The Lamentations of M.Night.

I just finished watching M. Nights latest film, which was somewhat akin to being naked in a train wreck, except the train wreck lasted for almost two hours, and I was being burned with cigarettes. Where the hell did Mark Wahlbergs testicles go? His voice was like a tiny whining machine, screeching inane things and cutting me in my face. For two hours.

I'm thinking about the film, and I'm trying to understand why M. Night would even put his name on this piece of shit, and the credits roll, and I'm stunned, what a complete travesty, I'm pissed off that I spent so much time on it, and THEN...I watch ALL of the extras on the DVD, hoping for an apology, or at least an explanation.

Anything.

I expected something along the lines of "well, M. Night gave us most of our instructions from a bathtub filled with crack cocaine and bleach. And then he died, so we got Denny the craft service guy to do rewrites and made the rest up."

No.

This was not said, or even alluded to in any way. Instead, we are treated to a definitively odd M. Night trying hard to seem normal, but coming off drugged and giddy about shooting the black kid in the back of the head with a shotgun. I'm confused. The plants decide that humanity is a threat, and so....THEY MAKE US STAND REALLY STILL FOR A SECOND, AND THEN WE WALK BACKWARDS AND THEN WE HANG OURSELVES WITH A GARDEN HOSE IN THE WINDY ENVIRONMENT. Who pays for this garbage? Who pays me to sit through it?

Someone does.

This was not an M. Night film. This was not even a film. This was a handful of people who can only aspire to be bad actors, wasting mine and everyone elses time and money. People are starving and they feed us THIS.

It makes me vacant.

Fail.

sometimes, the secret code word is "dirigible".

I remember the days when there was no Internet. And then I remember the days when there was Internet, but the Internet acts like its just arrived from 1986 and it doesn't have a clue where it is. Today is that day. The Internet arrived, breathless, listening to Corey Hart full blast, and then just stood there. "You are fascinating", I told it, "and f--king USELESS". It nodded and smiled like a jackass, clearly misunderstanding.

At work we have multiple offices, in different cities scattered slipshod all over the country, but mostly in two major cities. As a result we have a good flow of information that needs to travel back and forth between the two cities, and so we have connected them through the miracle of technology, using something called a VPN tunnel. This VPN tunnel is the technological equivalent of two cups and a piece of string, except the string is a wet, toeless sock, and the cups are me glaring and stringing together random curse words in inexplicable and disgusting ways. I could get information faster if I literally stretched a toeless sock city to city, wrote my information on MEAT and then crawled through the tunnel naked, pushing the meat in front of me. That, or I could just hit you with the meat. That would also be faster.

I'm away from my family and I miss them.

"Even through the helmet, the distinct smell of burning black chubby ghost made her eyes water."

Pencil in fake moleskine. There is no explanation for this. None. Floaty girl, floaty burning black chubby ghost, random hardwood floor, chunks of things, helmets. This all stinks mightily of both the apocalypse and a disappointment. These are the things that happen when you have no direction, kids. These. (Short message for the Kids). These.

geometrics makes its debut, and the author breaks another toe.

Geometrics is something I have been dabbling in and about for a while now, and is a process in which I come to your house while you are asleep and stand by your bed, and then I make hissing noises just enough to scare you into that state where you don't want to get up to see whats going on because you are scared, but if you don't then your wife will think you are scared, so you get up and then I will smash you right in the face with a book.

Then I will choose something in your bedroom, maybe your wife, and I will sketch it in a geometric way.

Also I did break a toe...my ring toe on my right foot and I was just trying to kiss the baby so I could go to work.

Do not be dismayed. Its quite warm out, and the europeans know true hardship. The last thing she needs is a sweater.

This is pencil in small moleskine. By small, I mean 3.5 inches by 5.5inches. Not very big. The art then, is even smaller than that. I added eraser rain last minute and it was the first time I have ever done so.

This is a sketch of my great aunt on my fathers side. European. She was nearly 80 years old when she posed for this. Fascinating woman. Liked raw shrimp and hot air balloons. Once shot herself out of a cannon. She came to herself dressed as a clown on the wrong side of the Berlin wall, answering only to the name "Gershwin". In her handbag she kept a fully grown king cobra right until the day she died. It took three full days to access her body because the snake was attacking anything that came close. They found her wrapped in tinfoil, with the manuscript of a fully finished novel written all over her body in tiny Sutterlin script, a nearly impenetrable and abandoned German dialect.

I'd been saving this one, but now....its just raining so hard.

A high school drawing. My teacher at the time, (brilliant man, typically artistic), spent a LONG time trying to convince me to make the eyes red. Even going so far as to color red circles, cut them out, and then lay them gently on the drawing itself, so that I might KNOW that it was right. I still refused, and so I got a lesser mark than I could have. Its somewhat absurd, the theory and practice of grading art. Its such a subjective thing, that to grade it can only ever be one persons opinion. There is no right or wrong. Its not math, its art.

Not to say that the world isn't absolutely GLUTTED with terrible, terrible artists.

It is.

It so terribly is.

That being said, art class in high school was, for me, pretty close to my worst subject in terms of grades. It brought my average down every term.

This tells me several things, none of which are your business.

the reason for my extended absence.

My beautiful son was born on October seventh. Our third child. He is absolutely small, and perfect. Alexander. That is an actual quarter. And my actual baby.





I couldn't resist. Photoshop is like quicksand. I am actually developing a graphics program that functions exactly like Photoshop called "quicksand" (TM). Exactly like.

beautiful.

For my beautiful wife. I have missed several days, with good reason. Very good reason. Well...that and I slumped a little into laziness and complacency. Apologies all around. Reasons will be laid forth in the next post.

There are things worse than death. Windows Vista, for instance.

Sometimes I draw something and I think...."meh". Other times I draw something and I am giddy as though I am a heavily pregnant filly about to cross into the end zone of the Daytona 500 during the World Cup and then I look down, and I am, ON TOP OF IT ALL, carrying the Conch.

Today's posting is me as the latter example, sweaty and tired, giving my all, beaming ear to ear, about to cough out the placenta of joy. I love this drawing and I don't have the slightest clue why. It's not overly special or detailed or mind blowing, but as the artist, it is one of those sketches that makes me want to keep drawing. Artist's seldom love their work, they are by nature insecure, neurotically so. I suspect there is a story in this drawing somewhere, but as of right now, I don't know what it is.

I drew this during a staff meeting, and I am beginning to suspect that if ever my employment there is terminated, I will still request that I can sit in on the meetings and draw. I do some great work in there, and I'm not sure why.

Maybe its as simple as having 3 consecutive hours with pencil to paper.

Ah, time. How poorly you are sometimes passed through.

Portrait of a Monger, in which the commodity in question consists of brilliant songs you WILL NEVER HEAR.

This is a friend. Daniel S. He does not look exactly like this. We were in a band together, for a year or two. We spent some time writing music, and it felt inspired. He was inspired. He wrote so many songs he couldn't keep track of them and many a brilliant melody has been lost.

He wrote songs for the guitar and now composes chiefly using another instrument called "World of WarCraft." The music is beautiful, can you hear it? I can...it's sooo beautiful.

Come back, Dan.

Music needs you.

A long time ago.

This was drawn in pen only. Back when we all smoked. Ah, the folly and joy of youth. What a treat it is to be young and foolish, secure in our naivete. It was only seven years ago, but it feels like hundreds. We lose ourselves, our old selves, one year at a time. Slipping from memory and looked back upon vaguely, strangely even, as though we had never existed, as though we had never truly inhabited those smaller versions of ourselves.

snowman, his father, and the snake.

Here's another concept sketch for snowman. He is standing behind his father, small. This is from my moleskine proper, done in pencil, with a little pre-post digital manipulation to satisfy my egotistical nature. Nothing major. A little clone stamp here, a little clone stamp there. You know. Also, please stop sending money in the post. I am obviously NOT receiving it. Lets do PayPal or something. Something not quite so evil. Like EBAY evil.

You know what I mean.