900th Post: 2015 in Review

260 posts for the year! (not counting this one!) NEW RECORD!

Lots of pictures and comic-things. Probably the lowest word count of any year.

Should I include some favorites? Nope. It was all killer. No filler. Just pick a month that wasn't between February and April and it'll be good.

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For 2016:

For January: at least 20 3-panel comics!

More poems!

Yesterday, my sister and I started playing 1,000 Blank White Cards. So I will post some of the better cards that come out of that.

More job update posts. Kids do funny things.

What I ask of you: More comments please! They are very nice. Suggestions, requests, or questions, or be like Bird and just link to other comics and things.

More running related stuff.

(many of these likely won't be done. Except the comics. Gotta do that one.)

Pokemon was Right.

Sticky Wicket

I like these characters. They are easy to draw and unemotional in a way I find appealing.

An Ode to the Throat

Written for a poem exchange with a friend.

Leapman

@ the leap contest:

A Christmas message: it's not about what you get, or even what you have, it's about not falling into a bottomless pit.

Response to Earlier Posts:

Some interesting articles by Angela Hanscom about the constraints on young kids movement and social development. Makes me rethink my role and the role of an after-school program. Maybe they do need less regulation and room to get hurt and make mistakes.

STOP REGULATING EVERYTHING ADULTS!

Kids gotta move

More about kids moving

14 Cartoons for the Holiday Season, Friends

A swarm of these gentlemen have occupied your property, sir. They are here for the holiday magic. Surrender it promptly with cheer and sweat of the season.

This is not a good Christmas party.

At a good Christmas party you wouldn't be trying to kill me.

My holiday problems are unique and my joys are special and my own.

You are my enemy. I must destroy you in the name of Christmas with this laser.

 You are not Santa.

Santa wouldn't be trying to kill me. 

At the holidays we hold hands in pairs and give thanks to the horrible monster that conquered our territory.

Many people are not fond of the hand holding.

Don't be intimidated by anyone yelling during the shopping. They have given in to the rage that you are strong enough to bottle.

This Christmas trip got my socks wet. We were alone at sea and rescued by Crab-Santa.

I'm disappointed that you didn't get me anything for Christmas. I thought you were a good friend but now I don't think that. Get out of my sight, you.

We are different than the other two guys. We didn't get to be in that cartoon and instead are in this one. Neither of us have gotten the other gifts and our fate is truly worse than the one guy above.

My friend has been torn limb from limb by this tree. It is not a Christmas tree.

We are falling to be born on Christmas day. It is the end of a long silence of unbeing before a burp of existence.

Being around this large creature by myself is terrible. I hate it.

Being around this small creature with other people is great. I love it.

Happy Holidays. Remember to be happy.

Little Run On and On

Today a little kid came up to me and said something like,

"We were talking about playing Star Wars and then he came over and knocked down our fort and we told him to stop and he picked it up and threw it through us and gave everything to until we anyway already started going over that part a little bit after he said we couldn't build with me and now it took a long time to take it but he doesn't even care."

And I blinked a few times and said, "....well, what do you want me to say?"

"We were here first and he said we weren't."

Then the other kid screams, "NO they weren't!"

I like watching kids face these really challenging problems of blame and justice and feeling wronged. Their testimony is usually unreliable and I think the best thing they can take away is a quiet confidence in themselves to persevere through their trials. As for my part as a robo-cop/judge judy of the playground/gymnasium, I just take in their data to build patterns of behavior and optimize my tiny-human directing approach.

Looking and Intaking

The curtains are drawn. The glowing screen dimly lights the face of the hunched man. His burned out, pinpoint pupils furiously scan the shining page. The black beads vibrate in their cells. A grim, slack look sits on his face. His hands are like gnarled spiders jabbing at their webs--agitated by prey ensnared. His chest is sunken and his spine is curved and his shoulders hunched. His clothes sag on his frame from the pull of the musky layer of sweat-dried damp socks and underwear covering his shadowy floor. His eyebrows clench like muscular furry worms ready to attack. His overbite reveals large jagged crusty stained teeth that shatter Dorritos and burritos and Tostinos and Fritos, Cheetos, and pizza regularly. His hair lies lank and around his neck--slowly coagulating into a shimmering creeping ooze that will slide down his back and run out through his pants leg and settle around his feet that he has not seen in many months. A quiet, motivated, desperate man.

Some Jumbled People and Some Jumbles

Here's a duck in a bowl. Today these pictures feel like justifications for writing words. For some of your time and mine. Setting an occasion. Trying to have a moment of not-sucky expression. 

And I like telling you about these pictures. It helps me see things in them and it also helps express ideas that didn't have form. It's reciprocal between the pictures and ideas. A vehicle with passengers. A bowl with a duck-bod in it. 

This guy is all squiggly moves. Only squiggles. Which a lot of people find frustrating. It bothers people to go through life in a squiggly way because sudden turns and bends and windy paths are frustrating and halt the part of your brain that is able to predict what is happening next and allow you to be comfortable now. And when that system fails, at least for some people, the default is to be worried about the future which equals worrying in the present because you might as well assume something awful will happen. But then in the bigger picture the squiggles usually add up to a person anyway so we should chill out probably.

This guy has a giant fin or horn (hard to tell which) on top of his head and he doesn't want anyone to look at it. But he also doesn't want to look at people and see that their eyes are consciously avoiding it. And, really, what he wants is to be able to look at other people and not see them looking at him how he assumes they will be looking at him, which they always do...it seems. So now instead of looking at them looking at him, he just looks.

This guy is seeing something terrible that just happened behind him. Previously, if you'd asked him if there was a chance that, as part of the whole "vision" deal, he would potentially see something that would make him wish he'd never been able to see, he would have said, "Okay. I accept that condition and would still like to see." But no one ever asked him that. And so he feels kind of crushed by the whole situation. It doesn't really matter what it is he saw. 

But if you're really curious, what happened was this small child started screaming. It was a high, clear, horrible, sharp scream that went on and on until she ran out of air. But then, even when she couldn't produce sound anymore her face was still frozen in this screaming mask of pain and the child's mother was shaking the girl, trying to snap her out of it and then the girl's nostrils start expanding and they explode out of her face like parachutes and these huge nose-flaps of skin are hungry and angry and they envelop the mother and start slowly trying to pass her through the child's nasal cavity. The child is catatonic at this point and the really crazy thing is that the mother is strong enough to resist the nostrils so that she doesn't get totally devoured but not strong to escape from the grip so both the monstrous nostrils and the mother are destroying themselves in the struggle and there's blood and mucous and hair everywhere and loud sucking sounds and screaming and...well, goodness. I shouldn't have told you.

This guy is peacefully sleeping. What a horrible subject.

 

Drawings from the Weekend

This lady is trying to yell at you but she is too far away for it to be intelligible. You feel guilty because she probably has a reason to be yelling at you and you know she will only become angrier because you will not rectify the issue. But then, on another level, she's in the wrong for only being able to suggest irritation without providing justification. Her anger takes on a senseless quality. Best to respond with your own overt displays of aggression and balance the equation.

This is jumbled space. The T-Rex is wearing sneakers. The woman is pondering serious ponderings. Sometimes a homeless man named Frank comes to the door seeking money and a ride. My roommate complains that he leaves the doorknob all greasy.

This mouse is thinking to himself, "My oh me! Three cheeses. This is the height of my triangle-headed life." But the question becomes, is the mouse happy because he is unaware of all the cheeses he is not able to possess or because he is consciously able to focus on the cheeses that he has? Is the Mouse's happiness a function of his ignorance or concentration? I guess it could be both. And your answer would depend on your interpretation of the mouse's character. He looks pretty stupid to me. But maybe a "simple-minded" kind of stupid as opposed to a dimness. 

This guy is like, "Y'see, the thing about the fifth dimension is that it's made out of invisible walls. And you gotta take off your shirt like this and really feel around if you ever want to discover one."

This guy looks like if you visited him, everything would be awful in a way that you couldn't quite put your finger on. And then, eventually, all these slightly-off annoying things would build up until you could examine your own abstract hatred of it all and laugh at it. He's that kind of funny. Interacting with him is like being handed various harvested organs and trying to balance your distaste for the body parts with an obligation to make an honest effort at your task until the task becomes physically impossible and the stack topples and you can only laugh with relief that the horrible thing collapsed under its own weight.

Fart android. Sitting on the dock and waxing melancholic.

This guy is really rich. Which he finds alienating. Which drives him to more extravagant displays of wealth and that feeds the cycle and blah blah blah. I think he likes being rich more than he likes feeling accepted. So then the alienation drives him in a way. And in some moods he fancies himself 'special' and 'unique'.

Plots n' Sots

Idea #1- A guy attempts to make a drastic life change and run away from everything bogging him down only to be mired in trivial things that his soul-crushing routine had guarded him from.

Idea #2- An otherwise normal woman who emits a xenon-headlight-level beam of light whenever she opens her mouth works up the nerve to intervene in a confrontation between a raging customer and a cashier at a grocery store. 

Idea #3- A 1st-person-perspective view of a million worms burrowing through your body from front to back. And then you get hung up on a pegboard in a classroom at a school for blind children where you are beloved. 

Idea #4- Assemble a line of like 5 to 6 thousand people and have them tell a story with each person contributing only one word.

Shaking Clenches

More plots.

#1- Baldy Takes His Shot. This guy is going to arm wrestle someone or some thing that is just out of frame. And before they begin they have this extended conversation that we join in the middle of. The guy talks about all his frustrations and failures and disappointments and what he would have done differently and how unfair it all seemed. 

#2- In the Caves of Trolls- On the way to a death metal concert, three friends (an old bag of leaves, a dusty rake, and a trumpet) stumble upon a cavern full of cave trolls working on some sort of mysterious sub-subterranean project. Instead of investigating, the friends/discarded objects go to eat pizza and speculate on the cave trolls' intentions.

#3- There's No More Ocean Anymore- The ocean is slowly emptying into a large drain in the South Pacific. The story takes place 45 minutes after the last of the water has disappeared.

#4- Life Finds a Way- A dangling piece of yarn shakes about spasmodically and babbles loud incomprehensible jibberish. The task of the reader is to try to procure food, water, and shelter from this piece of yarn.

(Blogger! Why are you center-justifying everything against my wishes?!)

Caaaaaaaaaaaat

This is a cat. He's a character in a story that I'm writing. In the story, a family of microscopic folk singers cling to the bridge of my nose and try to discover America. You'll have to accept that they somehow understand the concept of America but due to problems of scale, they can't experience a nation the way you or I would. But they are trying to discover it by way of their itty-bitty senses. It's a delightful farce that will please some and likely not resonate as much with others. 

The cat is a sort of ambiguous villain/anti-hero with motives and a backstory that is gradually pieced together and careful readers will like the cat best and think everyone else must be hopelessly blinded by stupid for not also thinking so.

Me at 24

A solemn young man in skinny pants and an oversized hoodie searching for danger and malcontent on a school playground. 

I like my job. I enjoy doing it and I want to get better at it. My goals as an afterschool guy are #1) keep kids safe (from themselves, each other, and the environment they interact with) and #2) foster positive relationships between the kids and each other and myself and the kids. (#3 have fun).

I feel like there's more to say but this is it for now. Me!

Guerrilla Chicken Restaurant Psychology

I got this text from a friend.

Him: Boberry biscuit [picture of biscuit on paper plate]

Me: Looks incredible.

Him: Tastes like victory.

Him: What's even better is that there isn't a Bojangles in NOVA

Him: Who knows where this came from!!!?

Him: Who cares. 

"Now remember, y'all. DON'T eat me! A mysterious Bojangles blueberry biscuit found in a bar in a town with no Bojangles."

THE NEW BOJANGLES TEMPTATION

You just gotta try it!

(available everywhere that isn't Bojangles)

Weird Bird

Hey, weird bird. Man, you are looking so weird today.

Are you trying to write something on that piece of paper, weird bird? Why does it appear that you've jammed the pencil through the side of your lank, malleable bill? That doesn't seem convenient.

Weird bird, you can't just hop around in an old duffel bag instead of flying. Duffel-locomotion is still severely under researched and under-funded.  

You have too many eyes, pupils, and human-baby-hand-syndrome, weird bird.

I don't know what you're doing all the way over there, weird bird; but I bet it is something that is weird. Maybe you're ordering a special baseball bat made of lead and try to market yourself as a bargain pediatrician for the children of travelling salesman. That's a terrible demographic to cater to, weird bird! You leave those kids alone! They've been through enough.

Now stay in this man's ear and think about what you've done.