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| Hell yes Wednesday is my day off, and I barely got out of my pajamas all day. Spent the time de-cleaning my room, dragging the massive piles of videotapes required for Evil Video 3 back out of the closet and spending a solid few hours dubbing away, inking long-behind comics projects in between presses of the remote. I tried to hook my feet under the bedframe and do some sit-ups at the same time but I kept sweating on the Bristol board so saved that for later. By the evening I was exhaused and after a serious discussion with E. (about a project that's going to blow your doors off) I retired to my mattress, already dressed for it. |
| Woke up an hour and a half too early, rolled over twice, said "fuck it" and just decided to go to work. I've got a lot of inking to do so it behooves me to take advantage of the pre-bossman time to do as much of it as possible. I'm grinding away on my New Year's resolution (work accepted by 12 anthologies before the year's up) and hopefully I'll be able to pull it off - I've heard if you break a New Year's resolution God hits you with a magical thunderbolt that gives you herpes so I'm trying to avoid that. |
| Financials are still a little iffy - I've been doling out too much cash gathering material for Evil Video 3, among other things (booze) and now I'm left to appreciate the error of my ways with a dinner of white rice and margarine, maybe a little pepper for seasoning. Wash it down with some tap water and then occupy myself casting shadowpuppets by candlelight. It ain't like I haven't been here before - I once lived for two and a half months on discarded crusts fromt he bakery I was working at. I just wish I didn't have to do it so often. |
| My roommate has an old friend of his from the hometown visiting, and said friend is something of a beer expert. As such, the fridge has been recently stocked with a metric ton of hopped-up glory and I've been slathering for the eventual tasting frenzy that was bound to happen. Well, tonight it did, and four hours later I was staggering off to bed holding my dome in my hands, six types of weiss and a couple other assorted beveregestibles rattling about my liver and giving me a one-way ticket to a long night's sleep. |
| Spent a good portion of today enjoying the destitute's favorite hobby, wandering aimlessly around New York. Walked a good 120 blocks from my PO box down to my office, cursing my tight-pants vanity every step of the way. Hid out from the sweltering sun for an hour or so composing my mega-awesome birthday invitations and then back out into the world to hoof uptown until my legs got creakazoid and the subway back home beckoned. |
| Scrambling like eggs to get this week's Red Eye, Black Eye out the door while also percolating final plans for my big birthday bash (August 4th, in case you want to send me a card) and there's just not enough room in my cute little cro-mag skull to house all of this thinkin'. Compound that with my brutal new case of financial insolvency ($50 to last me until Thursday) and we've got an exciting adventure for the whole family to enjoy. |
| Pictures from last weekend here annotated in mysterious Internet code, twelve pages of them. For some reason I seem to photograph about six shades redder than I actually am - my dreams of becoming a famous goth cartoonist shattered forever. Also, it looks like my back sweats a lot but that may just be a central Missouri setback. If you're afraid of fire, goats, partially nude (computer-obfuscated) Maryland dirtleggers or everything, don't click. Everybody else, go nuts. |
| Man, it's dismal in the city this week - all gray and cold and rainy, waking up to dark summer skies. It's pretty freaking lame, considering that I'd rather be out frolicking in the sunshine and climbing trees and doing all that happy man-child hijinx stuff. Oh well - it'll keep me inside and drawing and dubbing video, which is I suppose where I needs to be. |
| Okay, so I'm back at work, which I guess is the essential failure of my nomad lifestyle - that I always end up behind this desk eventually. I need to find some sort of cash-paying occupation that I can do from the road and track - so far my options are gigolo, professional gambler, grifter or itinerant dishwasher, none of which come with the promise of Internet access or a reasonable health plan. So it looks like for the time being I'll be representing my nuts receptionista style, answering the phones and sneaking off to the lav whenever possible. |
| Hit Hackensack at about 7AM and I slid onto a bus back into the city. A few hours later I was showered, shaved, and in bed, not likely to leave for a good 24 hours or so. It's gonna be quite a while before I hit the road to that magnitude again. |
| We lit out early as it was predicted that it'd be a 20-hour drive at the bare minimum to get us back to civilization. Aside from a waylay for breakfast at the Iron Skillet where I murdered a chicken-fried steak and a batch of eggs, we were on the road straight for a solid 21, each of us gripped by the freeway madness in turn. Jeff took the first shift and blasted us through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana before folding and konking out in the passenger seat courtesy NyQuil. Sean got laid up in traffic outside Dayton, Ohio and I took the opportunity to call E. who I'd been missing like crazy. And then Ryan took over as we barrelled into Penn. and home at last. |
| Saturday pretty much everybody was in attendence as Grimes and Gibbons (a team of detectives) had rolled in at 4 that morning. There was a lot of straggling to awaken as most everybody had pretty thoroughly deadified their noggins on booze and "chronic" the previous evening. Once there was rousing we took a trip to some caves and natural wonders where, like children, we were captivated by frogs and lizards and other things of the natural world. I'd like to say that the night was all eating crumpets by firelight and jocular jesting but really everybody basically got trashed and lit shit on fire and I hit the trifecta of post-midnight skinnydipping before collapsing a-mattress. |
| Friday was the official showing-up day and if you read this you might not know about all the Interniggas that I'll reference by their comical fake names so I'll try to keep this general and say that I was pretty thoroughly blasted by 2PM. Drinking vodka out of a mason jar is pretty awesome, especially if you're mixing it with strawberry Fanta. At some point the idea to play rock & roll was hatched so Ryan and I headed out to the barn to try to work up some songs. We got halfway through "Transmission" by Joy Division before we got bored and went away. I hate to admit it, but a lot of this is still a Kodachrome blur. I'm like a Vietnam vet - I remember fire, smoke, and not much else. |
| Ryan took over the next morning and we zoomed through Illinois and Indiana (where Sean got a ticket) and Missouri where things got a little boondockable. Driving down around 8 miles of dirt track to the site of the thing, greeted by a rickety-ass wooden slat bridge and a sign reading, simply, "WHOA". We drove over it and after a little confusion found the place, claimed beds, and went swimming in the ol' swimming hole. It was pretty hot to be swimming in lakes again but then we all had to go inside and wash off the spirochytes and leeches (note: there were no leeches). Uh, more people showed up and I went skinnydipping once the sun had set and my pale white Internet ass glowed like a second moon. |
| I hit Hackensack at around 3PM and we wait for Jeff and Sean to roll up in their respective olds-mo-turds and get some pizza and also GET AWESOME. We eventually get packed and roll at around 7 or so, hit the Costco booze store for a case of Smirnoff Ice (that's DRIVING LIKKER) and the store on the dark side of town for an armful of King Cobra in the 40-ounce Economy Size. We hit the real driving with JSP taking first shift as he is IRON MAN and got into EPICDELPHIA about nightfall. There's not much to be told about driving through Ohio in the pitch-ass-black night so let's end this here, OK? |
| Payday, thankfully, and what with the forthcoming events I'm going to need a little more in the wallet beyond the $8.74 I was rocking previously. Hopefully this latest will be enough to fund me to Missouri and back, as as a non-driver I usually pick up the lion's share of the food and gas expenses on the way. It doesn't look like we'll be bringing the homoshop as Shmibbon's Saturn has no roof rack but I'm packing a box of fun anyways. Tomorrow we hit the road - wish us luck. |
| Monday morning come again and even though I'm packing an abbreviated week into the rucksack I'm still overwhelmed with workaday druthers, both boss-derived and freelance. Things are falling into place, though, and I feel confident that I'll be able to roll into PoEcon with everything I need done well in hand. Now I need to figure out how to strap these four pieces of homoerotic Photoshop art that my roommate found on the street and that I'm planning on exploding onto the roof of the car. |
| Slept in to the extreme this AM, and justifiably so, then headed out to the ArtBots show to see some crazy robots drawing, talking to crickets and playing the theremin. On the way out, we noticed the High Line, an elevated railway that snakes through the West Side of lower Manhattan. I'd noticed it before but never really put it into context - it was designed to speed meat up from the ports to the rest of the city, and the tracks went through buildings! It's abandoned and barbed-wired off now, but that didn't stop E. and me from making plans to sneak into it some night soon. |
| Laid up and bedridden most of the day - ate something that disagreed with me greatly and now it's throwing a monster party in my stomach and intestines, resulting in lots of agonizing jogs to the lavatory and even more laying in bed holding my abdomen and releasing a number of hideous moans and laments. Eventually I roused myself, ate a Sicilian slice to settle my ulcer and headed out to the assiest art-party in human history. |
| Friday come at last and I'm still frenzied and frizzle fried out trying to get everything under control before Wednesday. Already I'm modifying my goals to remain within the realm of human feasiblity. I'd like to go out this weekend so that means Evil Video 3 won't be finished by the time I leave which means I'll have more time to work on Red Eye, Black Eye which means these Oneadays are already behind which means I need to start drinking coffee or smoking crystal meth, whichever's cheaper. |
| Man, I'm feeling almost unstoppably snacky today - I been eatin' exactly my share of food so it's not that I'm undernourished, it's more like a long day behind the desk gets me craving mixed nuts and yogurt-covered pretzels and other assorted bad-news foodbombs cannonballing their way down my gullet at around 4PM. I can usually hold out against it, though - my waistline needs to remain strong and fight back the mongol hordes of pants with a 32" waistband or higher. |
| Wednesday off and of course it's monsoon-level raining out. I'm still a little rickety from my epic drunkenkopf of Monday but I'm feelin' my cheerios a bit, gettin' shit accomplished (for the most part) and out of the way so I can spend tonight schnoozlin' with my sweetie. In a week I leave for Missouri for a six-day long haul roadtrip with Ryan, Jeff and Sean to PoeCon 2, and considering that the last one boasted two-story pillars of flame and drunken Vietnam vets prowling the area, I may not survive another. Hell, I may not survive the week leading up to it. |
| Well, I'm going to assume that your standard art openings don't devolve into fistfights, stupors and forgetting your wallet and cell phone in New Jersey but when you've got 2/3 of the Unholy III in attendance and drink tickets are floating around like confetti in a parade, things are bound to get out of hand. Eleven beers and eight hours later, I'm falling down the stairs of the PATH station and blindly fumbling my way home. I don't think my painting's gonna sell, either. |
| Art opening tonight - Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey - 1039 Washington Street, opens at 7, open bar (!) from 7 to 8 so come get your drink on hawadcawh and look at a painting I did and some other paintings that other people did. Please bring your rich uncle who likes to buy paintings as I need some money in a very extreme fashion. |
| Woke up late and spent the day wandering Astoria, heat baking down on our gentle noggins as we rolled down to the river to lay in the grass at the Socrates Sculpture Park, listening to the wind-driven gamelans and picking through the topsoil for four-leaf clovers. It's a beautiful summer, finally, although I can see the spectre of intolerability on the horizon, most likely in August. Until then, though, I'm going to bask in the sun like a giant bespectacled lizard as much as possible, saving up heat for the cold winter months. |
| Was originally going to go to the beach with Leela today but after hauling my painting to Hoboken and sweating it out back to the Path train I was too crunked out to deal with massive throngs of bathing crowds. So I took the day to malinger around, trying to stay off the heavy-traffic paths and spending a lot of time up in trees or on my back in the grass watching the world go by. Eventually wound up back at my house where E. and I watched some Young Ones and collapsed into heatstroke slumber. |
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Can't wait for sunset - kids on the street, lighting off sparklers at lunchtime |
| Three-day weekend, and hopefully the weather will hold warm but not too warm as I've got some beach-going to do and rain on my parade is an unacceptable solution. The list of parties this weekend is as long as my arm and has twice as much ink on it, but I feel confident that I'll be able to jet from locale to lacale without any real difficulty, as long as I can keep my stamina up - loading myself up on soy protein and Red Bull for exactly those reasons. See you Monday - don't burn your faces off. |
| Everybody I know is sort of a little off this week - tempers flaring, grumpy back-talk and hurt feelings across the board. I'm not immune, of course - hell, I've got emotional AIDS, you can cry in my direction and I'll likely break down, but it's interesting to think about what causes these outbreaks of unhappiness. Some kind of massive celestial disconvergence fucking up the delicate electrodes of our brains? Odd pollens creating chemical hate reactions in our sensitive sinuses? Too much bad music on the radio? I couldn't tell you, but I hope it blows over soon. |
| July comes kickin' in with a vengeance and I'm, as per usual, crazily darting about trying to get all my ducks in a row and waddling into my mouth. The big news this month is PoEcon 2, and if you've been reading for awhile you remember the sheer terror-blast that last year's was. This year, the Unholy III are driving all the way out to Missouri, and it's going to be a pretty epic road trip that, if we survive, will go down in history. So I've got a lot to do before then. |
JUNE
all content (c) 2003 k. thor jensen