Blondey Blob

Oh hey, what's up?! I'm a red blood cell. I live in your body and carry oxygen and junk to stuff. Um, when you think about me, it makes you pass out. Which is hilarious. Later dude.

List of Foods I Know How to Prepare

-Kale and Kale chips
-Oatmeal
-Fried Egg
-Cream of Wheat
-Popcorn in a pot
-Fried Potato Slices
-Baked Sweet Potato
-Cereal
-PB&J
-I can put vegetables in a skillet and heat them
-Rice
-Grains
-Noodles
-Pancakes (sorta)
-Smoothies?
-I can make portabello mushroom sandwiches
-the microwave
-bowls
-toast
-bagels
-spinach
-twelve
-hot baskets
-mens deodorant
-odorant
-magic
-pickles

Poem Written On a Bus #1

Hurtling forward in a metal tube of children meat
Do they know they will miss these green trees?
Do they know this lush green corridor
Is enough to make the bowels of grown accountants weep tears and numbers and ink.

The smells will always draw you back
The sweet rot of the park by the stream by I-81 when you'd run at dawn.

What is the power,
What is the strength
What is the growth and loss
Of time spent in transit?

I say it is the waking sleep.

But green ideas sleep furiously in the back of this nauseating jostling rumbling yellow steel cab.
They cannot know they will miss any of this.
And I cannot try to miss it as stretches itself wide and wraps itself across my face and breathes in my nostrils.

Facesucking nature laying its eggs in all of us
Set to burst from the chest years later
In sloppy slurpy lines like these.
Regurgitate
and enjoy.

Armpits smell like prayer

Playing Disc Golf

I wrote that title and now I'm going to write for about 10 to 15 minutes on everything I can think of about disc golf.

I really enjoy disc golf. It takes concentration and skill and fluidity of movement but it's also played at a very leisurely pace. Like golf! But...better.

The drive is my favorite part. You step up and as your moving forward you cross your feet and as you uncross them your body twists and you whip your arm around and fling as hard as you can with your wrist and hopefully you send the disc flying evenly. Then it just sort of hangs in the air and gets smaller and smaller.

But that wasn't very exciting. It's not very exciting. Muscle memory is pretty cool though. And disc golf is all about muscle memory. If your limbs and wrist and fingers aren't moving in concert and doing what they're supposed to be doing then your disc will come out all wonky or fly off in the totally wrong direction and sad times for you abound. But, of course, you can't do it well and think about it at the same time. You just have to keep doing it until it works.

This is boring. I could talk about the flight of the disc. I don't want to but I could. I won't. It's a great activity. You get out in nature. And you're trying to increase your mastery of a completely arbitrary and useless skill.

Arbitrary and useless skills are by far the things most worthy of mastery. Isn't that where all the greatness and glory comes from? By the sheer needlessness of the whole thing?

As Don Quixote once said, "The greatest thing, is to lose one's mind for no reason."

Or something like that.

Delving into the fantasy waters for a second, as a younger boy playing disc golf I can remember my friends and I would always like to imagine the discs as deadly blades that could slice through trees and skulls.

Silliness.

It was supposed to rain today! I think it might start now.

Yee-Haw

Time now for me to tell you about what's been happening in my life.

A whole lot of big stinkin' nothing--that's what!

But that's a good thing. That's definitely a good thing.

I'd like to make something with more continuity. Because, wouldn't that be nice? Hopefully I'll keep using the big-horned sheep. He's fun to draw. And then something will just emerge out of that. Maybe like a mythology-deal.

I'm gonna make a mythology! On accident!

Or not. Things will continue happening regardless. And some sort of theme or message must develop out of that eventually.

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The Knees

The knees are dark and the knees are cold. Shadows play upon on the knobby bones. They make me cringe. I can't help but imagine a hammer smashing those floating bones right off. Knees are mistakes.

But knees bring out the worst thoughts in me. All that flexing and bending and poor lateral strength. Knees are point of weakness.

In another life, I would reinvent the knee. Make it stronger and more durable and violent and grim. Knees would be vengeful. Knees would be obsidian discs spinning and whirring at a righteous speed, cutting and eviscerating indiscriminately. The knee would be the ceaseless march of progress.

The lower leg would be a pedestal and the upper body the globe that Atlas-knee holds up as a curse. We will be the burden to the knee. And the whole course of human history will be man's attempt to understand his inferiority to the all-mighty joint. We can't help but feel that we're just in the way. That the knee has come before us, and will live on long after we perish. It's already made plans to jump this burning ship.

Can you smell the carnage? Can you feel the cartilage?  The fumes are making me dizzy. I'm just gonna squat down and take a breather.

Apple Enormous

I'll think of something to say about this later...

DOES EMERGE IT!

He's a smiling.

Fife and a drum and a drum and a drum

This is based off a drawing in a book I took from the elementary school I work at because they're trying to get rid of old library books.

It's about the fall of the Aztecs.

It was fun to draw and then give them stupid faces but I don't think this picture really says anything. Beyond stupid faces. Which makes me happy.

Every day when I'm biking to work there's this hill that I ride up and more times than not it seems like it gets easier to pedal and that I'm being lifted or gently pushed up the hill. And that makes me happy.

Or sometimes I think back to people I knew who seemed impossibly cool. Who spoke and acted with confidence and conviction. Unique and different because whatever extra-funky muck they had in their craw that made them see things that way, they would always say, "yes!" to it. Yes! To their own perception and interpretation and creations. People driven to make connections, but not in a fun, team-building, social, networking, kind of way. In a self-butchering, self-baring, exposing, (desperate?) kind of way. Style. People who have a style and something from them gets lodged inside you, or disturbs something that was already there. That's valuable.

6 Portraits of Ben Blankenship as Himself and as Various Animals

OTC Runner Ben Blankenship as himself and as a lion, walrus, bird, gorilla, and zebra.

Keep on Truckin, Ben.

also, sorry.

Monster vs Red

This is a motivational poster for kids who used to talk to themselves.

Two Things

This picture is about how even though we always have choices, we don't have full control, or hardly any control over what plops out of our mouths.

For example, after field trips at my job as a day-camp counselor, I like to enjoy a juicy ear of corn on the cob while sitting in the backseat of the bus, this inevitably leads to me shouting to the children seated around the back of the bus, 

"If you children don't let Mr. Andy have his cob-time in peace, I'm gonna rip off my face, then rip off your face, then put your face on my face and put my face on your face!"

Nature and You

A lot of important poets drew a lot of inspiration from nature and the seasons and the flora and other ecological-paraphernalia. 

T.S. Eliot said that April is the cruelest month while Ezra Pound talked about petals on a wet black bough. Chaucer talked about flower juices and Wordsworth accidentally climbed a mountain one time. Robert Frost was actually the Snow Miser from that animated movie about Christmas and never saw a real flower in his life until he defeated the Heat Miser.

But it's important to remember that nature means a lot of things to a lot of different people, and the truth value of those perspectives can only be judged within their respective perspectives. Which is a lot like relativism, which people don't like because it's like comparing babies to pinatas. Just because candy comes out of both of them when you beat them with sticks doesn't mean that you condone them equally.

The point I'm trying to make though is that your ability to shape your own reality is extremely powerful and you better make sure that you have flowers in that reality because you need to be able to stop and smell them. It's something that science oftentimes fails to account for in its mad pursuit for false objectivity.

As the late great E=MC-cummings once said, 'everybody lives in a pretty how town, eat a can of prune-whip, pants turn brown."

That's strictly conjecture. But we really should reject dualism in our ideas about ourselves and reality. Because we can never get past appearances of how things seem to be and our bodies are undeniably linked to our thoughts and reactions and as it turns out, we all tend to accept that there is something instead of nothing in front of us and that's probably a good enough reason to paint a dinky picture of some flowers.

If you've enjoyed what you've read here, I encourage to write to your local library and tell them to turn websites into books.

Boiling Lemons

I take as my symbol the Bighorn sheep! 

Made Kale Chips Today

They were delicious. You go make them too! Okay? Have a grateful time!

Mr Andy's Three Extra Rules of Summer Camp

#11- No farting
#12- No chanting
#13- No being weird and gross

[Picture to appear come daybreak]

Head on a Thread

About Working:

Hello! In this segment I'll be sharing some thoughts on a topic I have chosen and feel that I can speak upon. The topic and thoughts have also been inspired by the picture that hangs ominously above this text.

It is of a human head--caught in an expression of bug-eyed surprise and/or horror and/or awe. It is a severed head. A bodyless head which hangs upon a string that is attached to a magical cloud one thousand feet in the air. The red and yellow color clouds or AURAS surrounding the head are reminiscent of a McDonald's food restaurant and beckons one to think, "I. am. loving. it."

I have some experience working. Not much. But some. And as far as I can see it, the coolest job in the whole universe would be to have heat-ray vision. You could use it to light hay on fire. You could use it to melt asphalt on the road. The uses are basically innumerable. A young child with a positive attitude and the ability to excite particles of matter until they ignite using only their brain and special corneas deserves all the success they will undoubtedly receive.

HOWEVER, it must be exceedingly obvious that, at the very most, only six people in the world at any given moment will possess this ability. What are the rest of us supposed to do?

And though the following advice may seem sparse and opaque, I assure you that it is the truest sentiment, expressed in the simplest, most complete way:

"Take a whole bunch of dead animal carcasses, put them in a burlap sack, and leave the sack on top of a slide at a local elementary school playground."

Truth is beauty and beauty is a well-executed plan.

Done and done.

THATCHED ROOF COTTAGES!!! THATCHED ROOF COTTAGES

BURNINATING THE COUNTRYSIDE!

Grape wizard. Strawberries. Cottages.

In other news, my apartment is in need of fruit. 

Man just sheeps and toasts

Beauty at the Beach

A patriotic monster has a good day at the beach.

ANGH NAGH GAH GWAGGGHHH!!

My long crooked limbs bake in the warm sun. My skin cracks and oozes, leaving a trail of toxic bile and pus with every rickety step. I have come here to live life to its fullest. I will sequester beautiful women and copious amounts of laundry detergent.

In this great free land, nothing is behind the reach of my nefarious grasp. Freedom shines on the wicked and the pure! It burns me the way grease fires never quite can. These grains of sand will soon be glutted with the blood of vacationers and their ice creams will be orphaned and dissolve in the heat.

The crust beneath my eyelids is boiling now! Their sandcastles will be razed and their umbrellas will be shipped to Mexico via Overnight express delivery. I don't mind the extra charge! I'm not in this for gain. I just want to watch the world burn.

It's a beautiful day! Not a cloud in the sky and the children squeal as they splash in the gentle waves. I will turn their joy to fear then jolt their minds with absolute terror until they are nothing but husks of skin and brittle bones. This country is good! Country good! Monster love freedom! Fireworks will soon give way to rain of fire and monster will be at peace once more!

Rurning

Crabadonk!

Sock feet Block head

I like running!

Green green ideas sleep furiously

It's not all that common; but, in this case, this is actually pretty close to what I had imagined in my head when I started making this.

So that's nice.

Robocakes

This is a tracing of a drawing I did at work today of Strawberry Shortcake with a giant fighting robot body. Every child was at least a little confused by a part of it (differing by gender) when looking at it.

Comfy Spoot

http://grooveshark.com/#!/album/Birthmarks/8722185

This whole new Born Ruffians album exists too enjoy! (and it's already two months old!)

Discoveries!