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| Oh oh oh! I forgot - one of the PoE kids I was hanging out with last weekend, on picking me up at the train station, was a little confused because she thought she'd met me before. It turned out that I apparently have my very own celebrity impersonator! She was waiting in line for some screening with a dude who looked like caricature-me - bigger nose, greasier hair - and topic turned to something evil-worthy, at which point he introduced himself as me. What the fuck? I certainly hope your gambit got you some anime con pussy, O fakester, because trust me, you don't want my life. |
| Back to work - I leave for the West on Weds so trying to get things in order - my computer-failure last week making things increasingly more difficult, but for the most part clocks are ticking right enough. I was supposed to go to Brian's birthday tonight but I really don't think I can - just too much packing & cleaning & drawing & et cetera to get done before my flight. Sorry, dudenheimer. I suck as a friend, major. |
| Last day down in Jersey and young Eric, tasting the ocean for the first time, loses his glasses in the surf. Not a big deal, except that he drove a rental car down from Vermont and was also our ride back to the train station. Thankfully, Jack's prescription was similar enough that he could manage a subtly nerve-wracking drive back to Bay Head, where we very narrowly caught the train and returned home to a Penn Station in which every other person was a cop with a submachine gun. Home, shower with Dr. Bronner's peppermint to cool the skin, and then asleep in my own sorely-missed room. |
| We got in last night, went down to the beach - a block away from the house - for a bit, and then drank ourselves into a collapsing stupor. Today we swam, tanned (or burned), kayaked and then went to Fantasy Island, a surreal "kiddie casino" where 12-year-olds pumped quarters into slot machines in exchange for prize tickets. Bowled some skee-ball (pretty much lost my arm, alas) and rode some jittery carny rides (including the Scrambler, a favorite) and then back to the house to oblivion-drunk and retire, sandy and tingling, to bed. |
| Totally muddle-headed and hung over - went out drinking with the crew after the date - no spoilers, sadly - I figure I'll keep things under wraps until the episode airs (December/January) - so you'll just have to hold yr. horrible horses. It wasn't the complete disaster that I was expecting - unfounded rumors that they were going to fix me up with an ultra-monster proved false. Today I'm off down the shore after work with E. and some PoE kids for a weekend's boozing, swimming and carbonizing in the summer sun. Also avoiding the Republicans but that should be a given. |
| Dear Diary, today I got kicked in the nuts like fifteen times on TV, more later, love Thor. |
| Of course, the day before I have to go on TV I get a bunch of new zits right on the bridge of my nose. HELLO WORLD, thanks for making things more difficult yet again. I'll hardcore treat them tonight and hopefully be halfway decent by tomorrow. The Proactiv doesn't seem to be working as well as it was when I first started it - it could be because I'm not exercising as much, thus not sweating & aerating as much, or it could be that my skin is just becoming cockroach-resistant to any such aid. Who knows. Just one more little thing to worry about. Hopefully after I get the next few weeks finished I can spend some time putting shit in order - my room, like most of the rest of my life, is a collapsing hellmess and I gotta get that shit shipshape, stat. |
| I can't believe that I wrote the phrase "buck up, little huckabee" yesterday. Something is obviously deeply wrong with my brain. I could barely sleep last night - finally drifted off for a few hours at 5:30 this morning, but had to get up again to go to work. I was exhausted - just a lot of rolling around uncomfortably with the lights off. Now I know what all those girls complain about, haw. Oh, lord. Jokes! Always with the jokes! Two days until TV humiliation, a week until Seattle, back! to! the! griiiiiiind! |
| Ugh. Another beautiful outside mocking my office-bound inside. Three days until I film the fucking Blind Date episode, my face is of course a total hell disaster, I'm tense as fuck with a million things to do before I leave for Seattle next week, deadlines deadlines deadlines, now is most certainly not the time to be having gay-assed personality crises. Ah well - what to do about them? Buck up, little huckabee - get through this and, well, you'll stay alive to get through more stuff in the future. That's some pretty cold comfort. |
| Well, that was kind of embarrassing. Leaving it up, though. Today was a little less intense, lonelywise, but maybe that's because I slept 'til noon and it was a beautiful sunny day out. I really don't know if there's any solution to the way I feel sometimes - maybe it's just the way things are, through whatever combination of genetics and environment, I've been wired to feel this way. I seem to be oscillating wildly between optimism and fatalism, which I guess isn't exactly all that new a feeling. I get built up by little successes but it's not the huge failures that drag me down - it's the regular mechanics of living in a world that I really just don't understand at all. I can cope with failure - I've been doing that for a long time. I don't really even know what I'm trying to scrape at here. I don't have a way to describe the way I feel when this happens. Anxious, fearful, nervous, hyper-conscious - here's an example. Saturday night, walking down the street, walked past this couple - the guy says (referring to me) "That guy?" - girl says "no," I glance over, respond "No." and walk away semi-laughing. Of course, after a block, creeps in paranoia - what were they saying about me? How was I being judged by these complete strangers? What the fuck? And then, sinking and sinking, until I fled back to the office to drink whatever beers I could find in the fridge. How do you not let this bother you? Ugh. |
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Warning: long, wallowing. It's 1:00 in the morning. I'm sitting in my office listening to Dragonforce and there's really nothing I feel like I can do right now but write. Walking back through the LES from this shitty avant-garde metal nonsense bullshit illegal performance in a graveyard under a bridge, I was completely overwhelmed with shit feelings. Walking past people spilling out of bars, grouping, talking, I felt incredibly alone and hopeless. I ws thinking about stopping into the Magician for a beer but when I walked by I couldn't. I didn't feel like I belonged. I felt like if I walked in I was going to be so painfully, obviously, pathetically alone. I felt false. It's really hard for me to write about the way I feel every day, because doing so kind of acknowledges that it's not a normal way to feel, or that I don't think it is, but I gotta try. I feel incredibly awkward in any sort of social situation where I don't feel like I have power over other people's attention. I am desperate for attention and terrified of rejection. I do really well in situations where I feel I am more socially competent than the people surrounding me - where I can assume a leadership or mentorial role. When I don't know where I stand, whether it be because I don't know the people around me or I don't know what the connection is to them, I get anxious. Usually there's somebody around to act as a bridge and let me acclimate myself, but when I'm alone I feel completely incapable. And it's disgusting how much of my self-worth and emotional happiness is based around this. I am pitifully, painfully insecure. And this expresses itself in me avoiding socialization to an almost pathological level. When I was a kid, I was a complete hermit - I lived in the basement and locked myself in as much as possible. I could count on one hand minus the thumb the number of friends I had before the age of 14 or so. There's obviously reams and reams of writing on this shitsite about my early life and how it made me the way I am today, but I don't know what the fuck I can do about it! Am I just fucking broken forever? Is it ever going to get any easier? Am I ever going to feel comfortable outside my fucking bedroom? Shit, I sometimes don't even feel comfortable in there. I really, really don't belong anywhere, I think. I don't have the tools that people have to deal with each other and I don't know how to get them. And every day that goes by makes it worse, makes me feel more alien and outsider. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Yes, the fact that I'm listening to ridiculous over-the-top theatrical power metal doesn't make this any easier. |
| Every time I open my mixed fruit salad container from Gourmet Garage, the blueberries go cascading out onto my desk 'cause they're just ladled on the top of everything else (the bottom, of course, is junk-fruit - cantaloupe and honeydew melons). I have to scramble to round them all up and plop them into my mouth before they get all intermingled with my office supplies. And, since I'm more than a little hung over this morning, this simple act has been proving very difficult. So there's fruit all over my desktop and since I forgot to grab a plastic fork I'm spearing blueberries with an unfolded paperclip and ferrying them gently to my mouth. Not an auspicious beginning to a weekend. |
| My friends Jon & Karen, who have known each other for just a sketch under a year now, are getting married today. Unreal. And I'm all for it - they work, as a couple, pretty briliiantly. Just strange to watch it happen so quickly. Kind of heartening, though, too - not everything is doomed to the same flameouts and disasters that characterize my romantic life. So, tonight, after a short civil ceremony, a reception - two people, two dogs, a bunch of birds, et cetera, one marriage. Good luck, youse. |
| Went to the Vomitorium last night - while a lovely idea for a perfomrance piece (last days of empire, consume until you are sickened, etc), was dragged down by extreeeeeeemely hamfisted political-sarcastrismo ranting &c. Not that I'm calling for a vomit-based performance to be subtle, but after a half hour of "KEEP THE POOR PEOPLE POOR! YES!" I think everybody in attendance got the gist. Like all uninformed political ranting, it got better as the participants got drunker - but then, when the purging started, audience cheering, I was a little taken aback - you're not supposed to cheer for this, kids, it's not a comeuppance - this puke is a thumb in your eye, a nail in your coffin. So I bailed, bought some records, headed home to bed. |
| Bguh - we've got new tenants moving into the office and having to shift things around and make room is running counter to my boss's legendary hoarding - today, as their phone guy is running cable through the office, I find out that in a storage space above the bathroom he's kept every box for every piece of hardware the company's bought for the last 7 years or so, fully assembled, just sitting and rotting and collecting dust mites. And, of course, I have to move these boxes out of the way - and, of course, I get coated in itchy dusty filth for my efforts. It's not even noon yet and I don't really need this. |
Okay, doublyew tee eff with this:
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 Fucking sweet! Click image to enlarge. Thanks, Stiv. |
| Dear Madagascar Institute: Thank you, ever so, for the things you do to make New York a better place. Case in point: today's "Cake" piece - billed as a celebration and apology for everybody's missed birthdays. I show up at the set meeting point with a crowd of about 100 other people, the organizers are passing out wrapped presents, lots of signs and warnings: "Don't open them until we say to!" Happy Birthday is sung, and then the announcement goes out, OK, open your gifts! Inside every box, a full squirtgun, sometimes some water balloons. Instantly, a massive water fight breaks out amidst complete strangers. Second surprise - there's a little flour in with the water, leaving white streaks on targets. Beautiful, giddy, stupid fun, and I walk, soaked and happy, back to the subway, loving it here more than ever. |
| Great practice last night - tried out a new drummer, so there was the usual how-do-these-songs-go-ing, but that aside we sounded really motherfucking great, Jon and Jonathan really meshing well, Leela singing well (if forgetting words here and there) and I felt more confident in my bass playing than I have in a while. Playing with a drummer really helps - it's the skeleton to my muscle system. Let's hope he sticks around. I gotta write some songs today. Holy shit, it's Friday the 13th! |
| Kind of in a bad mood today - muscles are sore and achy, don't feel like I'm really getting anything done (although some would argue), lots of related irritants. And, yes, taking things out on people who don't deserve out-taking. Need to slow down a little, calm down a little, breathe a little. Practicing tonight - that should help me rock off some excess tension. Seem to have handled the money crisis with aplomb - now comfortably in the black. Let's hope I can stay there. Sorry, anybody I've been short with or weird to in the last few. I'll try not to do it again. |
| A day of tiny irritants and not-workings - had the day off, but had to get up and go into the office for a few hours in the morning to clean up for the new tenants. Didn't sleep well last night - haven't for a few days - and so was muddled and cranky throughout. Bill came over to record a track for the soon-droppin' secret musical project and we muddled through some samples for a few hours. When it came time to tape nothing worked right - minidisc acting all shitty, couldn't mix multiple sources, so after some fumbling we decided to table, gave him a recording of the beat and he went off to try to finish it at home. Went to try to go to Game Night at Gamelab, fell asleep on the train, went home, caught in the rain, collapsed back in bed, blinds drawn. Sometimes days just don't work. |
| "Almighty above / Almighty below / an unfortunate end / to yr. first civil war / somewhere ahead / must lay my first peaceful night" - and lo, I have become someone who expresses himself best in the lyrics of others. How cliche - and of course, writing that leads to somewhere else. The day AK and I broke up (and yes, long-sufferers, I still think of this, on occasion), she, finally letting herself be enraged at my sloth and idiocy, remarked how cliche it was that, now that I had been faced with the results of my problems, that I was remaking myself, starting down a new path, in her words "just like every stupid story." And yes, cut by that - but also confused - what else could I even do? What other options are there? Cliches become so because we overuse them, but that doesn't negate their truthfulness. Rumor has it there's only seven real stories in the world anyways. I wonder how many songs there are. |
| Back to work - finishing up some Roctober stuff this week to hopefully hit the summer issue deadline - lots of compositing and cleaning-up in Photoshop to do before I'm through today. And, of course, actual workaday work too, just so you don't get the idea that I'm some kind of lazy-assed slacker (that I am). Going to be a very busy couple of weeks as I get all my shit together for Seattle - bear with me, droogies. |
| Yesterday I actually did stuff - went to the African Festival at Prospect Park, enjoyable (although got a little lost coming through the park from the Flatbush side) - Kaleta was really freaking great (I have a soft spot for masked performers, obviously), I had to leave before Kanda Bongo Man to get home in time for dinner. It was a good, easy day. Today I went to the Singapore Chili Crab festival only to find it atrociously overcrowded, with food lines up the wazoo and a really terrible band playing (lots of harmonica). So, bailed without even a morsel of chili crab to go to band practice, where the three of us cranked out in a dark purple room that was less than amenable to true rock glory power. And then home, to continue the gradual cleaning of my roomscape and the near-finishment of this painting I've been working on for what seems like months (because it's been months). And then, sleep. |
| At my birthday, Marisa, totally unprompted, said something fairly interesting about how me and her brother John (who I've had minimal interaction with, but like) are similar in a weird way - how we're both stuck on this idea that people like us because we're brash, funny, extroverts, when really what people like about us is that we're sweet, intelligent, caring people. Which is weird - I would not have put myself on nearly the same social plane as John Bowe, who is a massive schmoozer and as charming as all get-out, but what she said dovetails pretty neatly into things I've been figuring out on my own and with the help of other peoples. This is something that it's so hard for me to understand, partially (I think) because I was so solitary as a child. I think I absorbed a lot of wrong lessons on how to behave and I'm not getting rid of them as well as I should. Nao and I also talked at the party about Portal of Evil, and about how by running it I am kind of associating myself with a particularily negative mindset - and that's a deeper problem, and one that needs a lot more analysis. I love PoE when it works like it should work - site goes up, is amazing/weird/bizarre, people talk about it for a bit, move on. But there's definitely a culture built up around the site now where it can be percieved as a mass of bad feelings, or outright hatred. And (this is all very unformed and kind of blathering, I will probably explicate and amplify on it later) by being an authority figure in this, I kind of take on the (for lack of a better word) karma for all this negativity. And I'm not one who believes in swirling masses of emotional energy or other New Age hobbeldehoy, but there's something to be said for how all this affects me internally. Anyways, the "solutions" for this are pretty difficult all around, and none are really quite satisfactory at the moment. It's weird, because many of the things that I do and enjoy doing - the Amber chats, Evil Videos, et cetera - are pretty deviant. And some of my friends argue that I should try to either keep these things a secret or eliminate them from my life entirely if I'm going to be able to keep a relationship going. But is that a good strategy? I mean, I am a deviant. I'm a weird little dude in a lot of ways. And I'm not saying that every one of my flaws is a precious crystal flower, but there's some things that I like, no matter how weird they may be. Yeah, there's others that are horrible turds, but I'm workin' on them. |
| Pretty much alone in the office on this crisp, warm Friday morning - my co-workers are, for a variety of reasons, off doing other business, so it's just me and my desk and a few pages of comics that need workin' on. Burning DVD's on my boss's machine, running scans on another, typing this on my box, using a fourth to play CDs to listen to - I'm owning this piece. Feeling all right, for the most part - thinking about some stuff that will probably show up in another post here but not yet - not really getting my brain wrapped around it as completely as I would like. Going to finish some projects this weekend, open up my schedule, enjoy this last month of summer, this first month of my new year. I'll see you. |
| Heeeeey, who replaced the contents of my skull and rib cage with slightly moist cotton balls? Oh, wait, I did that, with the assistance of Mr. Beer and his sausagey buddies. And now I'm semi-functional and grinding through another workday with less than ideal results. Ah well, it's tradition to kick off another 365 with a muzzy-headed slog - let's hope the next 364 are crisp, clear and cool. I'll do my best to make it so. |
| It's my birthday - or, more correctly, at 11:54 this evening it'll be my birthday. 28 - not a particularily symbolic year, but hopefully I'll do a little better with less symbolism anyways. Too much going on today - got finagled into auditioning for long-time favorite terrible reality TV daing show Blind Date ($100 in my pocket, no complaints) and then it's off to gather with some of my best and brightest and beeriest for an evening of remembering exactly why I've lived so long in the first place. |
| Surprisingly enough, the knee isn't seriously wrecked - still a little tender going up and down stairs but for the most part I'm fully mobile, if a little limpy. Today's my day off but I'm still all over the place - haircut, errands, stop in at th eoffice to make sure no pots or kettles are boiling over or calling black, then back home to paint and draw and generally try to nail down stuff that needs a-carpenting. Tomorrow's my birthday and all forecasts call for scattered ridiculousness. Also there's new stuff in the store if you're curious and wealthy. |
| Rode my bike to work this morning - made it over the bridge fine, was zipping down Second Avenue in the bike lane when a taxicab suddenly turns, without signaling, veers over in front of me and then stops, trunk in the lane. I jam on my brakes and try to turn to an oblique angle, but it's too late, I DUNT into the trunk of the taxi, do a knee-plant hard enough to get yellow paint all over my pants, bust up my hand pretty bad. The driver hits the gas, rounds the corner and drives off. I look up, crumpled on the asphalt, as a bald old business fuck yells over at me "You were going too fast!" Fuck you, you asshole. I may well have been going too fast but I'm laying in a pile of blood and pain here. Some other people gather, help me up, I mangle over to a bench and collapse for a few minutes. My knee is in serious pain and I know it's the kind of serious pain that's going to be even worse tomorrow. |
| August - new month, blank slate, full of possibilities both good and bad. It's my birth month - I turn 28 on Wednesday, another notch on my cane towards 30, towards 40, towards the rest of it. I don't have the same fear of 30 as many of my friends do. I've always been a late bloomer - it runs in the family - so there's a part of me that thinks that maybe I'll finally start to figure things out when I hit my fourth decade. But then, it could just be another ten of shambling, ambling, flailing about trying to figure it out. It could go either way, and I've got another 730 days or so before then anyways. I think they'll be interesting ones. |
JULY
all content (c) 2004 k. thor jensen
