee bucket

So I handed the bucket and the box off to the bee man. I never got stung, which I think is more about the bees being good and less about my technique. The main hive seems normal again. Hopefully I sent the swarm off to better opportunities, where they won't get sprayed with poison or flat pop. Now pollinate, my swarm!

Easter Aftermath

2011-04-27T17:59:00.001-05:00

My wife always says Easter is her favorite holiday in the "candy" category. About a week ago, I asked her if she'd "blown her load" on getting her Easter candy fix. I knew the answer would be NO, and it was: "Oh God, no! I still need more jelly beans and peanut butter eggs and all kinds of shit--I'm going to Walgreens!"

Well, now we have been basically satiated, but we're not finished with all the candy. Knowing my sister's candy-eating prowess, and that she has two small daughters, I assumed there was probably lots of candy there, too, and maybe some fighting over it. I decided to write them a play involving all the Easter candy I could think of.

It has been confirmed that the gist of the scenario is dead on, but my characters are calmer and more civil than the actual toddlers... still, I can say: BASED ON A TRUE STORY.

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/11891440/easter-debate-georgia-raleigh

Frog in a Pipe

2011-04-24T10:40:00.000-05:00

Beefy treefrog sheltering in a PVC pipe. He scooted downpipe when I started eyeing him, but I found that when I covered the opening completely with the camera, the interior was lit by sunlight coming through the pipe--eerie vortex effect achieved.

Down with Garfield

2011-04-16T09:05:00.002-05:00

If you've lived more than ten years on this planet, you may have figured out that the least creative, least surprising, least mind-taxing comic strip in print is Garfield. If you have made this assessment, you will be pleased to know that I began boycotting Garfield as early as 1983. Years previous, in second and third grades, I’d finished a few of my friend’s Garfield collections and felt comfortable with them. However, by grade 5, Garfield was an altogether too-accepted running dog of grade school mediocrity, and I was rapidly souring on it. Mrs. Hampton, my teacher, had Garfield and Michael Jackson plastered on our classroom’s every surface. They became a one-two punch of Orwellian brotherhood–”join us in predictable vapid loyalty to Mrs. Hampton’s mainstream tastes or just sit there deprived of fun.” Stephanie Long and Michelle Hawkins rubbed Teacher’s shoulders while I fumed. Garfield was not funny, and Michael Jackson was not cool. I wasn’t joining. Our big rewards were Garfield stickers and, for a recreational milestone after completing some big study unit or "fall quarter," we would be shown “The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller.” For Willard, MO in 1983, this was probably pretty progressive, but I was already poisoned. My only feeble resistance to their bogus mass-consumption was “not really being into it.”

Eventually this would lead to minor displays of “bad attitude,” and it finally culminated in my refusal to do a report on some topic because I felt all the good topics were taken by the students who were in the fold. When confronted over why I failed to complete the assignment, I said, “Because I thought it was a buncha shit.” This got me put in the hallway with, among others, Richard Peck, the mean kid who once pushed me down on the playground and ripped my favorite corduroy pants. So began the corrosion of my conformity, and my bitter, near-everlasting gobstopper of virginity.

Thanks Garfield, you unfunny piece of shit.

I Give Up

2011-04-09T08:18:00.000-05:00

This "hangman" puzzle was much too hard!

Found: Swamp Thing's Placenta

2011-04-09T08:15:00.000-05:00

Yardwork Archaeology plus Defensive Snake

2011-04-03T20:41:00.001-05:00

Ancient Cartilaginous Duckling Unearthed

Yes, it was a weekend that demanded yardwork galore, which in my yard means fighting vines. While pulling some out of my hedge, I unearthed a crumbling ducky portion with the bleached color and translucency of cartilage.

Then I ripped up a root and flipped a garter snake into play. I grabbed it to make sport of it, as one must do with a little harmless snake. At first it was cute, so I decided to get my phone and take its picture. Then the trouble began. I'd held it for 20-30 seconds before it started to excrete a stinky defensive juice--enough that it was dripping off my fingers, so I didn't want to step inside for my phone. Looking around for a bucket to put him in, he got mad and started striking, so I wussed out and dropped him. Then I flipped him outside and scooped him into a styrofoam faucet cover, got the phone, and started taking his picture.

That was when I discovered that the garter snake's natural enemy is the iPhone. The snake started gaping its mouth and striking at every slight movement of the phone.

Maybe the reflective logo or the lens look like predatory eyes. Either way, after getting juiced with all that stinky brine, I was determined to take a cool picture. I tried a few times to shoot him in mid-strike, or even with his mouth coming over the lens, but with the delay of the photo snap, I would have been tormenting him all day, so I finally dumped him out and let him go.

ATARI on LSD

2011-03-23T19:24:00.000-05:00

OK, I remember a sort-of-scary Burger Time commercial (above), but I don't recall this shit at all. Did I miss these, or did I just block them out as trauma?

Joust

Centipede

I mean, holy shit. If I can come to grips with these, I'll write about them on Cinematograflop, but I think they may be beyond the scope of my intellect. Truly astounding work.

Another Pathetic Tale for the Faint at Heart

2011-03-22T23:04:00.000-05:00

What's even better than an unfinished illustration? An unfinished story to go with it!

Frumpty Lumpty

You may have heard of Humpty Dumpty, that grand old character of Eggsville, who had a great fall and was never the same again, but you probably never heard of Humpty’s nephew Frumpty Lumpty. Frumpty Lumpty was an egg just like his uncle, but smaller and a little more raw. When he saw what happened to his uncle, he decided to stay indoors on a bed of soft cushions. He carefully sanded the corners off all of his furniture and glued pieces of foam on the edges of everything. “Nothing will take me by surprise,” claimed Frumpty Lumpty. “Just because I am an egg does not mean I will be easy to crack.”

Soon Frumpty Lumpty developed a habit of ordering useless things from television infomercials and mail-order catalogs because he was bored with his shut-in lifestyle. To get his deliveries, he had to walk to his mailbox—just across the street and under a tree where a woodpecker lived. Every time he went to his mailbox, the woodpecker stared at him. “Stop looking at me, woodpecker!” Sometimes the woodpecker moved its beak as if to say, “I will punch holes in you like a whiffle ball.” Frumpty toddled fast as he could back inside, wiped his forehead with a tissue, and fainted onto his soft recliner.

Frumpty ordered a bunch of Snuggies—all different colors, one for each day of the week. He ordered an 8-hour video of a yule log burning in a fireplace. He ordered little blocks of freeze-dried ice cream like astronauts eat up in space. He ordered a stack of edible dinner plates that tasted horrible. He ordered shoes shaped like penguins holding little snow shovels. The catalog guaranteed that they would shovel your sidewalk snow for you*. Frumpty ordered a lot of things just to get free shipping, and then forgot what he ordered so that when those things arrived, they surprised him. “Oh, what a treat! Some kind of slippers for cat feet,” he said when he opened a box. “Now if they would just send me a cat,” and he started looking through catalogs. “Maybe one with no claws.”
               *Only up to one centimeter of snow

Although it strained his budget, he’d joined the Toilet Seat of the Month Club, and was waiting for this month’s toilet seat to arrive: the Wonderplush Microfuzz Rumpcradle, so comfortable it will make you forget you’re on the toilet. Frumpty was a tad bit worried about forgetting too soon that he was on the toilet, but he was also painfully aware that last month’s toilet seat, the May Flowers Garden of Rich Delights, was already in the red-hot crosshairs of toilet seat fashionistas across America, and he would soon be noticeably outcommoded. “What if someone finds out I’m still using last month’s toilet seat four days into May?” That’s when he decided against letting anyone into his house. No more repairmen or surprise visitors. Even friends could be a big risk. He would keep the curtains closed so no one could see him watching TV or sitting on his outdated toilet seat.

One Saturday, Frumpty Lumpty needed to go out to get the mail. He was expecting a 9-volt Hot Dog Slicer with free Hot Dog Peeler, making hot dogs easier to eat without choking, but he was really scared to go outside. It was rainy, and he was worried about slip-and-fall situations because he had seen a number of Tad Morlan commercials. Finally he put on three layers of Snuggies and a hardhat, plus some grippy shoes. He also used a walker like some grandmas use. He made it to the mailbox safe and sound.
    “Darn,” he said, “No Hot Dog Slicer.” He got some new catalogs from the mailbox and looked up to see the woodpecker landing on his shoulder. His eyes stretched maximally open and he cried a little bit of egg white. Then he tripped on a tiny pebble and died, but came back to terrorize your neighborhood!

Just kidding--that's not how it ends.

Bill Maher as Seen by iPhone

2011-03-21T22:47:00.001-05:00

Despite Bill Maher's vehement opposition to all things religious, he appears supernaturally energized to the electronic lens... as a Cocoon alien, or as my wife called the image, "Electric Sasquatch."

Last night he stuck it to Sarah Palin, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, the Pope—and Obama for being a pussy. Somewhere outside, the Westboro Baptist Church protested in vain.

One of many highlights: when he said he liked coming to the Midwest because we don't call our mothers "cunts." Also, when he spoke of politicians who always talk about praying in the wake of a disaster: "Yeah, that's what I want in a leader—someone who says the first thing he'll do is try to telepathically communicate with his imaginary friend."

In Defense of Bastard Teachers

2011-03-13T13:41:00.000-05:00

(Looks like this will not be appearing on Thought Catalog, so it appears here.)

A recent Thought Catalog article (Be Generous. Speak to the Smartest.) by Daniel Coffeen sparked a mixed comment thread marked by numerous calls for the author to stay away from teaching for the good of students and society. Others, fewer in number, weighed in supportively. I was one of the latter, with some misgivings; as the comments rolled in, I steeped in deeper waters. It’s easy to make the case for caring, for hand-holding, for kiddie coddling. I will make the tougher argument (and probably get skewered for it). I will make the case for bastards.

I’ll start with a quote from Mr. Coffeen on pedagogy: “This may sound obvious but, needless to say, many in the pedagogic community believe just the opposite: aim for the lowest common denominator, for the stupid and least interested.” While I think he may have been punished by some for his bluntness and honesty, I can also get why he was attacked for being a dick. Maybe he pushed it too far, throwing around the word “stupid.” My brother was not academically inclined, but I have never considered him stupid; there are many topics (construction, demolition, flora and fauna both local and worldwide) where I will quickly bow to his expertise. Still, he wasn’t built for school, and I’m sure some people thought he was dumb.

Now, a general theory that I think stands a (faint) chance of uniting the factions in Coffeen’s comment thread: As we progress through school, the hand-holding can decrease. It MUST decrease. Coffeen’s detractors, some of whom practically demanded that he be banned from teaching, have a point if he taught K-6. Higher than that, and they become increasingly full of shit as Coffeen’s credibility grows.

Here’s why (and I can only speak from a full public-school background, K-MFA): From high school on, many of my best teachers were bastards. On the flip side, people like my brother needed waste no more years in school. Sure, he might have found some area of interest had he attended college, but that’s alternate universe stuff. He prospered by getting out into the hands-on world, and that’s the sanest, kindest outcome pursuant to Coffeen’s statement, “If the dummies don’t get it, fuck ‘em. It’s not the job of smart people to cater to dumb people. It’s the job of dumb people either to shut the fuck up or try and be smarter.” Ironically, this sounds like something my brother would say today; only he might be saying it because some college-educated person didn’t have the brains to replace a bad capacitor in their HVAC unit. I know the outraged commenters found this to be one of Coffeen’s most incendiary bits, then calling him things like “arrogant asshole.” What they don’t get is that their view of education has a built-in arrogance of its own: that their overly democratic view can be a waste of everyone’s time, including a “stupid” person’s, based on the conceit that they can enlighten everyone in their image. Sorry, in some cases you’re just beating square pegs through round holes—the sort of exercise that dumb guys are often quicker in spotting as foolish, if put against academics. It should be obvious by now that higher education is not for everyone, and that’s not a judgment from on high; it’s a common-sense recognition of different types of intelligence, different ways of navigating life.

No matter how much our culture devalues the blue-collar man, manual labor persists in its manifold robotic and animal usefulness. It neither ennobles nor dehumanizes, necessarily; it’s simply necessary. You’ll know this when your car breaks down. You will be saved by a man with no PhD, no letters at all after his name. His power comes from a realm neither academic nor celebrated, but today he is the better man.

I realize at this point that I’m inching away from Coffeen’s main point of lecturing on a higher rhetorical plane. I seem to be aiming at some kind of moving target, either highlighting the “smartness of the stupids,” or just making common enemy of his detractors, whose attacks seemed too rote and simplistic. I realize also that my thesis may be teetering on the cliche of promoting a “school of hard knocks” mentality. If so, it is because George Carlin made a lot of good points when he dissected the continual “pussification of America.”

One of my favorite Coffeen comments came from someone called BRI: “I once had a professor who called my writing "trivial" and told me that my writing skills were behind most of the students in my class. Instead of sitting around attacking him with the rest of my classmates (he was pretty nasty to everyone) I took it as a challenge. I managed to pull off an A in the class. His superiority, which was extremely apparent to anyone in my class, did nothing but motivate me.” This embodies the right attitude to me. Not all students will have such fortitude, but it’s exactly what progress is built on. When I taught writing, BRI was just the type of ore I loved to discover.

Another thing I noticed in the comment thread was that Coffeen’s attackers, aside from hating the word “alas,” used more ad hominem attacks, where the supporters offered more anecdotal evidence. I’m staying true to that formula and going with the anecdotes, because stories are not only more memorable, they’re all I have: the pedagogy course I took against my will in grad school made barely a ripple on my long-term mindset, and is less than forgettable compared to the bastard giants on whose shoulders I stand today.

Before I send out my champions, I’ll concede that they not only teach/taught above grade 9, but that they in no way nullify or diminish those teachers who are kind, soothing, and ever-uplifting. I’m hardly an Iron John cultural conservative, but it makes sense to me that the teacher of small children be stereotyped as a smiling, nice lady with the capacity to unselfconsciously help six-year-olds with potty problems. It also follows that we grow toward adversity (within reason), and men tend to make better bastards. I can make you a list of the sweethearts at some point if necessary, but today we celebrate the sons (and daughters) of bitches. The whip-wielding masters of public school sado-academic darwinism. The tellers of harsh truths.

Bastard Champ #1: Eric Pervukhin

He might be my all-time favorite teacher. He teaches design and illustration at Missouri State, but seems to know everything visual from classical painting to computers, printmaking to cartooning. He came from Moscow, tells vague stories about surviving post-WW2 internment camps and later working on what he called Soviet version of Sesame Street. He talk a little funny but knows English better than most native speakers. He’s a friendly, hilarious and talkative guy, but he used to make students cry occasionally after critiques. I took two of his classes for the sheer joy of them—they didn’t count toward my writing degree—and came away with not only technical knowledge, but a wealth of funny stories and wisdom. When I later taught writing classes, I found myself quoting Eric more than any other teacher.

For instance: “Students, be smart. If you cannot draw hands, don’t make comic about people—make comic about blob. Might be sad blob, might be happy blob, but BLOB YOU CAN DRAW.” This was one of several announcements made, in slight disgust, hot on the heels of one or two classmates trying to compose complex Hollywood blockbuster comic stories despite a total lack of artistic draftsmanship. Nothing looks more foolish, and they needed to be told, so Eric told them. His comment is awesome because it sounds delirious and wacky at first, but delivers the invaluable wisdom of working within one’s limits to meet deadlines with artistic savvy.

I generally got off easy, with Eric liking most of my work. Still, I was not above whipping. My lack of typography knowledge once led me to a layout with several characters “kissing.” I thought I was being slick or something; Eric said, “It looks like it was made by a totally ignorant person.” This brought me down for a bit, but I never made that mistake again.

More champ than bastard, Eric still makes the list because he embodies fearless knowledge, unafraid to scrape a few feelings. He once provided a possible slogan for this topic: “Remember, students like to be beaten!”

Bastard Champ Team-up: William Logan & Debora Greger

In 1998 I won my way into the University of Florida writing program. While I’ve not had stellar literary success since, I still feel it was time well spent. I learned great amounts at a great pace, much to the credit of the program director, William Logan. Logan had a reputation, of which I was faintly aware going in, for being the bulldog of the world of poetry criticism, and some people would say that comparison abuses bulldogs. Little did I know that it would be Logan’s wife, Debora Greger, who would be the true literary Shiva, destroyer of egos. Whereas Logan would litter a page with erudite comments ranging from informative to snidely mockful (“Oh! Oh! This sentimentality brings tears!” or “Amusing as it is, this poem never rises above the giddy.” Greger would do things that could literally keep a young writer awake at night. She routinely drew an “X” through a whole stanza, even a whole poem, with terse comments like “trite and embarrassing.” Naturally we grads learned to form little support groups where we shared our Debora lashings for communal relief. One of her classic comments, which stayed with me partly because it was never delivered unto me, was, “This is exactly the sort of Southern-fried writing that I wish would crawl under the porch and die.” At her harshest, she delivered your poem to your mailbox in an envelope, saying, “This is a waste of my time—and yours. What exactly HAVE you learned this semester?”

Greger could also be very nice—never quite warm, but nice—which was almost more terrifying. In vaguely dominatrix fashion, she lashed capriciously, keeping one guessing when the next blow would come. I must say that I think Debora was occasionally too hardcore in her criticism, adding perhaps more anxiety than creative flux to the atmosphere. Still, there were lessons galore from both Logan and Greger. In tag-team fashion, they cured me of 99% of my sentimental writing instincts.

Finally, the King of Bastard Teachers

So much can be said, but in the end only so much can be said. At some point, a person must learn, do, fail, fight, and finally die. There is a grim ingredient in life that is sometimes overlooked, especially by institutions like schools, but a good Bastard Teacher will give it to you straight. I’ll end with a remembrance I wrote last year upon the death of my most memorable high school teacher.

RIP Great One (Summer 2010)

I heard today that Bill “Great One” Gould died this week of cancer at age 66. I told my wife, and she asked, “Who is that again?” That made me realize I’ve been remiss in spreading the good word.

“You may call me Sir, or Your Highness, or Great One,” he stated on the first day of class. “I will call you maggot.”

I used to say that if you went to Willard schools and never had one of Gould’s classes, you pretty much missed the Willard experience. You missed out, probably on getting your ass kicked by the champ. “Great One?” would be answered, “Yes, maggot?” with lightning speed and just the right touch of imperiousness.

Surfing the pimply tide of smartass teenagers with golf club in hand, playing Whack-A-Mole with any heads that poked up too high, the Great One jabbed us with Rickles-esque mockery and made sure he scheduled his conference hour in period 7 so he could scram an hour early— straight to the Brown Derby down the road in his greenish El Camino.

If you had fortitude, Gould was one of your first shots at having an anti-hero. He proudly revealed his closet full of the same history tests he’d been giving for 20 years. “There are no tricks here,” he’d say. “I’ll write the questions on the board Monday through Thursday. Every Friday there’ll be a test. There’s no reason everyone can’t get ‘A’s. But most of you will blow it.” You knew it was all true, because the tests were printed in purple mimeo ink even though the school had switched to photocopiers a decade earlier. Amazingly, some people managed to flunk those tests.

He practiced his golf swing at the front of the room. If you fell asleep, he’d hit your desk with it. God help you if you woke up drooling. He knew no fear or mercy. He skewered the kids of the School Board members, the Superintendent, anyone. He once signed a petition that called for the firing of… Bill Gould. He saved chalk dust and erasers long after blackboards were replaced with dry erase whiteboards, just so he could dust the cheerleaders’ black outfits on game days.

He thumped his liquor gut like a melon and said it was almost ripe.

Great One had funny nicknames for many students. Some were recycled year after year— “Zulu,” for instance, was used on my sister, and later on another tan blonde girl. Was it about the tan? Some were appropriated from the student lexicon, like Eric “The Juice” Poland, which Great One probably assumed was some ironic play on Eric’s being a pale antithesis of OJ Simpson. No, it was because Jimmy Barnes and I decided once that Eric’s big boxy noggin resembled a juice box. Maybe he’d call you J.J. or Bubba or Fescue Phil. He didn’t have to explain.

If he lacked a nickname for you, he just said your name in a snide tone to tarnish it a bit. Great One knew that one’s own name could be the most cutting and original smear.

In the end, Great One used the academic situation, and the topic of world history, as trojan horses to deliver his true curriculum: horrors of the social mirror. He tried to force our heads up through the low ceiling of our small-town youthful ignorance so we could see our own foolishness, and maybe see past it. He was also teaching us to wake up, to watch out, to be ready when it came time “to thin the herd.” Long after the facts about ancient Pharoahs faded, Great One’s core lessons remained relevant. I have never been more honored to be called “maggot.”

Oh no! 8.9!

2011-03-11T08:53:00.002-06:00

Good gravy, that whirlpool off the coast of Japan in the wake of the tsunami looks like Godzilla will rise out of it!

Poor Japan! What a mess.

New Blog A-formin'

2011-03-08T20:27:00.002-06:00

I'd like to have a communal blog for harsh write-ups of bad movies and TV, such as my previous post. I will try to watch something terrible periodically, and invite you to do the same. This would probably be easier to do in a Facebook group, but I don't want Zuckerburg dragging us down.

WEEKEND WASTED is the best title I have so far. I think my Dungeons and Dragons entry sets up a pretty good template, but we also need a ratings system. I don't think it works just to give a bad movie fewer traditional stars, because what we're craving here is that rare bad movie that is so bad it's also mutating into good; thus, a certain one-star movie might be ridiculously funny, whereas another one-star movie may just be unwatchable and boring. Here are ideas:

• 1-4 BLACK STARS: inverted stars that denote anti-quality
• 1-10 on the ED WOOD scale
• 1-3000 MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATERS

It might also be funny to say where you "acquired" the movie—in the bargain bin at Mal-Wart, or on local late-night TV.

We can also nominate certain movies that need to be tackled, like a list for bounty hunters. I hereby nominate those "Left Behind" movies with Kirk Cameron.

If anyone knows the best way to build this blog/group, let me know. I suppose Facebook will be hard to beat.

Weekend Wasted—Episode 1

2011-03-07T21:48:00.004-06:00

Dungeons and Dragons (2000)

After my wife and a friend exclaimed about Jeremy Irons on a Law and Order episode, I used it as an excuse to come to terms with Dungeons and Dragons, a movie I never saw because it looked like crap.

A truly awful movie can be a joy to behold, at least in the comfort and privacy of home. In the case of Dungeons and Dragons, joy may not be the primary feeling involved, but it does come bearing many gifts: feats of lousy acting, bizarre stupidity, feeble theft from greater films, and a dragon's hoard of floppy cliches. How much does this movie stink? Let us count the ways.

1. It has a Wayans brother. As soon as the tale begins you'll get to see him in action. This Lesser Wayans is the first, best sign that you've boarded the chump train. You might be like me and point him out with the same weary dread that Boromir used in Fellowship of the Ring when he said in Moria, "They've got a cave troll…." “They have a Wayans.”
2. It has a Beholder, but they don't do anything with it.
3. The effects are weak-ass. The only inventive visual comes when a Persian rug turns into a pit of oatmealy quicksand, and even that isn't mind-blowing.
4. Most of the actors can't even be bothered to adopt a faux British accent to boost their medieval mojo. There are some very non-human races who speak modern casual. For instance, a blue guy with a third eye in his forehead who sounds like he works at Fast & Friendly.
5. The main badass villain, the Darth Vader to Jeremy Irons's Emperor, has nonsensical blue lips.
6. Just when you think you might be treated to one scintilla of originality, that doesn't happen.
7. Some of the weakest fight scenes ever filmed. As if no one ever planned, trained, practiced, or cared. Most of the fights count on the scene being very crowded with people, so they just scramble around and bump into each other, but with swords in their hands.
8. Rip-off Town: Take the Princess and the Emperor from Star Wars, take Gimli, Elrond, Sam & Frodo, and the giant tree from LotR, take a brain-worm vaguely like Chekov’s ear-grubs from Wrath of Khan, run your hero through a maze challenge kind of like Indiana Jones, then mash them all together into a charmless gruel.
9. Apparently, the good guys dissolve into fairy dust at the end and follow the dead Wayans brother to heaven! Jesus Christ.

Talking Points:
• When Ghost World came out, Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson seemed equal. When did Thora Birch officially lose the fame race with Scarlett Johansson? Either at birth or when this movie came out, depending on your level of cynicism.
• Lord of the Rings was in production when this movie came out. Did they just rush it out to cash in on sword-and-sorcery fever?
• Why would anyone make shit like this?
• There is a theme of class warfare built into the script, where Mages are the ruling class and likened to the rich and powerful. Everyone else is poor, powerless, and rag-tag. This socio-economic theme is resolved by a computer-generated ruckus of fire-breathing red dragons.

Cast of Characters:
• Two thief buddies—Some Fucking Wayans and Bland Young Stud. They are the embodiment of the worst in buddy movies, plus a bit of Abbott and Costello. SFW is supposed to be hilarious because he's both cowardly and flirty, while BYS is supposed to be full of admirable gumption and loyalty. It is a relief when SFW dies, and a constant worry that he’ll be resurrected by magic.
• Empress Thora Birch—She dresses and functions just like Princess Amidala in Star Wars, except when she rides a dragon, in which case she wears a secondhand Penthouse magazine Joan of Arc get-up.
• Foodbeard the Dwarf—he’s like a homeless Gimli, but with a lot less class. He gets so much food in his beard throughout the movie that it often resembles a beard of vomit. Between this and his overly expressive face, he is the second best presence in the movie, because he is unapologetically moronic.
• S&M Spock Elf—She’s a mysterious battle-bitch with above average skills. She looks like a Vulcan, but wears a sky-blue Madonna-tits breastplate, pastel plate-mail, and leather work gloves from Race Brothers Farm Supply. When Bland Young Stud is stabbed in the collar, he swoons like Morgul-blade Frodo and she takes him to be healed by her Elf-lord father, faux-Elrond. He chides the humans: “You USE magic… WE are PART of it.” All eyes moisten with wonder.
• Cut-rate Anne Hathaway—sort of a magical grad student. Semi-hot; moistly harmless.
• Blue-lipped Prick—Bad guy who is so bad he’s really bad. He stabs, beats, and lies under the command of Jeremy Irons, who controls him with a mean-looking brain parasite. Potentially one of the more interesting items in the film, but it fizzles predictably.
• Jeremy Irons— When things get serious, he takes off his white clothes and puts on his black clothes. Everyone knows he can act, but he does his best to prove otherwise. Maybe he’s trying to beat his co-stars to the Shit Trophy. The director must have told Jeremy Irons to act to the point of seizure, because that’s what he does.
• There’s this talking skeleton tied to the wall of the dragon’s treasure chamber. He is the best actor in the film, and I commend him.

Plot:

The two buddies have to steal things in lively fashion, because they are thieves. Right up the street there must be ripe pickings at the Magic School, so they break in to steal. The smarty-pants grad-student girl nabs them with a magic binding spell. They argue about their values and begin building a little sexual tension. Then they all run around. Meanwhile, Jeremy Irons throws caution to the wind and fucks with red dragons, bending them to his will whilst twisting his teeth into various grimaces. Then they all run around. The good guys have to do some feats of skill to win a map from the Lord of Thieves. They win, but he screws them over because he’s the biggest thief, and laughs at the concept of “honor among thieves.” Blue-lipped Prick shows up and they all run around. Soothingly, the Prick kills the Wayans brother. The remaining good guys follow the map and get to the dragon’s lair, where they steal a gem, put it in a secret slot, and get magical results. Thora Birch rides a dragon in her Penthouse Joan of Arc suit, winning the hour. A pissed-off red dragon bites the bejeezus out of Jeremy Irons in the Superbowl of dragon fights, which plays like a video game. Then they have a modest funeral for the Wayans brother, and—I fucking shit you not—they all turn to fairy twinkles and rise into the air!

Did my friend Chris DeLozier write this in junior high when he was our dungeon master?

Comics!

2011-02-27T19:11:00.004-06:00

For some reason it's rare that I put comics here, despite the title of the blog.
That's because I don't finish very many comics. Well, here's one I just finished.

Something for Dad

2011-02-25T23:10:00.002-06:00

You know you're becoming like your dad (MY dad, at least) when you feel energized by finding a rubber strap. Sometimes I see them on the road and consider stopping to pick them up. Actually, I fantasize about opening the car door and snatching them off the concrete as I pass over—an act that would be not only sanctioned but necessary in the mindscape of Hollywood, but that would lead to real-world consequences somewhere between scraped knuckles and fatal crash, accompanied by at least one blast of angry honking.

You know you're not becoming like your dad when you photograph the rubber strap you found and admire it as potential typography.

Why do I keep finding yogurt?

2011-02-25T23:01:00.003-06:00

As the multiple snows of February recede, I am left with inexplicable yogurts. These are just two of the three unopened servings visited upon me by the lords of happenstance, found on my normal morning rounds at work. In ten years on the job, the previous yogurt tally has been zero. Now, three in two weeks. They're not even expired!

Yes, I ate the first one, before suspecting a trend. It wasn't great, but it didn't make me sick. Yet.

Sometimes it's the Plate

2011-02-16T21:27:00.003-06:00

Angel of Death

In the olde tyme printmaking class, ye ol' printmaster used to bitch to us about many things. One was that we should not get into making the plate look cool, because all that matters is how it prints. Well, after a disappointing proof, today I'm just gonna sit here and enjoy this plate, because it looks cool. Maybe I'll just frame the damn thing, because it's soothing to behold, unlike the muddy print.

By the heavenly glow of Thomas Kinkaid, I banish myself to the Land of Shades.

Toilet Reading?

2011-02-12T09:56:00.004-06:00

It's out, it's out!

That's what you'll say while relaxing with this new volume, a 60-page review of my etchings, engravings, woodcuts, linocuts and wood engravings. While its usefulness in the bathroom is yet untested, I'm afraid this fifteen-year compendium can be absorbed in its entirety in the span of one sitting.

Now that it's finished, I realize it shows only about half of my printmaking, but probably the better half. I'm going to set up a supplementary blog showing some apocryphal Apocrypha, new work, and whatever comes to mind.

Junk Apocrypha 1.5 now processing...

I Win Again

2011-01-29T08:24:00.003-06:00

I finally finished my first xtranormal movie. Once I had a script, it only took me about an hour. They have a pretty brilliant interface or template or whatever the hell they call all the dingleknobs that allow you to make stuff. Oddly enough, among the many platoons of characters to choose from, there are none approximating a mother and son. Couldn't even find an old lady.

You also have to type a lot of phonetic misspellings, especially names like "Obamma" and "Paylin." And it has trouble with contractions and some pacing, but in a way, the vocal weirdness adds to the humor. Thanks, internet!

Freebooters Galore

2011-01-27T22:10:00.002-06:00

Look! Page 2 is even better than page 1. It runneth over with improbable delights.

Joy Ahoy

2011-01-22T12:58:00.004-06:00

Fun times ahead, as Edward Bolman, creator of Noble Head Funnies and many other amusements from mini to epic, draws one of my stories into comic form. Page one already complete!

Wintry Poetics

2011-01-13T23:14:00.002-06:00

Wrote this yesterday, because snow has that effect on some people.

Snow

The fly in the window stumbles downpane,
snowblind on the glass map
of the white world.

Two neighbor dogs snozzle and puff,
jamming their noses down again
to the novel powder.

The living squint and the dead lie still,
both with bones in common,
just a blanket apart.

Search engine jokes

2011-01-05T23:39:00.003-06:00

To check some facts for an essay about Oprah, I typed "Oprah is moving" into Google. After typing the first two words, I got the following funny list.

oprah is gay
oprah is a racist
oprah is dead
oprah is an idiot
oprah is the antichrist
oprah is on what channel
oprah is the devil
oprah is fake

There you have it. Instant zeitgeist.

The only one I pursued was "oprah is dead," which led to a funny video.

Colony Collapse Disorder?

2011-01-04T18:52:00.005-06:00

I hereby record my own chapter in the creeping ecological collapse of our humble biosphere.

In 2009, I witnessed the founding of a honeybee colony high in the brick wall of one of the buildings I supervise at work. They had a little ribbon-cutting ceremony and everything. Actually, I just saw them coming and going through a little hole under some wooden fascia, and their numbers were on the rise.

The entrance to their hive was a few feet from a walkover I use regularly to reach rooftop furnaces, investigate roof leaks, etc. At first I worried that the bees would attack me or some repairman and cause a fall to the death, but soon they were confirmed to be reasonable bees with minimal aggression. Still, they were setting up shop in the wall of an office complex. I let it slide for a while, but the more I learned, I found reasons to worry. A lot of honey inside a wall can draw roaches or other pests, and there was always the chance that someone allergic to bee stings would be stung and I would be found negligent.

Eventually, the problem came when the bees started scouting for new territory INSIDE the building. They didn't sting anyone, but they died by the hundreds in some light fixtures and windows. People started asking about the bees. I thought about just blasting their wall with poison, but I didn't want to kill them, especially with all the news about dwindling bee populations. I asked one day at the Nature Center—it turned out they had a list of local beekeepers.

After a few dead ends on the phone, I met a beekeeper who decided to set a box hive atop the wall. We lifted the concrete cap off the wall and set the hive. There were thick honeycombs right underneath. Bruce, the bee man, said the queen would prefer to move upward, so she should move into his portable hive, given time.

Many bees expanded into the box in just a couple of days. I caulked in the old holes in the wall where the bees originally entered, to encourage full use of the new bee condo. Traffic into the new home seemed to constantly increase.

Every month or so, Bruce came to check, but he could never nab the queen, which was essential.
For several weeks, I updated a few of the nearby tenants on our endeavor. But Bruce ran out of steam, I think. By early fall, I hadn't seen him in a while, and noticed one day that the bee traffic was down (which it always was when temperatures dropped; 45 F was the bottom threshold for bee activity). Way down. A few bees still poked around the wall beneath the box, but none used the round drill-hole that was the main door. I'd lately found a roof leak originating from the hive as well, so I was ready to get closure. It was a cool day, so I just lifted the hive lid.

It was full, not of honeycomb or bees, but of black, webby crud with a sort of rotten grain smell. Total lack of bees. I picked up the whole hive, a stack of four interlocked boxes with wood slats inside. Only buggy rot. Survivors still came and went into the wall; an angry drone or two swooped around me.

Soon after, I reset the concrete wall cap and mortared it into place. There were still a few bees staying on task, so I set two little lengths of tubing into the mortar to allow entry.

Here you can see a couple of bees, one with fat pollen sacks hanging on her back legs.
At last check, a few bees still persist here, so I assume the queen still lives, but the overall colony seems weaker than ever.

Human Centipede Revisited

2010-12-22T20:36:00.003-06:00

Still waiting for my conception of the Human Centipede sequel to be optioned. I posted this drawing to Tom Six's Facebook page, but no response yet!

MacGyver Lives

2010-12-21T22:48:00.004-06:00

On one of my TVs, I'm now getting every local channel but one with this halved pop can scotch taped to a balun. It works better than most commercial antennae. I've completed several homemade antenna rigs now—mostly the 8-ear coat-hanger variety—and none work much better than this piece of crap.

P.S. Fuck you, Channel 10