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b.l.o.g.4.l.y.f.e.04/22/06
Man I was writing and writing on this blog for a while and then was doing something else and accidentally quit my web browser. And my entry disappeared. But it was kind of a negative thing about how I don't like postage due letters or washing my clothes in a laundromat which is also the neighborhood bar, and everyone that goes to the bar is homeless and begs for change outside of the post office. Which is like five hundred feet from the laundromat-bar. Bar-o-mat. (I moved out of the neighborhood last year, anyway, and bought a washer and dryer, so it's not like it really matters.)
Anyway, instead of mouthing off about Columbus "The Hipster's Icy Glare" Ohio, let me share an animated gif of my dog twitching: DOG GIF
Welcome to Columbus "Weird Helmet-Hair Lady At The Pet Store" Ohio. Here is your dog gif. Over here in the next aisle you will find a spray to improve your dog. Or you can spray it in the room, and it will improve the room. Whichever.
Columbus "It's Where The Fast-Food Restaurant Wendys Was Created, Which Is Actually Fairly Representative Of The Way People Here Eat" Ohio.
Do you remember the Superbar, by the way? I know you probably do, but I'm just saying the word real quick to make you remember. Three staggered self-serve stations, bountifully flowing with... rotini, pudding, and salad bar. Would someone bring me some more soft taco shells, I absolutely must have a hamcube/sunflower seed soft taco.
"Too bad we're not at Arby's, or we could have had Horsey Sauce on these hamcube soft tacos."
"What's for dessert?"
"What do you THINK you're having for dessert we're at the SUPER BAR."
"YES!!! PUDDING SOFT TACOS."
They cut off the Superbar at one point, when the amount that Americans ate actually overtook the incredibly low price of the ingredients at the Superbar. If food costs twelve cents a pound, you have to be eating a lot of food to run Wendy's out of the Superbar business. But it happened. Dudes, just regular dudes, would roll in and suddenly think, "Oh my GOD if I can eat about three pounds of food this will be SO CHEAP and 84 OUNCES OF SODA OH HELL YES." Congratulations, America, you finally beat the system. You just got so hellbent on savin' money in the most physically harmful way possible that you destroyed the integrity of the Superbar.
I didn't like the Superbar really, not once I had it a few times, so I guess that it's not so bad. If someone would invent a way for us, as good flag-waving, astronaut-loving Americans, to eat so much that we can destroy salad bars and other buffet bars just by the sheer force of extreme gluttony, that would be so great.
Good bye, "Various Flavors Of Honey-Glazed Ham" Bar. Good bye, "Horrible All-Vegan/No-Salt/Everything Has Brown Rice In It" Bar. Good bye, "MCL Cafeteria". Oh my god that MCL Cafeteria is a quiet and mournful place. It's like a welcoming room for the dead. You die and the walls are just drapey blue velvet and little white plastic letters in little black foam boards. "WELCOME NEWLY DEAD" Everyone is all somber cause they die, I mean, first that happens, then they have to be in the cafeteria, and THEN they dig into their green beans and it's just like "man, I really am dead, I guess." It just sets in. Half of the people in MCL are just sitting, just bugging out staring at their green beans, because they think they're dead.
I went into an MCL Cafeteria in Lexington once and I felt myself age ten thousand years in an instant. I was looking at my own skeleton reflected in the beef gravy. I was 9 and liked Garfield so this was terrifying.
I can't believe that I admitted to liking Garfield on the internet. I am going to go clean my mouth out. With buffalo burgers.
A glimpse behind the scenes04/20/06
I can't believe the way American Inventor is going. Check out my, in-ven-tion. Check out my, cry-cry-cry. Cry cry cry, sob sob sob. I sold my, wed-ding ring. I lost my, ware-house-job. WARE-HOUSE-JOB.
I can't type any more about that, I got to keep quiet about TV shows.
(LINK TO GIANT ANIMATED GIF)
There goes the rest of my April bandwidth, that animated gif file is like 300k. But that is how I roll, I roll on the cusp of EXTREME BANDWIDTH CHARGES. Just doing a dirty 360 grind or some other skateboarding term, holding six sparklers and writing out "INTERNET" in the air while some dude takes a long-exposure photo of it to post on his blog.
i'm a have to set it04/18/06
So I had to have my spectacles adjusted yesterday, which was due to them rubbing on my head something awful. Which meant going to the mall. Here is when I recommend you go to the mall: After 8pm, on Monday. Also you can go, no, never mind, every other time sucks. 8pm on Monday is pretty much it.
Since we opened Married To The Sea it has been kind of busy around here, but, well, if your job is webcomics, step up to the plate and make webcomics. We have gotten a few MTTS shirts in so far and they will start shipping this week (ahead of schedule, thanks to our awesome printer) and you should know that if you've ordered a shirt it will ship April 25th or before. Just in case you're wondering "where is it". Since it is a new site we had to collect some orders before making the shirts, so we'd know which ones sold well and which ones didn't.
Speaking of which. When you get your Married to the Sea shirt, if you ordered one, you should get on the MTTS myspace page and post a picture of you wearing the shirt. You can post a few if you bought more than one shirt. I like to see how they look on people. There are only so many ways I can put a t-shirt on my own body.
Do you know what myspace is? It is a website where everyone I know is on it, my whole entire peer group uses this to communicate even though some of us are "post-thirty", and you can look up everyone you went to high school with. In my book, it is a good site. Sometimes I click on a page and it fills my browser with flashing stars and I can't read the text and then it crashes my computer, but that's not any worse than the rest of the internet. The idea that everyone you know has a personal web page assigned to them is proof to me that writing things on the internet is now extremely normal. These days I can ask people to email me without getting dirty looks like I asked them to fax me handwritten letters rather than call.
The reason for having b-sides is that I draw pictures all during the week and then every so often I collect them and load them into my site. Then there are some left over, because I bring the webcomics pain every day at midnight (actually 12:05 but that doesn't sound as cool.) "Atkins yum yum" I don't know. I just don't know what happened there. What does that even mean.
I saw the scrabble club out and about the other day. It always looks like a documentary about outsider artists or something. There is one guy who talks too fast and another with aggressive aviator sunglasses and a renaissance faire lady. That is just how the scrabble club rolls. They have secret codes. "10-12" is code for "check out that lemon cheesecake in the display case".
10-22: Mountain dew running low.
10-46: Breaker one nine, breaker one nine, come back aviator guy. Breaker breaker, aviator, you got your ears on. We got some smokeys in the northwest quadrant of the board, let's roll on up and teach them about a triple word score, over.
10-51: Request dictionary backup.
10-58: Star Wars showing tonight at my house, repeat, Star Wars time at my house.
I'm not unfairly biased against Star Wars or people who watch it. I was simply born after it was released. My first and last experience with actually watching this movie was watching about half of it on a top-loading VCR when I was 8. My family had an obsessive numbering system for VCR tapes (just think about this the next time you wonder where my darts come from.) Star wars was number 8, and I was 8. I felt this was fortuitous but I didn't like the movie. Maybe the tracking was off.
Or maybe it was just mind-numbingly boring.
I drew that last year, so it says 2005, but yeah, still don't care. I am not going to say anything to you if you like this movie, because IT IS RETARDED TO ARGUE WITH PEOPLE OVER THEIR PERSONAL TASTE IN MOVIES OR MUSIC OR BOOKS, but I couldn't post that without some prelude and epilogue, because I don't want the scrabble club jumping me the next time I am out walking around the Short North without my bodyguard.
10-87: Star Wars hater sighted. Renaissance Faire Lady, you distract him with your crystals. Aviator Guy, you perch on top of Coldstone Ice Cream-Cookie Mash-Uppery and use one of your collection of sixteen guns to take him out.
The scrabble club practices an aggressive policy of pre-emptive murder in the case of people who do not like Star Wars.
10-98: JESUS CHRIST RUN IT'S THE SCRABBLE CLUB
the wheels of time/trash04/12/06
So I am sitting in my house looking at a huge pile of garbage. Well, I mean, it's not really that huge. It's kind of huge. I mean, it's bigger than me, but smaller than my car, and my car is a sensible four-door sort of thing. Just over a year ago I used to live in an apartment whose largest window looked directly onto a dumpster, and trash was piled (blown? dumped? abandoned?) against the side of the building with no windows. Also the side of the building where my desk and computer are.
One day I came home and saw a bum directly peeing on the wall of the apartment. So there was actual pee just six inches away from this website, because I make this site on my computer. Just think about it. The pee was so close.
The dude just did not care about it though. I guess if there is a pile of trash there in the alley, you figure you might as well pee. I mean, if I had to pee pretty badly I would probably do it there too. Why not. The thing is, though, I used to live near campus here and everything was surrounded in, and covered in, trash. Nobody bothered to pick it up and so it looked kind of like Tijuana.
Well, better than Tijuana, but also worse, because nobody would try to sell me prozac and valium when I walked down the streets of my old neighborhood. They would either ignore me, or stab me with their eyes. They gave me kind of look where you lock eyes with a person for a brief moment, just long enough to get a vivid image of the dude coming towards you and just stabbing the crap out of you. I have been to Tijuana, on my honeymoon, and I didn't get stabbed, but a man actually yelled to me as I was walking away from his storefront, "Hey! Come back man! You know you want to buy this crap!"
Also, I had my picture taken on top of a donkey painted to look like a zebra. I'm not sure how I feel about that practice, but I was kind of overwhelmed with being in Mexico. I was really out of touch with my liberal outrage at that moment. If I had a clearer head I am sure I would have said something like "I will not support this industry!" under my breath, as if the donkey-zebra-sales-photographer-guy was a co-subsidiary of FOX NEWS and Wal-Mart. But I just sat on the donkey and the guy put a sombrero on me that said "MEXICO" and raised the price by five dollars in between me agreeing to do it, and me paying him.
I went to the post office yesterday, speaking of liberal outrage, and there was a booth set up outside of the office with Lyndon LaRouche merchandise. I am going to allow you to google that and see what you think of that guy if you want, since I don't really know all of the ins and outs of his whole platform. But the Lyndonites (Can I call you that guys? It sounds better than LaRouchies. Or LaRouchebags.) were calling out to everyone who walked by, "Do you want to put Dick Cheney in jail?" And, actually, to my surprise, every single person said yes. I mean, I thought maybe one person would just be like "SHUT YER HOLE AHM MERKIN" but EVERYONE WHO WALKED BY said yes. I thought this was wonderful. I donated a few bucks, I couldn't help it. If I can keep a fringe group on the street for one more day asking passersby to put the vice president in jail, I think the world is a better place.
A merkin is a pubic wig, by the way. I would make some joke about it, but maybe there is a reason for a person to have one. I don't want to make a pubically bald person cry for hours because of my laser-guided sarcasm. SENSORS LOCK ON!!! TARGET SIGHTED!!! TARGET HAS PUBIC ALOPECIA.
The huge yellow trash truck just backed up to my house which reminds me. The dumpster. The trash. Nobody peed on my trash in my new neighborhood. Nobody stole the water cooler out of my car, even though I left it in there for a whole day, just in the back seat. Because nobody goes to my neighborhood because it is small and middle-class and full of trees, and there is nowhere to put your trash, and nowhere to pee, and nowhere to stand and ask me for cigarettes or change. My neighborhood is like teflon for the homeless.
It is also sweet, sweet honey for the aspiring worker bees of the middle class. "Darling, let's buy a house with a lousy adjustable-rate mortgage that will blow up in three years! We'll never be able to afford it when prime rate goes up a quarter-percent!"
"Lovely! Do we have enough room in the budget for spinners for my Bronco?"
