Pirate Ship Name Generator

While starting a new story, I blanked out when I needed a good name for a pirate ship. Googling "pirate ship names," I immediately came on a website called seventhsanctum.com with a whole battery of "generators," or programs that randomly generate appropriate names for monsters, heroes, ships, you name it. I had it spit out a few pirate ship names before I took words from two of the combinations to make my own, "The Vile Mermaid," featured in the unfinished story below.

The site seems geared toward role-playing gamers, but I think it could be handy in many situations. You could name your pet or baby from either "goblin names" or "evil minions." This probably appeals to me more than most because when I was a kid I used to write numbered lists of nouns and adjectives that I liked and then roll D&D dice to generate random combinations, sort of like mad libs without the connecting story.

Yes, there were some slow and lonely times out at my house when I was growing up.



The Monkey and the Ghost Ship

A very high-strung monkey named Mr. Tinkertot lived on a pirate ship, The Vile Mermaid, in 1899. It was getting pretty late in history to be a pirate. Most of the pirates on board were getting old, especially Captain Poisoneyes, who was becoming fat, deaf, and forgetful. However, he could still give a man an angry look powerful enough to wither his timbers.

Even though the pirates were old enough to know better, they still drank and smoked to the point of folly. They drank horrible pirate ales, wormy tequilas, dirty rums and toxic vodkas from the Black Sea. These men would take the fermented juices of any spoiled thing and slurp it from a bottle. They drank until they vomited and they drank some more. Anything they couldn’t drink, they smoked. Mr. Tinkertot didn’t like to drink or smoke, so he spent his time patrolling the poop deck, the crow’s nest, the mast ropes and the hold. He even walked the plank sometimes, just for fun.

One day, the ship’s cook, Roasty Whiskermeister, very drunkenly tried to smoke Mr. Tinkertot’s tail. The monkey was sitting on the captain’s shoulder at the time. He shrieked and grabbed the captain’s ears, and the captain tripped over a pile of old beer bottles, falling painfully on his knees and elbows.
“Blast ye, Whiskermeister,” said the captain when he saw Roasty sanding there with a smoking match in his fingers. “I’ll soon give your job to a broad-shouldered woman.” He rubbed his knees and glared at Roasty till a little tear rolled down the cook’s dirty face. Then Captain Poisoneyes looked around and said, “What a slobby lot we are! It’s time we cleaned this pigsty of a ship! If I fall over garbage again, some mangy fool’s gonna walk the plank!” Mr. Tinkertot was clinging to the ceiling, which he often did when the captain was angry.

Found Glory

Picking up trash around a movie theater sometimes yields oddball treasures. I have found every denomination of money up to a $20 bill, endless Happy Meal toys (mostly broken), finger puppets, gloves, mints, magnifiers, balls, beads and more balls.

More common of course are the items solidly in the realm of garbage: drink vessels and candy wrappers ad infinitum, used condoms, diapers, and even pooped pants (yes, adult man-pants). Then there are discarded items like notes left on windshields to berate bad parking, grocery lists, and love notes. Sometimes you have to wonder if they were lost or dropped deliberately. Some things contain embarrassing personal info or just weird glimpses into a life; for instance, a list of someone's children tallying the monthly costs of all the prescription drugs they were taking.

My favorite things (like those pictured) are kind of personal/anthropological. Apparently self-motivational things like photos where someone's face has been vandalized, or drawings by kids (or adults) showing their attitude toward life. Once I picked up a ton of giftwrap paper and ribbons right after Christmas, which gave me visions of a trashy family opening their presents in their van and dumping all the wrapping on the ground so they wouldn't have to deal with it at home. There have been multiple Bible-study sheets with funny answers written in, dorky heartbroken notes, you name it.


What does one do with stuff like this? Normally you just end up throwing it away, but recently a friend of mine started working at a nearby building. One day an offhand comment I made seemed to reveal that he was worried about me leaving embarrassing things on his windshield (because I said I would, and told him some of my ideas). It seemed like he started parking differently after that, in a more "safety in numbers" fashion, nosing his car deeper into the co-worker motor-cluster. So, I keep him on his toes by sending him photos like the above, saying, "Consider this put on your windshield."

Fungal Feast

September's biblical rain flooded fields and basements, but once the water drained off: Mushrooms! They swelled out of soil and dead wood. They flexed their feeble muscles while I took their pictures. They only lasted a few days, but they put on a good show.

This fungal spectacle brought to you by the inescapable iPhone.

Carbondale’s Gauntlet of Death

this guy, but with bushy white hair

It was Halloween Eve, just fully dark in time for my drive back to Missouri. After a day at a funeral where I got a dusting of my uncle’s ashes on my shoes, I had multiple warnings from my dad that it was too late to leave, that I should drive back the next day, then lots of “drive safe” grumbling as he realized I was leaving against his advice. My mom ran out and gave me three caffeine pills (I think). I had a tray of funeral reception cookies and I was ready to make tracks.

To escape Carbondale, I would have to face various envoys of oblivion. My phone battery “going dead” did not strike me as ominous, but it did leave me to trial-and-error my way out of town. It took a few turns and a backtrack to figure out which direction I was going, and a few looks at a map made me decide which highway to take: 57 south. To get there, I circled a downtown block full of one-way streets, which took me past a haunted house. The street was empty but for me and a Grim Reaper figure with long white hair and a huge scythe. As I drove slowly past, he swept his weapon and beckoned eerily with his other bony hand. His skull face tracked me all the way until I turned the corner. The emptiness of the streets at only 8:45 made him creepy.

Getting to the edge of town went smoothly, but as countryside darkness took hold, a deer appeared at the roadside with luminescent hypno-eyes, tracking me much like the Reaper. It jerked slightly as if it might leap right into my speeding, egg-fragile compact car. “No, deer—stay away!”

A few miles later, a rabbit darted right for my wheels but missed. “God, rabbit, damn!” That was the last of Carbondale’s mortal taunts. I ate cookies, drank Powerade, and popped two of my mom’s speed capsules. Got home at 1:40 am. Those pills or all those subtle death threats did something to clear my sinuses; my nose remains clearer to this day.

Genetic Anomaly

Taking a child's toys for my own agenda, I transformed into the villainous TinkerEyes.


Then mere moments after sending this photo to terrorize my sister, she sent back this picture of my niece.

with the explanation: "Never fails, every time I get stickers at the store, I look back and they are just sitting there like that. Funny that they never say, "Hey Mom, look!"

So it seems I am not the only one who possesses this sinister mutation. Soon I may have to do battle with my young relative for supremacy of facial distortion by misuse of playthings.

The battle royale—TinkerEyes vs. Stickerface! To the winner goes the spoils: my mom saying, "Aren't they weird? What's wrong with them?"

Cranial Headgear

This hat now exists, making me look more successful than I am. Yes, I am vanity publishing these hats. There's also a lighter color, and a blue stocking cap if you think you're going to be cold.

George Washington's Hearty Breakfast

(with optional horse-joke ending)

Life was tough in the days of the Founding Fathers, but the rewards were rich. George Washington knew better than anyone that the key to having a monumental day, a healthful body, and a free republic was to eat a nourishing breakfast fit for a king—but made without the bloated and scurrilous appendages of tyranny.

Each morning General Washington sprang from his bed one second before the rooster’s first call (so trained were his senses that he could wake up to the sound of the rooster’s mere throat-clearing). Straight to the frosty morning air he opened the door, grabbing his bullwhip. Cracking the whip several times near to his face both galvanized his fortitude and knocked the gritty sleep-matter from his eye-corners.

Next he would reclaim his teeth from the river, where they’d washed overnight in the rushing water of the American continent. If the river was high, he had a brisk swim to the cord holding his ivory dentures in the rapids, where he hoisted them out, gleaming— “No soaking my teeth in a tepid teacup like an Englishman,” he declared. “This is America! I’m a Virginian!”

To shake off the river’s chill, G. Washington fetched meat from his smokehouse. This required that he wrestle a brown bear and a black bear, the two guards of his meat stores. Of course they were his pets, so he rarely suffered more than torn pajamas. Meat in hand, he rewarded his bears and himself each with a modest slice of salt pork: protein with stern authority.

“Martha, where browns my toast?” Washington cried, now in a hurry to beat the sunrise. “Hither flies the pigeon!” Martha held out her hand for the packet of sugar and cinnamon arriving by carrier pigeon, careful not to neglect the day’s ration of coffee—one charred bean clutched in each of the pigeon’s feet. Martha would grind her bean for brew, but George preferred to crunch his whole, in the mill of his teeth. As the sun brinked over the horizon, Paul Revere arrived on horseback with his clanking silver tea service. “Tea and grapefruit, General Washington,” Paul said, tipping his hat to Martha, then riding swiftly away without spilling a drop.

Finally Martha stamped out a griddlecake in the shape of a Redcoat, running with red, red cherry syrup like the noble blood spilled on both sides of freedom’s boundary. This they shared as they watched the sunrise together. Their plates clean, George Washington mounted his horse, bade his wife farewell, and returned to the chores of liberty. Any vestiges of hunger yet lingering in the depths of the great leader could be banished by a quick fistful of oats straight from the horse’s feedbag, which any experienced Minuteman would attest can lend a soldier the reliable, muscular bowels of the mighty stallion.

“May I gnaw on your raw oats today, my good steed?” Washington asked, always respectful, to which his horse replied, “A-fewww.”

works in (lack of) progress

Most of the new artwork I've done lately has been illustrations for a friend's book of poems—Wonder Girl in Monsterland, by Brenda Sieczkowski. The recurring character is named Yomi, Japanese for "underworld." The text is full of oddities I tend not to grasp until I draw pictures of them, at which point I think, okay, that makes sense now because I'm looking at it.

Drummy Croc

La Luna

Yomi

A Funeral in Monsterland

A Certain Lamentable Splendor (complete collector's edition)

or, Clan of The Cave Geeks

“Man, that place is sad,” responded a friend when I sent him a photo from the convention room floor at GAME con—and sad it was.


And yet, as always, because of some indelible devil’s advocate DNA in me, I found myself respecting the geeks of geekdom anew. OK, not the ones wearing the fuzzy fox tails, and maybe not the Damsels of Dorkington, and, well, maybe respect is not the operative feeling here, but some kind of appreciation feebly rose up...

...appreciation for a sort of social bravery that says it is okay to exist without an iota of cool. Bravery that could indeed be disqualified as such by the likelihood that hormonal deficiencies or degrees of autism have established in these folks either A) total lack of self-awareness, or B) sociopathic behavior that is not anti-social, but quacky-social, drawn to dwell in only the most impractical, imagined realities.

Today this bravery walked up to my Artist Alley table embodied by this earnestly, politely, home-schooled-ly harmless proto-woman dressed up in boy clothes and near-total sexlessness. For the minute she was there, I was merely bemused. Later, I sort of felt this retroactive affection for her—the same feeling I have for Sue Heck on “The Middle.” What a superb dork girl, in her outdated suit-jacket, jokey buttons, and modest androgyny. Was this one of her normal outfits? For all I know, she was in costume as an alternate-universe Dr. Who. She bought my choose-your-own-adventure comic book for a dollar and seemed pleased with it. I soon re-read said comic with her in mind, hoping that its crude comedy wouldn’t corrupt or disgust her.

Most of the day passed uneventfully. The “con” was scarcely attended. The lovable nerd girl had been one of maybe five people wearing a tag indicating that she was a paying attendee as opposed to a merchant, artist, or other “guest.” Mid-day passed. I bought a barbecue sandwich from a dim meat-scented alcove and ate it in the Media Room, where two other slobby gents were watching Tron. The twelve or so minutes of Tron I watched were pretty good, maybe because my sandwich was so dang savory. I kind of regretted spending two bucks on water when pop was also two bucks, but maybe I did the right thing in forsaking pop.

I was falling asleep around 3:00 when my friend Cody arrived with Mrs. Cody, AKA Sam. They provided me a vivarin-esque boost of conversation. Cody got annoyed when the audio-video tech guy zeroed in on me and said, “Do you have the movie we’re showing at 9?” I indicated Cody, and the AV Guy sort of scolded Cody in advance, saying, “You’ll give it to me on time, right? Because the movie I was supposed to show last night at 9, the guy JUST gave it to me.” Cody told him he’d have it on schedule. The AV Guy retreated but seemed unsatisfied.

Cody would be on two panels later, as well as providing the one must-see film on the movie schedule. In the meantime, he was going to see the first panel, with screenwriter, teacher, novelist, etc, Diana Botsford. I had no idea who she was, but decided to go check it out. I found out that she is like an all-around bad-ass who stealthily exists in our meager locale. She’s worked on several Hollywood movies, several TV series, and she’s shipping out to Antarctica in a few weeks to research her next Stargate spin-off novel. Who knew? Around that time, I’m sure to be fixing toilets and raking leaves, so I was wondering why she was giving us the time of day, but she treated even the kid holding the light-bulb-capped wizard’s staff with total respect.

After that, my old landlord and cartoonist-about-town Phil Morrissey showed up. I was quickly being surrounded by characters from my past. The show was being run by Scott Villareal, an all-around nice guy I went to art school with. He’s very dramatic, and half-hugged me in public, which is always a little more than I bargain for....

Part 2: OK, I'm a Bastard

I was trying to figure out how to break the ice with Phil, because I hadn’t seen him in a long time, and as usual, he was “holding court” with a certain segment of geekdom (above photo). He is, as far as I know, the local king of the Anthropomorphics, or Furries—people who like art and role-playing about humanoid animals, but of a certain fantastical seriousness. Think Avatar rather than Bugs Bunny, because the characters tend to have the proportions and the secondary sex characteristics of humans. Phil draws these, and some people collect this art exclusively, as well as sometimes dressing up in mammalian costumes. I don’t think Phil does the dressing up, though I’ve noticed that he and his art comrades have formed an Anachronistic Hats Society of sorts, for reasons unknown. I would eventually give him one of my new comics once a window opened in his fandom popularity—he was in big demand here, so it took a while to reach him without interrupting.

Just when I decided to throw in the towel, nearing 5:00, I was finally recognized by Joe-Man, seen above in his wheelchair (right side of photo). He’d passed me a few times and even said Hi once, but it had been 17 years since I’d been, for one semester of a poetry workshop, his wingman—getting his tape recorder out of his bag, relocating his beverage cup, removing obstacles from his path. He’d finally worked out who I was. He pulled up and began a 45-minute awkwardfest of reminiscence, starting with, “So Chad, have you written any more perfect haikus lately?”

I call Joe “Joe-Man” because he used to call me “Chad-Man” in class. He talks as if he’s been building me up as legendary in his mind, saying lots of grandiose things about my poems, even quoting lines that I’m pretty sure I never wrote. I keep saying thanks to statements like, “I felt as if I was sitting next to the next Poet Laureate of the United States.” A few times I said things like, “I think you might be overestimating me, Joe, but thanks.” Later I wondered why, if he thought my work was so great, why did he seem completely uninterested in all the new work I had on the table?

It is easy to be haunted by Joe-Man, who is near to being his own ghost—the wheelchair-bound specter of whatever functional man he might have been had he not been born into a tragically damaged body. He told me, after a metaphysical preamble, that “in the fourth year of his parents’ marriage,” he was born premature, and his father, a drinker and womanizer, was unprepared for such a child, and took out his anger and disgust on his family. He said he had given up his bitterness and had, in ways inspired by my “perfectly balanced poetry,” achieved a more Zen outlook.

How does one respond to this? Joe-Man is a being of pure tragedy. The sheer obscenity of what he’s had to endure, coupled with his overblown notions and his obvious need for social interaction make him the perfect foil for any positive outlook. If each of us must build a ship of conscience and practicality to stay afloat in this world, Joe-Man is something like a torpedo designed to sink whole fleets. I know because, after that semester with him, it was clear that his presence was simply catastrophic to any able-bodied group, disruptive and destructive to all discourse and progress. You begin with the best of liberal intentions and end with guilty resentment and existential terror. Joe is the eternally suffering child in the classic story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”

The thing about Joe-Man in this context is, he’s the only one in the room with an obvious, physiological explanation for being a delirious, fantasy-addicted fuck-up. On the other hand, I never saw him involved in any sort of gaming throughout the day. He obviously watches and reads science fiction/fantasy, but just like 17 years ago, he’s still addicted to inflicting himself on others. He parked in front of some tables and dominated their attention, sometimes for hours on end. Several times during the day, he rolled up very close to question the M.C. WHILE THE GUY WAS ANNOUNCING SCHEDULE INFO ON THE LOUDSPEAKER, so the M.C. had to stop in mid-sentence and cover the mic. At one point late in the morning, he motored his chair across the 40’ Pac-Man maze and got a wheel stuck on one of the “power pellets.” I think it was obviously not to be tracked across; I think Joe just wanted to get attention and maybe a chance to complain. I might not jump to this conclusion, but in his long haunt of (S)MSU, he was often seen ramming his chair into counters and library check-out desks, complaining about handicapped discrimination. Actually, it just wasn’t his turn yet. Whatever his major at the time, Joe minored in martyrdom.

It turned out that my wife once encountered Joe, recognizing him in my photo. Possibly not long after my semester with him, she sold him some perfume at a department store, for his “girlfriend,” whom he’d never met. They’d been corresponding by email, and Joe would help her escape an abusive boyfriend. Joe, I say the world is ripe enough with torment, without you sowing it Johnny Appleseed-style.

I finally packed it in. The biggest disappointment of the day was that the giant Pac-Man board was never officially used. But at least two children and some home-styled Ghostbusters got a little use out of it.

I broke even, around the $30 mark.

Marketing Freebie

HUGGIES: Strap Me to My Excrement!

(feel free to use this in your next ad campaign, diaper companies)