I'm home. Come back home with me!(click here).

Later, Cali.

So, here's the pre-round-up. Tri-word hyphenation! Beat that.

I am going home sunday. I am so ready. Smell ya later California. See ya, wouldn't want to be ya. etc.

I'm depressed. Not because I'm leaving, probably because I didn't leave sooner. Too long with nothing really to do.

My 2 main goals were to get something going drawing-wise, which I did, so good.
The other was to lose some weight, which I did not do, despite rather concerted efforts. That sucks.

4 months is a long time to be aimless and not around your stuff or people. I'm not complaining. A break is a break, and someone less conflicted probably would have used their free time better and whatever, but that is not my concern. Or rather, that's what I keep telling myself.

Look, we saw lots of stuff. I loved all the road trips and all the visits to SF, that stuff was great. I loved the hot tub. I loved the dishwasher. Loved having a car. All the rest, the whole being in America part... didn't love that so much. I knew that would happen so no big surprises there. I've always appreciated Canada, an appreciation which has been freshly renewed.

That's that. I'm going home. We'll see what happens back there. I'll let you know.

That hat is so wiener.

Visited SF for the last time this weekend. Highlights:

1. Flamboyant man in silver spandex with 10 inch speakers mounted to his bike, blasting Journey - Don't Stop Believing.

2. 2 hipster German men in a vintage shop deciding which full-on toque with pom-poms to buy. One was trying them on with the other offering decisive comments like: "Ya, this one, I don't think so. This one is fat man in jogging pants walking around Vienna, full of sausage."

3. Ordering a million things from our favourite vegan restaurant AND dessert. In your face Richard Simmons.

4.Climbing a trillion steps to get to the top of a hill with a tree and a bench and no one else but us and a 360 degrees view of all of San Francisco.

5. Nearly getting knocked ass over tea kettle by ferocious wind, ocean side, while the pacific heaved and hoed.


Photos here.

Also, I was feeling very poopy so T brought me these beautiful flowers. Flowers rule.

Peectures.

Photos from the weekend, click here: peeeeee.


Of course I took your suggestion Joby.

Grr.

Obviously, I'm not keeping pace with drawing updates. So!!! Don't bug me! I'm grumpy.

Now that I have a long story stretched out ahead of me, I'm more interested in planning it out than drawing other stuff. It's an adjustment period. Plus, I go back in 2 weeks. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything but it's affecting me unconsciously.

So, I have more panels roughed out and will be adding and will continue this blog as well as the other, but check weekly instead of daily. That's my advice. I haven't given up, just changed my strategy.

And that's the way it is. Did I mention I was grumpy? I am. Oh and by the way, I will probably draw and write about you. Don't sue me.

Chased a balloon this weekend. Sounds like something Polkaroo would do but he wouldn't have had all the beeping devices we had or a Volvo driven by a Dutchman who insisted on playing Rammstein cd's for 2 hours.Go here for Balloon chase photos or be square.

Rammstein are hilariously bad. For extra fun, I like to picture German superstar Heino as the singer whenever I hear them. Try it sometime.



Yeesh. German Sheppards, heavenly rays, stay-pressed turquoise blue pants...it is a goal of mine to recreate this photo with myself as the subject. Let me know if you can help me out with the temporary loan of dogs, pants or heavenly rays.

Kitchener and me continued

Uggg, wrenching the story out ever so slowly...big project...must fight urge to bail...reserving energy...full sentences...impossible.

The one.

I think I have begun the big one. It's not coloured in yet, these are just the outlines and it's coming along slow, but I think this is it. The beginning of the whole story.

Alcatraz

New look to blog. As if you didn't notice.
Went to Alcatraz. See here.
Still working on comic.
Over and out.

Shout outs to Al Jaffee and Elizabeth Fraser.

There's another one coming. It's just taking a while. It's inspired by the Cocteau Twins. I had to brew it for a while and listen to a LOT of Cocteau Twins to conjure up the right mood.

So obviously I've surrendered to the comic book form of expression. It's had a strangle hold on me since I picked up my first issue of Mad Magazine in 1982. I didn't really understand at the time that it was a monthly magazine. I'd go back to the corner store every couple of days to see if a new one was in yet. I would spend hours trying to copy the drawings and had a revelation when I realized I could make up my own drawings. So thanks Al Jaffee mainly, for kicking off my "lucrative" and not at all fraught with conflict, path as a cartoon artist (and also embedding my love of sarcasm with his "snappy answers to stupid questions" series).

So there. On another topic...

So far, California has been...let me find the right word here...California-y. Not really up my alley, as it were. Sometimes though, sometimes it's nice.

Like at dusk, when it's cool enough for a sweater and coat, and the sun is sinking behind the mountains so they are purple and soft looking and the same purple jumps out in the wildflowers against the green of the grass and trees and you can smell the blossoms on the trees in the breeze and everyone is inside their homes and you can walk past and see blue computer screens and someone at the stove and the flickering lights of a tv and planes are circling high up with the last of the setting sun reflecting off their wings and the sky is huge and cloudless and unbroken...that's when California works for me.

4 weeks left. Crazy.

Cards for peeps.

Why not throw up (as in throw up on the blog, as in put up on the blog, look, just stop picturing the act of vomiting!) a couple of real life cards and stuff I made for peeps. You tell me why not, go ahead. One might be lost in the mail by the way. This deeply irks me.







And yes, I totally stole the "I'm a lady" thing from Little Britain. I don't think they'll mind too much as it's a card for my dad only.

INCOMING!!

You will see that I have a whole number of new posts all at once. Due to popular complaint (a couple people anyway) I've put up the entirety of some of the "teaser" comics I only posted part of before. They are in various states of being unfinished or sucking or whatever but you'll find them below, plus this new one. Aren't I great? Ehem.

Speaks for itself.

Decided the painting technique didn't work and abandoned it. I'll have to redraw it entirely!

Geeks and freaks.

The title of this one is the same as my blog.

Bookstore continued.

The moral of this comic is that there is such a thing as too much background detail.

Urges continued

Urges

It's my highschool geek tribute.

"Time isn't holding us, time isn't after us..."

Ahhh, the library. Why did I put off the library for so long? I went there today to work distraction-free. I felt like drawing something different. I did research drawing. I pulled some William Morris and Arts and Crafts movement books off the shelf and practiced their beautiful lines. The results were very grade nine, but it sure was fun and I didn't get up once to play a move in scrabble, or see what's in the fridge or on tv, or wander around aimlessly, seeing if there was a bed to be made or a toilet to be cleaned. I concentrated the whole time. Imagine! Unheard of, except for the trillions of people who manage to concentrate everyday and get things done and don't make a big deal out of it...

Well anyway, it got me out of the verstinkine house.



I went home during rush hour. While waiting on the light rail platform I listened to Talking Heads playing on my iPod: "...letting the days go by, let the water hold me down...". I'll tell you what you see a lot of here. Guys with moustache handlebars and tatoos. You don't see that in the part of town where we are staying, but all other parts of San Jose you do. You know that Frank Black video for Los Angeles, where he's standing out in the desert at night with sunglasses and a rain jacket, and a fu-manchu stache, holding the microphone to the side? The one where he drives the hovercraft around and drives over the lightbulbs? This one here. Ya, well, uh, I kind of get where he's coming from better after living here for a while for some reason. I bet I'd get it even more if I lived in Los Angeles.

I just went back and reread that paragraph and noticed I wrote "moustache handlebars" instead of handlebar moustaches. They don't sound like even remotely the same thing when you switch them around like that. By the way, go here to see a very hilarious blog about moustaches.

As a final note, I wanted to tell you that the library has a big section with hardbound thesis papers, since it's shared with San Jose University. My favourite topic was : Perceiving Ingmar Bergman's The Silence Through the I Ching. I shit you not. Good job Gordon A Lee, on ensuring a jobless future for yourself. Can you imagine the scores of people he must have alienated during the writing of this thesis?

"It's about WHAT?" -his parents.

"I dunno man, it's like, you've become so crazy-boring and I don't mean crazy as in super boring, although you are, I mean you are crazy AND boring. I didn't know that was possible until hanging out with you lately." -his best friend.

"Robert, I just can't picture a future with someone who tries to apply ancient Chinese philosophy to Swedish art films, there's something about it that makes the idea of seeing you naked, so... horrifying." -former girlfriend.

und so wieder as the Germans say. (means: and so on.)

Poor Robbie. Wonder what he's up to these days. Academia can truly be so far up it's own hole, it ends up finding some new spacial dimension of up the holeness. Shine on crazy diamonds. Shine on.

Now please enjoy this photo of an Amaretto sour I enjoyed at a British-style pub on sunday. That is all.

Conspiracy ahoy.

Well, as usual, I am antagonizing bureaucratic workers. It's sort of my special skill. Remind me to never move to France.

They haven't had the little fresh wipe thingys in the gym that people wipe the machines off after they are done, for a week. Gross, today I was talking to the cleaning staff who just happened to be around, asking if they could maybe throw a bottle of spray cleaner and a roll of paper towels in there while they were waiting for these magical wipes to get off backorder. The leasing office lady happened upon us and got indignant informing me that people should use towels and that the gym is cleaned everyday. I said, "Great but, my towel is just going to wipe the sweat around and unless you have cleaning staff doing each machine after it's been used all day, you've got a hygeine issue." She said, "We treat this gym like all other gyms in the complex." This mystified me. What did that have to do with anything? So all the gyms are gross and unclean and that should somehow shut me up? I said, "Well, I'm just trying to suggest a simple solution for the meantime." and left. I'm sure she deeply appreciated my input. In the way a beaver appreciates you putting up curtains in his dam.

What's more fun is that I found out my key needed to be updated to access the other gym which involved having to call on the same lady AND, the corporate housing company that oversees the details of our stay, called her because I mad a noise complaint about out neighbors. Ah yes, she will know me by name and will probably do all she can to foil me at every step from now on. That's what charm and charisma buys you ladies and gentlemens; an easy road, or rather, a trail of annoyed enemies.

That's right, enemies! You're all against me!! Facebook, my neighbors, that glass over there on the table, my socks. If I don't cover the walls with tinfoil and demand that the governor of California hire a flock of ravens to guard me at all times, evil will have it's way and the battle will be lost.

Sure I'm kidding. Ha.Ha.

I have to go buy more tinfoil.

having a real good day.

Ah MAN! Scheise! I tried today, I really did. It's all shit today. Shittty shit.
Some days, it's just really shit. And then I went to get the mail in the parking lot and the elevator wouldn't come back down and I was ready to kill anyone who looked at me wrong. I walked to the other end and took the other elevator and then went to see what the deal was. Some asshole pushed the button for every floor then got off. My PMS has been so mild this week that I almost didn't know I had it until I yelled through the wall Saturday for someone to turn down the fucking tv, at 1 am. And today, when I was ready to fist fight anyone pushing buttons superfluously on the elevator.

What I drew today was just not what I was trying to draw and I spent ages on it even though I knew it wasn't working. Lesson learned. I'm only just now starting to understand what my life needs to be about to get done what I want to get done but I'm so impatient. Now that I know, why can't it happen right away? I know why. I know I have to work. I will. It's hard. Hard when it doesn't go right. Hard when it's bubbling inside, but you just can't put your damn finger on it and get it down on the page. Hard when you have to admit defeat and go take a bath and regroup for trying again.

And fuck you Facebook. You suck. You will destroy proper communication. You are making life a high school for millions. Millions who are NOT in high school anymore. Even back in high school, did we talk only to ourselves into our little locker mirrors and hope that others were watching us as we did so, and was everyone else so busy talking into their own little mirrors and hoping the same, so that in the end, no one cared about anyone but themselves???? No, but Facebook is making it so. I wash my hands of thee.

Whatever, right?

It's warm as hell here today. Almost t-shirt warm. A gal should go for walk in that shit. Maybe I shall. Maybe I shall.

PS: I took a bath and made myself do another drawing. Both shitty and post-shitty results below.


The drawings on top of the page, were the unsucessful drawings that made me give up and try the one below it. I'm going to give the below one some more attention. I think pushing through paid off more than if I had just given up. Head up your ass much Monsterteeth?

3 for the price of 1.

This is a real person. She was in my New Media Design class. I won't say her real name, but it rhymes with Pix Bathknocker. I saw her parents once at an open house for the school. It's clear she was doomed from the start.



Ya, so out of the 5 weeks I've been here, I've been sick for 2 of them.



I dunno, but she seems like a fun lady.