Apologies

Just got in from Ireland. Today a friend of mine passed away after a week of being unconscious after an accident when he was riding his bike. I'll try to start posting as soon as possible, but things are complicated right now.

Peace and love to everyone.

And Dreams So Easily Dashed

Dear Paul, Thank you for your interest. Unfortunately, we do not have an Icelandic instructor available currently.
Best regards

I'll have a few sketches posted later tonight.

Update: it's 12:30 and I just got home. The Internet is out because comcast is a technological bag of dicks, so there are no sketches tonight. Might not be for a while. Looks like a possible 70 hour week. Thank god for sigur ros, tea, and Heaney.

Boo / Hiss

I'm behind on things, I know, but I was too busy celebrating freedom to lay down some ink. I'll make it up. Not today though, because I'm at work right now, and probably will be the entire week until I leave for Ireland. As the only person that knows After Effects in the office, it is my duty, my responsibility and my ass on the line to get this project finished before I leave. So here I am.

Picked up a Qdoba burrito, which just further reminds me why Qdoba isn't Chipotle. Smothered with Ancho BBQ sauce, the flavors of the actual ingredients are lost and only provide different textures when eating. On a scale of 1-10 I give it 2 asses down. But the workers were nice, maybe a little too smarmy (they call you "my friend"), but their eyes are like summer prisms and butterfly smiles, so you kinda put up with the entire charade.

And wasn't that Teddy Roosevelt sketch worth at least a few days?

New Deal

First of all, I know this isn't the right Roosevelt, but admit it: Teddy was the cooler one. That mustache, the wild west background, those killer glasses and complete lack of polio – the man only knew how to do two things: bust monopolies and kick ass. And build canals. And end Russo-japanese wars. And make low-fat fudgey brownies (the secret is apple sauce!) What couldn't the man do? Love.

And thus the nation's preoccupation with wonderful head attire began in earnest.

Not Horrible

Worked until 8:45 today and probably heading in on Sunday. To make up for this, I ran to the bus stop to head down to Pioneer Square and Eliott Bay Book Co.. A series of construction sites, mis-timed buses, and people in wheelchairs found me hailing a cab for the first time (I've always called for one). Seven bucks later, I stepped from the raucous world of drunken weekenders celebrating our sweet freedom to the warm atmosphere of the bookstore. It's like walking into a bakery: all the promises of delight, the familiarity, the general glow of the place. Ended up getting another Seamus Heaney collection, a book of Borges poems, a Chabon novel, and a continuation of the Mysterious Benedict Society.

Afterwards, wandering the streets by lamplight, I realized how awesome the city is. Walked past some kind of vendor fair where a group of Capoeira fighters flipped and cartwheeled to brazilian music and chants – there is always so much stuff happening in the world that it's tough to look past the sidewalks you're used to.

Tried to sum it up in, that's right, another damned poem. Horribly unpolished, taken word for word from the newspaper that I self-referentially describe.

I'm really, really sorry.

How strange and transformed the city.

My mind is filled with song,
Perhaps the melody of a waltz
Where swept into the crevices and cracks
The bustle of action and the fervor of passion;
Or perhaps the lonely croon of a bluesman
Pouring a whiskey-soaked tune
In a room of smoke and dark, wood-paneled walls.

Peering through the windows of fluorescent-lit offices
Their sterile light piercing the soft orange glow of lamplight
The illumination of all detail
– in contrast the whispers and secrets
Hidden in the still shadows of the street.

A bus lurches precariously at the turn
Its lumbering form for a moment
The terrible bulk of a heaving monster.
They run in the streets
With frantic gasps
As they jerk
And screech
To stop:
The clockwork automata of an ant colony.

As we leave
The ebb of the fantastic
And the slow seep
Of the world I know.

So I bury myself in this poem
Letting the careless sway of the bus
Make scratches of my words
As I pour ink onto the pages
Of a newspaper I found in my bag.

Now I'm posting this as I watch Heima because it's Sad Bastard Thursday.

No idea where this came from. She's checking her phone...and...yep.

1st Place Loser

Not much to report except that we held our first game night in two months. The result? In a game of five player El Grande, I remained at a sizable last place. But it was nice just to say weird, awkward, i-hope-HR-isn't-around things with coworkers.

If you enjoy euro-style board games (catan), try it out, easily one of the top 3 games we've played. Also the only one I consistently crap out on.

I'm not going to lie, I knew as I was drawing this the effect it would have on Laura's nethers. I KNEW THE EFFECT IT WOULD HAVE ON ALL YOUR NETHERS (none!)

Haha, if you check out the average posting time on these things, you can inference a lot about my current lifestyle (and morning productivity).

It's not a bra!

I'm a hip young go-getter, so when I suspected that the machines at the gym are inaccurate in determining my heart beat in relation to my untimely death I chose to get a hip watch/heart monitor suitable for a hip young go-getter. Thing is, the watch itself doesn't measure your heart beat, this small bit of plastic on an elastic belt does. So you wrap it just under your pectoral muscles (read: boobs) and both the gym machines and your watch pick it up. Pretty sweet, except that the adjustment slider in the back looks like a bra clasp, so the entire time I felt like people were staring at me and wondering why I needed support.

Unrelated: a poem! I know you love my poetry, or at least I haven't gotten any responses telling me not to post it and that's pretty much as close to adoration as I get. So blammo!

A place to rest

I should think a good place
would be the forest,
deep in the bramble and thicket
where age-worn oak and maple
etched with moss
vault a cathedral of branches
above you.
Lay me down in that soft earth
far down in the roots
and spongy loam
where muffled are the gentle
footsteps of elk and fox,
like raindrops soaking down,
down to that warm darkness
that heaves above you
like a thick blanket
on a cold winter's night.

So I leave my door open a lot, because I have no windows that open (well, one opens right into a thick bunch of branches, so much so that I can't actually open it) and the aforementioned fridge is spewing odors of milky rot throughout the apartment. So door open, cool breeze in. But the cool breeze brings with it flies and crap, so now I have an otherwise ignorable ecosystem of moths and mayflies that occasionally freak the crap out of me. On close examination, however, moths are pretty awesome. They're so damn stupid that they're adorable, like lemmings and dodos, and the dusty pattern on their backs is intricate, worn, and understated, unlike that damned gaudy butterfly with its blender vomit of color. So moth!

fig. 1 - Unknown to many people, moths feed on pencil shavings and the crumbs of BBQ style snacks. Some native peoples of northern Hungary feed the moths a steady supply of Red Fanta and Cheesy BBQ Fritos and harvest their wing dust, as this dust, in small portions, is a hallucinogen and diet supplement. In large quantities, this dust causes wild dementia and the possibility of fatal boners (the second definition) during the operation of heavy machinery.