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| Hopped on my bike on the weekend's only truly sunny day and schlussed all the way from Queens to Coney Island, about a 20-miler plus the time I spend meandering, wandering and looking for snacks. neglected, however, to lather on sunscreen before I left and the combination of sleeveless shirt and roaring sunshine made me an aloe-craving lobsterchild by the early evening. So I rode to E's and then we put on helmets and rolled around on her futon. I'm serious. |
| Three-day weekends that start with gray skies and unrelenting rain really don't raise much hope in my spindle breast, but I took the deuce to stay in and lay down ink for four straight hours, pausing to straighten up my mess every once in a spell and deal with the chaos that the rest of my apartment has become. "Never live with couples," a wise person once said, and it's a shame 'cuz I feel like Mommy and Daddy are getting a divorce and I went through all that as a toddler, thanks. |
| Who's that that has to pay the IRS $1043.61 by the 15th of September? If you said your very own K. Thor Jensen, you'd be right as rain. Financial planning has never been my strong suit, and going from riding high on the UGO hog (ug-hog) to unemployed and homeless right around tax time 2001 left my affairs in a bit of disorder. So now I'm scrambling to accumulate surplus so they don't seize my bank account (totally not kidding). If you haven't patronized the store in the last few, may I make a gentle plea? In the meantime, it's off to the plasma centre with me. |
| Back at work and since the bossman's in absentia I'm laying out the bristol board on the desk, working like a madman on Unholy III, trying to get the damn thing ready to go by next Friday, hell or high water or both. I've got a good six pages to ink (I think) and if I keep on the page-a-day regimen I may be able to pull it off. Just counting seconds 'till I jump on the train and back home to the workdesk now - 360 of them. Fly by, little arbitrary markers of time. |
| Took my day off and headed up to my PO box only to find that I'd left my keys on my nightstand, so ended up hauling ass back home before my roommate went ot work and left me trapped outside for the rest of the day. Once I got there I was loath to leave again, so I huddled in trying to catch up on the epic amount of chickenscratch drawing that I needed to get done. My success ratio was less than I would have liked, but some days you just kind of have to write off and chalk up to human error. |
| Reader survey: What do you think of when you read the phrase "get awesome"? Please tell me. |
| Rode my new bike to work this morning, the chain grease-marking my left ankle and the kickstand occasionally wobbling back down to tink against the pavement. Took about an hour and a quarter and was well worth it - it's mostly downhill from Queens to Soho and zipping through 2nd Avenue traffic was fun and dangerous, especially with all the construction equipment and buses threatening to decapitate and otherwise sever my extremities. In a few hours I'll be reverse-engineering the ride to slouch, greasy and sweaty, into the shower and behind the drawing board, home at last. |
| Took the autobus to Ikea to use the gift card my maman gave me for the birthday, long haul into Jersey with a crammed cargo load of like-minded furniture shoppers and lovers of the Dane. I'd pre-selected the TV stand I wanted on the Interweb earlier so it was a quick operating, darting through to the self-serv area and lugging the 70 pound box back home to Queens. It strained my spider-arms a bit more than I'd like to admit but after an hour of Allen wrenching and general hammering it's up and doing the job, making my living space that many inches closer to civilized society. |
| The sun shot out from above the windowsill to rouse E. and me from a solid state slumber, today was the day that I buy my new bicycle. We logied up, ate breakfast and then I split off to Wmsbrg to find the hippie who sold me my last bike and then smoked pot through a toilet paper tube stuffed with fabric softener. $100 later, I had my new ride - a cherry red one-speed Schwinn with no handbrakes and I was coasting down the bridge, dragging my scuffed Converse heels to slow down. Now to wedge some playing cards in the spokes and get some streamers for the handlebars. |
| Friday, finally - getting jazzed up to buy a bicycle this weekend and start oscillating around town trying to fill the blank spots in my Hagstrom. It's been over a year since I've had a ride of my own, and I'm jonesin' for my traditional 1-speed Schwinn with the high handlebars and the black spray paint job, U-locked to the grill outside and invulnerable to thievery. |
| Back to work but with weights lifted - tiny sun of optimism peeking through clouds of total-fucked. The summer's not yet over, motherfuckers, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna let a little bucket of stress knock me out of the game. So I start whistlin' and drawin' and gettin' mine again, trying to let it roll off me. I'm good at taking abuse - maybe too good at it, Naomi sez. Who knows, though - I'm so used to bein' beat down like a dog that I'm not even sure I feel it anymore. Having thick, dumb, hinterland hillbilly skin can be a perk sometimes. |
| After my rage-out of yesterday, I haul one of the chairs up on the roof, go to the beer store and buy a six-pack of shandy and half a roast chicken and sit in the sun, trying to melt away the stress like butter on a hot Minnesota morning. It works, for the most part - after two hours under the glare, I'm jelly, incapable of mustering a harsh word towards anybody, so I go inside, shower off, and collapse back-first onto my bed, wondering what I'm going to do with my life next. |
| Overcome with broken, crippling rage - slamming doors and yelling and hands locked in permanent strangle, ten-hour work day grinding down last flakes of my will-to-live. The continual teeter towards oblivion that my workplace puts me on is getting a litle stressful, and I'm not able to suffer it with my usual duck-back aplomb. So I yell, slam, huff on subway home to beers and collapse. |
 Outside my office this morning. |
| Spent the day working on eBay stuff at the office, the rain torrenting down outside not making me regret that decision. Things are going well on that front - making enough to hopefully haul me out of this recent wallet crisis and pay a decent chunk of Ryan's wrestling school tuition to boot. I'm about 1/3 of the way through mortgaging his precious childhood memories and should be finished by mid-September at this rate. After that? Raid somebody else's basement, perhaps. Any volunteers? |
| Most everything's back to normal today, people already sharing stories about what they were up to when the lights went out. Apparently there were crazyparties in more hip locales around the city, but in sleepy Greek Queens, nothing but some breaking bottles and scattered whooping. Spent the day running errands left undone by blackout, sweating out the morning sun before heatstroking back home and collapsing, lugubrious, to bed. |
| Woke up, batted at the radio expecting to hear nothing only to find out that power'd been restored in my tiny neighborhood in Queens before most of the rest of the city. A second nice surprise was that the subways and most of Manhattan were still out, so no going to work for me today. Got up, ate some breksne, and headed out on a ramble around Queens for lack of anything better to do. E. came over (she'd made it across from Jersey via ferry and crashed at a friend's who not only had no power but no water as well), took a shower and then enjoyed the bounty of modern civilization via DVDs and cold beer. |
| The lights dim, brown and die and, after some confusion, I walk home over the 59th street bridge, cracking jokes with a throng of other power-deprived commuters. I get home as the sun sets, light some candles and work on a painting by dim, flickering light until my roommates get home, and then we drag some chairs up to the roof and watch the cherry moon rise into a sky of new city stars. |
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randompartier: so my mom has this kid in her class named k thor denson kthorjensen: impossible randompartier: yeah and he has ADD syndrome or something randompartier: and they say he has an "interesting mind" kthorjensen: no actually that sounds about right |
| The sun's out, my belly's full and while I'm certainly not going to trumpet that all's well with the world, I'm at least still walking and the tearing pain in my groin and hamstrings seems to have gone away, so that's a small favor I suppose. Continuing the mighty slog of eBay listings, still amazed at all the crap Ryan's parents bought him. I certainly don't remember having this many toys when I was a callow youth, but maybe I just didn't realize it at the time. |
| Back at work and most certainly not enjoying myself all that much. The latest wave of financial insecurity is threatening to topple my litle watercraft, and my valiant efforts to scrape-scratch away at the dam holding the metaphor in seems only to be resulting in broken fingers. I hate this. I hate feeling like this, and now my boss is talking about cutting me down to three days a week, a move which I will not be able to survive. I am sliding into my thirties and I'm basically in the same hand-to-mouth position I was five years ago. Something needs to change but I'll be fucked if I know what it is. |
| Yankees went down to the Mariners 8-6 but I can't get too upset about seeing the old hometown team beat the new hometown team - in this case, the winners are the fans. And the real winner is my roommate, who after half a decade of baseball attendance finally caught a foul ball popped into the stands. Yes, he did catch it with his face, but he kept hold of it and thus it stands. We took his scuffed rawhide home and sat it on the mantel, and then I ate dinner and, sunstroked and sportsed-out, went to bed. |
| Spent most of the day locked up in my office throwing a ton of Ryan's stuff up on eBay to pay for him to go to wrestling school and me to go to the grocery store and get something to eat. If you're into comics, old Nintendo games, or action figures that you had in your youth and hate your Mom for throwing away, click on over. I'll be putting up new stuff all week. |
| Cotton-brained and hung over all day today from a solid sixer of Hoegaarden-sipping in the beer garden as the rain came down. Many meltables were kept scared off from the weather but those who dared were amply rewarded with good beer and great food, and we went until past midnight on a school day and it was all pretty Goddamned great. Figure another 14-18 hours of sleep tonight to catch up and I'll be ready to rumble by Saturday night once more, older but no wiser. |
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| It's my day off and I have to get a haircut, get my glasses tightened, get my mail out of my PO box (hopefully containing at least one mid-sized check so I don't have to eat beans and rice for the next 9 days), go home, clean my room, finish this week's comic, practice some Eno songs on the guitar for yet another mystery secret project, and probably a half-dozen other things that I'm blanking on before the big party tomorrow. I hate feeling like this - overdriven, heart beating six steps too fast, out of control and not in my usual good way. Maybe I'll try to squeeze in some meditation time tonight, slow down the motor a bit. |
| What with all the hecticity of planning a party and trying to get everything to run smoothly, things are getting more than a little stressful around this little e-homestead. I'm tired and groggy and sweaty (the humidity here seems to be hovering around 140%) and flat ass busted broke (not so good) and honestly I kind of just want it to be over and me to be waking up Friday morning with a skullsplitter hangover and a handful of pleasant memories. |
| At 11:54 this evening I'll turn 27 years old. Usually my actual birthday is pretty quiet, as I tend to offload the celebration to a later, more feasible date - in this case, Thursday. Until then, though, I'm juts going to quietly enjoy being another year older and more awesome and wait for my fabulous golden presents to roll in. You all did remember to get me fabulous golden presents, right? |
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Dumping tactics inspired by sleepily half-watching an episode of Sex and the City, alternating between me and E. "I'm going to break up with you with a commemorative coin." "I'm going to break up with you with a Franklin Mint collectible doll of you being sad and it's going to be called JUST GOT DUMPED." "I'm going to invent a massive laser and carve on the surface of the moon a Lockhorns cartoon where the Lockhorns are breaking up and then I'm going to draw an arrow with the laser and write THOR pointing to the guy and E. pointing to the girl." "I'm going to get Tyra Banks to come over to your house and tell you that not only are you not going to be America's Next Top Model, you're also totally dumped." "This year at the Super Bowl they're gonna bring back the Bud Bowl and the Bud Light team's going to run one back from an interception for a touchdown and as they're getting ready to kick the extra point they're going to show you and me in the stands and I'm going to break up with you on the Bud Bowl jumbotron." |
| My roommates are fussin' and feudin' so I went to Neil's Ultimate Murder Party (Quicktime, 2.5 megs) to clear my head with booze. It worked! Did a little painting on his walls and kicked down a sizable amount of beer in a short amount of time. Unfortunately, New Jersey runs out of ber to quick for the likes of me so I drunkenly staggered back to my office, cracked open a Sapporo tallboy and boozily talked shit on the Internet for a few hours before passing out. All in all, a successful evening. |
| E. last night: "I thought ugly was the new black." Also: new stuff in the store if you want me to be able to eat. |
JULY
all content (c) 2003 k. thor jensen