Sturm unter Drangt

Stupid interior critical voice.

Always bringing me down.

Anything I do that I am even remotely proud of, and the whisper starts.

You suck. You suck you sucky suck suck failure man.

How does someone even get an interior voice like that?!?!?

What the hell....mom and dad? Evolution? God and/or Pantheon of gods?! NutraSweet?!?!?

WHAT THE HELL ALL OF THE ABOVE, MAYBE, NOT SURE, HEDGING MY BETS SO I WILL BE RIGHT REGARDLESS OF OUTCOME?!?!?! CAPITAL YELLING!!?!??!

It's so invasive too, like things you didn't even think you could be critical of yourself for, and it's right there, fucking up the program.

You don't really like that band, you sucky fake. You just like it because the lady on the radio said it was good.

Really? That's really how you're going to walk across the street?

Could you chew your apple like anymore of an asshole?!?

Wait a second wait a second...are you telling me you are going to stand that close to the mirror when you floss? That close? You're like a..like a plaque spraying embolism....

You don't even know what an embolism is.

You are dumb. And worthless.

If I had an amazing imagination, tons of time, and boodles of talent, I would draw you a rendering of what exactly I picture this interior voice as looking like.

Kind of like that, I guess.

Someone told me that it was sad that I killed off Jim's steed, so I gave him another one.

But I don't want to have to redraw that horse over and over again, so I simplified it a bit.

I am rather proud of the design. It's kind of an elongated square.

If the story is just going to be silly, then "Jim Dandy to the Rescue" will be it's theme song. Go, Jim Dandy. Go. 

But if it manages to become a serious fantasy epic that stretches into multiple volumes and spins off into its own trading card battling game, then it's theme will probably be from Fantasia (the boobie scene) or anything by pre-Phil Collins, post-Peter Gabriel Genesis, during the time when nobody sang and the whole band just sort of waited around.

That's the worst Genesis joke I have ever heard.

Oh, great, it's you.

You should know by now I am never gone for long.

 Well please go away, I have a lot of topics I need to discuss and you are a real downer.

Anyways, there is really quite a bit I want to say about character design.

First, lets define character design. It is the act of coming up with a character that you then put on things like paper or small pocket books.

When designing a character, there are so many things to consider, but all of them boil down to please don't be terrible at it.

I'm sorry, Jim.

It is a fact that the Japanese are way better at character design then white people. Just ask anyone who feels exactly the same way I do. Don't ask someone who believes differently, though, because then you will have to weigh both sides of the issue, do research, form thoughts....it's just a big pain and I want to make things easier for you.

Let us test my thesis statement:

WHITE

Dagwood

JAPAN

Ambassador Magma

WHITE

Clarabelle Cow

Well, no need to flog the horse. You concede my point.

But here is an amazing secret about me: my great-grandfather was 100% Japanese. That means I am part Japanese. Which means part of me is really good at character design. I just hope it is my brain part.

So after the utter failure of Jim, I think I will do way better designing Jim's enemies.

Because they are monsters.

I really like to draw monsters. I wish I got to draw them on my blog all the time.

Dragons are very easy to draw. Start with a closed-eye smiley face:

Add some wicked clawed fingers and gently curving line connections:

Now put in the final details, like the whole rest of the body, alternating up-and-down pointy teeth, and horrific eyes:

 It takes practice, but you'll get there.

I drew my dragon in my notebook while I was watching the students clean the shoe store.

A woman trying on shoes walked past me, and I noticed her sneak a glance at my picture. I could not read her expression, but she got me to thinking how interesting it is to watch people try on shoes.

I like it when people just put on one of the shoes they are thinking about buying, and then walk around the store, staring straight ahead. Sometimes you can hear them talk a bit to themselves. The expression on their faces reminds me of watching a baby fill a diaper; it is very serious and focused on what it is feeling.

They have a funny shuffle to their walk because they are only wearing one shoe.

I really like it when old guys come in. They don't walk around at all. They just sit on one of the mirrored stools and put on one of the shoes they already knew they were going to buy. It is black with a nice dependable rubber heel. It is made in the U.S. of A. They put on the shoe and let out a sigh. Sometimes, their posture is really excellent.

If I age, I hope it is with excellent posture and no use for drawn out shoe purchases. 

Who am I kidding; I don't purchase shoes. I wear them until the bottom flaps all around like a giant lip. It makes me fall sometimes.
I tried to fix them with Elmer's glue. It made a neat glue sandwich but it barely worked. Then I tried super glue and other over the counter adhesives. Now my shoes are like new. 

My point is, if I walked through an ankle high puddle of Goo Gone, I would come out the other side barefoot. But the convoluted series of events that would have to take place for a puddle of that magnitude to appear in my path seems highly unlikely.

You just wrote 500 words about shoes. What is happening.

 Thanks, Jim, it seems like you meant that bellow to be supportive.

How does it feel, your only friend is a rectangle-riding simpleton that lives in your imagination? You really are the worst.

And did you get that library job?? Even an interview?

No.

I'm not surprised. When was the last time you actually achieved anything, anyways??  

This past year. I stopped smelling my finger; that was something. I have struggled with smelling my own finger since the 80s, when I accidentally grabbed a handful of fresh garlic and could not get the smell off my hands. I just kept sniffing it, like this:

The garlic faded, but it was too late. The monkey was on my back.
    

I would always trap the ring finger under my nose with my upper lip. Women have told me it is the sexiest thing they have ever seen, and then those women have dissipated with the wind because they were imaginary.

Actually, I had no idea I even did it. Sometime around 1989, a neighbor friend pointed it out to me.

"Why do you always smell your finger like that?"

"I DO?!?"

"Yeah, like this" and he imitated it:

     

"Are you kidding? Like this?"

"Yeah, just like that. Like this."

 
What followed was an idiotic display of simple primate behavior. 

 After awhile, I was just pretending to be incredulous; I was in it for the sniffing.

I am not going to even admit that I listened to one second of your ridiculous story. 

But if I had listened, I suppose the natural thing now would be to ask, 'how did you eventually quit'? 

I told myself that I could still sniff, but every time I did, I had to watch myself do it in whatever reflective surface was near at hand. 

After I made that resolution, I sniffed exactly one more time.

And??

That was all she wrote. I was so horrified by the obese Capuchin monkey in the mirror that I walked away from it and never looked back. 

If you have a bad habit that you love, never watch yourself or a video of yourself doing it. Except smoking, which is always cool and beautiful.

I'm so weak.

You are worthless. Have a nice day.





Creative Character Druthers I Have You

Do you remember when I called forth Jim into being?

It was last week.

I drew Jim for the first time, and then I felt like dying on an emotional level because he was so useless.

It's not personal, Jim. Well maybe.

I am having trouble pinpointing why you suck so bad, or why all the air goes out of me when I draw you.

But I guess it could be something about how you look.

How come you don't make me laugh?

Oh Jim, sad, stupid Jim, a rubber pencil and fake pooey are pretty good, but it's not just having funny stuff in your hand, the humor comes from what you do with them.

That's just juvenile. Babies stick things in their ears, Jim, not original characters bursting with inherent hilarity.

It gets worse though.

After I decided Jim would exist in a fantasy land with it's own incredibly dense and planned out lore and back story, I had some even better ideas.

My fantasy world would just turn every convention on its head, you know?

I have always been kind of a trailblazer. I was the first boy in my family to go to a public high school. At work, I am usually the first person to say out loud what I think about everything.

So in my children's marker pad that I bought at Big Lots for .50 cents, (for my Australian readers, fifty cents American is like two of your farthings, so like omg, bargain, right?) I began to lay the groundwork for Jim's world.

For one thing, I thought, holy crap, what if elves were short and bearded and stocky, and what if dwarves were tall and skinny and had arrows?!?!?

It was at this point in the creative process when I realized I was at a crossroads.

I'm not a fool; I know these drawings are kind of silly. No detail; childish; anatomically muddled.

But here is the thing: silly drawings can still convey serious themes in a meaningful way. Look what a miserable portrait of a marriage that The Lockhorns comic strip portrays. It's like a Bergman movie.

Was Jim's world going to be one of epic tragedy, or one of complete ridiculousness?

An example: I wanted Jim to have a weapon, but not a sword, because that is what people would expect. So I gave him a mace.

I was drinking my first mug of coffee in the school kitchen when a hilarious thought came to me. I drink a whole pot of coffee a day. By the time we put the kids on the bus, I am usually kind of sweaty and intangible. But the hilarious thought was unrelated to any of that. The hilarious thought was what if Jim had a spikeless mace?!??! HA HAHA!

OH MY GOSH MARTIN JUST THREW UP HIS ENTIRE SALAD!! GWEEN, WHAT ARE YOU DOING??? HELP ME!

I ignored lots of people and my entire job to draw that picture of Jim. You don't make art, art makes you.....do it.(?)

But here was the problem: this is the worst:a double colon. No just kidding. The worst is having an idea that makes you laugh in your head but when you write it down or draw it, you pray to God that no one finds it in the trash and traces it back to you because it is so terrible.

Now I have to redraw spikes on a hundred different pictures because I erased all the spikes back when the whole idea was unbelievably funny.

Do you want to learn to draw?

Here is how you draw spikes on a mace:

First, take your picture of a spikeless mace

Then cover it with pointy mountains.

Now draw me.

and call it either Adonis in front of yellow gradient fill or Hindenburg Rising. Let me know if you pick Hindenburg Rising, so I can get mad at you, eat all the Cinnamon Toast Crunch in the school pantry, and drink my tears mixed in with sweet, sweet milk.

I hope one of my loyal readers is a medieval weapons expert, and takes the time to let me know that a spikeless mace was a real thing and not funny at all. That it had a cool Latin name and was the weapon of choice for some fighty old weirdos. Sometimes I sound so nonsophisticated. Be smarter, I tell my brain. He can't hear me because he is not an ear.

So any epic hero needs a steed.

Do you know how hard it is to draw a horse from memory?

Or Snoopy??

Ok, this is an honest to goodness horse that I drew from my memory. It took a really long time, though, and I find that very discouraging.

Have you ever sat around all day, just being discouraged? It's pretty terrible.

So, although Jim's mace will be rendered at an epic level of fantasy realism, I have decided his steed will lean towards the silly.

Pssst...let me tell you a little secret, an artist's secret, if you will:
I like drawing blood-tee hee! lots of it! It's so nostalgic, like being a kid again. sh sh don't tell anyone hee hee

Anyways, Jim's steed is a classic children's toy-how ironical!

Looking around, I suddenly remember that I am at work and lunch break ended like four hours ago or something.

Don't worry, I have LOTS more GOLDEN CONTENT just like this to come.

But for now, I leave you with our hero beginning his epic quest:

Proteus

I was trying to write a novel but the songs on my MP3 player kept changing.

With each shift in tone and tempo, the novel would veer off in a direction that matched.

What started as a fantasy romance set to the music of a young Phil Collins quickly turned to the ethnic hijinks of some merry vagabonds prancing to my Songs of the Balkans CD. By the time Flatt and Scruggs started a'pickin the banjer, the whole story went terribly south. 

That was all in the first paragraph.  I gave up.

I have a tremendous envy of other people.

Those who can wear their earphones so discreetly you hardly notice.

Just a white slip coming up from a secret corner of their hoodie.

Mine dangles all over me in a mass of figure 8's and hopeless knots.

I am sure people see it hanging and assume it is some sort of intravenous feeding device.

If the volume takes a considerable jump from one song to the next, or heaven forbid someone is attempting to communicate with me, I can never find which pocket I shoved it in in order to turn it down.

There is a brief period wherein I scramble my body. My hands tangle in the cords of the ear buds and accidentally yank them from the port on the device.  

The person trying to talk to me assumes I was only pretending to listen to music because the headphone jack flings out, plugged into nothing.

I envy writers.

You hear them interviewed, and they talk about characters they created "coming to life". Surprising the writer by what they do or say.

"I had this guy, this character, running around in my head for awhile. And I was curious about him. Who is he? What does he want?"

I wish I could think like that, have a head filled with characters and worlds and be surprised by how they all interact.

It would be the best place in the world, and I would never leave it; just sit observing my interior, continually laughing at how surprising everyone was being.

Of course I want beautiful things to happen in there as well. It would be so great to create something beautiful.

Beautiful surprises. And then, after a series of like nine novels, I would have to kill off one of my characters. My wife would hear me crying from the other room.

"Is somebody stepping on the cat?!?" she yells.

"No," I whimper back, "no. It's just me. I...I...just killed Jeremy Titmouse. On the wall of the Obsidian Fortress. Run through by the Centipede King. The 11th of Dun, on Mondaynoth...in the..
...the year of the...*sniff* the Owl."

How do those writers do that??

When I try to create a character, I end up making myself.

I may call it some terribly bland name like Jim or Tim but it always ends up being me.

My anxieties; the exact same interior monologue as I, obsessing over stupid things in the same whiny voice.

And then I populate the world around the character with the mental equivalent of a set from a 1st grade production of Peter Rabbit.

Jim walks past tree number one. He sits on the floor in front of a cardboard cutout park bench. Ten kids sing and furiously pump their legs, none of it on beat. Jim sighs. The fourth grader playing Farmer Mcgregor hammily crosses his arms and yells Boy Howdy that dang rabbit is up to it ageeeeen. Some flatus escapes the music teacher's buttocks when she angrily shakes a finger at misbehaving boys.

Jim feels guilty all the time. He doesn't know why.

Peter Rabbit does that absolutely dreadful imitation of rabbit sniffing and whisker wiggling that theater people do, where they make circles with the lower half of their faces while scrunching up their noses.

You are not a violent person, but when they do that, you feel you have no choice and somehow you have to kill them.

The first time I ever felt irrational hatred for someone was at a play.

Our Town. The guy playing the father made an elaborate display of brushing imaginary toast crumbs from his fingers. You could tell it was one of those authentic details that actors know how to do, and the rest of us marvel at how effortless it seemed.

For some reason, I stared at him and could not stop thinking how he was a complete buttmunch.

Then Jim felt guilty.

My wife once almost broke up with me for calling someone a buttmunch.

It was an old lady who stole my parking spot.

I muttered how she was a buttmunch.

I think my wife was just repulsed that I could dismiss another human being, especially a frail old lady on her way into church, as a particularly unhygienic act of cannibalism.

I envy actors because maybe I want to be one.

There was an opening for a voice actor advertised on the internet, and I thought I could do that job.
I really did.

The description said, "Male voice needed for wake-up messages aimed at female listeners. Think warm and sexy. Sample lines might be "wakey-wakey" or "hello sunshine."

I crouched in front of the little microphone on my computer and said the lines over and over again.

It seemed OK. Pretty good, even. When I played it back it was the shittiest thing I had ever heard.

"What about being an essayist, or a man of letters?" no one asks.

A good essayist extrapolates larger truths from their personal experiences.

I can't extrapolate. All I see is me.

There is no one for me to write to. Can you be a man of letters that you wrote to yourself? If you describe yourself as a man of letters, are you a total ass?

It's like calling yourself a poet, I guess. You just shouldn't do it because it sounds kind of stupid.

You have to wait around forever until someone else calls you a poet, and then you can kind of go with it.

But the someone else can't be just your girlfriend or something; it can't be yourself as a man of letters writing about yourself and referring to you as a poet.

It's got to be someone like Oprah or Rabbi Kushner.

How I long to create something beautiful, something that truly moves the emotions of a whole roomful of people.
Or write a book that has a map in the beginning, and an appendix at the back.

My imagination is so destitute, though. The map would look something like this:

Okay, Jim. You are my character. I created you. Now run free in my imagination and amaze me with all the surprising decisions you make.

I drew this picture of Jim and suddenly went blank. Blank on Jim, on this post, on everything even remotely creative within me.

What should he do? Is he conflicted?

I hate how much he looks like an idiot.

Is there more to you, Jim?

Of course you are.

This novel sucks.

Don't characters have motivation or something?

I wish I had paid attention in all those writing classes. I wish I had paid attention to anything, ever.

Jim you idiot-looking fool, you are motivated by....your fear of people.

NO DAMMIT that's one of my fears.

JIM YOU ARE AFRAID OF....OF.....PEOPLE WITH SPECIAL NEEDS.

Jim is pointing at someone who is different then he is.

One time I pointed at a midget in a convenience store and my mom refused to buy me candy because she was so mad.

I wrote that sentence and hit another wall.

Why is being creative so painful?

Shut up Jim.
But no, you're right.
I would take a break, but every time I leave a post I can never finish it. Hours later, I've lost the thread of where I was going.....

Ha ha ha.

Yep, pretty stupid.

Jim leaves. Cross-eyed boy exits the other side of the stage.

Take a bow, Peter Rabbit.

The cheese stands alone.

Redundant Serialized Funny Papers

Regular readers: scroll down for the new stuff. SCROLL DOWN I SAID.

These are the continuation of my earlier serialized funnies post, and dumped here from my facebook.

I hope to hear back from that library job this week. yay.

Martin's dad really was mad at me about something, but I had to change the details of it somewhat.

Kan-cho and his family returned to Korea about a year after this event.

Please let me know if you like these comics, because I have very low self-esteem.

If I had more things to say, I would write them right now.

Have you noticed that I have a problem with repetitive sentence structure?

It's like: "Badunk badunk badunk COMMA badunk punchline/non sequitur." 

That is what it is like.