Mission Accomplished

Welp, after however many years it's taken since I've first began bitching about my desire to leave Los Scandalous a shrinking figure in my rear view mirror, it's finally done.

Technically, there's still expendable bits and pieces still left floating around in various storage arrangements sprinkled throughout the Basin, but for the most part, it's over and done with.

Now begins the process of, well, processing and rebuilding something resembling a life out here, hopefully bereft of any of the toxins and bullshit sensibilities that wore heavy on all my later attempts at life-building in that particular part of the world.

I think one of them new-age type people put forth the notion that you wear out people and places, and the best thing to do is keep moving on lest you wear out your welcome, and become the villain of your own story-- no, that was "The Dark Knight."  Yeah, so anyway, that being the case, I probably should have left Southern California along with the rest of the gang back in the early aughts instead of stupidly soldiering on ice-skating uphill.

 Maybe in some alternate quantum-divergent or quantum-conjectural universe, I did, but since I'm not around to experience whatever it is that alternate-me is currently going through, it's just that much mental wank-material and nothing more.

The point is, I'm here now, and what the hell am I going to do about it?

More Art. And I have to find a better way to do shit, really.

Posting stuff here so I can post it to the tumblr later.

One of these days I'll figure out how to do this shit up proper.

Will edit this post later.

Art. For reals, this time.

Well, thanks to a bout of Blizzard and Power Outage on the part of Scooter and a bit of Food poisoning on mine, we have a filler episode of Life Under Construction.

I rather enjoyed doing this piece, so much so that I've made a few variations:

Sort of like a low-rent Masumune Shirow without the nekkid anime chicks with the censored genitalia getting violated by naughty tentacles and tag-teamed by chicks, dudes, mythical beasts, Elder Gods, and what-not.

Not really art-related. Well, sort of but not really.

One of the many-- well, few, actually-- useful things I've learned on my foray into the great Green North over the weekend for that which passes for the day-job is to appreciate the dangers of showing someone up on their own turf-- In this particular case, it was quite the necessity as the local "talent," or rather, the gruppenführer of said local talent wasn't quite up to the level of quality needed for the task at hand.

His minions, however, especially the females of the species, were absolutely kick-ass wonderful and I would write glowing letters of recommendation for any of them if my name had any weight at all in the industry.

Anyway, the consequences of doing my job properly is that I could most likely be persona non grata in certain areas of the East Bay where the aforementioned gruppenführer and his second-in-command hold any sway.

That's neither here nor there, however, since I don't really plan on a life in the Life in the East Bay anytime soon.

It DOES, however, explain why some people no longer return my calls.

People are funny like that sometimes. And it only took me a field trip up north and getting my ass beat down brutally for the past four days to figure that one out.

 Also, one of my co-workers introduced me to their spouse's artwork.

He kicks ass and I'm jealous as fuck of his talent.

Updates galore. Alleged.

Welp, yeah, I kinda suck at this blogging thing, considering it's been a few months since my last post about wanting to get the fuck out of Dodge and other bits of self-indulgent bile.

And sure, I'm quite a bit late, but that Alleged Art thing has been taking up a wee bit of time.

I suppose that one piece was good enough to get showcased on Girls With Slingshots while the rest of it went to finishing up the latest arc for Life Under Construction.

There's some more stuff coming up as far as guest shots are concerned, so yeah.

I might even post more shit about how whatever alleged "style" I've developed for the Scooter and Liam Project has shifted quite a bit since Scooter first lit a fire under my ass and got me interested in doing this sort of stuff again after Los Scandalous killed off whatever art-type leanings I had YET AGAIN.

All in all, though, it's been a pretty decent trip.

I may even start updating this thing on a regular basis again.

Exit Strategy

Yeah, it's about that time, that time being "Get the motherfucking hell out of Dodge tiem because Los Scandalous is beat and I've pretty much had it with the people, places, and things in this place, especially those who share some DNA in common with yours truly."

It was once told to me that people eventually wear things out-- places, jobs, people, etc., etc., etc., and you either go down with the dying host or move on like any other virus to new pastures.

Recently, I've discovered to my horror and great distaste that I happen to be "people" and have started to exhibit some of these people-like symptoms.  Which means that my current figurative host has lost some of its splendor and sustenance-providing sparkle as it enters brain death and its sphincters start to loosen and it's time for this particular virus to ride off into the sunset.

Or the sunrise, as the case may be.

Change is good, and sometimes a change in scenery is even better.  So why can't I get that Buckaroo Banzai adage out of my head?

"No matter where you go, there you are."  Therein lies the danger-- if you're stuck in a pattern you don't enjoy, change the pattern before you change the channel, otherwise you'll be bringing the same old shit to a nice clean slate.

So that's probably first on the list of things to do before I start packing shit into my car.  Figure out what doesn't work anymore and get it the hell out of my psychic real-estate.

In the meantime, let's wax poetic a little bit more:

Maybe it's part of the whole "rejecting the end of cycles" thing.

El Aye has nothing for me anymore. Certainly none of the "magic" that may have enticed me to these parts back in the day-- no, that was college, and the chance to escape those over-rated environmental changes known as "Seasons."

Perhaps it never did.

Time to stop being an observer of cycles and slave to patterns.

On to the next host.

Also, maybe some more art later this week.

Hurr Hurr, here's some alleged "art."

Okay, in keeping with yet another aborted project that's not so much aborted as it is constantly interrupted by the shit I do to keep me nourished and sheltered and occasionally liquored and well-traveled as a nameless statistic here in Los Scandalous, here's the latest iteration of Coffee Shop Girl, as seen in Scooter's latest comic.

Or will be seen, since the gods of the machine have decided to make me their chew toy for a few days.

Hi there!  What do you need?

Now, this iteration is a combination of the first two meatspace sketches, plus the scene/hipster short-haired chick sketch in Photoshop, plus bits and pieces of of what Scooter finds aesthetically desirable, and what I consider teh HAWT.  Pretty tricky, considering he tends to go for brunettes and I prefer blondes.

This impasse was broken one fateful evening in Fort Collins after a few beers and an ill-advised milkshake on my part, when random reveler girl decides that she'd love to "jam" and "rock out" with us for a wee bit.  Said reveler seemed to be some sort of cosmic embodiment of Coffee Shop Girl both in character and aesthetic.

Neither of us had considered the "Dark Skinned Red-Head" trope until now, but combined with random girl's vivaciousness and alcohol-fueled friendliness, it seemed to be the perfect match.

And just as quickly as this Avatar of CSG entered our lives, she just as suddenly disappeared, and between the libation, the wings, and the milkshake that would drop a cow at fifty paces, I was in no condition to look for her again.

Just as well.  Whatever bit of the universe was at work that night gave us a little something to work on, and I hope that my sub-par artistic abilities were adequate enough to capture a fraction of that spirit.

Three weeks in, hitting the wall, the archeology behind not going "home" again, and crap artwork.

Okay, temporally speaking, I’m typing this out in Word like a little bitch since my parent’s spread in the Central Massachusetts hinterland is bereft of internets thanks to a bricked router and possibly other issues due to their alleged lack of tech savvy.

As I POST this entry, it's currently 24 hours later, I've vacated Central Massachusetts without much incident and am currently editing/posting/adding embarrassing pictures to this entry in a nice spread in New York just north of what these folk refer to as "The City."

It’s been roughly eight years since I last set foot in these here parts, and before that, probably another five more, and so on and so forth. This place was never home, and I think from a young age I resented being raised in what I sometimes still claim to this day to be the Masshole of the world.

Again, I’m probably not being entirely accurate, considering that THIS house is not the one I grew up in, that being an ugly sea foam green abomination exemplary of shoddy 70’s tract-house workmanship. THAT house was never home. THAT house was a way-station, a detention center of sorts where I was forced to do time until dumb luck and a college acceptance on the other side of the country paid for my escape. THAT house is where all the lousy memories reside, all the angry native ghosts itching for some idiot to build residential housing on top of their restless remains just so they can pull some unsuspecting child into a T.V. set.

This new house of theirs, purchased after the last of us children made way for greener pastures and matriculation elsewhere, is a museum piece, where bits and pieces are cobbled together in some wildly inaccurate reconstruction of days past and long since dead.

So it’s no surprise, after a fashion, that THIS place has no visceral resonance with me—quite the opposite, in fact. It’s here that I realize that the past is truly dead, with only the survivors left to commemorate and immortalize some latter-generation iteration of the things and people that have influenced us in equal parts significant and ineffectual ways.

Old photographs and yearbooks, mementos of long-forgotten things of dubious importance, keepsakes poorly stored and miraculously untouched by the callous attentions of indifferent moving companies, all now strangely fascinating once stripped of their old meanings.

I’m cringing at adolescent artwork, douche-y pieces of derivative crap emulating other derivative crap from the age of Grimdark and Edgy sensibilities that folks like Moore and Miller and Morrison and Millar now laugh at themselves for in their wisdom and old age.

And now I’m gazing at a yearbook picture of a girl that never existed, except possibly as a set of flawed and fractured stories spun to the amusement of drinking buddies long since departed, the historical female in question replaced over the years with increasingly addled remembrances of the emotions that may or may not have been involved, edited in whatever manner to make for a better yarn. I don’t know you now, and I’m increasingly of the opinion that I never did. Or maybe I let the fiction take over and lost the truth in the process.

An acoustic guitar squirreled away in a closet of a room that would have been my brother’s had he been around for the move to the new digs, the location of said guitar having been a point of contention for the last decade and a half—appropriated by my brother during his college years, then shipped off to wherever school, work, life, and love took him, only to somehow no longer be in his possession somewhere along the journey, in the nebulous years between his then-live-in unceremoniously dumping his ass to him proposing to the girl who’s currently his wife and the mother of his child.

Like any other museum piece, it’s wound up here with no ontological inertia or rhyme or reason.

There’s some interesting history in that guitar, if by “interesting” you mean “emo bullshit moping crap because you were disproportionately devastated when a tangential relationship ended abruptly and not in your favor, so you pounded out a bunch of weepy crap and angry punker music on said guitar until your fingers bled and your voice went ragged, which might’ve only been marginally more pathetic than your alternate plan, which was to get plastered on shit-tier tequila and write “cunt” on her front lawn with weed killer.”

“--And then proceeded to use the douchewad guitar guy routine to get laid by every doe-eyed college freshman with a weakness for “musicians” who accrued a collection of musical numbers sure to get a heterosexual female’s nether regions moist in some dumbfuck sensibility effort to get back at the original girl, who, in all likelihood, couldn’t be bothered to give a shit once you were off her radar.”

But it’s the pictures, and the LACK of pictures, that tells the real story—or rather, the story that isn’t the real story-- pictures of things and people I barely remember, as if some sort of alternate universe somehow intruded upon our own, stealing away all the things I once accepted as immutable fact in my life and history, and replacing it with an odd collection of pictures of me as a child vacationing in places I don’t remember ever having visited.

This is what is left of my life, if you would believe the markers of this Museum, a series of events I don’t recall and everyone else accepts as fact. Maybe we just remember things differently, and I spent so long believing them to be one way for the sake of a good story, while the ones I’ve looked back on in anger responded with bewilderment and confusion as they remember a much happier version of what transpired.

And even this is probably nothing more than late-night insomniac mind-wank.

There probably was a point to all of this, but it’s freaking late and I’ve spent the last three weeks in transit.

Yeah, I guess the point was this: Having come back to the place I spent the majority of my first two decades didn’t quite elicit the torrent of snark and hatred and calls for firebombing a neat little swath across Central Massachusetts that I thought I would.

I STILL didn’t enjoy my time here, and have no regrets about pulling out when I did, but seeing as how even the echoes of whatever it was that kept me in the cycle of anger and resentment for a less than adequate run in these here parts fall dead and flat, it really doesn’t seem as important as it once did. Perhaps it never was.

Maybe this is the point where the turnabout from “graveyard desecration” to “archaeology” happens. Because this is definitely more of the latter than taking a satisfying dump on the headstone of your deceased enemies before engaging in sexual congress with their widows on top of the freshly packed earth.

Maybe that’ will change in the morning light, if the Massholes of the present are anything like I remember.

In any case, enjoy a bunch of shit artwork from the late 80’s.

I’ll try and make up for it in the next few days.

Shit derivative adolescent crap is shit.

HURR HURR TURTLEZ DERP.  Goddamn, I suck.

WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN

I suck. No, I stand corrected. I FUCKING suck.

Welp, it's been how long since I last updated this thing, full of piss and vinegar reminiscent of my younger days, claiming a new paradigm and all sorts of other vitriol... 

Suffice it to say, inconvenient shit such as "real life" and "work" and "metaphorical and figurative sodomy by the likes of teh M*S****/S******" have done much to curtail what little artistic expression I've managed to bring into being in the past few months.

By the bye, speaking of which, again, you need to check out Scooter's webcomic, www.luccomics.com, because, although the art is fairly mediocre, the writing is top-notch.  Keep an eye out, grand things be happening with this shit, yo.

Anyhow, no alleged artistry for this particular entry, and it seems that there's a full-on clusterfuck until sometime later this week when I make for teh happy trails out of Los Scandalous.

Fuck, man, I have no freaking idea why I'm even updating this blog, past a couple of jumbled ideas whose incoherence pretty much precludes any sort of meaningful whatever can be gleaned at this particular point.

Oh, yeah, slight update on original blog entry, turns out I finally checked out acquaintance-girl's blog, seems she's living the life of Riley in her whatever-it-is-equivalent-of-a-Eurail-pass-JetBlue monthly thingy.

Anyhow, long story short, scored big part in Big Movie, didn't leave El Aye (yet), scored sweet-assed Month Long Pass to these United States, a bunch of other happy stuff, all is well and hunky-dorky in her perceptual universe, etc....

I'd be more of a bitter sour-grapes motherfucker if this completely ruined my original shit, had I not somehow arranged to be absent from the Greater Los Scandalous Basin for the month of September myself.

Here's to a grand escape, however you find it, and a furthering of Grand Designs, mine, Scooter's, hers, and anyone else's.

More fooling around (non-meatspace)

Here's another attempt at Coffee Shop Girl, a character we'll meet in the second (fourth?) story-arc.

YEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

Scooter's site's up!

www.LUCcomics.com

WOO HOO!!!!!

Scribbling scribbling scribbling scribbling...

Quick random sketches of "Coffee Shop Girl" based on description within second arc.  Well, more of my weird impression based upon my reading of the arc.

and another variant:

or how about this one?

She's supposed to be a young-ish barista with whom our intrepid protagonist crashes and burns in one of his many forays out into the single life after years of domesticide.

It's shit like this I do to take a break from "illustrating" the actual script, since I'm hopelessly used to doodling in meatspace, and still occasionally have my spastic-on-crack moments with the tablet.

Nth Verse, Same as the First, but Not Quite

It shouldn't seem surprising after all this time, considering that I've seen it time and time again.

Things change, move on, move out, and new cogs constantly and endlessly replace the old in the giant soul-crushing siege-engine that is Hollyweird. Parts and people wear out, ground to dust and nibs chasing fortune, fame, and other vile and pathetic states of being advertised nightly on prime time.

And I've had the curious fortune to have been there to see the end of it, the downward spiral, the last bits where, as Harvey Dent observed in The Dark Knight, "you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." Sans the heroic sacrifice bit, that is.

And I've seen the endings of many, many things-- loves, lives, friendships, dreams, hopes, illusions and delusions. I may not have been around for the beginning, or even to have witnessed the peaks and highs and triumphs and salad days of yore and legend, but I've definitely been around to see the days of decay and disillusionment and deaths of empires and fiefdoms carved out into the social landscape of this urban sprawl.

So you'd probably understand it if for quite a long stretch of time, I'd consigned myself to the role of eternal witness to the end of cycles, a part that I'd not been too pleased with for quite a long while. I mean, yeah, there's that crap one-hit-wonder song about every new beginning coming from some other beginning's end, but the focus for me had always been about the ending, never the eventual flora and fauna that would emerge from the fertilizing decay of a much-abused and obscenely violated figurative corpse.

I don't know if I'd really consider the actual ending of things to be intrinsically good or bad, since for some, it was merely a mercy killing and a blessing, but the fixation on the declining bit of the curve was very much starting to get old.

Which brings me to an interesting bit-- after a rather interesting conversation from someone I barely know, a sometimes-co-worker to whom I'd be generous in saying that I've talked with for what amounts to slightly more than a cumulative hour's time in the months that we've been aware of each other's existence. We'd had a brief exchange on the subject of world travel, specifically the Down Under bits of the world, and I'd asked about her blog, since she'd mentioned blogging about those bits. After the blog exchange, we'd gone about our way, I filed the address away somewhere, and that was that for that, as far as things went.

I may have talked to her once since then in the subsequent months.

Anyhow, a few weeks later, having been the equivalent of the utter shitknuckle fucknut FlakeyMcFlakerards who say "yeh, sure, I'll check out your blog" but never do, I ran into said acquaintance yet again and was met with not a description of a blog filled with riveting accounts of her encounters with exotic marsupials and other denizens of the Island Continent, but rather her decision to pack up and pull out.

No surprise there, happens all the time. Tinseltown takes its toll on people, and though taking frequent journeys out of the basin for points elsewhere might be a healthy preventative measure for retaining some semblance of functional sanity, the wear and tear does add up. Plus seeing how real people live in other parts of the globe will probably give you a slight distaste for what passes for a wonderfully airbrushed cardboard existence in this corner of the world.

Point being, she was leaving, marking the end of yet another cycle, beginning with a dream somewhere else and finishing sometime this summer with the planned departure. This person I barely knew was getting the fuck out of Dodge, with mixed feelings but a sense of peace and acceptance in her decision, and for the first time in a long time in my rather jaded and cynical run in this town, I didn't really know how to feel about that.

Don't get me wrong, I usually don't feel anything-- been there, seen it, had many a good friend abandon this sinking ship of a city, finding that which they'd been searching for here in the place they'd actually left to begin with or something else equally as ironic or comical, leaving me the last holdout of times and ambitious enterprises too numerous to count. Then again, I'd actually come here NOT because of anything in particular, but because it was anywhere BUT where I'd started, so I wasn't pre-packaged with the sorts of aspirations others have when moving here. In any case, most departures I've been presented with in more recent memory have been met with either indifference or some sense of "good riddance."

It may have been the way she framed her particular decision which gave me pause for thought.

No, this isn't going where you think it's going. I've not decided to pull up roots and head out myself-- not yet, anyway, and not without a proper exit strategy. But it's this:

If I've learned nothing else (and I really haven't learned all that much) from the years of playing witness to the end and death of things, it's this: All cycles end, including the cycle of being at the end of cycles. This somewhat friendly acquaintance pointed out that sometimes you realize that what you want (or don't want) wasn't what you wanted (or didn't want) at all, and that some things are just past their expiration date, including, in my case, seeing things to (and sometimes past) their expiration date.

So it's quite fitting that the end of yet another thing in a long litany of ended things be the birth cry of the Grand Design, the distillation and reincarnation of the best parts of times and cycles past, brought forth free of the end-times baggage that's mired previous incarnations.

Fresh and new and ready to rock with the fist of an angry god.

Stay tuned to more bits and pieces and segments and parts.

And to the girl I barely know who's determined to make her happiness elsewhere, thanks for the cumulative hour's worth of interesting conversation and good luck and much good fortune in your travels.

Also, ave atque vale.