I have not posted anything for quite awhile now. It is sort of for lack of trying, and also sort of because I don't want to clutter up this blog with the stuff I've been writing in my notebooks. Things are still kind of stressful and I am still unemployed, though that also can be chalked up to lack of trying. But for the time being, my life consists of music, Fallout 3, and Netflix. I feel bad wasting all this time doing nothing, but I'm having troubles getting myself motivated. I suppose you could say I've lost my muse. With any luck, I will find her again soon. But until that happens, I'm not sure when you're going to hear from me again.

Another missed deadline.

Perhaps one of these days I'll be able to organize my time wisely enough that I can finish a post once a week. The past few weeks have been hectic and full of strange upheavals that mostly aren't my business to discuss. If you're looking for gossip, may I suggest you turn to Livejournal?

Are Livejournal jokes even funny anymore?

Anyhow, I was saying that I've been busy and stressed out. The long and short of it is that on November 5th, I will be out of my current job with no guarantee of a new one. I live with my parents so it's not like rent and bills are a pressing issue, but it's just so easy to get sucked in to unemployment. I certainly don't want to do that again.

So in between filling out applications, band practices/gigs, work, and just trying to relax once in awhile, I find it hard to sit down and write.

Also I think I am getting sick.

In fact, I need to go lay down. But I will leave you with beautiful music from an incredible musician:




And the news that I will be launching the blog of my zine The 814 Times later this week! I am pumped!

P.S. A spider just descended from the roof and NEARLY LANDED ON MY HEAD. Not cool, bro. Not cool.

I Fail.

...At regular updates, anyhow. On Friday last week, I was sitting here looking at my unpublished posts, thinking "Oh yeah man, I can totally finish one of these for Sunday! Then I'll have a schedule of one post a week!"

But then real life happened and I had a crazy hectic weekend and now I'm back at work, thwacking out these words on the world's dirtiest keyboard. What happened? Who knows. Sorry for missing the deadline you guys didn't know about til now. Hopefully some time in the middle of this week I can finish something that'll make you all laugh. Or it might horrify you. Possibly both? Note: I am not responsible for headsplosions resulting from mixed feelings of horror/hilarity.

Our Children Will Party on the Moon.

So according to this website, someone has brewed a beer specifically for drinking in space. As an avid beer drinker, my first thought was "FUCK yes, Space Beer! This is mankind's crowning achievement!" I was genuinely excited by the prospect that maybe, just maybe I could drink a beer in outer space before I die.

Then I thought about it. When I drink beer, I do not drink just one beer unless that is all I can afford. Mind you, since you pay eight dollars for a can of Budweiser at a concert, Space Beer would probably cost something like seven hundred dollars an ounce so I would spend more getting drunk in space than actually getting to space. But space stations are by nature very delicate, expensive, and precise pieces of machinery, and given that drunk people should not be near anything delicate, this seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe they can make a big padded room for all the drunks to go play around in zero gravity.

But just getting to space would be an arduous task. Using current rocket technology, a Space tourist would be subjected to around three gs of force for roughly ten minutes on the journey to the starry voids above, which is comparable to the force you feel on some roller coasters. I don't think that it would be a crippling experience, but I certainly would not be in the mood to get hammered afterward.

Well, let's say that you have taken this flight into space with no ill effects, other than you are very thirsty. So you walk over to the Crab Nebula Bar and Grill. The pretty Space Waitress walks over to you and you order up a Space Beer and suck it down. It was pretty good, so you get another. And another. And another. At some point, you probably eat a Space Burger and wash it down with yet another Space Beer. At this point, you are five beers deep into your Space Party over fifty miles above the Earth's surface. What else is fun in Space? There's a Space Tennis court down in Sector Alpha and a bunch of gift shops selling Moon rocks and other cosmic debris, as well as kitschy tourist garbage you can't afford because you spent all your money on Space Beer. But for the most part, there's just these lame observation decks with windows and tables in front of them. You try to look out the window but the vast and limitless expanse in front of you doesn't translate well into double vision and it makes you dizzy. You try to lean on the table nonchalantly in lieu of real activity.

The pretty Space Waitress from the Crab Nebula Bar notices your plight, and helpfully directs you to the Drunk Tank. You stumble down the hallways and corridors in search of it. When you arrive, you find a gigantic padded room with people just floating around in it. NO WAY. Zero gravity?! Awesome! Unable to contain your excitement, you run/stumble inside and immediately launch into the air with a tremendous leap. For the first five minutes, you are having the time of your life.

Then it all starts to go wrong. The Space Burger and the Space Beers have been meeting secretly in your stomach, planning their escape. You become wise to their games, but it is already far too late. You try to brace yourself, but how the hell can you do that when you're floating upside down in a big padded room with no gravity?

So you awkwardly curl up in the fetal position, your momentum making you spin downward ever so slightly. There is a brief moment of anticipation, like something is welling up inside of you. Then it is welling up and out of you. The force of your vomiting makes you curl up even more, so not only are you sending a small fortune in half digested Space Food floating across the room, you are also coating yourself in it. And then you aren't allowed to drink in space anymore. And man, which poor sap has to clean the vomit out of this big zero gravity drunken playhouse? How much does that guy make?

Not nearly enough, if they're making him clean up puke in zero gravity with a net. I just can't imagine any other way to do it right now, so his job sucks a little extra.

The crazy thing is, Boeing wants to start ferrying tourists to space within the next five years. So for our children, this will probably be an average night.

Stating the obvious:

Changed the template on here. I like the sickly yellow color. Yea? Nay? Leave me some feedback but don't necessarily expect me to listen unless you make a REALLY good argument.

I don't know why I'm posting right now. I will try to finish one of my real posts this weekend.

Wherein I Plagiarize Allie Brosh:

I know I said I wasn't going to be whiny and bitchy on this blog, but right now I can't help it. I just experienced a sneaky hate spiral that has been building up for a couple days. A little back story is in order-Namely that a friend of mine is having some issues, another friend of mine is recovering from her fifty millionth surgery, and my sister is getting a divorce. I had a suspicion that it was only a matter of time before this happened. Personally I kind of wanted to celebrate, but I knew this was a tough decision for my sister so I kept my cheers in.

The real hate spiral started with me sweeping the floor before leaving work yesterday. I started to feel this awful pain in my left hand. When I looked down, I saw that I had either gotten a blister and popped it, or I had contracted ebola and my skin was sloughing off. It's in that perfect place that has to bend when I pick up anything at all.

Do you see that? That is not a happy wound.

Anyway, that sets the stage for today. I arrive at work to rumors that two of my coworkers were thinking of walking out on the job. This, of course, would mean plenty of extra work for those of us left until we could hire replacements. So with thoughts of sixty hour work weeks and my sister's divorce running through my head, and the occasional sharp jolt of pain from my thumb, I proceeded to go about my work day. Now, my father is the shop foreman. He knows most everything that goes on in that place, and has many gripes that I don't care to list, though I listen to them enough.

Today, he tells me that he is going to wait until his birthday, November 30th, to decide if he's going to keep working there or not. He has a much better job waiting for him, so I kinda want to smack him and tell him to quit tomorrow. But if he goes, I go. And despite how much I hate my job and the fact that you start out at a higher wage at the local gas station than I make, my job does have some perks. I am settled into a routine, and even if I don't like the routine, I have trouble with adjusting to changes. Further mental stress.

Then I come home after a ten hour work day to learn that my sister is thinking about not divorcing her husband. I would be relieved if he had changed and they had sorted out their problems,  but he hasn't. Mind you, just prior to the decision to split up, my brother in law had taken a job in Greenwood, Indiana. We live in central Pennsylvania. Mind you, it's really good money that he's making. It's just too fucking bad the dickhead never sent any of it to his family. They didn't have running water OR heat in their house for three fucking weeks. And he never sent them a dime, even though he had just taken this new job and a fat pay raise. He came home last weekend wearing a brand new outfit. This is the man she plans to get back with? Really? He spent money that could have saved your house from foreclosure going on a golf trip to North Carolina. When was that? Oh, that's right. On your wedding anniversary. For God's sake, sis, his initials are J.R.K. Do you see that? Cuz it spells jerk. I hate to say it, but I will lose a lot of faith in you if you stay with him.

And then, blinding rage and hatred for everything that ever existed. All the awful circumstances of the day crashed down on me in a wash of negative emotions. I may have broken some things. I don't really know. The spiral is winding down and I don't hate the world quite so much right now, but for a little while there, I was out of control.

Sorry for the lack of funny. Just needed to rant for a bit and none of my real life friends(Psh, as if I have any of those) were available.

Busy Busy

My post schedule shall be drastically altered until after Halloween. I am working on too many other projects to give as much attention to this blog as needed. I have something like six or seven more posts in various stages of completion right now, but I'm not even sure I will get to post all of them this month. I will try.

Lots of love,

Adam

Fun with Photobooth

It's late and I am bored. So I took these pictures of myself. They vary between funny and creepy.

See? This one is funny.

So is this one.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

This one bothers me a lot too. Shit, where's the funny?!

Ah, there it is.

The Legend of the Destructo-Ball

Back in high school, my friends and I did not do very much with our time. Most of this is to do with the fact that there is not very much to do in the town we grew up in. We would go to Goodwill and the Salvation Army to root through society's unwanted things, lurk around the skate park, eat at Willie's Pizza Buffet when we could afford it, or simply walk around town. That is, until somebody remembered the bowling alley and how it was open most days after school.

We became obsessed... Those of us with jobs blew most of our paychecks there, and those of us without jobs saved allowances and stopped eating lunch so we could go bowling after school. We were so into bowling that even though we were terrible, we wanted to form our own team for the leagues held there.

Of course, being dumb teenagers, we would do things like throw two balls down the lane at once, or backwards through our legs. But the crowning story of the damage we caused that bowling alley, though not the most costly incident we were responsible for, is the story of the destructo-ball.

We were the only people in the bowling alley that day. My friend Andy was before me in the rotation, and upon taking his turn, one of the pins spun towards us a few feet, out of the range of the machine that is supposed to clear away the pins you knock down.

As it was, the pin spun into the gutter and sat there. We all looked down the lane at it, contemplating if we should tell the owner about it. We decided that if we got a gutterball, it would push the pin down the lane and everything would be fine, so I went ahead and took my turn.

I lined up and threw my first ball, blissfully unaware of the chaos about to ensue.

"Oh, good," I thought idly to myself. "It's going to knock that pin down the gutter and out of the way..."

"Oh, it landed ON the pin? Wonder what's gonna JESUS CHRIST!"

The ball exploded into the air, knocked down some pins, then crashed into the pin-setting machine. On the plus side, it did indeed send the rogue pin down the gutter. Everyone froze. We watched the machine at the other end of the lane with bated breath. What the hell just happened? Did we destroy it? It didn't move. Trembling, I hit the reset button on the ball return.

Hooray! It worked! Apparently the people designing this machinery figured that a bowling ball would smash into it eventually. I like to think they had a prophecy that one day the Destructo-Ball would visit upon their creation a devastating blow, but it was probably just an engineering department meeting.

We bowled the rest of the game quietly and like respectable members of society under the watchful eye of the owner, then left as quickly as we could. Something in his glances told us we were beginning to push our luck.

Hey would you look at that. I actually wrote about bowling.

Last Post for September

I like to think that we are made of anti-matter and not matter. But if that was the case it wouldn't matter because we would call anti-matter matter and matter anti-matter.

I shall return this weekend for a real post.

On Blogs, Fame, and cross dressing:

Lately I have become enamored with the Next Blog button. For hours, I will click through all that Blogger has to offer. And the sad truth is that not many of the blogs on here are worth reading. I mean, really, between finding fifty blogs in a row about fashion(Perhaps Blogger thinks I could use a hot new fall look, but dresses and high heels are not my things. At least not my public things.) and the countless "DAVIS FAMILY ADVENTURES LOL" blogs, it can start to look hopeless.

Yes, I just drew myself in drag. Yes, I look fabulous.

I don't care what human walking sticks are wearing down the runway. I don't care that little baby Allan said his first word today, unless that word is Ron Burgundy or something obscene. I don't care what you think of the latest NFL draft. I don't care about your spin on the political scene in our country.

But I'm sure you don't care about me crashing my sister's car. I highly doubt anybody really wants to hear me complain about my job. But the one difference I notice is that most everybody is trying to become famous with their blogs. In fact, a study I recently read about found that when asking children what they want to be when they grow up, the most common answer was 'famous'. Not 'a famous writer' or 'a famous actor', just famous. It's sad that the only ambition the future generation seems to have amounts to "HEY LOOK AT ME EVERYONE. HEY. LOOK. ARE YOU LOOKING YET? HEY"

People used to become famous because they did extraordinary things. All it took was glorifying one or two perfectly ordinary people doing nothing special, and all of a sudden everybody thinks they deserve to be famous too. Not that there's anything wrong with wanting some degree of fame -I'd be a liar and a hypocrite if I said I don't want lots of people to read this blog or listen to my music- but to me, the reason why you're famous is more important. What did you contribute? Why should people remember your name instead of the billions of others on this planet? If you have nothing useful to say or contribute to society, there is no reason society should put you on a pedestal.

I guess until I complete my plans of world domination and become Big Brother I can't control the things people decide to devote their attention to.

My evil lair is gonna be the shit.

The reason I do not have my driver's license:

Disclaimer: This is the first real post I have made entirely on my iMac. As such, the drawings will suck even more than usual while I get used to using Paintbrush.



In Pennsylvania, you have to be sixteen to get your driver's permit. I know most kids are excited for this time, because for them it means freedom. I was not excited. It wasn't even that I didn't want to be able to drive, I was mostly just apathetic about the whole idea. I had recently moved into the center of town where everything is pretty much within walking distance, so I had absolutely no reason to be excited about driving.

As it was, I finally got my permit about three or four months after my birthday. This is about how I felt about that:

After a week or so, my sister decides "Hey! Why don't we go driving? I'll take you to a parking lot and you can just take it easy and get used to it." I agree, so she drives about five blocks from my house to a school. I take the wheel and putt around the parking lot at about three or five miles an hour and I start to realize, "Hey, this is fun! I like driving!"

I practice pulling into parking spaces for a little while and then my sister says "Why don't you take the car around the block?" So I leave the safety of my parking lot and turn left on to the real road. I navigate the block successfully and by this time I'm feeling a bit smug. I can totally drive. I got this. I pull into the lot again and park in a space. "Now what?" I ask.

"I don't know."

So I drive back to the road and turn right this time. Now what I had failed to remember is that this road leads to a hill. And of course, on hills objects with wheels will pick up momentum. I was not prepared at all. The car began traveling faster and faster, so I panicked.

 

 My brain had frozen up. But I was quickly entering an intersection that looked like this:

So since I had totally forgotten that cars come equipped with mechanisms that allow them to stop, I had three choices.

1) Crash into the house on the corner, leap out of the car and start yelling "Who the hell parked in my spot?!"
2) Smash into the car parked in front of the house
3) Mow down the stop sign and pray the telephone pole will stop me.

I chose option number three.

A lady came rushing out of the house, and having just watched an idiot teenager crash his sister's Taurus into a telephone pole, she was understandably excited. "Oh my Gawd, are you guys okay?" We muttered some embarrassed response, and I was literally shaking with adrenaline and guilt. I kept apologizing to my sister, but displaying that classic elder-sibling wisdom, she simply smiled at me and said "Don't worry about it. The insurance will cover it."

And it's a damn good thing that it did, too. If you've ever examined a road sign closely, you will know that the signs are on a long piece of metal that bolts into a shorter piece of metal that actually sticks in the ground.

This piece of metal tore up the underside of my sister's vehicle, and it cost over three grand to have it all fixed.

And that is why I have not gotten my driver's license.

Embarrassing stories from childhood, part one.

I finally got my iMac issues all sorted out(had to get a wireless router) so hopefully now updates can be a bit more consistent. I was going to say frequent, but given my schedule the past few days, I'll be out of things to talk about in a week if I post any more often and then this blog will die off until I do something cool or at least kinda interesting. Then perhaps I could write again.


Just so this doesn't feel like a waste of space, here are three embarrassing stories from before I had learned how to remember things:

1: "Is this yo baby?"

I was very young at this time, at the very oldest I could have only been a year and a half old. While my family was living in Wisconsin, the house we lived in had a big screened in porch, complete with doggie flap in the front door. Apparently, while my mother was cooking, she let me crawl/stumble around, figuring I wouldn't get far. Of course, I crawled out the doggie door and into the street. A few minutes later, my mother answers a knock at the door to a stranger holding me in his arms. Even as an infant I wanted to run away, I guess.

2: We wish you a merry Christmas

This was also from the time we lived in Wisconsin. I found a spare bulb for a string of Christmas lights and because babies are stupid, I ate it.

My parents did not find this out immediately, but I'm sure the wait made the surprise even better. I wish someone would have taken a picture of my diaper just so I would have some proof. I don't think anybody else in the history of ever has uttered that phrase before. Ah, the smell of innovation.

3: I really like Ford F-150s.

Around the time I started learning to speak, I had developed a fascination with trucks of all sorts. Dump trucks, fire trucks, pickup trucks, monster trucks, I loved them all. Now, the funny thing with kids and learning to talk is they always have some sort of cutesy speech impediment while the child wraps its brain around the concept of making articulate sounds from organs previously devoted to gibberish, crying, and yelling. I had one such problem that wasn't always so cute.

Trucks are everywhere. And when your toddler loves them dearly but pronounces the letters tr as an f, it can make you never want to take your kid anywhere ever again.

P.S. I know I referred to a child as "it" above... but I dislike using "his or her" so much I'd rather come off as a desensitized asshole than use it. I actually kinda like kids, if you must know.

DuBois Graffiti Showcase: Sandy Bridge Edition

The other day I found my digital camera for the first time in months. So naturally, I had to go play mister photographer. It seems like every hooligan with a dollar and a valid ID wants the world to know something badly enough to deface public property.

Hi Sammi!

I like this one. It actually looks like graffiti.

 

Har har.

Once I got up close, I found some really cool artwork by someone going by the name of Chubson. Who are you Chubson? And where can I find more of your work?

Hair? Eyepatch? I honestly do not know.

D'aaawwwww.

This one is my favorite.

EXTRA CREDIT:

 

EDIT: I don't know how the hell I forgot to post this one. It's so simple, yet elegant.

I vote we rename the bridge.

I am worried my niece may become a lesbian.

Not that there's anything wrong with that... But I came home from work to find this window open:

I fear she is getting some mixed signals about genders..

A brief interlude

When you work a full time job and you have many hobbies, you have to learn to split up your time wisely. By nature and/or upbringing, I simply cannot do this. So what usually happens is I pick one thing and work at it mercilessly until I am burned out, then trying to find time for my other projects. This is why my blog posts have been a little sporadic. Between working, two bands, making jewelry, maintaining some semblance of a social life and trying to start a zine in my hometown, I barely have the time to watch a cartoon, let alone write a post.

I don't really know where I was going with that or why you needed to hear it. I was just trying to post before bed and couldn't think of anything. So here are some pictures from my sketchbook. These are all from the era when I was obsessed with pastels.