executive healthcare for artfags below the poverty line, oh god o'clock edition

Today's menu:  SHOTS!  SHOTS!  SHOTS!

Renewing covid jab this morning, downtown, at a free clinic.  Since getting a shot at CVS-- where it had been free for individuals w/o insurance up until three months ago  --now sets a body back a min of $200.

After that, we'll see if my arm functions well enough for a complete re-type of the working draft of PROMISELAND.  Probably at Loaves + Witches, because I need to work in a cozy atmo that isn't home.

It's how I usually do these things:  write a draft, review, re-type, revising as I go.  This would be the third draft.  I normally only do two to three drafts.  This fucker might go to four; PAINLESS ran four drafts.  AZURE PANTRY only went three drafts.  DENIZEN was two.  That was easier because I knew the Big Beats, since it was a historical crime thing.  KILL HOUSE is on its third draft.  PROMISELAND, I'm off the res, because it's massively ahistorical & has consistently been surprising me.

I have to insert a bus scene and some characters--  Robert de Grimston (of the Process church), David Berg plus other creeps.  de Grimston's working as a sideshow geek & pole sitter at the local boardwalk, where beachcomber David Berg and his wife(?) are heckling the simp.  Dennis Hopper is walking home after a particularly disastrous pass at Bobby Beausoleil.  There's gonna be a surprise waiting for Dennis on the bus.  A surprise fresh out of jail.

For my travels I hope there are no surprises on the train to, or from, the clinic.  Chi transit surprises sometimes have a predilection for setting hair on fire.

executive decisions for artfags in poverty (part of an otological regress into finitude)

You could record.  You could.  You could record, and playback, the process of hacking out the art.  The layout process.  The correcting and re-positioning of elements on the page.  You could.  You could record.

Often I do.   Yesterday I did not.  Nor the day before.  I did not record those days because there is a crudity and artlessness to the uncertainty in the initial stages of sketching, a goofyfootedness.  Often I don't.

Recording is something I do when not altogether there.  There's the OCD, y'see.  If the obsessive-compulsive mark-maker is In, in the driver's seat, in the director's chair, then "I" am less in evidence.

Then I'm more liable to record.  But if it's the layout guy, the composition hack, that's less Inspired.  That's mechanic brain; that's function and form guy.  That guy doesn't do much that's inspired.  No sense to 'im.

No sense recording that.  But the camera's charged.  Battery pack plugged in.  Tripod extended to full height.  So maybe next session.  Maybe tonight.  Or tomorrow.  When the brush is in hand.  Maybe then.

sleeplog - 112225

Not tremendous sleep.  Let the dosage on the lion's mane slip.  Got to be careful about that.

Last night had a minor return of what I've dubbed "the stabby-spikies"-- random flares of nerve pain.  They're fallout from the wreck, I've decided.  There's no way to diagnose this stuff, because it's a transitory phenomena.  I've been learning how to cope for four years.  The pains don't stay localized; they migrate.  Yesterday when walking the pier it was like someone lit a tiny firework in my left buttock; later that evening it took up brief residence in the back of my left hand; the last time it visited it flew through the wiring of the right side of my jaw, like an electrified toothache.

Most of the time they're not significant enough to stagger me.  I've learned how to suppress most of my physical reactions to the pain.  Maybe I grunt under my breath.  Sig notices, because he's known me for damn near a decade, and he's helped to troubleshoot some of the fallout.  He's the one who suggested the lion's mane.  Mainly I try not to let the stabby-spiky shit override my ability to enjoy life.  In the immediate wake of the wreck it scared me.  Like the tinnitus, just one of those things that says "You're not here to stay."

A body is like a house, and sometimes when you enter a room the light switch doesn't behave; maybe it's the bulb, maybe it's the contacts in the receptacle, maybe it's the contacts in the switch itself.  I've lived in enough houses, and walked through the remains of enough houses, that I dunno, being sentimental...  I never particularly liked the house I was born into.  Family always said mine looked exactly like my dad's.  I used to hate that.  Now, when I look at it from outside, it's an okay kinda fixer-upper.  I've modified it enough that it's me.  So I guess the damage is me too.  What's the alternative?

The only real problem with pain is, it's tiring.  So yesterday I went to bed early, totally sapped.  It's taxing to think about the work ahead, today.  But at least it ends at 3pm.

Finished reading Fraction & Charretier's 'November'.  Damned fine little crime novel.  I liked it a lot.  If you squint you can see Fraction's struggle with alcohol & pills in the margins.  It makes me glad I'm not an addict:  noticing the problems other creatives have / have had.  I can't concieve of those lives, of the expense, of the frustration.  Nor the Fear, which I've noticed in so many with the chronic substance tendency: the Fear that they've forgotten how to be themselves without the dope or booze or whathaveyou.  I can't conceieve of living in fear that one day I'd have to get it together.

I mean, being afraid you've lost the fine motor control to make art with, being afraid your brain's been too shook to manufacture fresh memories properly?  I can empathize with that, easy.  But my fears are not Chronic Fears.  Mainly I'm just afraid of having wasted forty-odd years.  Because one day this house will not pass inspection, and it's the only joint I've got a lease on.

Apropos of sweet fuck all.  I'm awake.  It's still November.  I'm not officially 49, yet.  No pain so far.  Let's go to the job & get it done.  Think I'll stop by lighthouse park and see how many rabbits we can spot, before work.  Sunrise over lake Michigan is one of the finest panaceas I know.

sleeplog - 1o2725

The last two days have averaged 4-4.5 hours.  Woke at 3am & 4:45am, respectively.  Today came to at 3:40.  I'd say yesterday and today were restful.  No weird excesses or twitches.  No dreams that I can recall.  Biked a little each morning.  Ankle is a trifle sore from last week's exercise + this week's work, but seems to be healing well overall.

Sig's been going through my physical film collection for seasonal treats.  Saturday we did Leigh Whannell's 'Invisible Man' (2020); last night began Verbinski's 'A Cure For Wellness' (2016).  I note that these savory parables about power & corruption are in the tech & finance sector, respectively, and share a similar ethos in title card reveals.

I'm thinking about the Title Card thing because began doing layouts for DENIZEN, which has a conspicuous title drop, as well as a diagetic use of datestamp.  Can you call a datestamp diagetic?  Don't you wonder some-tiii-ii-iiimes, about sound + vision?  I have plans for word & image, within the body of the comic; arguably diagetic ones.

Right.  Kicking off today.  Got another concept for The Burroughs Folio roughed.  The final of the series, which heretofore had me stymied.  I'm satisfied.  So that's four of the seven portraits for the Folio nailed down.  Even tho it's tried to send me on a totally tangential sidequest about the religious significance of jade in mayan burial ceremonies...

morning rain, morning gray

Contemplating distractions, like an "audioplay" reading of DENIZEN, for my own amusement.  Which isn't entirely true:  it could be useful to hear the material acted-out so I can refine the staged action on-page.  I've read and re-read this accursed thing end to end uncountable times, now.  It's part of my morning ritual, before clocking in at The Job, re-reading any of the four novels I've been working on.  A little reminder that even as I am not. a. writer., I seem to have written things.  A necessity, methinks, for staying sane, particularly in this accursed moment in history.

Don't lose sight of the fact that you are accomplishing good works, fam.

S'pose if I do go forward with this dopey radio play edition of my script, it'll go up on Internet Archive.  I should research what the bandwidth limits are on that site.  Never had reason to before now...

little free libraries

are a joy & a marvelous resource.  landed a pair of nice coffee table style, photo-heavy reference books, both relevant to projects on deck, in as many weeks as i pursue AZURE PANTRY and DENIZEN.  the mayan data is on point for the chapters i'm sketching, as is the 40s manhattan photo ref.  art dork heaven up in heah.  i donate to L.F.L.s regularly.  as the sole other reader of this blog is aware, i am a biiiiiiiiig believer in circulating books.  generally i don't try to sell 'em or trade 'em, unless it is a season for purging the stacks.  (sometimes you want to recoup your losses!)  category need not apply:  comics, fiction & non-, art books, any & all of it, i like to give 'em away.  it's how the world should work: and i believe this is rewarded, with synchronicities like finding the perfect book, relevant to the topic at hand.  environments talk to you when you communicate with them.  i tend to take these messages that i'm On Mission, artistically.  they're reassuring when you don't really know how to talk to, well, people about the multitudinous obscure fixations that fuel this lifelong hobby, comix

not having had any family but of my own choosing

--i do miss the people i left behind.  the people who abused me, who made me a little crazy, who gifted me these curious scars i call my creativity, i miss them.  i miss those places, the padded smell of cloverfields, sundried kudzu flaking like papyrus, the endless red clay afternoons.  it should be impossible to miss alabama: but people die, and places are erased, whether by lightning or buyout, and all the dread that went alongside winter spring summer and fall's glory, that stuff is as dead as my grandparents.  filed in amber, suspended in the fine comb of slowed time--  because what is memory but increments of spacetime re-encoded in an impermanent neurochemical matrix  --locked precious in a bone vault where light neither penetrates nor is generated.  i miss them though all they were is with me now; i miss them because i lost them and i am losing them again, as time & experience & wear weathers these memories into so many insensible scales of driftglass.  as my memory decays and their faces-- which i kept no photos of --are made strange to me.  if i were to see my father today, or my mother, would i recognize them?  the last times i saw either were in 2004 & 2012, respectively.  two weeks ago i walked out of a public restroom, having locked my bike up outside not two minutes previously, and when i looked around i did not see it and panicked, thinking it stolen, briefly-- but no, i had only locked it up in a place i'd never used before, out of my immediate field of vision.  still, that tiny taste of fear is a preview of what i probably have waiting for me.  one day i will not remember them, and i will be afraid, and i'm not quite sure what to make of that, because i wanted to be rid of them and all the hell that went with growing up there.  so.  yeah

jobs (a post-it nope)

Woke to a dream of dicking off at work.

There I am, washing bloody dishes.  Everyone stands at the back window, gawping at the sunset.  I stop drying silver and go to work the switches, which stick, shy of full contact; the descending dim falls away and I'm given to wander.  So I wander out of the kitchen, into main dining, which-- I'm dreaming about the covid lockdown, here, and three jobs back --is all open air, surrounding the decaying house.  The wheelchair ramps are half-rotted, soft wood buckling beneath my feet.

I sneak up to Dominic Monaghan, who's apparently one of our new servers.  Charlie, from fuckin' Lost.  This is a really low-rent dream.  Playfully I snap my towel at him--  this was something I noticed our new cook doing, this past week, reviving memories of when I was a grabasser at any-and-every gig  --and it cheeses him off.  He starts talking trash about my double standards.  I pretend to be mollified, but my mockery is muted by pain in my right hand.  It occurs to me Charlie here has bandaids on his fingers in the same places I'm experiencing pain.  I ask him what happened.

"I turned a bloody doorknob, if you must know, and the rusty bastard didn't spin.  Laid me open."

My boss, Emily-- who I've developed something of an internal distaste for on account of her promising a raise at six months, then backsliding & gifting me an 8oz bottle of olive oil instead  --appears as if by magic, perhaps irritable to find me here, seated at a staff table next to a waiter who's ignoring the massive reservations milling about all 'round the grounds.  He promises to get back to work.  I do not, instead preferring to extract the-- what are these, cactus? --needles bloodlessly from my fingers.

The thin bladelike tines slide out of my flesh as cleanly as slivers of glass.  Charlie gives me a curious, perhaps sympathetic look, and fucks off.  As do I.

Woke and read some more 'The Power Fantasy'.  Got to the backmatter & realized Gillen's done a Watchmen riff.  I look that up.  Gab at an internet friend--  as distinct from the meatspace variety, yes  --and then...  And then?

Welp, today, unlike yesterday, I am scheduled off.  Yesterday I called in sick.  Because fuck that place.  Spent the day with my husband, because that's actually important.  We don't have days off together now.  Stumbled across some new-to-me comix in a l'il free library.  Read another chapter of 'Vineland', a chapter wholly about Frenesi, the ex-activist, ex-mom, turned gov't informant, and thought about my mother & her association with the Weather Underground.  Talked to Sigfried about that stuff some.  We went to a park, he had a swim, we documented some butterflies together.  All in all a lovely unscheduled holiday.

What I'm not mentioning:  the physical fatigue from the weekend at work.  The chronic aches & pains, mostly localized along the right side of my body:  my right foot, which is still healing from me bloody working on it while injured; my right knee, which nowadays bitches when I take the stairs too aggro, and I try not to think about the inch-wide white scar outboard it where I literally caught a nail in the joint as a toddler; my right shoulder, which I landed on during the wreck that cracked my skull; my right hand, which was split & skinned & sewn together again b/c bike accident; my right elbow, which was the preferred point of articulation to land on, back when skateboarding seemed cool; and the right side of my jaw, which I've come to unconsciously clench until my chipped & fractured molars make sounds of distress not unlike tree trunks scraping together in a hellwind.

Hey, I'm not insured.  My job offers insurance.  Which is great if I feel like deducting money I'm not making to pay for injuries which, historically, they haven't paid for.  They didn't think to deal with Northwestern back when I got some stitches in the-- you guessed it  --right side of my scalp, from mis-gauging my distance from the dumpster & laying my head open, on a trash run.  Now Northwestern, who's never sent an actual physical bill to my actual physical residence, has turned me over to a collections agency.  I've mentioned this to my bosses, a couple of times, and they've done sweet f.a.

So maybe I don't trust these guys to give me insurance.  So maybe calling in sick doesn't wrinkle my conscience.  Much.

Still, when I start dreaming about a gig, it's time to fuckin' quit.

Anyway, back to my Real Job.  Drawing.  Let's see if I can accomplish some shit today, and post it.

memory (a post-it nope)

you know & i know no-one is reading, so:  this is a safe space, right?

facts:  my memory blips aren't getting better.  i've drawn things i don't remember, and i've written things that don't cling to the gumline of my stupid-ass mind.  that bothers me-- but since you don't exist, who's to know or care.  a couple days ago, i had just arrived at work, and i couldn't remember whether i'd just locked up my bike less than five minutes previous.  a month and change ago, i walked home after having forgotten i rode my bike to the store & left it locked there

what's the point of writing this stuff down, and re-reading, if the mechanisms of self-reinforcement don't function as previously understood?  why am i making lines on paper if this stuff isn't going to stick?

you can say history, or the value of art, or whatever, but i know--  and even not knowing you, i know you know i know this shit  --that history is a faulty-ass machine for generating vast omissions, and art can't have any sustained value in a system that doesn't see any purpose in remembering the preterite

that's cynical & self-pitying, fer shure.  which ain't the game for me, right now.  i'm just irritable because my hands hurt & i don't have any real confidence in my ability to make art, and capitalism is just a capitalized -Ism that's never meant anything real to me.  art is what i know how to do.  art is what i chose.  the memory thing is depressing, but no more depressing than any of the Real Shit i'm not going to type here, because i don't WANT to remember some stuff

hey.  not giving up.  just admitting it's hard to give a fuck, this morning

satisfaction (and where to find it)

first & foremost, satisfaction is to be found puttering in the studio, idly fixing things:

taking the splitting wine crate-cum-cd shelf off the wall to reinforce the joins and level it.  it takes minutes.  it's been staring at me for months, an ugly separation of staple & wood, a widening crevice along a seam, positioned right next to the light switch for the hall closet.  today's the day the crack is sealed and the irregularity ends.  it takes minutes to resolve months of entropy.  why not sooner?  why is now the Right & Proper time for such a simple thing?  and why is it satisfying?

it's an endless source of satisfaction, knowing that everything in the studio is something i have competence in repairing.  if a wire needs replacing, or a switch requires installation, or if carpentry needs doing; knowing i have all the necessary tools & supplies for executing swift & clean repairs

this comes from a childhood spent in relatives' workshops & garages, obsessed with pegboard & circuitry, eyeball deep in a world of belts and capacitors and spindles and vacuum tubes and screws and fuses--  everything must be arrayed in order or nothing can be accomplished... a place for everything & everything geddeouddaheahkidyabotherme.  every barn i ever spent time in had a workshop, a makeshift garage, a surfeit of spare parts.  it is not nostalgia that satisfies me: it is knowing that it was all Purposeful

i may not always get to a fix-it first thing but if it idles long enough it will take priority some fateful day in the studio wherein i am dithering-- not because i do not want to work, but because there is work to do that is not Art, and it is through the perfection of those specific labours that my mind is cleared of everything but Craft; and it is in that state, finally, that i am best prepared to wield my brush & inspired to Do, and Make, all thinking & saying spent.  there is only the Moment of implement applied to paper, and that is not simply enough:  it is simply everything

some days you have to 'bay

Hitting the 'bays again.  Bagged 'Amnesia #2' by Al, as well as 'Young Lions' by Blaise Larmee--  waffled for a bit whether to buy YL or '2001', then settled on the one that actually got banned in Canada  --and 'Distant Ruptures' by Christopher Forgues & Sammy Harkham.  I've been hitting nothing but Ewing's Hulx for like a solid week now and I just gots to get my chakras blown, you dig, clear out my system for the Great Labors ahead.  Spent the morning meditating on the logistics of making a minicomic, the editing & packaging of "trailers" as they might be applied to comix, and mulling over Barry Windsor-Smith's storytelling tools.  Some people have Aims, and Goals, and Plans.  Me, I just have this one life...

workdesk: a s'update

It's my blog, and I'll walltext if I want to.

Today I don't want to.  Finished the inks & tones on Merrick, the elephant man portrait, and am quite happy with it.  Putting it in the pile to make prints from.  Have my buddha / owl piece out, and did some touchup on tones today.  It's ready to go, too.  Nearly done with 'Chirality', a piece that's been some eight years in development, one terrible sketch & rendition after another.  But I got it right, this time.  I'm proud of it.  Not a thing I say often, if at all.

It's a time for completing work & clearing the desk.  I'm taking time off work to build the art pile.  Took a shot in the teeth with a cutting board today, so that's yet another injury at this gig.  So far I've had my scalp split open, the back of my drawing hand seared, and my bottom lip split & bruised.  I associate this job almost entirely with physical endurance & weariness leading to accidents.  The raise I'm due in May better be significant.  The hospital's already handed me off to the bill collectors: before sending me a bill.

Otherwise, re-reading scripts.  Doing thumbnails.  Thinking about Promiseland.  Working slowly on tarot.

Reading the christ outta comic books.  My reading list for March has turned into a motherfucker.  In lieu of new posts I just revise & add to the 'Wuxtry' list.  Keeps things simpler, and makes me feel less like a blogosaurus wanx.  Though after a while I'm not sure what to say, or who I'm talking to.  The eternal wangst of the internet addict...

logo bullshit for a buddy

 

roughed concept sketch & test logo

getting there.  having some hand trouble so none of the art's turned out these past few days.  but the fresh scar is healing well and i've done a lot of work tidying the studio & fixing up the house.  here's hoping next week everything gets back on track.  my pocketbook needs a stable supply of hours, and last week was all over the place.  out one day for sickness, the business closed the next day because of a broken water main, and the following day i get my scalp split.  something of a financial setback.  onward...!

new scar, new me

Tamed the bookmarks, today.  That's about two years of bookmarking & notes for the four GNs I've been building like a layabout hobbiest.  Nobody cares what you say:  they only care that you DO.  While I've been allowing myself to age like a scar collector and pretending to be unafraid of the inevitable-- when what I should fear is it all having been for naught.

Because what good is "the conceptual incomplete"?  (If I had to name these ambient thought projects I call scripts for graphic novels.  They're concepts that haven't been fucking finished because they're not fucking drawn.)  It's not like a fuckin' readymade, is it?  No one's going to pick these things up and finish them for me.  No-one's liable to say OOOOH that pile of overwriting's lovely let's wear it like a fabulous mink stole.

It's only going to moulder in a box, like me when I'm done.

Which is morbid, but fuck it.  Yesterday my husband was talking wills, and I was nursing a fresh scar.  If one requires more motivation than that to get up off the old rusty-dusty and DO something, then that person is prob'ly a PC gamer.  So it's up and at 'em, today.  Tidy the bookmarks.  Tidy the studio.  Add lines to pages.  Fix scripts.  Buy a new print cartridge & start a fresh round of revisions.  GET TO IT.

I am not leaving a pile of work for the love of my life to sort out.  He's not going to want to draw all this rubbish.  I barely do, as it's intimidating and seems like more than life's worth, some days.  But these are the tasks we are set, the roads we pave ourselves so our inheritors may travel more easily, yes?

New scar, new me.  And I've accrued enough scar tissue I barely recall myself.  The memory is loose as milkfed stool, falling out all nasty.  Like I've been meaning to amend the final few pages of Denizen for a few months now.  And here are all these bookmarks on the moon, staring at me.  I don't remember researching these things, honestly, like I don't remember finishing sketches for so much of this tarot.

If god tires of tapping your shoulder for attention it raps you on the skull. 

Let's get to it.

tarot, shmarot

No major art updates lately because, simply, I've barely been drawing.  Work's put a minor damper on productivity.  That said, the Hierophant card's coming along slow, and I'm working out the future cards for the deck.  Normally on a Saturday I'd be slogging through a shift at the bakery but it seems the chill has blown a water main over in Skokie, thereby shutting down Evanston, so I'm going to be in the studio, hacking away.  Perhaps expect some art / studio process vid later on this evening.

On the script front, as ever, if I'm not writing on Promiseland I'm pondering how to move forward with it.  Set myself a minor challenge & not really quite certain what to do with it.  It's my fault for asking "What have you never seen done with a seance, in fiction & film?" because the answer (I came up with one) is a bugbear of bother & bullshit.  So Promiseland remains in process.

Meanwhile, over at the comix I draw & you never see, thumbnailing continues.  Page layouts for Azure Pantry & Denizen are ongoing.  Who knows, maybe I'll just start posting roughs.  Practicing on Painless could prove fun, too.  Protip for amateurs:  don't have too many projects.  Just don't.  There are days when it pleases me to have three whole novels in my workbag, and there are days when I wish I'd had these scripts in hand a decade ago, when I was a little less physically challenged.

self-reflection, thy name is studio time

 looking at the tarot project, which i still haven't given a proper name to, as a whole, meditating on balance

 i think i've got something going on.  i think i'm bringing the notions to fruition.  the series is still only a quarter-way to realized.  only the major arcana are developed.  the individual suits will take a moment.  but i figure prints of the arcana will be a good foothold to launch the initial print run of full-size reproductions.  i'm only selling pencil prints for a select few of the major arcana; it will not be all 22

22.  let's focus on that number for just a moment, shall we?  the tarot numbers the major arcana at 0-21.  what else has 22 as a baseline?  the 22-page comic pamphlet

that was the reason i started this whole damn thing, i recall.  the idea that the tarot is just a story that explains itself asynchronous-ly.  so i started drawing them.  the first one was simple enough.  i just stunt casted michael moorcock's queer spirit of our aeon, jerry cornelius, as the fool.  there's a nice picture by mal dean of jerry dressed very improbably & making a war face as he brandished a hawk, a bat, and some nice flowers wrapped in newspaper while a violin dangled from a literal noose, strung from his elbow

*  jerry is notable for being a comic book character first & a creature of letters second

i'm pretty proud of the shoes in that picture.  that's some tasty ink.  but where was i?  the series

yeah, 22 panels for a comic told out of order.  that was the original notion.  a story that would tell itself to you anew every time you did a tarot reading.  and, hopefully, a jump start on financing the rest of deck, and printing the tarot cards themselves

i might, just for a larf, print up the arcana as a comic.  i'd do my best to randomize the 22.  that'd be a good way to test the quality of the fine detail work in reduction.  i'm doing some really ornate touches and i know that stuff's gonna vanish when it's shrunk to tarot scale, so, yeah.  a randomized "comic" isn't entirely masturbatory cashgrab, methinx

on persecution

obviously, i have feelings regarding the incoming admin of criminal toxic failson mafioso snowflakes

a lot of these feelings respect what i interpret as the persecution of my husband

my husband held my hand the last time i nearly died

that means more to me than all the legislation in the fucking cosmos

i'm not saying the name of the motherfucker who's purposefully targeted people like my husband, who is the single most important force for good in my existence.  but i think you can guess to whom all i refer, i mean, there's enough fucking merch and shitty real estate and virtual hype wet dream currency named after The Motherfucker (Who Shan't Be Named Lest He File A Defamation Suit)

i am not saying these things for legal reasons.  because i want to keep a blog.  which is a form of complicity, in my book:  to protect my husband and myself, i cannot say certain names if i choose to maintain a form of social media and continue my necessary self-expression in the arts.  because we are living in an era of absolute censure, by a candre of shitheels who could have been stopped, at any time, from committing the harms they now commit, with grindingly deliberate cruelty.  they call it a mandate.  i call it less than a quarter of the population being fucked beyond repair, deciding for the majority who simply want to coexist in peace.  i call them nutless thugs.  mandate my ass

i don't like that i can't just say FDT like nipsey hussle at the top of my lungs until my vocal cords erupt

because none of this is necessary nor productive, bruh

and you're fucking persecuting the love of my life.  i mean, fdt

these asshats have decided to be fascists because the power was there for the taking, and we're all to some extent complicit in letting this minority claim it.  you want biological truth?  i know this is the most hippie tripe to express, cringe is my middle name, but the truth is we, YOU, and "i", and they, and them, and They, and THEM, that's all consciousness.  Individual consciousnesses, entangled in individual bodies & lives.  There is no one perfect model for consciousness.  There is no perfect soul.

but my husband comes so near to close as makes no legible difference

i have been abused, drowned, homeless, broken psychologically, and quite literally bled in my brain.  i have nearly died three times.  my husband is the man who held my hand that third time

that cannot be taken from us.  not with a pen.  neither with handcuffs truncheons nor guns.  and that seems to be where things Are, in this present moment.  i have been a demented runaway from a violent home, and i have survived being homeless during the covid pandemic, and only one man has been there for me through two thirds of that.  who am i s'posed to listen to, the flabby combover with a toadstool dick and a history of rape and bodies upon bodies upon bodies to account for, or, uh, the man i love?

 fdt

that's the last i have to say on that.  it's out of my system, i promise.  fast forward four years.  fer shure

sorry i ain't no ///max///headroom/// [ . . . memory, brain trauma, near death experience & other mysteries of the creative process . . . ]

i hate needing to explain who i am in order to explain what i am which is a total headcase

i can't just say "artist" because i taught myself to do this stuff so i could hold myself together

but i want to be part of this world, so i blog as best & as bravely as i am able because holy shit

this world is not nice & is extra hard on everyone & especially brains

today's blogisode:  sorry i ain't no ///max///headroom///

[ redacted thoughts, redacted ]

Chicago had snow, then rain.  I had a case of the lows, now my brain's ringing.  No big talkies today.  Redacted thoughts are redacted.  Head's a wreck.  Christ, the ringing.  If it's not vertigo or being a goddamned mental patient it's tinnitus.  Gonna try to grind more tarot art tomorrow.  Think I have this composition down.  Honestly, why are you reading this?  Go read a paper book.  Something with real words by actual people.  The internet will only break your spirit & wither your glands.

inking xtinction - 4 (((the sound of uncertainty)))

(((inside my head, every day)))

 

there are times where i am trying to do something and i don't know what

 

with apocalypse: it's trying to work out what i liked so. much. about walt simonson

because i'm not a simonson superfan, i'm not reading all that thor shit.  but

i thought simonson on x-factor was actually pretty righteous.  i dug on all

the dashed-off weird reflections w/ chrome filigree he would add to everything,

almost compulsively.  he had a real punk energy to his art at that time, i dunno,

and i felt him kind of flexing at mignola, too, like oh a contender.  his art was more fun,

competetive.  after leaving x-factor he became kind of a famously fastidious & consistent

workman, but for a minute it felt like he was in the dojo just throwing down, like wildstylin

i didn't CARE about or like anything apocalypse brought to the table of the summers saga

i kind of dug apocalypse whenever mignola got to draw him.  but otherwise idgaf.  he looks doofy

so ultimately this is all just me rehearsing textures & working out ocd kinks

 

it's not entirely a simonson tribute.  i find myself trying to do something

but it's not silvestri, like on the left, with sinister.  that's me aping silvestri

apocalypse just winds up being something else.  i dunno.  i hope james (tiberius) likes it

 

i'll be glad to start inking the rest soon