One of the reasons I never use this is that the comments feature is impossible. It doesn’t weed spam–either I ban comments altogether, or allow them and delete a hundred spam per day with a feature that doesn’t allow batch edits.

If you’re on Facebook, you can always find out what I’m up to…and then some (I’m a loudmouth).

If you’re not, I’ll be sending some email news soon. In the meantime, I’ve started a blogger page specifically devoted to my A #1 Silly Plan of All Time: selling my shit, quitting my job, and moving into a van:

Into the Surly

Back from a couple weeks out west, one spent kicking around Vegas and LA with my gentleman friend Paul, and one spent working on storyboards for a real live movie. As soon as I can figure out how to post multi-page PDFs I’ll put some of those on the art pages (and I’ll post some pix of the Studio City place where I was doing my storyboarding sometime soon, as well, I hope). Besides being awesome because I was working on a GODDAMNED HORROR MOVIE, the experience prompted me to finally buy a Wacom tablet (to save my hands and my markers and TONS of time, I hope–thanks to new friend Liz for the tip!), and was like a sequential art bootcamp. When I’m done with this, no way will I be intimidated by the idea of drawing comics.

If all goes well (and so far, so good, why wouldn’t it go well?) next year I plan to cash out my 401K, pay my debts, buy a car, and move to LA to follow my dream of being a full-time, paid horror movie geek. My friend (and director) Adam did it. And he is, I think, poised to mentor me in my own “living the nightmare.”

This kind of confidence is pretty new to me. It’s been a wild couple of years. In the past couple of months, four people I respect more than anyone (should it be surprising that they are all men I’ve crushed on in the past or present? Have I mentioned my freakadelic animus grappling? Yeah, I think I have) have all told me, in so many words, that I am a very unusual person. I sure have felt isolated, scapegoated, lonely, and different in the past, and have mostly shaped my life from the stupid cesspool of bitterness those feelings caused. But I’ve never thought of myself as “unusual” in a positive way. Until now, I guess.

Since my dad died, and since starting therapy, I have gotten divorced, gotten my own apartment, gotten tattooed all over, taken up burlesque dancing, fallen in love while attempting the superhuman feat of not making possession a part of it, started making moves toward a huge career and location change, and gotten to the point where I don’t give a rat’s ass what anyone thinks of me or what I do (while still I hope not being cavalier about the feelings of people I actually DO care about). I’d walk down the fucking street naked and dare people to say something about it. I’m 41, I’m fat, and I have nothing to lose at this point.

Recently I’ve been reading about Jung’s “shadow” concept (yeah, I think I’ve maybe resolved that whole animus thing for now…I don’t daydream constantly about older, bald characters from the TV show “Lost” anymore, anyway [don’t ask]). I think most people conceptualize their shadow sides as their “bad” side, their “sinful” side. That’s too simple. The shadow is what you hate about yourself, what you don’t wanna claim. MY shadow side is timid, fearful, starving, and gullible. My shadow side is what keeps me from being who I really wanna be, and I’m sick of her shit, frankly.

Something I wrote in my private online diary, the contents of which I usually wouldn’t publish because the corniness is puke-worthy. But if I was gonna summarize what’s been on my mind lately, this is pretty much it in a nutshell:

Good things I am:
compassionate
non-judgmental
hard to scandalize
open-minded
enthusiastic
willing to try new things
daring
funny
aware that other people have a right to their own feelings and that I don’t have to take them personally
responsible for myself
sensual
naughty
encouraging
appreciate difference in others
appreciate those who seem misunderstood by most
unapologetic, usually
try not to foist my emotions on others, try not to imprison them in my internal drama
easygoing
honest, usually
intelligent
freespirited

When I was little I had a sunny personality. I didn’t cry to get what I wanted. I was also hypersensitive. I took being bullied to heart and became timid in some ways. I became scared, and self-judging. I felt unprotected. But I mostly did not take it out on other people. I stayed compassionate, even toward the people who bullied me. Who knows why.

Things I don’t want to be scared of anymore:
People I sense look down on me or dislike me
Poverty
Angry people
Debate, stating my opinion
rejection
asking for what I want–but I have to be prepared to cut my losses if I dont get it
expressing my discomfort
interruption of my plan/spontanaity/unexpected change/loss of control
loss of security
starving
pissing people off

Yeah. Here’s hoping. And by the way, for everyone who, like I once did, thinks antidepressants are horrible, dangerous, and for weak people…I started taking Prozac about 6 months ago and firmly believe if not for that, I would not have been able to get past my obsessive thinking long enough to be able to even look at any of this stuff. In “Listening to Prozac,” the author makes a case that rather than curing depression, Prozac’s most noteworthy effect seems to be in assisting its users in feeling “like themselves” for the first time…it reshapes entire personalities. And he gets into why that brings up plenty of ethical problems. Yup. And that’s pretty much what’s happened to me since 2007. Prozac was one piece of the puzzle, but a pretty important one. So hey, y’all who aren’t medical professionals…keep your opinions to yourselves. Thank you. Now, back to storyboarding!

I’ve fallen into the vortex of Facebook, where sporadic updates to a captive audience have supplanted blogging.

Much art news in early 2009.

First, I’ve illustrated another book. This one is published by BBC History Magazine (UK only) and presents a bunch of hilarious history trivia. You can preorder it here.

Secondly, with the encouragement of some good friends, I turned my “naked-ladies-with-animal-heads” into a 12-drawing series called “Calendar Girls,” which I had professionally printed as oversized postcards. You can view large files of the postcards here. You can also buy them from my new ETSY SHOP, SurlyShop. Go here!

Thirdly, my original Calendar Girls are featured in my first ever gallery show! Yes, my art, hanging on a wall! Bizarro! They’re at Kayo Gallery in fabulous Salt Lake City until mid-June.

And lastly, I have been hired to storyboard a horror movie, which is just about the raddest goddamned thing that’s ever happened to me. I’ll be going to LA in July to work with writer/director Adam Gierasch on a ghost story, Fertile Ground, that will start filming in Iowa in August. Adam was the first person who ever spoke to me at Bennington and we’ve been friends ever since. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the coolest B’ton grad EVER, and if it wasn’t for his encouragement and willingness to test out a total noob, I wouldn’t even have thought of this as a “career option” (which, at this point, it sure is. LA in 2010, baby!). I’m fairly freaky with anticipation.

And in other news, I’m divorced. It was amicable. It was my doing. Yeah, that’s what the whole Joni-Mitchell-cryptic-references thing was about, in case you were wondering. And that’s all I’m gonna say about that!

And in other mid-life-crisis wackiness, I am taking burlesque classes at Studio L’Amour, owned and operated by Miss Exotic World 2005 Michelle L’Amour, and loving it. Finally, something my GIGANTIC ASS is actually perfectly suited to! It doesn’t take itself as seriously as belly dancing (I had to stop when I realized that I was in fact feeling old and fat, and it wasn’t all me–it was a vibe I was picking up, and it wasn’t cool), and unlike roller derby, it doesn’t leave me in an exhausted, puking heap. I’m not exactly the most coordinated person in the world, so you may not see me on stage anytime soon, but I definitely get a kick watching myself bump & grind in the studio’s full-length mirror. Burlesque dancers are pretty! And I am one!

And finally, the piece de scandale… Me. Topless. On the interwebs. Go here and see if you can pick me out of the lineup. And even if you can’t, the blog is by my excellent friend Mike McBeardo, Mr. Skin columnist and a man of wealth and taste.

Enjoy! I sure am.

That said…I’ve been listening to a lot of Joni Mitchell this year.

The women I have most admired have been a bit like Joni Mitchell–strong-willed, usually single, frank, almost “masculine” in an unsentimental approach to life, mostly childless, often adventurous. Katherine Hepburn is another of these women. Neko Case is another. Imperfect, often reckless in love, but unapologetic and brave. In my own life, my friends Valjean and Emily have been exemplars of this kind of independence.

The last several months, beginning with Dad’s death, have been full of change and loss. Just this month I said goodbye, for the most part, to roller derby, which dominated my life for more than two years. I helped my ex Al, one of my best friends and a bit of a rock for me in many ways, move halfway across the state. And there are other, far more major endings that I don’t get into here because they involve other people and while my own laundry is one thing, I prefer not to air the laundry of people I care about in a public forum, no matter how few readers it has…and no matter how easy I make it to read between the lines.

There are beginnings, too. My life feels wide open right now in a way I have never experienced… and even then, I wonder how fully I’m experiencing my current situation. I’ve always been emotionally myopic–when life gets too confusing, fraught, scary, I tend to close up on myself and narrow my focus as a way of keeping control. I once used alcohol for that purpose, as a way of packing some kind of gauze buffer around the part of myself that I’m afraid will bleed out if I leave it exposed to all the elements around me. I can’t do that anymore, so often I experience what AA calls mental obsession. The only way to stop my brain from flitting around like a bee in a jar is to focus on SOMETHING. Often this something is another person. I’ve gotten into a couple of long-term jams that way, and the objects of my obsessions haven’t been particularly well-served when I suddenly come to and realize what I’ve done. Havoc wreaked. As I mop up the aftermath, I need to remember that now.

There’s a lot I’m suppressing at the moment, I think, in order to keep myself sane. On the other hand, like the women I so admire, I am either not a very sentimental person, or I am aware that sentimentality often impedes one’s forward motion, so I’ve given it up.

For better or worse, I’ve listened to Joni Mitchell’s Hejira at least once a day for many, many months. This is the record that is currently “singing my life back to me,” I guess, or else it’s given me a path to follow, some kind of reassurance that it’s possible to do the things I know I must do, to live with melancholy and unresolved emotion and to occasionally fly too close to the sun, and to keep traveling through it all. It’s an album of deserts and roads. I go back to it over and over again to remind myself of the open spaces that lie before me, and that setting off into them alone isn’t so scary I need to look away. It’s been done before, by someone thankfully better at expressing what it is than I am.

When I was a kid and in a home of drunkenness and emotional violence and dreaming of getting out, I used to obsessively write Bruce Springsteen lyrics in the backs of my schoolbooks as a kind of exercise in grounding myself. In that spirit, here are the lyrics to the song Hejira. Maybe I’m not so un-sentimental after all…

Hejira–Joni Mitchell

I am traveling in some vehicle.
I’m sitting in some café.
A defector from the petty wars that shellshock love away
There is comfort in melancholy when there’s no need to explain
It’s just natural as the weather in this moody sky today
In our possessive coupling so much could not be expressed
So now I am returning to myself these things that you and I suppressed
I see something of myself in everyone just at the moment of the world
As snow gathers like bolts of lace waltzing on a ballroom girl

You know it never has been easy
Whether you do or you do not resign
Whether you travel the breadth of extremities or stick to some straight line
Now here’s a man and a woman sitting on a rock
They’re either gonna thaw out or freeze
Listen—strains of Benny Goodman coming through the snow and the pinewood trees
I’m porous with travel fever but you know I’m so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger can set up trembling in my bones
I know no one’s gonna show me everything, we all come and go alone
Each so deep and superficial between the forceps and the stone.

Well I looked at the granite markers
Those tributes to finality, to eternity
And then I looked at myself here, chicken-scratching for my immortality
In the church they light the candles and the wax rolls down like tears
There is the hope and the hopelessness I’ve witnessed 30 years
They’re only particles of change, I know I know, orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view when I’m always bound and tied to someone?
White flags of winter chimneys waving truce against the moon
In the mirrors of a modern bank
From the window of a hotel room

I’m traveling in some vehicle,
I’m sitting in some café.
A defector from the petty wars until love sucks me back that way.

Here are the movers, in the alley behind his house. We had eight trailers, I think, ranging from my little Action Packer to Steve’s 6-foot Bikes At Work trailer, which can (and did) haul up to 300 lbs. We made it in one trip.

When I turned 30 I promised myself I’d never help anyone move again. It’s different, though, moving by bike. It’s a parade, a party. It’s a challenge to find creative ways of making everything fit (and not tip over). I made sure the Rock Em Sock Em Robots found a spot on MY trailer before we rode the two miles down Humboldt Blvd/Sacramento to John’s new place.

…and by the way…

This:

is only okay because it reminds me of this:

and I love Los Bros Hernandez.

Seriously though. All kidding aside. I need to do some frigging pilates.

Actually, the skirt was form fitting so not a problem at all, and the boots lace so high that there was no danger of the laces getting caught in the drivetrain. Toe cages weren’t really made for jackboots, though, maybe.

I like this one. I look like Max Fischer.

Diane and Marco are caretakers for a little village on a ranch in San Cristobol. Aldous Huxley lived there, and the DH Lawrence Ranch is right down the road. Georgia O’Keefe used to ship her paintings from their trading post.

Here is the “cabin” where I stayed:

A bike killing time in the barn. Boy, did I want to take a brass brush to that sucker:

Bones. Always with the bones…

Sunset at Rudy’s:

Whitey, my favorite of their six Border Collie pups:

Marco prepares to SHEAR the sheep. That’s SHEAR the sheep, people!

More at flickr.

Mere weeks ago I was proclaiming my love for gears and joking about “fixie freaks.” But one or two sentences in defense of fixed-gear riding from Alex, along with this passage from Sheldon Brown’s site, was all it took to convince me to convert the old Bianchi frame Jay gave me in payment for the poster to a fixed-gear.

Alex used the word “zen” when describing the awareness that fixed-gear riding requires. Sheldon sez:

It is not easy to put into words. There is an almost mystical connection between a fixed-gear cyclist and bicycle, it feels like an extension of your body to a greater extent than does a freewheel-equipped machine.

Although this sounded like a buncha BS to me, I do take Alex’s word (mostly) as gospel, and Brown (RIP) was no slouch himself when it comes to bike knowledge. Plus I’m totally into new and different bike projects now. So I took a leap of faith, as it were.

This is Amelia. The frame is a 1986-87 Bianchi Strada from Jay’s basement, covered in red electrical tape (almost a perfect match for the original frame paint) to hide chipping and cuz I can’t afford (time or money-wise) to paint it at the moment. I flopped-and-chopped the original drop bars myself using some instructions I found on the web and wrapped them in brown cloth tape that I’m gonna shellac to make it look more like leather (not even I am wack enough to spend $75 on leather bar tape). The brakes were a gift from West Town for volunteering (Thanks, West Town!). The pedals are MKS Sylvans I picked up cuz I just couldn’t find any clippy ones second hand–oh well–and the toeclips have leather-padded ends to avoid shoe-scuffing and cuz they look classay! Fake brown leather straps too. Neato. I splurged on wheels and had them built by Marcus at Yojimbo’s: brown deep v’s, because I’m fancy that way.

The seat is my Brooks that I took offa the Badger (replaced it with this bike’s original San Marcos white seat, which it turns out is better for the Badger anyway in looks and fit). Of course, since one of the sweet things about fixies is how simple and beautiful they look, prompting their owners to geek out like girls looking for prom dresses, I am very bugged by the fact that the saddle’s leather is too dark to match the rims and the other components. Thankfully, the seat is also really too wide and shallow–I feel like my butt bones are constantly being pushed forward and putting too much weight on my already-numb hands. So in the name of improving the ride, I will be investing in a honey-colored Brooks B-17 and saving the B-67 for my future touring bike! Woot to self-justification!

And how does this geek-ass bike ride, you ask? Oh man. The dork in me rejoices every time I put foot to pedal. It’s really not that convenient to commute on this thing–I’m used to carrying a bunch of crap in panniers and being prepared for rain and whatnot. No rack, no fenders. I have to read the weather report and put everything in my messenger bag, and I hate that (though it turns out the bent-forward position means the bag rests on my back and doesn’t pull on my neck and shoulders the way it does when I ride upright, which was what made me hate those bags in the first place). But it’s just so much friggin’ fun to ride. At first I was terrified: how do I get my feet in the clips while the pedals are moving? How do I get a foot out in time when I need to stop? HOW DO I STOP???? What if I go down a hill and have to pedal so fast I go shooting off into space?

It takes a little getting used to but I’m getting the hang of it. I gotta anticipate more–I watch lights a couple blocks in advance and adjust my cadence to time my entrance into the intersection at the green–or I make sure I brake far enough in advance that I can come to a smooth stop. Stopping means almost standing on my left pedal while removing my right from the clip and planting it on the ground. And to ensure I’m in the right position to do this well and to get a good start when I’m ready, my left foot needs to be in the forward-up position when I stop. So that takes timing too. Cornering is fun–you accelerate through them, you don’t coast. I’m still figuring out how to raise my ass off the seat while pedaling, which is the only comfy way to go over bumps. I have no idea how to skid stop and if I had to stop on a dime, I’d probably be in trouble. And I’m working the hell out of my core in my constant effort to hold my weight off my hands (I’ve never ridden anything but upright–it’s a big change).

But oh my goodness. I can go so fast. And the whole “one with the bike” thing is true–it’s starting to feel really instinctual, like it’s a part of my body. I’m afraid it’s all true. I feel like Dennis Christopher in Breaking Away. Or make that Daniel Stern (Cyril!) cuz I’m a big dork.

So I am commuting on it. At least on days I don’t have to haul anything, and the weather is dry (I say bah! to fenders for now) and it’s warm enough that I don’t have to bundle up like an oompah loompah.

I’m calling the bike Amelia after Amelia Earhart.

I don’t really know too much about Amelia Earhart, though I plan to change that soon. But her persona has obvious meaning for a buncha reasons. And I’ve been listening to Joni Mitchell’s Hejira like it’s my fucking theme music, for better or worse–every song on it has really personal meaning for me at the moment to the point of discomfort. So good to acknowledge that with a naming. Also, the preppy colors remind me not only of the era in which Amelia reigned as the premier example of adventurous womanhood, but also of my grandmother Mimi, of Katherine Hepburn (my grandmother’s idol), and of my “so elegant, so intelligent” college roommate Jill…who was also an admirer of Amelia and of Joni. Too bad Mimi and Jill never met.

Here’s another picture of Amelia, with the Star Lounge espresso machine as a backdrop. Had to take the picture at Star in honor of Jay. Sorry I didn’t name the bike after you, Jay, but everyone knows vehicles get women’s names anyway (though I plan to buck that trend when I name my future touring bike after Werner Herzog).

Now that my bike has a name, I can refrain from calling it “the hipstermobile.” (See below)