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| 02282003 | |
| I have a zit on my chin - the first real zit I've had on my face in at least three months. I don't know what brought it on - a little evasive patch of french-fry oil that settled in to a long winter's nap in my pore? Nobody can ever tell me. My skin is a battlefield, constantly teetering on the brink of oblivion. I've been doing a decent job keeping things under wraps this winter, and I certainly hope this little red harbinger isn't the advance scout for a new ex-model army. |
| Workin' like a gherkin today, the bossman's going to the Game Developer's Conference to pitch a pretty sweet game we've been working on so I'm in charge of all of the associated items - press kits, CD copies, business cards, novelty flavored condoms - you know how it goes. I'm a little miffed that I don't get to go to GDC, but who knows - maybe next year. Yes, I do work in the nerdiest of all possible businesses, thank you very much. Now if you'll excuse me I have to play some Donkey Kong on company time. |
 Shit yeah! |
| I chipped a tooth this weekend - not sure how, not sure when. All I know is that there's a little crescent missing from the bottom of my front right incisor, my tongue obsessively reaching upward to probe the new geography of my grill. It's not bad, really - it lends a little character to my mouth, and I think once the novelty and self-consciousness wear off I'll be pretty into it. Still scheduling a trip to the dentist, though. |
| Another workweek starts, and even though my new office computer is leaps and bounds ahead of my previous paperweights it still clogs and stalls at the slightest provocation, turning me into an obsessive saver, backing and rebacking documents until my fingers hurt. Aside from that, events as normal - I realize that this winter's resulted in a lack of adventure for those of you who read this for that kind of stuff, but the thaw's coming and I'm packing my bindle again. Are you coming along? |
| Today is mostly a blur but I do notice that there's a cartoon heart drawn in Sharpie marker around my left nipple and I don't think I put it there. |
| Salty rain comes pouring down from a wide-open sky - I dash out as fast as I know how and down the block to the laundromat to rescue my only clean clothes and retreat back to the couch for Saturday morning cartoons and moist, microwave-warm bran muffins. I spend most of the day inside, listening to the water pour down and accumulate on the streets below, making tea and videotapes, not thinking about nothing in particular. |
| You can now buy the Eminem/Cobain shirt I designed for Cex here - scroll down to Shirts. Buy his records, too. It's funny when people who read my site get back to me when they're doing something - he's in the latest Rolling Stone with Phish on the cover. It's a weird feeling - a little pride, a little jealousy that somebody who I influenced in whatever meager way has already surpassed me. There's a Jim Woodring quote - "You cannot believe that your friend could do something great," but I believe it all too well. |
| Back at the office, yesterday was such a tornado of drawing that I've made a completely stupid late New year's resolution: in addition to finishing Red Eye, Black Eye, I'm going to be in twelve different anthologies this year - one for every month. This doesn't include general magazine or newspaper work, which I am also doing - just comics anthologies. I've already got two in the bag and another two in the hopper, so I'm on schedule so far. So far: a story about having sex in a van down by the river for True Porn, a story about a gay Irishman for for Legal Action Comics 2. More news as events warrant. |
| Another Wednesday off, the flakes have stopped faling and the temperature's up to survivability so I'm left free to aimlessly wander the thawing city, trying my hardest not to step ankle-deep in one of the many hidden lakes that have spring up out of liquefying snowfall - Lake 53rd and Lex, Lake 41st and Broadway, Lake Union Square. The geography of the place has changed - there's tiny walkable paths around mountains of slush and ice, people waiting patiently in line or clambering crazily over, Sir Walter Scotting to their offices and homes. |
| The snow's still falling, a gentle mist of big powdery flakes, but a lot of the ground accumulation has reduced itself to brown slush. I walked to the window of my office yesterday to see a pickup truck towing a snowboarder gleefully down Broadway, no traffic to impede him, and then I went out for dim sum and pinball down in Chinatown, snowballs whizzing frantically by my head as Chinese kids wrestled each other into snowbanks. I think I need to play more pinball, in general. |
| Stepping out of my door into knee-deep snow, walking down the middle of the empty street through half-furrowed tire grooves, coming into an empty office that is going to stay empty all day, except for me. Took off with the digital camera to get a few shots of a paralyzed white Soho - you can see them here. |
| Ladies and gentlemen, that is what I call a hangover. After scrabbling my way back to Queens through subways full of soldiers with M-16s, I hit my mattress at around 5:30 in the morning. Stayed there as long as possible, but it wasn't long enough. Spent the rest of Sunday in a goofy burlesque of lost balance, missed footing and hilarious pratfalls, my brain misfiring like crazy in my skull. Eventually I just gave up and returned to the mattress, enfolded in dark recovery. |
| Did I march? Did I assemble to display my complete and total opposition to a ridiculous, morally and logistically unfeasible war? Did I make a sign and wave it? Did I punch a police horse in the mouth? No, I didn't. I went to band practice and bought a pair of $140 pants and sold some stuff on eBay and went to a party at Neil's cavernous loft in Jersey City. And come war or don't, anthrax in the mail or North Korean nukes down my chimney, I've lived the way I wanted to. A page of comics is worth more to me than standing outside in a similarily-inclined mass, and I don't see that changing. |
| Ah, no valentine this year, alas. I'm not the type who fronts hatred on holidays like this - I don't give a crap how many boxes of gummy Whitman's samplers get sold to unimaginative lovelorns. I just really like that there's a day where it's OK to be giddy and moonstruck over someone else. I'm a helpless, hapless romantic - always have been, always will be. So go forth and multiply, those of you partnered up today, release your endorphins in great perfume-scented clouds over the city. Coat your epidermis in rose petals and fine wine, buy new sheets for your bed, eat the finest meal of your lives. And send me a bottle of whiskey - my own true love. |
| Lots of strange dreams lately - being sick has catalyzed my subconscious into a roiling hellpit of half-baked neuroses and dimly-remembered symbolism. Lots of dreams about burying things in the backyard, escaping from forested prisons, wrapping my arms in layer after layer of gauze bandages. I almost never remember my dreams so to be deluged with this wave of inner-brain cosmology is a little disorienting. I've never been one to take a great deal of inspiration from my subconscious so maybe it's just trying to make its presence felt a little bit more. Either way, my pillows are a little damper every night. |
| That's how you manage a day off - light oversleeping followed by brisk underachieving. A morning session with Doug as we discuss beats and ransack his uncle's post-Vietnam vinyl for a variety of uncleared samples, then a long walk in the crisp afternoon down to the sauna for some serious exfoliating and relaxipating, and then home to draw the night away, finishing finalities on a number of strips and getting them ready to speed out the door to the perpetuity of print. And then the sleep of the just, or at least the just exhausted. |
| Capsicum peppers in Korean ramen powder, coriolising down to the bottom of the pot as the water is taken off boil. Fresh-cut scallions, peppers and onions, dried fish flakes, carrots and noodles. Gas-flame bending air off the stove. Kitchen filling with clearing steam. Drinking soup straight out of the pot, in pajamas, on the couch, and going straight to bed. |
| The intense brain agony has settled down a little bit but as the working day drags on it's creeping back into the perimeters of my consciousness. Hopefully I'll be able to slip away before the full force of the thing comes roaring back and incapacitates me. I'm bundled up, keeping warm, drinking a lot of fluids but none of the above seem to be all too helpful. I can hear the siren song of my pile of blankets calling me back, telling me that the only thing that'll make me feel better is blessed unconsciousness, and I long to close my eyes and keep the grinding pain away. |
| Some days I really can't shake the feeling that I'm being punished for something - take this lovely, clear Sunday - a day ripe for adventure and exploration were it not for the intense, skull-splitting sinus headache that laid me up for the duration. It was one of those headaches where you're wishing that the sides of your dome would just rocket off and give your pulsing brain room to expand. Alas, nobody scanned me that day and my head remained intact, tucked between my knees as I moaned in sorrow and clumsily restrung my guitar. |
| Finally, a band practice that works - new drummer peppering merrily away and things are finally together and cohesive, minus of course a keyboarder but I'm confident we'll fill that gap soonish. Things that were forlorn and collapsing with just me and Leela playing/singing now spring to exultant life. It was maybe the best three hours we'd ever spent in the practice space and as the cold February night swallowed us up, the ghost of tinnitus began once again to haunt my ears like a mysterious old house. |
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Haiku: Snow covering us The bad news comes anyway Orange alert gone white |
| Day's sliding by like I greased it elbow-style - the boss is out having painful oral surgery (and you'd be right if you thought that warmed my coal-black heart just a little bit) and I'm catching up on stuff that's been left undone. I'm finally getting my room under control - the cardboard boxes are making their way outside and the sprawl of unshelved books and etcetera that I tread upon are finding shelves and holes to live in. Now I just have to alphabetize all my CDs and call it a night. |
| I sell a lot of stuff on eBay, both my own and other people's (for a cut), and it usually goes pretty smoothly. However, in the fall of 2001, I had a mail problem with somebody who bought a PlayStation game off of me. I sent it, they never got it - what can you do? Fast forward to yesterday as I'm checking my PO box. Inside, returned to sender, postmarke October 16, 2001, was the package I'd sent this guy. it'd been floating around the postal service for a year and four months. I'm gonna email him to ask him if he still wants it. |
| Tuesday Friday may be the name of my firstborn girlchild, as these new Wednesdays off are the sole reason I even wake up in the first place. This one's going to involve the usual surfeit of errand-related activity, as I clean out the PO box and do a last sweep of my storage space, but hopefully it'll also accomodate a matinee, a sit-down lunch and a nice, healthy walk from somewhere to otherwhere that'll eat up an hour or two of precious daylight. It's a rough life, I admit, but somebody needs to live it, or else it'll get sad. |
| On my Friday off apparently all hell broke loose in my absence - mysterious creditors baying at the door, essential files gone mysteriously missing, and as the cherry atop the disaster sundae, a Linux box running our office network collapses into a cloud of smoke, leaving the entire place incommunicado. So it's Monday and we're fixing it, new kids coming in to poke in the boxes as the bossman yanks cables like he's born to do it. And lo, behold - we're active again, and I can once more waste borrowed time. |
| An amazing, warm, clear afternoon and I'm down in Chinatown for the Chinese New Year's parade. A swarm of people clogs every street and sidewalk, the pops of fireworks going off and garbage blowing through the sky like confetti. I'm out on the streets and I'm happy, not only to be alive, but to be a part of life, to be a tiny independent segment of this enormous greater mass of humanity. Some days I can't deal with crowds but this is one of the ones I can, sliding smoothly through like blood cells in a capilarry, beating in time with my heart. |
| Another low, slow, sad and cold day, in a house not my own. Wanted to get some drawing done but pencil never met paper - couldn't work up the impetus so I did finish work on a commission that I want to get out the door, played a little guitar and spent the rest of the evening conceptualizing and watching crapshows on MTV, not really regretting anything. Winter is coming to an end, but not near fast enough to suit me. |
JANUARY
all content (c) 2003 k. thor jensen