It's been around 60 degrees for a couple of days, so I have my windows open for the air.

Meanwhile, the Malt-o-Meal plant has been baking cocoa cereal for three days straight and the wind is blowing it right into my room. It smells so fucking great.

Quick, everyone buy out all the chocolate cereal so they have to bake more.

Why, what could THIS be?

If you don't use DA, you can reach me in the comments here as well.

PS - Turns out my bank has changed its policy from "refuse transactions if there's no money" to "let all charges through and reap delicious overdraft fees." I was going to get the protection this week, but I let it slip my mind and now I pay the price. Ah me.

Voice mail message #1: "hi Luka, this is dr. X calling to give you the results of your blood test earlier this week and talk about where to go from here. Please give me a call at...."

Voice mail message #2: "hello Luka, this is Dr. Y from Dr. X's office. I have some open appointments with the rheumatologist for a consult. Please call me so we can set one up and discuss our options. Thanks!"

Called back. Results are not conclusive. Two of the tests show I have inflammation markers in my blood, which could be from non-blood-testable RA. With my symptoms and family history, they want to look closer. They can take me as early as August 26.

In the meantime, looks like I'm going to occupational therapy for yet another limb.

Went to the doctor for the wrist. Was given X-Rays, but until the radiologist looks at them nothing stands out about the bones. No erosion at least, which is a good indicator that it's not osteo-arthritis.

Then she sent me out for a blood test because my mother had rheumatoid arthritis and my symptoms are suspicious. Whenever I think of how shitty Mom's life was and try to imagine the constant pain she lived in, I cringe. I don't want that to be me.

If the test comes back positive, though, we'll have a good chance to keep it at bay with an arsenal of modern treatments and exercise, and at least I'll finally know why my joints are trying to destroy my life.

If it's negative, she's going to send me to occupational rehab for the wrist, and we'll just have to dig deeper to find out what's so messed up in there.

If that still doesn't work, we start considering sharp objects.

And now I begin the 2 or 3 day wait for test results. Plenty of time to stew in angst because OH GOD WHAT IF I'M TURNING INTO MY MOTHERRRRRRRRRR

On balance, it's an excellent chance to practice mindfulness.

Ok, am over the shock and now I juat feel determined instead. I will earn some moolahs for real through hard work and arty goodness. I am furthermore gonna chew through the War on Aisle 8 comic like never before. I WILL TRIUMPH TRIUMPHANTLY IN THE DEAD TREE FORMAT DEPARTMENT OR THE WORLD WILL BE DESTROYED BY THE WAILING AND BITCHING NOISES.

Oh fuck. My gym membership came off hold this month instead of August, and I didn't budget for it.

Hi again, negative account balance!

*Goes off to smack head into wall several dozen times*

And the newest addition:

Which Button(s)?

Evil Cats $2.00 Don't Worry, Bukkake $2.00 Anxious Shroom $2.00 Down With OPP $2.00 Tentacle Spectacle $2.00 Che Guevawesome $2.00 Gay Unicorns $2.00

Note: I have fixed the button so that combined shipping actually works now.

I have to wait til Monday to see a doctor about my left wrist. It's rull bad this time. I can't bend it at all without pain. Even poking the skin over the joint is horrible.

I've braced it, done hot/cold wraps and am taking ibuprofen, but they're not working. It feels like I broke my wrist. Even with the brace, it's waking me up through the night when I turn over in bed. It was already well on the way to being this bad when I helped Rah move her boxes, and I was careful not to flex the wrist when doing that anyway. Bleah.

C'mon Monday, c'mon!

Vitiligo 1 by *AtomicFireball on deviantART

I did some new art a couple days ago, and am all proud of it. 100% Painter, WOO! I am getting the hang of this layer thing :D

Kagerou is being worked on, slowly, while I charge ahead on The War On Aisle 8 (side comic). 8 pages of the story are done, and the rest should go quickly as I'm doing it all digitally from here on, and that eliminates hours and hours of finicky scanning and erasing and white-out abuse. I will post the Kagerou pages as soon as they're done, and will go back to the regular weekly schedule as soon as WoA8 is ready to format and publish.

Speaking of which!

I have NO CLUE how to put individual pages in a printable format. I will buy or barter the skills of somebody else who can do this job, since I will probably never publish if I wait on my own ability to figure it out. I'd like to get the book to Lulu this fall so I can take some preorders and have the whole thing available for the holidays. (I won't be doing preorders til it exists in proofed physical form, a lesson well learned from the erstwhile Bump collection)

Pretty much that's it for right now. Hope you're all well, and thanks for the birthday emails everyone! It was a sushi-drenched blast and I am now proudly 29 years old. Not crotchety yet, but I'm working on it.

Oh and I also need to hire someone to redesign the website once I've got moolah again. Even I must admit it's due for an overhaul.

It got so hot today that I had to hose off the dog when we returned home from the vet. Poor panting puppy.

I got lots of tip jar donations in late June and a few this month, so I was able to get him in for a full checkup earlier than I thought would be possible. He is healthy and well, aside from a bit of leftover winter chub. Dropping that won't be hard since I can run him and spoil him with carrot pieces instead of biscuit treats without reducing his happiness at all.

Now I'm broke again, but the fuzzy guy's checkup was worth it. Thank you to everyone who donated in June and July!

Tomorrow Rah is moving to Portland to pursue her love of hobo blowjobs art. Pff whatever, we don't need you anyway.

...

EVERYTHING I TOUCH DIES (vanyel sobbed)

Best day ever! Spent the day working up a lather helping Rah move all her boxes to the shipping place, wooo stairs. Between flurries of boxen I drew some kagerou pages and inked one of them. Looks good so far!

Then we shipped off the carload of gold bars Rah weakly insists is a mere book collection. One cold coooold shower later, I smelled like flowers and we went off to eat sushi and make dick jokes (yup, mostly me again).

Excellent bday party. Much nom was had by all.
Then we came home and I went to bed because I am super tired and deserve a good long night's sleep. My left wrist is screaming at me for whatever I did to inflame the nerve this time, but I have strangled the cries with a well-padded brace.

Yay 29! Glad to be a little closer to the inevitable (and AWESOME) terrifying oldster in the shadows era.

Boo.

I JUST TURNED 29 FUCKING YEARS OLD BUT I CHECKED AND I'M PRETTY SURE I STILL FIND DICK JOKES HILARIOUS.

HOW DO I GET ALL CULTURED AND SOPHISTICATED AND SHIT? IS THERE PAPERWORK?

Oscar Mayer died today.

I don't even want to know what the family plans to do with the body.

...

Am now thinking of the company jingle in a horrifying new way.

Cookout happened. I ate so much red meat you would not even believe it. Then I grilled up more and ate that too.

All four roomies sat on my rooftop balcony and watched the fireworks and munched hot dogs and made dirty jokes (ok, that was just me). Then we all went our separate ways to digest and unwind.

The captain is terrified of fireworks. He spent much of the evening hiding on the landing of the stairwell, still and quiet and afraid. I went and sat with him and he pressed his back against me and sighed and went to sleep.

He perked up around 11:30 but would not eat small treats or look me in the eye for a while, and I finally had to walk him out to the yard on his leash and protect him from the horible popping noises while he peed discreetly beneath the hazy moon.

Another fine fine day. Also, 8 pages down on the side project!

So my knuckle finally started to heal, and a bunch of dead skin was hanging off. I looked at it for a while thinking about how it didn't look all that bad after all. Maybe I overestimated the damage--after all, scraped-off skin looks ugly no matter how shallow it is. But it looked pretty good today. And then I thought to myself, gee, this dead skin is ready to come off, let's get rid of it.

I pulled, and the dead scrap peeled up. And then the entire thickness of my finger skin popped apart and I got to see into a lovely chasm. Hello, finger guts!

Turns out I was right the first time. The gouge goes in at an angle and only shows up if some damn fool whips off the skin tarpaulin for yucks.

Happy 4th!

It is 91 degrees according to the thermometer on my finally functioning bike computer. I'm out with the captain, testing the sensor and feeding mosquitoes. I forgot to eat, so we needed to stop for food or face death. So I hunted for someplace with an outdoor section that allows dogs, and that's how we wound up at Culver's.

I have just eaten my first fast food hamburger in 4 years. It was yummy, cheap and I did not feel guilty at al, because I got to sit with the puppy under a shady umbrella and feed him bits of greazy lettuce off my plate.

life is good.

My bike fell over and bit me on the finger while I was monkeying with the front wheel sensor of the speedometer.

( So of course I took pictures with my crappy phone camera... )

And if the mere throbbing subduction of speckly black grease and road grime beneath my near-favorite knuckle while I was miles from home with a whining dog isn't annoying enough to justify my bawwing on elljay, the damn sensor still doesn't work. And the computer part actually fell off in the way home. Caught it in time, but still.

Otherwise a great day, lots of biking and errands.

One week left til I'm 29! I want to really celebrate it this year. I'm thinking of baking a strawberry and cream cake to nom down on.

The more I listen to this song, the more I admire it. The whole thing is awash in this awesome desperate sunbeam of hormones and euphoria, and through the glow you can see a couple of muted glimpses of what's really going on.

I so seldom hear a love song where I root for the couple, because the usual fare is bland and harmless and about as challenging as a lump of tofu. They completely ignore the fact that passion makes you stupid and reduces your world population to 2. But to me, that's really the most interesting part to hear about. It's raw and honest and awkward and a whole lot realer than "oh baby please don't go" multiplied by infinity and poured through AutoTune.

I suspect you've got to have some serious balls to be love's proud retard. God knows I could never do it, with my embarrassment squick XD But congrats to whoever managed to pull it off (JESS AND SEEBS I AM LOOKING AT YOU) and come out the other end with all your wits intact (LOOKING SLIGHTLY TO ONE SIDE NOW).

TL;DR: Apparently therapy makes me a less bitter person.

Today I made bread for the very first time.

I used Rah's favorite recipe and took pointers from her and Jesse, crossed my fingers and hoped to God I didn't end up with a wad of half-baked snot for all my troubles.

Hours later, I had four wee bundles of carbohydrate and joy, fresh from the oven.



Oh those look moist. And crispy. And tender. And bready.



Oh look, my buttery fingerprints are all gigantic from when the yeast rose. Sweet fuck, I want to eat everything on this table. I'm... I'm going insane! LOOK OUT



ARGGHHHHMMMBNOMNOMNOMNOM DEVOURRRRRRRRR

It turned out awesome and made the best garlic bread ever. I ate almost a whole loaf by myself before anyone else got any. I think it was half starvation from spending all day in the kitchen cooking, and half astonishment that my very first from-scratch baking attempt actually came out tasting good.

OMNOMNOMNOMNOMMMMMMMM

This can't be right, he's not finished with the Becoming!

So fucking strange. My mom was always such a huge fan of his... We had a tape full of his MTV videos and I still love to watch them (not gay).

He and Farrah must be doing each other's hair like a sleepover party on speed up there in Icon Heaven.

Two victories against L Ron Hugbox in one day!? Wow, this rules.

The truth about Lisa McPherson's horrible slow death in a CoS hotel room has finally been confirmed by the guy who destroyed the evidence.

It's a well-known story of abuse and neglect in the cult. Ex-Scientologist activists have been trying to break it to the public for years--but this time it's not some shady tinfoil hat website full of exclamation points and rants that's telling the story. It's the fucking mainstream media.

Crumble, Scientology, crumble.

I finally understand why everyone wants to kiss Vladimir Nabokov's ass. I'm listening to Lolita and it's blowing my mind. Fucking amazing what this novel does with prose. He describes a woman as "a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich" at one point. Daaamn.

In my head, Humbert Humbert looks like Anthony Hopkins. Try as I might, I can't shake the idea of him as Hannibal Lecter, if Hannibal were a NAMGLA spokesman instead of the ultimate foodie. It's the sociopathic good humor and blood-curdling evil, I guess.

Holy fucking shit, this is huge. Former Scientology bigwig Mike Rinder has been found after two years, and he's talking.

David Miscavige's tiny powerful fists must be flailing in helpless rage right now as he watches his empire reduced to a current events punch line. I can't believe I'm finally seeing this shit on the AP wire.

Bless y'all, Anonymous, for breaking the cult's power over straight media so that stories like this can be published after decades of CYA self-censorship. You can believe more delightful revelations are on the way now that someone as high-ranking as Rinder has spoken out.

Oooh, I can't wait to see who blows the cult (and more importantly, the whistle) next.

Overdraft fee time!

Honestly at this point I am just sort of amused instead of frothing with anxiety. It's like, no, we did the financial disaster already. Old meme.

Project steams ahead with renewed vigor. The art mines are deep and scary, but at the end awaits profit and glory.

Also pirate costumes.

I just found another beagle in the street!

This time it was alive, thank god. Chasing me and the captain down the bike trail, which was okay in that he was an old beagle and not very fast, but bad in that the bike trail crosses the intersection of two very busy roads, Woodley and Hwy 3. After a while he fell behind and out of sight, and I figured he had given up.

We stopped at the crosswalk, and the beagle came pogoing along to join us about 10 seconds later. I took the captain's leash off the bike and tried to grab the beagle, but he decided to play hard to get and boinged across Woodley against the light, narrowly avoiding a mooshy fate beneath the wheels of an SUV (whose driver slowed down just in time).

The chase was on! Beagle was dead set on getting run over, and I figured his only chance to survive involved Fat Guy on a Bike (WITH DOG!) chasing him down and roping him like a mad piglet.

Which we did, and it was a hell of a chase. One thing to note about dogs: they like to be pursued, and the best way to catch a fleeing beastie is to turn around and make him chase you. We finally wound up in the grassy yard outside the McJesus drive thru window, and I ditched the bike and put the captain on his leash. Beagle-dog came running, and while he was investigating the smell of the captain's pee on a decorative flower bush, I nabbed his ass!

He had a chain collar and his tag said the beagle's name was Levi. There was a number, so I tied both dogs to the leash and called the owner. Mr. Levi came to get his wayward houndini pretty quick and all was well, albeit a bit sweatier than before.

I'm so glad I could catch the little bouncy son of a whore before he got crushed like that other beagle did...

Lying in bed, up way too late but cooling off nicely thanks to a long shower. I have a flopsome beast of a captain curled in a warm ball on my feet with his head comfortably resting on my left ankle. The 70 pound lap dog strikes again.

Outside my window, to the east, silent lightning jags through the sky. My walls flicker with random purple illumination. It's a quiet night and all is well.

The insurance issue is going a lot better. I've worked out a repayment schedule for the session fees that weren't covered, and the clinic will let me do their bill in several lump installments. I will not miss a payment again, not after this fuckarow.

Famous last words...

Kagerou update is gonna be postponed a while--i have a paying art project I have to finish ASAP and am throwing myself into getting it done by july. It's good stuff, well worth the delay in regular scheduled updates. I think it is, anyway.

G'night!

BRB tornado warning. I love the basement ^_^

Edit: Sirens quit, so we're back upstairs. The tornado(s) veered away and the warnings have been downgraded to Tornado Watch and Severe Thunderstorm Warning for the county. I can hear the thunder getting closer and closer...might be time to whip out the camera again.

Best thing about the threat of a huge storm out of nowhere? You learn your priorities. Seebs brought his laptop and his kitty, Rah brought her kitty and some drawings to work on, Jess brought his laptop and then wandered outside to watch the clouds, and I brought down my dog, Mom, Maya-kitty (who I saw hiding on the counter) and the Cintiq, then went back up on the roof to look for twisters like a damn fool. Hee hee.

During all of this, Rah and I are baking bread. Because that's what you do when the sky is trying to kill you.

Every couple of years or so, I have to whip out the Unico films and watch them again, and then pimp them out to my friends. If I do not do this, I will die horribly.

Since I enjoy being alive, I have taken the liberty of embedding both the movies from YouTube in this post. Meanwhile, I'm working on Secret Project (yes, the overdue one) tonight, and it's going well.

( I'M UNICO, THAT'S ALL I KNOW! )

Sorry for vagueness in last night's entry. I actually forgot to blog about the original incident, then forgot I had forgotten.

Basically with my health care plan, you have to pay a tiny monthly premium to get coverage, and if you miss a payment for some reason, you have a certain amount of time in which to make the payment before your medical bills for that month start bouncing back and cannot be covered at all, even retroactively. When I finally understood what was going on, I spoke to my social worker and she recommended I appeal the decision, and so I had my therapist write a letter certifying that the reason I am disabled is also why I fucked up paying the $4 premium on time. Yesterday I got a letter back saying the appeal was rejected and I will need to handle the bills myself.

This sucks primarily because of the tiny fail to consequence ratio. Remembering to shoot off a $4 payment every month is so easy and simple, and but not remembering to do it lost me coverage and now I have to pay the fees for about a dozen clinic visits (all grossly overdue now) out of pocket.

Just one of the millions of ways a little thing like ADHD can screw your entire life. Used to be, this thing happened all the time--spaced property, ruined credit, defaulted loans, lost homework, missed appointments and blown opportunities--and my reaction has always been the same: run away and hide and the damage will be easier to live with.

But thanks to therapy, I am well aware that this is a Very Bad Thing to do, and so my choice with my current flakery and its fallout is to embrace the suck, not hate myself or shy away from the problem, and take steps to make things better even though I feel on the edge of becoming utterly overwhelmed. I'm doing mindfulness to keep the panic down, and the new dosage of prozac seems to have made it impossible to go into anxiety attack mode the way I generally have done in past crises. Instead of time speeding up like a deranged hamster wheel, it has slowed down and I can think clearly and act on my decisions.

So, level up!

My appeal was denied, so I have to pay for close to 1000 bucks' worth of health care from this winter. I also have to take the captain for his checkup and vaccinations, which I think will have to come first.

Thank god this didn't happen two months ago. At least now I have the cintiq and can work to earn some fundage to pay the bills. I believe I can work out payment plans with the clinics I owe, so that's good, but it means I'll be paying this off til I'm 30.

Don't forget to pay your $4 insurance premiums, kids.

Mad commission time looms, as soon as I finish current outstanding jobs--it's time to sweat a little.

So no more fucking around, Luka! Seize this moment of crappy circumstance, and squeeze til success leaks out.

This is glorious and I feel like a better person for having seen it.

So Chastity Bono's a tranny and he's taking the testosterone plunge. Good for him, glad he's repping for the genderfuck crew and getting the issue on the front page and all that. It didn't seem like all that big a story to me, though, until the citizens of Fair-And-Balanced-A-Go-Go-Land decided to correct the gender language of the original press statement for us, and the whole thing turned instantly to gold.

"Yes, it's true — Chaz, after many years of consideration, has made the courageous decision to honor [her] true identity," confirmed Bono's publicist, Howard Bragman.

"[She] is proud of his decision and grateful for the support and respect that has already been shown by [her] loved ones. It is Chaz's hope that [her] choice to transition will open the hearts and minds of the public regarding this issue, just as [her] 'coming out' did nearly 20 years ago. We ask that the media respect Chaz's privacy during this long process as [she] will not be doing any interviews at this time."

In the time it took me to make this entry, the article has been speed-edited to remove all the brackets--but the internet sees you, Faux News. The internet remembers. More than anything else, though, the internet lols and lols, because you suck.

It took me all day, but I have restored the art to its pre-crashy state of doneness. I have also started saving the file under two names, alternating between them. So there.

Mindi's cat suit is way more aesthetic and shiny the second time around. So at least some good came of the whole thing, eh?

Oh my GOD. I just lost 2 days' worth of digital painting. It was a Kagerou poster I was coloring. It was going to be so fucking gorgeous (ask Jesse, he saw the work in progress). 

I opened the file to finish it this afternoon, and the entire half-finished foreground was missing. The layers aren't turned off, they're gone. I hadn't even started editing the background yet, so naturally that was completely intact.

I worried that Painter might have crashed when it came up with an empty "recent  documents" list, but that shit is just overkill. Even the line art's gone.

Fuuuuuck.

Edit: No, I lie. The skin base colors are still intact, which means there are flesh-toned patches here and there.

Rah and I went hiking in Big Woods State Park a week ago.



( WHAT WHAT TURTLE BUTT )

Today I raised the seat post of my bike several inches on advice from the interwebs, and discovered I had it way too low all this time. Got a lot more power and control out of pedaling than I had before. I took the Captain with me and we decided to explore a new part of town, a subdivision type suburban hell that looked boring as all get out from the highway. Which it is, except it's all sidewalky and very safe for biking with a scaredy-dog. We found bike trail networks I had never even heard of before, and at the end of it all was half a mile of wheel ruts in tall grass, leading to a hill so steep the front wheel tried to come up on me when I climbed it in a low gear. The Captain was a gleeful beast from all the jogging and exploration, so we kept going through heavy road construction where the street was just powdery dirt and parked heavy equipment. On the way home, we stopped at the grocery store and I bought milk and supplies for a truly lurid Nutella and peanut butter orgy. Gotta get that blood sugar back up, don't'cha know.

It was a good outing. I'm in no pain from the exercise, and I was careful not to aggravate existing injuries while riding. The rearview mirror is a godsend. I'm so glad I decided to invest in one. Need a new headlamp for night riding and a decent set of panniers, and maybe some clips for the pedals to maximize pedaling power. An odometer would be cool, too.  Also,I haven't changed a tire since I was 13, so think I need to get a patch kit and re-learn the skill before it gets a royal poking from random broken glass. The other day I ran over a whole smashed bottle in order to let the Captain veer away from the shards, but I got lucky.

Depends on how far the puppy will want to go, but I'd like to try a much longer ride sometime this week to test my endurance. A person needs adventure and it won't come to me sitting on my ass playing Mario Kart. :)

Comicking continues. I'm about 1/2 done with the first page of the next chapter and already proud of it.

For $20 bucks, I came into possession of a major headache called the Zagg Invisible Shield. It was advertised as being the perfect screen protector for a 12 inch Cintiq, right down to being cut to size. Application was a breeze, and as promised, the overlay was not detectable at a glance and did not affect the colors of the screen.

And yet, the Zagg Shield is now by a crumpled piece of squishy mylar lying on my desk in a state of shiny disgrace. You might ask, why is it now a crumpled piece of squishy mylar lying on my desk in a state of shiny disgrace?

Well, it was tacky. Very very tacky. The sheer rubbery give of the Zagg Shield rivaled the belly of Buddha himself for sheer bounceability. It steamed over easily from the heat of my hand and quickly glued itself to my skin, disrupting any hope of smooth lines. I figured at first, well, I'll just wear a glove then. But my friction-based suffering was only beginning!  See, the sheer stickiness of the material quickly changed the pleasantly HB drawing surface of my tablet into a rubber gymnasium mat from Hell. The surface was easily pushed into little hills by the pen tip, which made unpleasant noises, and scratched easily from the level of force required to draw a smooth line. The surface liked to catch  the tip and drag it unpleasantly, squeaking and skipping across the surface and sticking in the soft mucky plastic.

After one day I could no longer stand gripping the pen in my fist like an angry cave artist, and in a fit of sense I peeled the whole sticky mess off (horrible, horrible) and tossed the resulting clump of plastic on the desk before me.

But I don't think of it as a waste of $20. I see it as an investment in my very own genuine origami crystal boulder. But seriously, I am now looking into their refund policy, which I am hoping will include a text box for feedback.

Can anyone recommend a screen protector for the Cintiq that isn't a rubber gymnasium floor from Hell?

Edit: No joy. I bought it over 30 days ago, so I'll only be allowed a free replacement... so yay origami, I guess. Zut alors.

There is now no human left on Earth who survived the sinking of the Titanic. The last one was Millvina Dean, who was an infant when her folks got on board, and she died today in a nursing home at the age of 97. Mind boggling.

Meanwhile at the bottom of the ocean, you can find leather shoes still laced securely over nonexistent feet, lying in pairs where the passengers wearing them fell and decayed to nothing. And of course the great big anoxic mudfield where scientists won't poke around because the last time they did, they pulled up a chunk of goop containing buttons, fancy cufflinks, unidentifiable bone chips, dinner leftovers and shredded clothing.

Let's just hope the people who got locked in Steerage by crew aren't busy zombifying under there in the sunless depths. I console myself with the knowledge that it's a long fucking walk from the debris field to New York, but if you don't need to breathe and are pissed off enough, you might just say "fuck it" and waste some time.

Cloverfield, eat your heart out.

Two more pages!

Sorry for the varying quality of the art lately. I'm working stuff out as I go, which is always an adventure. No idea what style I'll settle on, but you'll probably know before me at any rate.

Last night I got on Google Earth and went hunting for my hometown. Turns out there's a street view of the house I grew up in, and while subsequent families have cut down two of my favorite trees from the front yard, the third is still there. When we moved in, I remember it as being just a smidge taller than me, and in a photo taken in 1990 or so, it looks about ten feet high. Now revisiting it via Google, it's now at least 30 feet. I kept exploring, and it looks like the trees in the neighborhood are all either huge or gone. It really sank in how much time has passed.

I zoomed out to look at the rest of the neighborhood, and discovered I could easily find my way around from the aerial view. The logging road is still there, and so are the woods where I used to play when I was little. Foliage covered everything, so I couldn't see if Big Mama was still the same. Back in the day, Big Mama was THE test of one's courage. Imagine a four-story hillside with nothing but packed dirt and protruding tree stumps, so steep that in places it couldn't be climbed at all. Kids used to steal bikes and ride them down Big Mama, generally bailing halfway down to save themselves from certain death, but the bikes didn't often survive. There were trails through the hillside there, and forts (which were actually hobo campsites, and sometimes had naughty magazines hidden in the bushes). I spent most of my youth up there pretending to be a cyborg.

I located a squarish scar on a hillside that is almost certainly the remains of a house that burned down just before I moved to Nebraska. I saw smoke coming home from my friend Wesa's house one day, and went to check it out. There was just a pile of crackling embers and ashes and melted belongings strewn around the concrete foundations. The family whose home it had been on the previous day drove up while I was looking into the ruins of their life and even though they didn't give me shit for being a vulture, their silent shocked ignoring of my presence was worse. So I cut through the woods behind the house with my bike, and felt bad for them.

I found Thurston High, where my sister's beloved Spanish teacher Mrs. Kinkel used to work, before her kid shot her and her husband to death. (He then went on to gun down a bunch of kids at a senior breakfast--a room I would very likely have been in, if we hadn't moved, full of students I had gone to middle school with).

And there was the quarry where I started rockhounding. One one of our trips, I found a giant crystal-lined cave hidden in the shadows of an ugly chunk of rock. It was several feet wide, and the crystals were spectacular.

I went back and told my father, and his friend immediately called dibs on my crystal, sight-unseen. My protests were ignored--the friend went to get his pickup truck to carry the rock home, but when he came back, they couldn't find it despite searching forever.

I was smug and gleeful about this, because I had dibs, whereas he was a dildo brain. I looked for the crystal cave for ages myself, all sneaky-like, but as far as I know it's still there to this day. Unless someone else found it since then, of course, but I wonder about that.

It's weird, how everything looked exactly the way I would have pictured an aerial view of my hometown would be. Flying over it filled me with all these memories of the good times, and I had some pretty vivid dreams when I finally yanked myself off the net and went to bed.

One year, officially survived. I spent the day thinking hard about all the things that have changed since last memorial day, making fervent prayers for the next 365 days, and playing Paper Mario like a drooling brainless thing.

Not bad, considering.

I was that strangely-dressed weirdo in high school who had the undiagnosed mental issues and a shitty home life. People threw things at me, called me horrible names, and stuffed things in my locker. The school I went to was in a very conservative part of the Midwest, where everyone was a military brat, and I was the child of a Vietnam Vet who taught me to hate anything to do with the government.

I hated everyone, was afraid of everyone, distrusted absolutely everyone. They returned the favor by never allowing me to see a humane side to the constant harassment. It got so bad I started thinking of them as They instead of as a community of fellow teenagers, all having the same chaotic experience. They rushed to their cliques--football, academic teams, cheerleading, pep club. I clung to the identity of "not one of you scumbags, not ever" and prayed I would survive just one more year of high school without killing myself.

Now I am nearing thirty, and I've chilled out. I no longer spout my father's line on nonconformity and I don't look down on people who feel pride in their school. What happened sucked, but we were kids. We were hormone bombs looking for a reason to explode. None of us knew who we were, so we defined ourself in outrageous ways that look terribly stupid in retrospect. Considering the different planets where we were raised and the general violence level of that school, I'm glad nobody died.

I am proud of my primitive motivations, because I learned to not trust large groups just because they outvoted me. I learned to rebel when I felt the need--even though the need was often hideously overblown. Pep rallies being mandatory struck me as the entire world accusing me of being a freak and loser. So I embraced this, and labeled myself as the Other and shouted rude things at the cheerleaders, fucked with the preps, and tried my hardest to make people avoid me with black clothing and face makeup.

By standing up and being an ass about absolutely nothing that mattered, I actually helped to shape who I am. I am as proud of being a stupid hateful little asshole as the football hero was of being admired and dedicated to his game, because we did what we did with complete intensity and the fervor of ignorant, passionate youth. I can't hate who I was, because I was honest in my outrage and I was magnificent in my tenacity. I am, however, often overcome by shame when I think about how many decent and loving people must still remember me as that weirdo from 1995 who had the photos of cannibalized body parts and Lum fanart in his locker and claimed to literally be a hermaphrodite from Mars.

Even the regret I feel for stereotyping my entire school based on the actions of maybe 25 people helped to make me who I am now. Humility was one of the lessons I took from high school after many years of anger and rage, and it has made me kinder. It has made me wish I could have been a happier kid, and it has made me want to forgive all the people who treated me like shit, because they were just fucked up kids too.

High school seems so huge and important and vital when you're that age, but it's not. Get through the bullshit alive and try not to let the boiling embarrassment of hindsight fuck up your adulthood too much.

I just had this bizarre dream. I was telling my friend Rain all about this game/movie I had been obsessed with as a kid, to the point where I was unable to hold a conversation without tying everything into "The Weez". The title was originally 'the wiz' but there were trademark issues.

I made everyone watch the movie/game, and did the same to Rain as an adult to show her what I had been so intense about as a kid. Only it was different from what I remembered, darker and even kind of offensive in places. I was like, ok, clearly as a kid this stuff went over my head, but jesus h christ, I don't really like this anymore.

All I remember of the game is that it had the actors from encino man (I even noticed the Pauly Shore/Weez thing) and the plot included a medical clinic in the jungle and some kind of real life owl raising minigame, which I opened 20 years later to find a newly hatched owlet inside waiting to be raised. I think it flew off, so much for mint in box.

The game and companion movie were spliced together and you had to play the oldschool 8 bit game segments to get to the movie. I remarked "kinda like ffx, but boring and with shittier graphics."

It never came out officially due to much-discussed legal issues, so it was rare and only a few copies existed. The box art showed a super nintendo controller and an atari 7800 platform, so it definitely wasn't legit. My copy had some kid's phone number and name written all across the box in ink. The obsessive fandom speculated endlessly on the minutae of it all.

One scene I showed Rain in the game portion had a bunch of people working out in the gym. One guy had tight spandex on and a very obvious two inch erection. It kept going inverted whenever he stopped lifting, making a little dip in his pants. We laughed at this. Then the guy wailed "oh, God, why do you keep taking my dick away?" and kept lifting like a lunatic. I made a note to write this down but decided against waking up just yet.

I then remembered what it was like, growing out of the Weez game, and as I described it to Rain, it dawned on me that I was actually better off without it. I should be happy to have left my obsession behind. It was a crutch and I no longer needed it, so I walked away from the nutty friends I had in the fandom, who were all hopelessly broken people who had turned the game into their religion, and didn't look back.

I realized that this was a sign I was getting emotionally healthy, and spent the rest of the dream citing specific parts of the Weez that had been utterly inappropriate (like the midget blowing the bull) but had flown right past my childhood weirdness radar due to chaos in the home. Even in my sleep I seem to be doing therapy work on myself these days.

I say again, Prozac gives you hella fucked up vivid dreams.

I just read the synopsis for the US version of Life on Mars, which I just found out got canceled last month. I had avoided watching it because the original series was damned good already. Also I feel embarrassed for the actors when I think of how much tarting up the show went through to make it consumer-friendly in America. It's like watching a tweenager put on tons of makeup and sashay around in a pair of too-big high heels.

But anyway, yeah. Spoilered myself to see how they decided to wrap up the time travel plotline, and, well.... to be quite honest...

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAA OH GOD I JUST FOUND WHERE THAT ENORMOUS SUCKING SOUND WAS COMING FROM

I wonder if that was intended to be the endgame plot all along? If so, thank god it was cancelled before it gained a fandom in the US. There would have been nerds rioting in the streets. What a dumb-ass reveal.

Today I biked to town, saw my shrink and came home soggy and mottled pink from the heat. It hit 90 and I just about melted before I hauled my sweaty self back indoors.

Seemed like a perfect day to dodge my responsibilities and just go out and play. I grabbed some towels and the dog and drove around in the countryside until I found a public swim beach. The water was ice cold and so soothing I didn't want to leave, but the dog was whining and driving me insane, so home we went.

I do not regret blowing off work for this holiday. I needed some time in the sun and I would have slow-roasted in my own ass juice had I stayed in my room drawing comics like a good boy.

Something about swimming always makes me ravenous for bacon cheeseburgers. So I made some and scarfed it, and now I am sleepy and limp.

It's very windy out, but still warm. I have a fan pointed at the bed and expect I'll sleep great tonight.

Crossover titles that give you emotional whiplash #43: Cry, the Beloved Country Line Dancing.

I have been dreaming about my mom a lot lately. This one was a standout, though, possibly thanks to the prozac.

I dreamed I was back in her apartment, the way it used to be when I was still a teenager. I could see all the mental illness she was dealing with and I wished I could help her with what I know now about surviving, but again the dream limitations: people act like the people you know, but they can't accomodate novelty at any level.

I remembered her death and what a miserable swan song it had been, but here she was, alive and still healthy enough to last ten more years. I said to myself, dear god, I'm living in a flashback scene! I knew everything that had happened was in the future and could not change it.

I cried and yelled and raised hell but I couldn't make her understand that I came from a future scene and that, to me, she was already dead. So I cherished her as much as I could, not knowing how long we would have before the flashback ended and she would be just ashes and a memory to me again. I made her tell me stories of her life and about the keepsakes she would soon be leaving behind forever.

At the end I hugged her so tight and sobbed that I didn't want her to die, but the flashback ended anyway. She told me something wordless and comforting as she went away and left me in an empty room. I looked at photos of how young and beautiful she used to be, and felt like shit.

Although this dream looks about as wretched as they come, it really didn't destroy me emotionally. Upon waking I feel sad but at peace. I know there's nothing I can do to save the dead, and I think the dream was my subconscious giving the idea a whirl and finding it valid.

I didn't want to leave the memory, not ever, but I knew it was a memory. And I let go of my frantic need to change the future, and grieved instead, and said those important things everyone always hopes there will still be time to say to a loved one who is dying.

Then a gnarly Cloverfield-type abomination materialized out of thin air and gave a roar that rattled my eardrums, and I had to run for my life. You don't fuck around with giant monsters.

Worked in the yard all morning and ate breakfast on the porch. Laundry and dishes got squared away in a few hours and my errands were done by 1. I took the dog on a bike run and tired him out good, then went and got takeout to avoid having to cook for the next two days or so. Showered and spent the evening watching Babylon 5 and reading about the Titanic (lifelong disaster fan, that's me).

I had no idea how much stuff on the wreck has been put online since I last looked ten years ago. I'm lucky the Buttkick is programmed with a 'go to bed' nag alarm, or I might still be googling right now.

I'm feeling much better now that the antibiotics are starting to smack this lung/sinus infection down. Apparently I still had a fever when I saw the doctor.

The majority of tomorrow will be set aside for working on the comic, which is going slowly on account of I'm still learning how to use layers. Expect much style fluctuation in the near future while I get a feel for the new tools.

La vida is pretty goddamn bella this week, almost like the year of Suck never happened. Almost. Still not 100% from you-know-what, but at least I have my emotional health.