Ten-In-One Part One: My Pal The Aggressively Gay White Supremacist With Supplemental Dentation

Just for giggles I threw some chee-z color down under the sketch I posted yesterday. After all, if I post without an image the Earth will be thrown out of orbit and spiral into the sun.

I've been up since two, which means I've gotten less than twelve hours of sleep in the last three days, so I've decided to let myself have a lazy day. I'll see if I like Saturn's Children by Charlie Stross, an anime-culture influenced pastiche of Heinlein's dirty-old-man period. Robot porn by a Scottish tech freak, gamer, and socialist? Sounds... eeeeenteresting. I've loved some Stross, been unmoved by others. We'll see.

But I've been working so hard that I've ignored the blog for a little while now. How about a real post, something amusing -- a set of brief glimpses into my past. Now from time to time you'll hear the phrase 'weirdness magnet.' I am here to assure you that the phenomenon is real, and I will offer you four stories from my life that suggest that I'm a grade-A weirdness magnet.

Anyone with the tiniest smidgen of critical acumen knows that even the cleverest lyrics for popular music are not fucking poetry. They almost never read well on the page. So the following is gonna come off a little dorky... Here are the lyrics for one of the songs we did for The Dizzy Toilet Devil's first album. It's one of the few untainted by our departed asshole guitarist, but alas -- Bile Langschodt is too embarassed by his vocals to let me post an MP3... Anyway.

Ten-in-One

He's trying to get his arm on my shoulder
he's got a little extra jaw in his mouth
he says he likes coloreds when they don't get an attitude
his lover was black when he lived down south

(Chorus)

Why is my life such a goddamned freak show?
Why do these people want to talk to me?
There's an attraction normal folks can never know
I'm marked in a way that normal people can't see

She walks right up to me on the street
she ought to be black but she's oozy and pink
she says, "Do you believe in morticians?
They fuck corpses, boy, what do you think?"

(Chorus)

His arm is stiff and pink like a birthday candle
he chews on the scars and it makes a funny noise
he tells me he's no child molester
he just likes to hypnotize teenage boys

(Chorus)

A sweet young woman sits right down beside me
she's holding her bundled up pride and joy
the baby starts to play with the hair on my leg
I see his little baby hands, the kid is a lobster boy

(Chorus and out)

First Verse

I'll always think of this dude as the aggresively gay white supremacist with supplemental dentation. (I can find a box to put anyone in.) It's funny -- I went through my teen years and early twenties assuming that if a guy hit on me in a serious fashion I'd probably freak out, but it turned out not to be the case.

In my mid-twenties I found out that serious exercise gets you high and leaves you tired enough to sleep, so I got hooked on the gym. I got to the point where I was having to add weights to the Universal and Nautilii.

(I should have switched to free weights but I didn't want to have fucking anything to do with the ex-cons and steroid freaks who do occupied that part of the gym. They were radioactive with assholery, and it would have just been a matter of time before some gland-munching juice freak pissed me off and I'd have gotten my head torn off in the ensuing scuffle.)

What I'm saying is that there was an extended period in my life where I was an impressive physical specimen. Gay guys started hitting on me on a semi-regular basis. Most of the time I didn't even notice because I am pathetically sexually naive...

Honestly, I think about this and I imagine how I would have felt about these situations if I hadn't been a comfortably violence-positive behemoth. I don't know why women aren't shooting guys left and fucking right, I swear to god.

(Interestingly, the two women who used those kinds of unsubtle tactics got me. Hell, one of them still has me.)

I was riding on Golden Gate transit, going from school in Santa Rosa to my girlfriend's house in San Francisco (I caught the bus outside school and it took me right to the foot of the hill her house was on. There were some weird fate issues in that relationship...) and this dude comes up and sits next to me and initiates a converation.

As he talks, he keeps slipping his arm up around my shoulders. I listen, I talk, and I patiently keep taking his arm off of my shoulders. Over and over again. I don't know why I didn't get pissed off -- I suspect it was because I didn't feel even vaguely threatened.

(Actually, it was because being openly and violently hated at school and alternately touch-starved and beaten at home has left me with the funkiest old set of personal boundaries. I accept stuff I hate and flee stuff I like. And have a desperate thirst for attention, as you may have noticed. But that's a whole other can of slimy disgusting worms... and I'm a lot better now.)

There was something weird about his speech, a slight slur that I'd never heard before. He asks me what my ethnicity is...

"Pretty much your standard white trash. We've been in the US since the pilgrims hit dirt and we still don't have any money."

And he gets pissed.

"I hate that... that... Saying white trash is racist! (I agree with him but as white trash I get to say it and fuck you.) I once went to this store down in Los Angeles that this colored (!) couple ran called Poor White Trash and it was filled with all these horrible statuettes and framed cartoons making fun of white people and they thought it was funny! I hate it when black people have an attitude!"

Please remember that he's putting his arm on my shoulder and I'm taking it off. Putting it on, taking it off. Putting it on, taking it off.

So at that point he must have seen something in my face because he got sheepish and apologetic.

"Listen, I'm no racist. I like colored people when they know their place. I mean, I had a black lover when I lived in the South."

Oh, brother. I don't think I've ever run across a finer specimen of a self-damning protestation of innocence. I wanted to mount it and hang it over the fireplace.

Anyway, that's when I get a look at the inside of his mouth. He had two rows of teeth! Man, that dude was quite a cake in the first place but that was some intense frosting. It looked as if he had a baby-sized extra jaw nestled inside the regular one. And for the rest of the ride I couldn't keep my eyes off of his choppers.

I remember thinking to myself, "Pay attention to this guy -- he'll teach you a lesson about humans you will get nowhere else."

This ran a little longer than I expected. Cool -- I'll get four posts out of this idea.

So tomorrow I'll tell you all about the diseased corpse-fucker lady who actually got this song rolling.

On Music, Friendship, And Therapy

A bit of juvenalia from my early twenties, since none of my current art projects are ready to show. I did mention that I first studied art and writing because I wanted to do comic books, right?

Hypermasculinity always seems to have a homoerotic component to it. And while I think of myself as completely heterosexual, it's hard to look at much of adventure fiction and the imagery associated with it and not see that it's got a queer component to it that's only invisible to most of the creators and most of the audience.

In other words, when they make a big deal in the media out of gay superheroes in mainstream comics, who are they fooling? All superheroes are gay. For pete's sake, they are defined by the fact that they wear fetish gear straight out of Tom of Finland. Of course if you told me that when I drew this I would have freaked out.

I've tried not to make a big deal out of it here on the blog but I've been going through a rough patch lately. My back has been killing me and I've been subject to a bad case of floating anxiety, the kind where you always feel as if the world is about to be pulled out from under you, where you wake up in the middle of the night and immediately start thinking about your problems and shortcomings.

February is the hardest month for me. My crazy always bites a little harder this time of year. As I've matured I've gotten better and better at handling this -- but this year things have been worse than they have for a long, long time.

As a result I've been getting about two hours of sleep a night -- which doesn't help the anxiety -- which doesn't help the the crazy or the pain. A big part of dealing with chronic pain comes down to will, which I have been sorely lacking.

But I'm not pleading victim here. The above paragraphs are a jumping-off point. See, last night I slept for eight hours. My back is in bad shape and I'm still going to need to restrict my activities in the near future -- but I have to look for the pain to notice it. The pain itself is not a concern. I have a calm, sunny disposition at the moment -- quite content with life and my place in it. Why?

Last night I got to hang out with my best friend, have a few drinks and some cigarettes, play music and talk.

This seems like such a small thing. And the term 'best friend' seems like something more fit for the playground than for use between a couple of guys in their forties. But it's the right term. Since this post is going to discuss a nefarious activity or two, we'll call my best friend Buck, at his suggestion.

We've known each other for about thirty years and for a long, long time now -- Jesus, somewhere around nineteen years -- we've been getting together to hang out on a regular basis. For the past while the routine has been fixed at twice a week, Thursday and Saturday nights.

We play the same handful of songs, me on bass and Buck on guitar, do some musical noodling and improvisation, share a few beers, maybe a shot or two, and every so often we go out on the deck to smoke cigarettes -- he's a habitual smoker, I'm opportunistic (if I'm around smokers I'll bum a smoke, otherwise I'm a non-smoker) -- and listen to music, trading back and forth between his and my collections.

We talk about how the women in our lives are trying to assassinate us through sexual denial and willfully crazy behavior, affirm that we love them enough to let them do this to us, confess our own odious behavior and figure out how to minimize it, discuss political news in increasingly loud and angry voices, cast our thoughts back to the joys and miseries of our rather unpleasant childhoods, I talk about my creative work and school, he talks about his job and how much he loves his son -- now sons. The arts, literature, nature, world culture, science, mythology, history, language, and a bizarre gallimaufry of other subjects are discussed, dissected, and delighted in. It's good to have a smart friend.

No matter what mood we're in when we start, by the end of the evening we've entered into what we call 'band space.' Low key but energetic, calm but confident. The music and the drink and the company and the ritual of it all work together to evoke a very specific mental space.

Do I dare to risk the wrath of the gods by using the word 'happy?' Yes. I do. We wind up happy. It's very, very rare for one of us to leave band practice in a bad frame of mind -- and even then, it's a better state of mind than we had going in.

It's our therapy.

There was a TV show that went off the air recently that I was very fond of. It was called Boston Legal. It's appeal was very straightforward -- one part freak show, one part 'I am right, you are wrong' porn, and one part friend porn.

(Then there was the Shatner factor -- William Shatner played a character named Denny Crane who was clearly Captain Kirk in his filthy degenerate dotage. This is an example of what I think of as the principle of actor continuity -- all the characters played by a certain type of actor are the same individual at different times in their lives. For instance, the Jeff Bridges character in The Big Lebowski wound up in that state because of what happened to him in Tron. But I digress.)

Buck never watched the show and one night I was explaining to him that the emotional core was the relationship between the characters Alan Shore and Denny Crane, how at the ending of each and every episode they were sitting out on a balcony overlooking Boston, discussing the events of the day, sipping whisky and smoking cigars, and basically affirming that as long as they had their friendship, as long as they had that time together, all was right with the world.

And as I explained that, I looked at the cigarette in one hand, the glass of Anderson Valley IPA close to the other, looked over the railing at my wife's garden in the moonlight below us, and looked at my best friend.

I realized that we'd been doing this long before that show aired and would be doing it long after -- that when I watched those balcony scenes, what I felt wasn't envy. It was an affirmation of an important part of my life.

Last night we got together for the first time in a long time -- and as I said, last night I slept for eight hours, my back is tolerable, and I'm in a good mood. I love my friend; I missed my friend; I saw my friend and now I feel better. And I know that it went both ways.

He's being a good husband and father these days, attending to his family now that his second child has been born. He's doing the right thing and more power to him. We're going to have to change the pattern of our time together -- we'll be over at his house and his kids and wife will be part of the mix.

But seeing him last night made me realize that it's all gonna work out fine.

I was going to tell you about how we found out that we were friends but this post is already too long. I'll save that story for tomorrow. It involves, as I mentioned above, nefarious activities, Jack London, my sorely-missed brother Duncan and a coming-of-age passage, The Ramones and Screaming Jay Hawkins, a trailer park, class warfare, and just a wee little tiny bit of amnesia.

It's a pretty good story. I think you'll like it.

From The Valley Of Lost Projects: The Ghosts Of T-Shirts Past

An earlier version of this had the burst in the background positioned so that it looked as if the Protoceratops was farting.

Dizzy Toilet Devil Logo Black and Glow. On the back – “We Had To/Destroy The Song/In Order To/Save It.” Spattery – do by hand with brush, import, turn to Illustrator file. In corona around toilet devil – “oddcore, power folk, lunchabilly, rhythm & booze, drunk rock, children’s music for underdone adults.” Underneath, Dizzy Toilet Devils.

Well, it's true!

These designs were done for a friend of a friend who worked at a T-shirt company up in Canada. I was told that they'd been accepted and there was money on the way and then my pal climbed on board the crazy wagon and vanished from my life. I still wonder if any of these were actually used.

And here are a few more thoughts from the files...

The eye-in-hand motif, green shirt and iris, brick-red hand, blue eye outline and shadow.

Swill. Black shirt, bright red lettering, glow in the dark outline.

SAFETY LEADS THE WAY – chipper Helvetica on the left hand of the chest against white, maybe a ringer T – with a gory spatter of blood. Dried or fresh? Dried. Make it look like a stain. Figure out the perfect corporate douche design, the shirt you get as a prize at work.

(I actually had this one once -- got it as a prize for making a safety poster. I took it home, tore the sleeves off and spattered it with blood-colored acrylics left over from the poster and then wore it proudly for years. I remember once a pal took me to play pool after work at an old-guy bar and it took me a while to realize that I might be getting the odd looks because I was wearing that shirt, a lab coat, and a pair of pants with a skull motif. That's the kind of style you can only get accidentally...)

IF IT SWARMS – EXTERMINATE, the two words to be separated by a square graphic of a crowd scene, preferably a Republican national convention. Glow in the dark on black.

EAT MEAT – MURDER’S NEAT! The two words to be separated by a picture of a man holding a pistol to a cow’s head as the cow weeps and says, “Please, oh God, you could just walk away and it would be like nothing ever happened.”

Hey, I'd wear 'em.

And a special tip o' the oaf to Traumador, who gave me the idea when he expressed interest in a shirt based on my previous post. Maybe someday, little guy. Maybe someday.