Been AWOL for family reasons. Been doing lots of drinking.

You know, instead of hanging out with Anaglyph, Joey, and Yuliya.

Delicious Hunan Chicken

Went out for Chinese with mom tonight. I was enjoying my hunan chicken when I overhear a portion of an elderly couple’s conversation.

…Anus shaver, with her husband. I think they did it together.

I stopped eating immediately and looked at mom.

“What the hell are they talking about?”

“What do you mean?”

“She just said ‘anus shaver’, didn’t she?”

Mom snorts on a pepper from her hunan shrimp.

“Anice Shaffer. She said Anice Shaffer!”

“Oh. Oops.”

Christmas time must be here, because the family has been arriving throughout the day (and night). The half of the family that is already here has been scurrying and cleaning for hours now. Doc has been hard at work, tackling the ongoing battle that is the cat litter box. A neat-freak whose pedantry rivals event the best, Doc not only scrubs the shitbox out, but filters and sifts for the tiniest of cat nuggets in much the same way as one might pan for gold. Like Jane Goodall among the apes, I observe from the sidelines and, as best as I can tell, the ultimate goal is to remove even the most miniscule of trinkets and reuse as much litter as possible.

Panning for Cat Shit

Seeing as how Doc is Chinese, I suppose the cat should be glad it gets such exceptional treatment. After all, it could be much worse.

The other white meat.

Mom’s taking some women’s art class and apparently needs to do a report on a female artist of some sort. My immediate suggestion for her was Carolee Schneemann. Sadly, the professor (like so many professors in this day and age) has a pre-determined list of artists that the students are to choose from. And the list contains artists that people are already familiar with (O’Keefe, anyone?). Why not stir things up a bit and let the student research an artist of their choosing? Why must there always be a list? And speaking of lists, it looks as though Ms. Schneemann has found hers:

Excuse me, but your rollers are showing

For those not in the know, Carolee Schneemann’s [arguably] best-known work was her Interior Scroll performance piece (photo above). Interior Scroll was performed in East Hampton, New York and at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. For the exhibition, Schneemann “ritualistically stood naked on a table, painted her body with mud until she slowly exracted a paper scroll from her vagina while reading from it.” From her web site:

“I thought of the vagina in many ways– physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the sources of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation. I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model: enlivened by it’s passage from the visible to the invisible, a spiraled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, attributes of both female and male sexual power. This source of interior knowledge would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh in Goddess worship.”

She’ll end up at the Gimcrack Hospital as a patient someday, mark my words.

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Part of my trip to Mayberry was spent visiting Grandpa. He’s in his late 80s now and is unfortunately slipping, both mentally and physically. He didn’t recognize me at first, and asked me how I knew my dad. He tends to repeat himself a lot and forgets things quickly. On good days, his sense of humor shines through, be it a witty remark or “dirty old man” comment. I think he flirts with the visiting nurse that helps him out from time to time (Grandpa still lives at his own place).

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Grandpa’s shop was once the busiest room in his house. He’d spend hours upon hours in there making all sorts of things. It’s been quite a few years since anyone has really used it to its full potential (as one can plainly see by the layers of sawdust). Whenever I smell pipe tobacco (especially that containing latakia), I think of Grandpa working in his old wood shop.

A few years back, Grandpa had some surgery on his nose and needed a skin graft. He told the doctors to “take it off his penis because he doesn’t use it anymore.” Sadly, the same is now true for the ol’ shop.

I grew up in a small town
But I’ve since moved away
I’m headed up this weekend
To watch the Indians play.

Some have said my hometown’s quaint
And some might find it charming
I find it fucking boring as
There’s nothing much but farming.

While driving through the country roads
I passed a bunch of locals
In NASCAR shirts with Mullet cuts
They’re hillbillies and yokels.

I’m only up this weekend
For the game and family
On Sunday I am heading home
And that’s just fine by me.

Stopped by a Chipotle restaurant yesterday with Grandma to pick up a tasty steak burrito. On the way home, the dumbest dog in America decided to run out in front of the car. The dog did not have a collar on and it looked a lot like the mangy dog from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. And though I could see the dog out of the corner of my eye and I instinctively knew that it was going to bolt out in front of the vehicle, I wasn’t able to bring the car to a complete stop from the 35 MPH that Grandma and I were traveling at.

Holy Fucking Shit That's a Car!

Well, that isn’t completely true. I definitely came to a complete stop once I actually hit the dog. Car definitely stopped then, I promise you. At this point, I wasn’t sure what was worse: knowing that I had hit the dog or hearing an 85-year-old lady trying to figure out what to do by yelling at me like I had done this on purpose.

Sure, I’ve hit animals before, and enjoyed it on at least one occasion. But I happen to like dogs, and I would never want to drive over one on purpose. I pulled over to the side of the road for a moment and saw that the dog had gotten up, was panting (and rightfully so) and then walked away as though nothing was wrong. So I continued to drive home.

And before you PETA Nazis start to chastise me for not stopping, the dog jumped out in front of the car without my permission, I had no idea whose dog it was or where it had been, and I didn’t want to chance something like getting bitten or dealing with rabies. I mean, I am pretty sure that if someone hit me with a car and then approached me after, I’d fucking bite them, no question.

Now, had the dog remained lying there, then yes, I would have scooped it up and taken it to the emergency pet hospital  about a mile away. But, the dog got up and walked away with a goddam smile on its face. And if it can get up and walk away, it means the dog is fully capable of biting. It was very reminiscent of that scene with Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves when he makes the suicide run and lives. I think the dog did it on purpose. Perhaps the makers of Shoo!TAG™ can come up with a really powerful device that emits enough hokum energy to repel a moving vehicle.

And I know what the #1 question on your mind is and I am here to allay any concerns that you may have about it. Rest assured that, once I got home, my burrito was still hot.

My Chipotle Burrito

Mom’s into needlework and quilting, and one of the things she likes to do is redwork. Sometimes she gets free patterns, and sometimes they’re free for a reason. Like this ‘winner’:

Why is there a space at the bottom of his last button? It looks to me that the snowman still has his nose, so I wonder what part of him the rabbit is eating. Suspicious…

The parents have been updating their kitchen with more modern conveniences as of late. You know, since their goat died (no more fresh milk) and the well pump rusted out (no more bathing in the kitchen, hafta wait for a rainstorm, now), they decided to go with some of this new-fangled modern-day shit. And one of the things they upgraded to was a new dishwasher.

Dang! Their new dishwasher is SO quiet compared to the old one. And it really gets the pots and pans a lot cleaner, too (Something the old one had real troubles with.) Of course, it was hard having the old one put down (honestly, it takes forever to train a St. Bernard to get those dishes clean) but his eyesight was failing and he only had three legs after he tried to lick the garbage disposal and slipped. The memories will live on, but the the time for a new dishwasher was long overdue.

Not only is the new dishwasher quiet, but he’s a snappy dresser, too. Well, except for always wearing one of Polanski’s dresses but we’re working to break him of that habit.

June 4th doth approacheth quick, and with it the portfolio show that I’ve mentioned in previous posts. I am happy to say that I am well ahead of schedule because I did a boatload of printing on Saturday instead of going to Cleveland to watch the Indians lose to the Yankees.

My portfolio will have several different pieces, but my favorite is the most ambitious assignment that I’ve undertaken my whole time at school. Everyone has similar projects because everyone has taken the same classes. While I, too, am using some of these “cookie cutter projects” in the show, I needed something that was completely my own that nobody else would have. So I wrote, illustrated, and bound a children’s book. And I think it came out rather well, if I do say so myself. I titled the book The Mysterious Misadventure of Bella J. Teagarden. Here’s what the jacket looks like:

And the synopsis from the inside of the jacket:

Bella J. Teagarden is sent to her room for a nap when the strangest things begin to happen. First, an ugly bird shows up at her window and flies Bella and her cat, Jynx, off to a strange island in the middle of the sea. An encounter with pirates, a cave of treasure, a dragon, and a rusty old robot. How is Bella supposed to take a nap through all of that, let alone find her way back home?

In the book, Bella is six years old and is based on my real life three-year-old niece of the same name. The character is based off the real Bella’s attitude and behaviors. No one has a cooler niece than I do. You may think that you do, but you would be wrong.

The first step was to actually write the story. I wrote the whole thing in a couple of days and, after three revisions, was happy with the overall tale. As with any story, cuts had to be made and characters were dropped because of length. However, there is always the possibility of a sequel, and I already have a good idea on how I want to treat that as well should one ever come about.

From there, the concept began with a sketch of what I wanted Bella to look like in the story. A large head, comical hair, and a simplistic, almost two-dimensional appearance is what I wanted. And she needed a badass dress, but more on that later. I also began to sketch the “sets” for the story. Characters were designed separately so that I could place them wherever I wanted within the scenery. The first set was Bella’s room, where the story begins.

The sketch of Bella’s room:

That sketch was scanned and brought into Adobe Illustrator, a software program for drawing vector images. I traced the shapes in the sketch, and put each shape on its own layer. The colors were not important, other than to make it easier for me to distinguish one shape from the next. Here’s what the vector version of her sketch looked like:

From there, the vector image was exported into Adobe Photoshop, where I applied textures, colors, and adjusted the lighting as necessary. The finished room, as it appears in the storybook:

The book contains approximately 6 images (all done the way I mentioned above) and 12 pages of text. I would love to have done a few more pictures, but I simply ran out of time. I don’t think that the story suffers from a shortage, but there are a few things that I would have liked to have been able to draw. Ah, well, perhaps in the Collector’s Edition.

Now, about Bella’s dress that I mentioned earlier. I used a placeholder texture (a nice pink plaid) when I first designed Bella, but someone suggested that I make the cover out of cloth, at which point I thought I’d make the cloth cover match Bella’s dress. Thanks to the beauty of Photoshop, swapping textures is a breeze.

Originally, I went to Joann Fabrics in search of a nice plaid but found something even better. Because of Bella’s no fear attitude and because the story involves pirates, I chose an awesome pink pirate pattern instead. Awesome!

Joann Fabrics is not exactly a place where men go to buy things. I was the only guy in the whole store and I was carrying a pink pirate pattern to the counter. The woman who cut it for me looked at me very suspiciously and asked me what I was going to do with it. I told her that I kept little girls in my windowless basement but they kept outgrowing their dresses and that it was time to make new ones and feed the girls less food. She didn’t talk to me after that.

And speaking of pirates, guess who makes an appearance in the story? (Used with permission, too! Thanks, JP!)

Once the pages for the book were printed, my mother was kind enough to stitch them together for me with her sewing machine. I cannot thank her enough for her help, because my original plan of using book glue wasn’t working out well at all. The stitching came out even better than I could have hoped for.

And a photo of the first image in the book, as well as the first page of the story. The book ended up being a nice cloth hardcover, complete with dust jacket. Finished size is approximately 8″ x 10″.

I even created a “Bella-ized” version of myself for the “About the Author” section on the jacket. I actually drew my own hair from scratch, but the filter I used in Photoshop generated almost the exact same pattern as Bella’s. Must be genetics I guess.

So there you have it. A sneak peak at my completed book and the reason I’ve been AFK from the blogosphere for so long.