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| 11302003 | |
| Another day mostly down the hole, still recovering from the frenzy of food-creation. Managed to get a little bit more drawing accomplished but for the most part I was a man-slug all day, suckling the TV teat and huddling up in my pyjamas. Ah well - winter's come, and I for one am not going to expose myself to its cold bleat any more than I absotively have to. |
| E. was off to the Poconos so I had the day to myself, and I wasted the hell out of it. No band practice due to utter holiday sloth, very little drawing to do, so I spent a good deal of the day in bed reading/slouching until I got roused to see the Triplets of Belleville (A+) with Tom and Leela, and then back to their place to serve up some leftover turducken and holiday cheer. |
| Spent most of the day sleeping it off - after dinner yesterday everybody took naps and I was gently lulled to sleep by E's heart beating against mine, and then we went out to get soused. So there was recovery in the cards today, for sure. We stayed in bed 'til afternoonish and then I kinda made a stab at doing some drawing but for the most part this one went in the forfeit column. |
| Thirteen hours later, we took it out (actually, it'd been out a time or two before to dump gallons of greasy drippings out of the bottom of the roasting pan (and on my foot)) and trucked it out to Bushwick and a hero's welcome. Cutting it open was a revelation - the knife sunk into it like it was butter and a cloud of delicious tripartite poultry fumes engulfed the room. Best eighteen hours I ever spent in a kitchen, for sure. |
| E. was housesitting for a friend of hers with an advanced kitchen so I lugged the 50 pounds of poultry and other assorted ingredients out there and we buckled down on the Turducken. We started at about 8:00 deboning the birds - E's pre-med so she knows how to work a knife and I did the strong-style stuff like breaking bones. While she was deboning I was preparing stuffings and by 2AM we had the thing assembled on the counter and ready to throw in the oven. |
| Printing out Turducken recipes and slowly grinding through another glacially miserable workday. Took Rishi out ot Jackson Heights yesterday so he can see the madness in which his people live around here and we gorged ourself on Jackson Diner and then I fell into a veritable food coma. I sometimes wish I'd stayed in it 'cause then there could be an ABC Family movie about my heroic struggle for survival - "Laid Low By Samosas" or something like that. Dibs on a Culkin to play my corpse. |
| Back to work for a sassy three-day Thanksgiving week, followed by a five-day weekend - as it should be all the time, I'd like to think. Got mildly shanghaied into attempting the legendary Turducken for the Thursday bloat this year (in case you're uninitiated, it's a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey) and that's certainly going to be a stretch of my kitchen muscles to pull off. But life's incomplete without challenges, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna let a three-layer poultry beat me down. |
| E. was out running yesterday when she saw a minivan run over a neighborhood cat and drive off, leaving it in the road. Being the greatest human being ever born, she gathered it up and brought it home to try to nurse it back to health, but unfortunately it expired and the ASPCA wouldn't come help her with it (one person she talked to told her to "just throw it in the garbage can.") So I was out there with a shovel the next morning and we gave the little man a fair burial, as God intended. Sometimes other peeps is bullshit. Also we saw a lot of squirrels and I found $80 and got free lunch at Veggie Castle. |
| Finally got the whole band in the same room (barely) and commenced the new-lineup outrocking, to a fair modicum of success. The new drummer and guitarer are way way better than I am so I'm swapping back over to bass (my first love) and cracking down on the low-end for the songs we've got written, which is fine - it's easier for me by far to sing and play bass over guitar any day of the week. Next practice next Saturday - luck (wish me). |
| Head still achy and stupid - I can't recall a winter that's been tougher on me physically, and I'm not sure why - I'm getting reasonable amounts of exercise, eating right (very little dairy, refined sugar, red meat, et cetera) and saying my prayers and taking my vitamins but I've been laid low by all sorts of creeping cruds in the last few months, as have many of my friends and foes. Is it the SARS? I haven't heard much about that in a while. |
| I've got some kind of sinus cold that's been creepin' around in my dome for the last week or so and recently it seems to have migrated into my left eye, making it all dry and scratchy and stupid. I've been dripping drops into it and trying to keep hydrated but nothing seems to be helping all that much except brutal oversleepage, so I think I'm going to get back to that. |
| E. lost her job yesterday so last night was spent takin' care of her with Thai food and beer before tucking her into my bed to sleep off a lousy week. She got booted simply because greedheads at her company gotta pull the $50K bonuses every year instead of paying a living wage to their employees - ass backwards corporo-capitalista shit sandwiches in action. So she's back on the job hunt - if anybody in the NYC area's looking for the best goddaned marketing writer on the planet, let me know. |
| It's kind of disturbing how great these shitty reality TV programs are for my productivity - they root my sorry ass in front of something I'm ashamed to pay too much attention to, giving me both a reason to sit still and a reason to occupy my hands with something else. Finished nearly 3 pages of REBE last night - nice ones, too. Worked on paintings and projects and by the time the news was on I was happy to hit the sack. Thank you, Joe Millionaire. You made me a better cartoonist. |
| Catching up on these little niblets of life - things just got too ridiculous last week for me to even take the 10-15 that it usually takes me to type them out. But now I'm recalibrating and getting back into the swing, until the next major-league crisis point comes along. Let's hope the world gives me at least a week before that day so I can catch a breath or two. |
| Finally made it out to the Morr Music tour, unfortunately at the Knitting Factory where sightlines are impaired for short-doggs like myself, and it was worth all the toil and trouble. Great B. Fleischmann set, surprising mostly-pleasant Ms. John Soda set (excepting some overloud synth-beats that grated like Romano only less smooth) and a couple whiskeys, beers and a pleasantly soused subway ride home. |
| Due to a mix-up of Biblical proportions I found myself out in Williamsburg nearly three hours after the show I wanted to see had started - just in time to, if I chose, catch half of the last band's set. I chose not to and started walking for the train only to run into Tom, get diverted over to him & Leela's house where I drank beers and stolidly rebuffed the advances of Leela's drunken friend before heading home to find E. asleep by surprise in my bed - probably the best thing I've ever found there. |
| All-day working on the Roctober piece - it finally came together at (as usual) the very last minute, laying ink down last night 'til 2 in the morning at the very least. Got up, got in, scanned and scanned, colored and corrected and fixed and flexed and by the time the closing bell rang had it all done 'cept one stray panel, which I pledged to snack in the next morning by noontime. Good to have that off my back - time to shoulder other papooses up thar. |
| Spent the day scrambling out this week's Red Eye, etcetera - a little dissatisfied by it - the art's getting too rushed as I have less exclusive time to devote to it, which just means more work in the redrafting phase, something I'm trying to avoid. I've pretty much given up on ever trying to get things right the first time, though - that attitude was a real holdover from my younger days, when I couldn't even be arsed to erase shoddy pencils to try them a second time. I guess I'm growing up. |
| Started reading the Brian Eno diaries again today - every year or so I find myself coming back to them - there's something really seductive about the rythyms of his life - traveling, facilitating and always preoccupied with not just art but the social space of his family as well. They're really inspiring and humbling all at the same time. I wish there was more of them but to be fair, a year's window into somebody else's life is more than I deserve. |
| Spent last night watching brutally shitty reality television (Joe Millionaire 2 - now with more Eurotrash and cigarettes!) and drawing like a madman trying to get re-caught-up (again) with the barrels of projects that I need to be finishing. The Roctober thing is almost done, finally, thankfully, and the other hoo and haw is coming soonish. I really need to learn how to stop saying "yes" to people and wrap my mouth around "maybe later" instead. |
| Another cold-winter week starts and while I was complaining before, Mother Nature has decided to just put me in my proverbial place and get serious with the freezing terror. The weekend was cripplingly cold and I was bundled eight-deep trying to keep it out with no avail. Thankfully, the office has plenty of central heating and the windows are closed so I'm a little more relaxed - until I have to leave. |
| So I wake up a little late and go across the street to Key Food to get E. some yogurt and a Diet Pepsi for breakfast. As I'm walking down one of the aisles, I see a woman and her chubby, hyperactive kid coming towards me. All of a sudden, the kid breaks away from his mom and dives headlong into the shelf with the toilet paper and paper towels in it, hard enough that he goes in as deep as his torso and his wiggling legs are sticking out. Packages of bogroll go flying everywhere and his mom reaches in, grabs him by the back of the neck and drags him away. |
| Went out to Schnack for a birthday party of a friend of E. and gorged hardcore on a variety of awful evil delicious mod-lang fast food, including the finest little burgerettes in Puppetland. Got good and heartily sloshed (including sips off of a stout milkshake which was basically like drowning in sweet baby Jesus's tears) and took E. home for sleep-in canoodling 'til the break of noon. |
| Copious amounts of whiskey set much of that right. Best tasting yet by a long chalk - free hip flasks, free bottles, three hour open bar, full dinner, and I'm walking wounded today. It's a good thing that I don't have a huge amount to get accomplished because there ain't much happening here. Except naps. |
| Back on the free booze bandwagon again, this time for Chivas Regal. Reports from others who have attended said events have been unilaterally positive (free flasks!) so I'm geared up for a drunken good time, which is exactly what I need about now with the rain rolling down outside. If I can get out of work on time, that is - this week's been a hurricane of frenzy and getting behinder and behinder and I'm not all that sure that copious amounts of whiskey will set much of that right. |
| Spent nearly the whole day doing prepwork and then actually doing to do for a hardcore meeting/pitch/putsch for a major-league project that would keep the office in chips and cider for at least another year, not to mention being able to sling some work to some friends and acquaintances. So I got all dolled up and went uptown with my bossman and others to aim to dazzle and it looks like we may have hit the mark. And then I went home and slept for many days. |
| Another day of minimal supervision, which is excellent as my hard-partying evenings aren't leaving all that much wiggle room to kick out the proverbial cartoon jams. So I'm sneakily inking at my desk, finishing up this week's Red Eye, Black Eye a little early so that I don't have to scramble on Thursday to get it done. Working on a tight deadline for Roctober that will give joy to old-time Portal of Evil heads, too. Lot of links in this one. Plenty to keep you busy, too. |
| back to work and playing catch-up, luckily most of my co-workers are out of office which gives me a chance to get all of my this and that out of the way out of the eyebeam of the bossmonster. I just got smacked with another, sooner deadline for a project that's been incubating too long already, so hopefully that'll shock it off of its hump and get it out the door. More news, as always, as events warrant - and how about this weather, huh? |
| Spent the day catching up on projects that got left in the wake due to Halloweener - painting and cleaning and writing and general chaos-control duties. I still have to get this giant papier-mache head out of my apartment - does anybody in the city want to adopt it? It doesn't eat much and it's only mildly pungent. |
| I always forget exactly how exhausting Halloween is - you're all amped up and jazzed for candy the week before but then once the night's over it's like some sneaky vampire sucked all of your energy and you just wanna lay in bed, which was a tragedy as today was astoundingly beautiful. I spent a chunk of it on the roof getting some indian summer sun and then came downstairs to let E. in - we were supposed to go out and party hard but both too gobsmacked to do anything but retire to the sleep. |
OCTOBER
all content (c) 2003 k. thor jensen