Complete summer time FEAR!

I keep hearing this clicking noise in the corner of my bedroom under a bunch of papers. I’ve been hearing it for a few nights now. It could be some kind of a neon colored bug that crawled in through a hole in the screen looking for security and companionship. I picture a praying mantis that spits cancer juice. But, to tell you the truth, I’m too afraid to investigate any further. So, I sit on this futon cushion, that I use as a bed on the opposite corner of the room, lights out, complete blackness (aside from that oppressive blood red moonlight), papers and empty cans strewn about, in complete fear. Fear that perhaps this clicking noise comes from some kind of amazonian insect. An insect that’s fit for National Geographic magazine. An insect that, god forbid, will find it’s way into my urethra. 

But, we’ll see. 

There isn’t much escape for me from these tribulations. Even when I go to my job in the morning, lifting a tray or a baking sheet usually interrupts some kind of cockroach rally that was going on. It’s the city, man. One time I ran to the back of the store in between all of the heart wrenching  labor to get a quick drink out of my coffee cup and a little, prickly cockroach came popping out to tell me that he had taste-tested it for me. I did not thank him. 

Leaving my place of employment, it is important that I shake out all of  my belongings. This sometimes leads to further interruptions to all cockroach rallies and scheming taking place in my coat pockets. Some will fall, resembling a scary ticker day parade near the back door of Denver’s filthiest bakery. Then, I run as fast as my quivering legs will move all the way back to my clicking bedroom. 

Goooooodnight!

I wonder if anybody actually really believes that they are smart. I wish I did. I’d be smart if I knew things. Most things that I know I know only because I set out to learn them. That’s the big difference between myself and a lot of other people. Most people learn things they don’t care to know. They’ll read a book only because they have to and so on, and are content to just drift through life with no real awareness to the world or it’s past cultures. That’s the way they want it. Ignorance is bliss!

And that’s okay. Just don’t talk to your buddies so loud when I’m on the bus with you.

I didn’t go to school, and if I had, I would have devoured everything I could have in those text books. It makes me sick even listening to my voice. I can hear my empty head in my voice.  The words that clumsily stumble out of my mouth. If you talk to me, you should know that every time I open my mouth, inside I’m screaming at myself to shut the hell up. God bless my heart, I’m just not as intelligent as I wish to be. 

Hey,

I sometimes have to resort to threatening letters to editors. 

It’s tough when you are basically a talentless cartoonist, waving your hand in the air waiting for somebody to turn around and take a look at you. I suppose it’s only getting tougher for guys like me. Everybody keeps on telling me that print is dying. I have a hard time believing that. It sounds so stupid. The strong will survive. I love books! I love magazines, I love newspapers. I want to hug them all. Tell them to come home with me, enjoy a nice relaxing evening in the trash dump I call my apartment. Have a cup of joe with me. Let’s film each other to mark our time together. 

But anyway, the people all want to talk about how the internet will be everything in cartoons soon. How, floppy comic pamphlets are going to be old news, that indeed alternative/independent comic books are a thing of the past. I can’t listen to it. It’s insane to me. Why do I have to walk among you all? 

This evening, I was in a sullen mood, wanting to take a walk through my city’s alleyways to think and get away and convince myself that I am a super man.  Not Superman the famous comic book hero, but super man. Somebody special. Somebody better than your friends. I have to walk through Denver’s alleyways to do this. Don’t ask.  I’ll tell you: alleyways are an untouched, dark and mostly silent getaway in a place that is so crazy with people young and old on their way to see Wolverine.  In some of my favorite alleys, you get to see for yourself how things were built a long time ago and adjusted over time as ownerships changed, as a window was smashed, as the concrete needed to be patched up, as a fire escape was removed and some windows and doorways were bricked up. Everything has a real look to it, because its more hidden from people walking by and therefore doesn’t need to be as slick as the front of the building. It’s the part you don’t see unless you want to, or need to. 

I can really  see the beauty of the affects of age in ways that other people can’t. When I see an old building that has been patched up a number of times, with a rusted fire escape, I think of all of the corpses in the ground who had fine memories of  that place. All of these people who had the greatest times of their lives in the rooms of that old apartment. The bricklayers, who worked putting all those bricks in place, not realizing that  one hundred and thirty years later,their labor would be appreciated by a young man who just happened to be passing by. Who was stopped in his tracks to become lost in the details. One hundred and thirty years later one man out of  thousands of people who pass by , was able to really see the work that they did and care. One man out of thousands who sees a lonely old building sitting in a parking lot by itself and feels sad about it.  I am such a Super Man.

Me with Orange county artist Ed Templeton in 2001.

Mortality poem

Not much to say, lately. I’ve just felt like hiding.  I stole this photo of me on free comic book day (at Time Warp Comics in Boulder )from somebody’s facebook.  It’s of John P., Jason Shiga and I selling our comics together. What a life I’ve chosen…