The lake was a lot nicer than people give it credit for, but I mostly enjoyed the company I kept while I was away. A lot of things have happened and a number of feelings were felt. I have returned and am currently listening to Back to the Sea by The Sandwitches. If you like lo-fi bands with an upbeat sadness that like to intentionally misspell picnic foods, they might be right up your side-street.
Adventure and original content to follow…
I’ve been making waves at the beach but will return with plenty of new content very soon. If you find yourself impatiently waiting, skim through some old posts or find someone else to read for the next couple of days.
If that single photo doesn’t tide you over, here are some less-mainstream recommendations that I’ve been enjoying this week:
Bring Me the Head of David Dixon
Other than that you can always surf the web for more popular comic gems, like Gun Show. My regular readers also have wonderful blogs on a variety of subjects ranging from amazing “food porn” to worthwhile advice on going back to school. Of course, there are some awful ones out there too.
When we were all young, everyone kept telling us that we could be whatever we wanted when we grew up. After all, we lived in America and that was the one place in the whole world where you could achieve your dreams. This was the land of milk and honey. People flocked here for the multitude of opportunities and just being born here virtually guaranteed you a life other countries could only dream of. The way people talked about it, you’d have thought the streets were paved with gold or something.
Now all I hear are reports about how Americans need to be trained for the jobs available in the market. Nobody is, or ever should have been, telling children, “when you grow up, you can be whatever you want.” What they should have said is, “When you grow up, you can get a job in mediocrity if you take out loans to go to school and, after fifty years, maybe you can have a fairly comfortable life if your expectations aren’t too high.”
I’m going to tell my kids that if they want to achieve their dreams they’re going to have to lower the bar or take that bar and use it to fight off everything that wants to steal their dreams away from them. I will teach them to make hard decisions and push them to the brink of insanity so they are hardened and ready for the world. If I had twins, I would force one to kill the other in order to double its strength. My children would be known to foam at mouth and bark at unfamiliar sounds. I will have found them all their first jobs well before adolescence. It would be at a foundry and the low survival-rate would further distill my brood.
Spankings would be distributed completely at random. They would understand the horrible arbitrary nature of existence early on. One day I would show up with a puppy and a wheel with numbers on it. I would make the youngest spin the wheel and whatever number it landed on would be the number of years the dog would be allowed to live. Upon it’s “death date” I would take the dog to my friend Tim’s house where it would continue to live out its life in secret. The children would never be told the truth and each Christmas they would get a postcard from the dog’s ghost. Their hate for me would grow until, eventually, one of them would attempt to destroy me. This child would be forever my favorite and everything I possess would become theirs upon my death. Until that time, they would be cast out into society and immediately become estranged from me. Frankly, I can see no other way for a child to achieve their dreams in the new American job market. I’ve been told that the recession is over but that the economy would never be the same. After a long hard labor, our country has bared-down and pushed out a stillbirth, silent and useless.
Despite the continuously high unemployment rate, some of us managed to acquire jobs in our respective fields. A few of us are even prospering and enjoying ourselves, while many more are taking what they can get and working for the sole purpose of survival. I know that, by definition, survival is living but I bet I could still argue a pretty good case against it. We are all so ready to pat ourselves on the back as hard as we can and for what? We weathered the storm and have nothing to show for it. We idolize the past like it’s so mythically far away or long ago that it is completely out of reach. We’ve ignored its lessons and have settled upon a lesser future than we deserve. Our parents and grandparents lived the dream and rode rockets to the moon while we’re selling off the space program like a beat up old car. There will be no missions beyond the sky for us. It has been decided that it’s just not practical anymore.
It was never practical. None of it.
For some people, just being in a public bathroom heightens the tension of every moment. Something as innocuous as standing next to another person becomes your own personal hell when it’s done at the urinal. I’ve heard sweaty bearded man-voices squeak with fright when asked a question while relieving themselves. Their nerves fail them and they shake and quiver as if their bones were attempting to gyrate out of their bodies. While I don’t personally relish the moments in the men’s room, I cannot say it has ever upset me either.
However, there was a single occasion at the Olive Garden that I will never forget. It all began, strangely enough, at the end of the meal. The bill had been settled and everyone was making their way back to the car. The faux elegance of Olive Garden has already made me slightly giddy, as it always does, and I was full of water. I made a detour to the men’s room and, for a time, had it to all to myself. The first person to enter was an eleven year old with a backwards baseball cap. He paused and decided that, rather than stand next to me, he would enter one of the stalls where he could have additional privacy. I head the seat flip up and his stream make contact with the standing water at the bottom of the toilet.
Moments later, a second young man entered. This one was in his late teens. Again, there was a pause before he too decided upon the privacy of a stall. I was almost offended but considered that they were both knee deep in their awkward years. At sixteen, there was no way I was going to stand next to a grown man and pee if I had the choice of hiding out in a stall. Satisfied that the problem was their lack of self-confidence and not some creepy vibe I was putting out, I went to wash my hands. At first, everything was going fine. My hands were wet, soapy and I was rubbing them together but something started to feel very wrong. I sensed that something awful was about to happen and then it did.
I looked over my right shoulder and found myself face to face with the teenager’s eyeball. He was terrified. He had taken every precaution he could have to avoid this very moment and it had all backfired horribly. Our faces were so close that I could almost taste his breath. Whoever had designed the bathroom had placed his stall as close to the sink as possible and then left a large gap in the wall next to me. We were both stunned and involuntarily locked eyes until I realized that his were just getting larger and more afraid. I could see the alarms going off in his head. His brain was trying to die to avoid any further shame and I fell into a fit of laughter because I knew it.
I laughed hard. Hard enough to drool a little. The entire situation seemed hysterical to me and I couldn’t help myself. I stumbled around the room and clawed at the towels while convulsing, honking and gasping for breaths between laughs. I snorted and chortled all the way out into the parking lot and for most of the ride back.
So, if you are that kid in the Olive Garden bathroom, I am sorry we had to share that wonderful moment.
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As a final reminder, this Saturday I will be at the Shadow Art Fair. If you think that you might like to enjoy yourself with an entire day of live music, good beer and art, you should visit Shadowartfair.com for more information. I will be there, at the VOSKY booth, selling the print version of some of my comics and stories (two dollars), music, short films and entirely new stand-alone pieces like the one modeled below.
We also made a commercial for it.
…see you there.
This is the seventh installment of the celebrated diary within a used book I managed to save from a clearance event for “junk books” in a rundown warehouse of a library. The journal is the story of an astonishing woman living in 1988 who just happens to also love her cats. If you would like to enjoy her story from the beginning or catch up on some of her earlier entries, go to The Cat Lover’s Diary.
Next month’s Cat Diary ought to come a little quicker than normal. I don’t have time to tease you with other content while I’m getting ready for the The Shadow Art Fair (July 16). I have a cadre of stories and comics all queued up, though. I won’t let anything interfere with regular updates.
Are you planning a summer vacation this year? Would you like to be my friend? Are you a creepy hobo-drifter? Are you currently residing in, or near, the state that Jim Harrison once called a partially paved atrocity?
If you even considered saying yes, you absolutely need to come to southeastern Michigan for the 2011 Shadow Art Fair and see me. I’ll be there with my creative collaborator in VOSKY selling my new comic, original prints and videos. There is also a good chance I will have some copies of the just-for-fun album from my band, BATWAKE. I will be there all day exchanging stories and, hopefully, blowing minds like some sort of psychic tornado. It should be a lot of weird fun and, better yet, it’s all going down inside of a brewery.
It’s on July 16th from noon to midnight in Ypsilanti. The entry fee is only two-cents and I’ll be happy to talk ears off whenever there is a lull in the crowd. If you’re looking for a good way to spend a Saturday, I can think of nothing better. Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. You can all stay at my house.
I also should apologize for my content flow slowing down ever so slightly while I’m working on finishing so many projects this month, but I’m not going to. If anyone has any ideas for last minute additions to my comic, now would be the time to mention it.
Kisses, hugs, drugs.
Swans are jerks.
Like many American fathers, mine always took a special pride in the appearance of his yard. Quite a few dads measure a large portion of their worth by the quality of their lawn. Because of my father, I could probably teach a brief course on the best way to care for your grass. That does not, however, mean that I would actually be capable of maintaining it. If yards were haircuts, my father’s yard is a healthy quaff styled by a true master, whereas mine would be more like the patchy remnants of alopecia hacked and mashed by a crystal meth addict. Needless to say, he holds the highest standards for yard work and my passage into manhood had a lot to do with that.
When I was thirteen, it had been debated if I was truly ready to learn to wield the power of the riding lawnmower. Up until that point, my chores included keeping the house free of trash, the garage free of dirt and the driveway free of leaves. Sometimes my father would have me dig a hole or whack weeds but mowing the lawn was out of the question, the closest I ever got was when he would have me edge the house with a pair of hand shears. Things changed when I turned thirteen, though. I was ready and everyone knew it. I prepared myself because by doing five sit-ups every morning and beating myself with reeds because I knew that summer would be the summer I became a man. Training was hard but I eventually had all the information and practice that I needed to mow the hell out of a lawn and, for a moment, my father was proud of me. I was shining in the sunlight of his love.
One afternoon, I noticed that the mower needed to be fueled but had difficulty locating any gasoline. I spent the better part of an hour running back and forth between the garage and shed hunting for any small red container with a few drops of fuel until I was exhausted. Then I remembered seeing several red canisters in the very back of the shed. Two were empty but one substantially different looking silver canister had plenty of fuel in it. I quickly dumped it into the gas tank and tried to start the engine. The mower started, ran for a second, made a bad smell, shuddered and then died. Having tried to restart it a dozen or so times, I gave up and went inside to consult my mother. When I replayed the events to her, she went into a panicked rage. I was informed that I had put kerosene into the mower and that my father was going to murder me when he got home. This was not first time I had been promised death upon the return of my father. When I was two, I once crammed several wads of electrical tape into a VCR and, at age ten, I had lit fireworks off in the house.
The relationship between a father and son contains a deep unexplainable love and a deeper even more unexplainable animosity. Dads spend their lives passing important information onto their sons while resisting the urge to crush their heads with their bare hands. It’s been this way since ancient times. For whatever reason, my father opted not to destroy me but he also did not trust me to touch anything of his that held any value for the remainder of that year. I did not have to mow the lawn once that summer and was free to loaf about with my friends, read and write all I wanted. All it cost me was my father’s respect forever.
I’m lucky to have even been able to share this with you this week. I’m reasonably certain that every animal between Detroit and Chicago has tried to place itself directly in front of traffic. I very nearly hit three deer on my motorcycle just last night. If you drive, be safe out there. If you don’t drive, well I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before animals wander into the cities and try to derail your train or poison themselves in your apartment.
The tale of one woman’s hell in 1988 continues…
This is the sixth installment of the fabled diary within a used book I procured from a clearance event for “junk books” in a rundown and partly abandoned library. The journal is the story of an amazing woman living in 1988 who just happens to love her cats. If you would like to enjoy her story from the beginning or catch up on some of her earlier entries, go to The Cat Lover’s Diary.
You Monsters Are People. 