Tag Archives: nostalgia

Walking on Down the Hall

Posted on by
Reply

There’s something about Three Stories in One. Of all of my intellectual properties, of all my ideas, it has to be the dumbest. It wasn’t just my idea, though. Severian (nee Boone) was there with me in drama class, and when Ms. Lindberg told us to take out seats, we discussed how hard that would be for me, who came to school on my bike, or Boone, who took the bus, and it took off from there. Suddenly, Severian is (kind of) hooking up with Amber, the most popular girl in school, and I was racing cars in the Indy 500.

When I sat at my desk after school that day and wrote it all down, along with some of my own embellishments (there was lots of flying), I inserted Severian’s friend (who I barely liked), Luke, inspired by a Doors song I had just learned, and later in the tale, Wendy, who I’d had a crush on at the time. The storytelling was unique, in that, instead of chapter or scene breaks, each main character’s adventures were presented as a separate story, woven together with titles and “To be continueds.” Severian wrote a sequel to the collection, and we took turns writing them.

Three Stories in One became a mini-phenomenon. This was in the early nineties, so there was no internet to share it on, but it spread anyway. Severian typed it up, printed out a few copies, and they circulated, even coming into the hands of Amber herself (who I’m pretty sure was horrified, though the only hooking up Boone and Amber did was to play games like Ping-Pong). Severian and I were celebrities. In 1995, I condensed my contributions to Three Stories in One into a single collection (which can be read here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OciHzg8YdB8wyjGZNZx509v1nCvXPMIO/view) When each story fragment is put on a separate page, it came out to seventy-eight pages. In 1998, I started to teach myself how to draw, and by 2005, with four comics under my belt, I decided to illustrate Three Stories in One. I wasn’t great with faces at the time, all five of us had a distinctive look that was easy to cartoon. I made it fifty-six pages before I started making friends in the town I had just moved to and abandoned the project. However, those illustrations stuck with me, and every once in a while, I like to come back to them.

When we were kids, we talked about Three Stories in One like a pop-culture mega-hit, and I still do, even though I’m only Facebook friends with Wendy and Amber, and we don’t ever interact. The less said about Luke, the better. As for Severian, the last time I saw her was January 1, 2000, and she was presenting as Boone. She and I had a difficult relationship, as we were both mentally ill and not receiving necessary care, and she had a number of issues on top of that. After Newcastle passed away, I sat down and worked on a watercolor to take my mind off of everything. As is the case with most of my sketchbooks, I let the picture tell me what it wanted to be, and it became a dramatic drawing of Wendy. Next thing you know, I made movie posters of all the main characters.

LUKE: A total sleazebag

JEREMIAH: A miserable nerd who rides his bike everywhere

BOONE: A surprisingly cheerful and innocent goth

AMBER: The most popular and perky girl at school

WENDY: The Worst Driver in the World

I’ve made attempts to reach out to Severian, but no luck. I don’t want to do all seventy-eight pages again, but I’d love to do something smaller with these characters, and I’d love for her to writer. Though, if she chose not to, I’d completely understand. It was a difficult time in her life, and one of the main characters uses her dead name. For me, though, it was an innocent time (even though I was unhappy for at least half of it), and I’ve never written anything as bananas since.

A Eulogy

Posted on by
1

February 22, 2024

A Eulogy

On Wednesday, 21 February 2024, at approximately 3:30 a.m., I made the decision to end Newcastle’s life. Everyone I’ve spoken to about the subject told me that I’d know it was time—that he’d tell me. I didn’t understand. I’ve spent the past three weeks in a near-constant state of stress. I spent mornings on work-from-home Fridays and Mondays, along with the weekends, begging him to come out from under the bed. In the afternoons, he would. He would walk to the food bowl, eat (less and less each day), drink some water, go to the bathroom, and yell at me to come pick him up like a baby. But after I got home from work at 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday for a telehealth appointment, he had found a space under my bed that was dark and cramped, and he hasn’t come out.

Ordinarily, when I would lie down on my bed at night, he positioned himself at my feet like the lions at the New York Public Library (Patience & Fortitude/Hallelujah & Amen/Run & Hide/Rack & Pinion, whatever their names are). He’d done this since he was a kitten. I think he was protecting me from the monsters. After I was asleep, he’d go somewhere else until breakfast. He didn’t do this Tuesday night.

Last night, I dreamt that he was fine. He jumped onto a stack of boxes I still haven’t unpacked to get my attention. The dream faded, and I found myself on an empty bed in an empty apartment, and I remembered. I gave him one of those yogurt tubes that cats will maul you for, and he ate some. I was so happy, I gave him another one, and he turned around and faced the other way. That’s when I knew.

Between crying jags, I made the preparations. I reached out to a pet hospice that makes house calls; it’s expensive, but this was the last time I’d spend money on him. I found a pet grief counselor to talk to after. I canceled his quality-of-life appointment Friday, and I canceled his twice-monthly kitty litter shipment, and let the online pharmacy know we couldn’t be needing their services anymore. I scheduled some time off work and arranged coverage for my job.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with his stuff. Because it’s a handy place to stash art supplies, I’m going to keep the cat tree I’d planted next to my desk so he could take a nap with Dad while Dad was working. He never used it because he’d rather lie down on Dad, preventing Dad from working.

He’s never going to do that again.

I asked Nicole to be there, less for me and more for her and him. When Nicole lived with Kate and me in 2012, she and Newcastle had a pretty great relationship. When we moved in with her five years ago, she was his auntie, though I’m pretty sure he thought of her as Mom. She gave nicknames to all the cats she’s lived with as an adult, so Henry is Gibbon, Andrew was Gray Cat, Magik was Badgley, and Newcastle was Babycat, shortened to Bebe.

Newcastle was an ugly, sickly kitten. They were going to put him to sleep when Kate rescued him and nursed him to health. This was during the six weeks between my deciding to move to Bloomington and me actually doing it. As she was cleaning bloody snot off the walls and giving his greasy body baths, she told me that she intuited that he wasn’t her cat. She didn’t know whose he was. After I’d been living with her a while, she realized that she couldn’t separate us.

When he wanted to play as a young adult, he’d run up to me, meow, and do a backflip. He was like a dog, always at my heels, playing fetch. When I’d taunt him with the birdie on a string, he’d reach a point where he’d just grab it in his teeth and walk away. I always let him take it to his den. He’d earned it. It’s been a long time since he’s played with me. Until Tuesday, he just wanted to snuggle.

He also did this thing where, before guard duty started at night, he had to sit on my chest and massage my throat. This wasn’t exactly comfortable for me. It seemed to be a compulsion, and he always had a serious look on his face when he did it, like it was his job. And yet he purred the whole time. If he came to bed and found me spooning Kate, he’d tap me on the shoulder until I moved down to my back. I tried massaging his throat with my thumbs to see how he liked it, and it turned out he liked it a lot. It’s been a long time since he’s done that.

I saw a movie the other day. I’d put it on so I’d have something to listen to while I drew, but it turned out to be engrossing, and I brought my iPad to bed and pet Newcastle while I watched it. Ben Kingsley played a good-natured senior citizen who befriended an alien, and Jane Curtain played an elderly woman with a cat so elderly it couldn’t walk anymore. Another character tried to persuade her to put her cat to sleep, and she said, “He’s all I have.” She took a breath and added, “He’s all I had.” Newcastle spent his last three days under the bed, not eating, not going to the bathroom, and only coming out for water. When I looked for him, he was just a pair of yellow eyes just out of reach.

Newcastle loved me. He loved me when I was depressed. He loved me when I was manic. He loved me when I was angry. He loved me when I went on long vacations. He loved me when all I wanted to do was hide. He loved me. I’ve never had that kind of devotion before, and I can’t imagine I ever will again.

I’ve never felt as lonely in my life as I have this past month. My hobbies are reading what I want to read, watching what I want to watch, blasting whatever music moves me and me alone, and writing and drawing. These aren’t social hobbies. Even when I lived with Kate and Nicole, people with whom I spent most of my time, and even when I drew apart from both of them, I always had Newcastle.

I never doubted him, but after the move, I could never be sure how he was doing. When the vet gave me the diagnosis of his kidney failure, I watched him so closely I got headaches. The vet gave me a couple of months. It’s only been two weeks.

The thing that upsets me the most, as I sit here in bed without him, typing this, is that I’m going to get used to his being gone. I’m not going to come home from work or from the store and look for him. It won’t bother me when I sit down at my desk to work, and I don’t get interrupted by his begging for attention. That editors and coworkers won’t see him draped over my shoulder and ask after him. I don’t want that to be normal. I don’t want this pain I’m feeling to ever end. But it will. I will feel better. I’ll go back to work on Tuesday. My gas bill is due tomorrow. I need to run to the store to pick up half and half.

Today, 22 February 2024, at approximately 9:30 a.m., Newcastle died, his face in Dad’s hands.

When the cardiologist diagnosed him with congenital heart failure, he gave Newcastle a year. That was in 2015. I had twenty years with him. It wasn’t enough.

Saving Faces

Posted on by
Reply

This is a hell of a big find for me. Sixteen years ago, I wanted to do a three-to-four-panel comic strip about my sleazy reporter character, Max Fuentes. I filled out this really great chart I found on DeviantArt, mostly as an effort to draw the same face over and over again, something I’ve never been able to do. I wish I could find this challenge again.

Eventually, all of these storylines came together in the novel I entitled The Grind, as I’m a better writer than I am an artist.

Strippin’ for Politics

Posted on by
Reply

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I approached the Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild in 2004 with the idea for a newspaper-style strip about the Bush Administration. They turned me down because there was “No way he’s winning reelection.” This was a big part of the reason I moved to Indiana that summer.

While excavating some old sketchbooks, I found my character drawings for it. See if you can remember twenty years ago and all the wacky characters.

First is Li’l Georgie, the rootin’ tootin’est president ever. His alien friend Li’l CheyNee is always by his side. Li’l Rummie never lets him down, and neither does Li’l Collie. Girls are gross, but Li’l Condi is the exception. And finally, their nemesis is Li’l Frankenheinz. (This one is a little obscure, to be honest—can you guess who he is?)

I’ll be honest, I had zero ideas for actual strips starring them. I was hoping to get other people to write it for me.

All Hail the Pirate Queen

Posted on by
Reply

Most of my heroes and villains in MortalMan are based on someone I know. This is M, Scourge of I-80. She jumps from automobile rooftop to rooftop on I-80 through the Midwest, stealing the change from people’s ashtrays. In this way, she is no longer relevant because who keeps change in their ashtrays? Cars don’t even have ashtrays anymore. Anyway, She’s based on my dear friend Emilie, who used to sign her notes “M,” which strikes me as something you could do with a sword. And if anybody I know in this world swashbuckles, it’s her.

I’m not good with likenesses, but I do a lot better when I’m not consulting a reference.

Pages 1-3

Posted on by
Reply

Here are the first three pages of MortalMan. Page 1:

Page 2 is a redo of a page from the original MortalMan in 2003, but it’s one of best pages from my history, and now it’s in color.

Page 3 is me drawing from memory the high-school-hangout diner from my youth (I used a reference from the sign–I’m not that good).

More when I have more!

You got the brawn, I got the brains, let’s make lots of money

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s a few more work-for-hires I did over the years. The first one is the most recent, from 2022, when my former roommate, Will, asked me to design a pair of avatars for his baffling username “Rocks in my Socks.”

Next, in 2014, my sister, Rachel, hired me (don’t worry, she got the family discount) to design a logo for the annual charity scavenger hunt she participates in, GISHWHES. I don’t recall the theme, and I’m not sure I want to.

In 2012, Michele paid me to make her look awesome in the desert, which I did.

And finally, in 2012, Whitney asked me to help her design a logo for something SCA/pirate-related. I feel like I did a great job with this one (I also designed a business card and a flag), but I’m not sure they used it.

Unfair Use

Posted on by
Reply

I was told under no uncertain terms will I be allowed to include the first 3 lines of  “I’m Too Sexy” in my upcoming novel. The reason I given is that the music industry is insanely litigious. They gave me several examples of the charges they’ve levied for the use of even “one lyric” (I assume they mean line because a lyric is a word). Note that I didn’t say “musicians” are so litigious. It’s the people who own the songs, which is not them.

I wrote Right Said Fred personally and asked them for permission to use the lines, and their assistant told me that to talk to the licenser. Now, “I’m Too Sexy” is not a work of art. The lyrics are uninspired, and the beat is childishly simple. It’s catchy, though, and most importantly, the brothers who make up the band wrote, performed, and recorded it. It’s their song. They don’t own it.

National Comics, which would one day become DC Comics, bought the rights to Superman from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster for a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars is worth a lot more than in the forties, but even then it was incredibly cheap. Superman launched an entire genre. Even before comic book movies became mainstream, the work of superhero creators inspired the movies. Remember the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Lando leads Han, Chewy, and Leia into banquet hall with Darth Vader? That scene happened over a decade earlier in The Fantastic Four:

Jack Kirby, the artist of that scene (and cowriter; without going into detail, the Marvel method of storytelling leaned a lot more on the artist than the writer, contrary to what Stan Lee’s hype machine will tell you), did not get to keep his own art. Timely, which became Marvel, got to sell it at auction, and Kirby didn’t get a dime. This went on until the seventies, when Kirby and Neal Adams and other artists fought tooth and nail for the right to own what they created. Likewise, in the nineties, Todd McFarlane was the superstar artist whose work was selling literally millions of copies of Spider-Man comics. Marvel went nuts selling merchandizing with his art. McFarlane got nothing. (He rounded up other superstar artists to form Image Comics, in which creators were allowed to keep their creations until they didn’t want to do that anymore and did the same thing.)

Sorry I’m hitting you with the comic book history, but it’s all I really know. I know that Disney and the Creator’s Syndicate (which owns Peanuts, among its extensive catalog) are so litigious, they will send cease-and-desist and even subpoenas to daycare centers that paint Charlie Brown or Mickey Mouse on their walls. Every time I see a place with a Garfield hanging around, I wonder who’s going to squeal on them and bring in the lawyers.

All of this goes back to my book. It’s set in 1995, and while “I’m Too Sexy” was released in 1991, it was still fresh on our minds at that time. My twenty-seven-year-old work friend told me the song was a banger when I mentioned it to her, but in the nineties, it was kind of annoying. Really, really catchy, but annoying. The people I hung out with hated the song, myself included, and hearing the acapella “I’m too sexy for my love; Too sexy for my love; Love’s going to leave me” meant we were in for a very difficult three-to-four minutes. One of my friends thought it made him cool to play that song in the Kristy’s every time he came in. (For reference: if most of the people in Gallup, New Mexico were Power Rangers, Krristy’s would be the juice bar where everyone hangs out.) It was not cool. In fact, we all kind of hated him.

Kristy’s is a major setting for my novel, and a character does the “I’m Too Sexy” thing. I happens repeatedly, but I can easily edit the subsequent uses out. That first use, though, is supposed to capture the despair those first three lines brought in me every time I heard them. Why the fuck can’t I use those twenty-one words without paying out a fortune?

Greed. That’s all.

Music is ingrained in us, from catchy ad jingles to that guy whistling on the elevator. We sing the lyrics to ourselves or other people all the time. It’s a part of our lives, and denying writers the right to use these words is denying us the right to properly chronicle how we live, how we talk to each other. My novel is about teenagers, and what do teenagers care about if not music? That used to be the first question I’d ask of anyone I met when I was that young, even before learning their name: “What kind of music do you listen to?” How does that count as “Fair Use?”

When I wrote this novel a year and a half ago, I had come to terms with Right Said Fred. Their one-hit wonder was a classic by that point, and I had begrudgingly accepted that. Even though I haven’t exchanged a word with the asshole who heralded himself with that song like it was fucking “Hail to the Chief,” I kind of love his chutzpah in retrospect. But after talking to three lawyers and Neil Gaiman (relax, it was on Tumblr), and now the legal department of my publisher, I kind of hate it again.

If he’d had the right, would Fred have approved of my use of the lyrics? I don’t know. The characters’ reaction to them isn’t positive. But I can use the title, so it doesn’t matter anyway. I have to rewrite the paragraph or the entire passage so I don’t just say, “She heard the first words of ‘I’m Too Sexy’ and slammed her head down on her book.” I’m too good a writer for that, all so some rich douchebags can charge me a thousand dollars or more for their use, douchebags who have never a created a thing in their lives except enough money to buy a yacht. I am so mad right now.

I’m too sexy for this bullshit.

Happy National Squirrel Appreciation Day!

Posted on by
Reply

Squirrels are assholes. They’re the only animal that sounds like they’re swearing when they make their “cute” little animal noises. I’ve heard stories about them stealing food out of people’s hands when they have lunch in the park. They watch. They wait. And in 2006, they went to war with me.

The first salvo began at our house in Bloomington, Indiana, when I was living with my wife. We had floor-to-ceiling windows that opened at the bottom, onto our front porch, and it was a warm enough day that we did just that. A squirrel descended from one of the majestic oak trees in our front yard to enjoy his tasty acorn on our porch, right out front of the open window. At the same time, we had three young cats, aged six, six, and two. They parted the vertical blinds and crouched, so tense I was worried they’d spontaneously combust, staring, glaring, and chattering in that way that they think is imitating wildlife. I don’t have the heart to tell them it actually sounds like a cat chattering. Eventually the squirrel strutted away, and they were so wound up afterwards, they started their own little war that permanently damaged parts of the house.

They weren’t done with us. I don’t know if this was the same squirrel. (I know, it’s speciesest to say, “They all look alike, but they do.”) This time, Kate ordered to get rid of it before the cats exploded. I grabbed our porch-sweeping room and stepped outside. An ordinary squirrel would have run away at that point, but this was no ordinary squirrel. This was personal. I poked it, and it didn’t move. So I charged it, and it fled. When I chased it to a tree that it shimmied up, I figured it was over. It was not. It circled the trunk and swung back over, inches from the bristles of my broom, swearing at me. After enduring the verbal abuse long enough, I backed away and retreated inside. Later, a friend would ask me what I would have done if it had jumped onto the broom. “I would have screamed in a very unmasculine manner, dropped the broom, and retreated inside.” I didn’t add that I’d probably go to the bathroom in my pants.

Then there was the kamikaze squirrel that jumped in front of my car one day. That “crunch” haunted me for years. I’m certain that instilling guilt in me was the purpose of that admittedly heroic sacrifice.

But the war climaxed one beautiful spring day when I left for work. Our porch wasn’t much of a porch, per se, but rather a concrete landing with a couple of chairs for smoking cigarettes and a canopy. That morning, when I stepped out from under said canopy, breathing in that pollen on a perfect sweater day, and a squirrel landed on my head. I screamed, and the squirrel screamed and scrambled off of my skull, leaving behind a scalpful of scratches.

It failed to kill me, which I’m not sure was its goal. I think it wanted to intimidate me. Well done, squirrel. After that, the hostilities ceased. I see them, munching on their snacks—a lot of them snacks left behind by the litterers that live in our neighborhood—planning their next move. Luckily, there are no trees near my new apartment (there’s a beautiful neighborhood about a block southeast, though), but I can never relax. I know they’re out there, watching me. Waiting.

Happy National Squirrel Appreciation Day! Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Schoolyard Haunts

Posted on by
Reply

Something I’ve always wondered about was where the supplemental lyrics to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” came from. I never hear them on TV (that doesn’t mean they’ve never been on TV), but I’ve been hearing them since I was too little to remember. Nowadays, you can’t sing “You would even say it glows” without someone appearing out of nowhere and adding, “Like a light bulb!” Where did it come from? How do I hear it from New Mexico to Oklahoma to Northern Virginia with few differences? And even if there are slight differences, the tune and rhythm is the same. I think this would be a better documentary than another one about Ted Bundy, so Netflix, call me.

However, that’s not why I gathered you all here. You are here because a chat conversation today revealed to me just how weird this schoolyard song was, and that it, from what I can tell, did not leave Woodall Elementary in rural Oklahoma. I’m calling upon you because, if you can identify the song, you would put to rest a mystery I’ve been living with for over thirty-five years.

The song, and I am not making any of this up, goes like this:

Yo momma, yo daddy, yo greaaaaaaaasy granny!

You got a hole in your pants, you got a big behind, like Frankenstein

You’re gonna beat beat beat down Sesame Street.

It was sung to me as kind of an acapella funk rap. The part where you’re introducing your relatives goes pretty slowly, like a train warming up. The rest of it chugs along at top speed.

I have no idea what this is. When the class clown who taught it to me was confronted by a teacher who said, “Where did you get that song, mister?” his answer was “Sesame Street.” Which is funny, but it is probably not accurate.

I don’t even know why I remember it, but I do. Is it from a song? That’s a possibility because I was not up on music in the eighties, unless it was by “Weird Al” Yankovic. And yet, I’ve never heard this song. Is it just a weird schoolyard thing? I have not heard it in any schoolyard I’ve been to, and anyone I’ve asked about it has usually given me a concerned look.

If I had the finances, I’d do a documentary about this, as well, but it would probably be lots of shots of people being puzzled by me singing to them. I’d be asking questions that would baffle them, such as, “How do you respond to the allegations that your granny is greaaaaaaasy?” Or, “Do you believe that this alleged hole in your pants might be related to your behind matching Frankenstein’s in size?”

Anyway, that’s why you’re here: does this ring any bells? Is this a song I’m not familiar with? I recently found out that accusing someone of having a “big ol’ butt” came from a song. I hope you have some answers.

There’s one possibility I hadn’t considered, and that’s that the class clown made it up whole cloth. Somehow, that would be the best origin for this strange little rhyme.