New Copper Road! 6/12/12

First off, Anthrocon is this weekend. Come! I'll have a more detailed post on it tomorrow.

And now for what's really important: CANDY! Sometimes, It's worth (other people) dying for. Vote here to see the fun!

A candy-colored day

I woke up today with plans of drawing all day on a sugar high, since my first act after waking was to drive to post office and pick up my package of gummies! (Also: Comic treasuries!)

Of course, as you were probably just mumbling to yourself, there's no real link between sugar and hyperactivity. Instead, I loaded up on candy, blew up my pancreas, read some new comics (the last Fox Trot dailies collection) and took a nice nap.

After waking, it was too late for a true drawing marathon, so I went with the foreshadowed watercoloring instead! Progress so far is slow but sure. There was only one moment of pure panic, when a tiny bit of blue snuck into my brown and threatened to mar Tiffany's ear - but it blotted up well enough.

What's in store for tomorrow? I'm gonna have to do a comic marathon sooner or later, but my normal Saturday schedule may get in the way. I think I'll play the role of temperamental artist tomorrow and do whatever the heck I feel like doing. So long as I'm doing SOMETHING, all will be well.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go consume another pound of gummi peaches.

It's time to declare Sundays non-canon

First: Here's the Roddy sketch I hinted at before. The expression is kinda blah, but I've been mindlessly crafting this sketch for two days now so I figured it deserved to be finished and posted.

Now, the ranting: What do you do when you've got massive momentum, have played all the hardest games on your schedule with great success, have not yet committed a turnover on offense and have one of the worst teams in history coming into your home stadium this week? If you're the Redskins, you MAKE MY SOUL HURT! I am too involved in football, man. This stuff can ruin my whole day.

Today was a "fuck it" day from the start. I had a dream in which I was visiting Andrew in some random place he was living while I was doing some cross-country trip, or something like that. Most notable: Dude had giant collection of candy! Wherever he was working used to sell candy but decided the demand wasn't high enough and let him take home the full candy rack. Dude was being sort of a dick in not letting me take all the candy I wanted. Listen, bro, if you have a bin of PEACH RINGS there will be no stopping me!

So I woke up with a a natural peach ring craving. Feeling like shit, and without any available drugs to go for a Hollywood style personal downfall, I decided to play the pitiful self-destructive role via food. I went back to Martins to grad my peach rings - in you FACE, Andrew! - and some TV dinners, since cooking for myself is a bitch due to my kitchen being gutted. As is is my habit, I hit up Chipotle for the scrumptious and waist-widening goodness. On the way I had to drive by two crosswalks. Each time the shopper decided to let me go instead, which is incorrect. The second time, I waved a woman through. She gestured for me to go, as she was waiting for her meandering child to get back to her. Naturally, the kid returned as soon as I went forward and dove into the crosswalk. Criminy. In line at Chipotle, a chattering couple in front of me really confused the staff, meaning their normally-efficient machine was working slightly off pace. I finished this up with an embarrassing verbal flub. Whatever, at least I had a "BURRITO!" and peach rings. Once home, self-destructive indulgences were a go!

THEY FOLDED MY BURRITO WRONG! This meant that when I got home I bit into my burrito to find a level of veggies, then a level of chicken, then a level of rice and finally a level of sour cream. Seriously, that's just cruel to a shut-in who is scared to leave his house like me. I may never leave home again after this disappointment.

Oh yeah... My "guaranteed fresh" peach rings were stale as well.

As I move to post this, I am about to lose my football consolation prize thanks to the Cardinals defense decided to take a nap with two minutes to go. There's still time for the Cowboys to lose, but today...

You know what, let's do a play by play:

-Dallas completes a long pass and clocks the ball with three seconds left just out of FG range.
-But wait! A Cardinal was INJURED AND UNABLE TO GET OFF THE FIELD! This means an offsides penalty by default!
-The Cardinals BLOCK THE KICK AND WIN THE GAME!
-But wait! The Cardinals coach called a time out to ice the kicker, blowing his own team's victory.
-The kick is good! Overtime!
-Cowboys win the coin toss, of course.
-Oh, and I just noticed the 49ers collapsed, giving the Eagles a win. Fuck.
-Back to the game: SACK! FUMBLE! Romo recovers, so fuck him.
-Romo throws to the receiver in the first row in the stands for a while, so they must punt.
-THE PUNT IS BLOCKED! TD! CARDINALS WIN!
-But wait! There's a penalty!
-It's on the... COWBOYS?! Holy shit. The win stands! FUCK YOU, DALLAS!

I still won't be happy until the Giants get destroyed by my Browns. (HA!) Hey, the game is on Monday, so today's fuckly nature might not affect it!

One more complaint: The makers of iTunes need to be raped with cacti in every orifice. The "upgrade" seems to have been designed to force PC uses to switch over by MAKING ITUNES NEXT TO USELESS!

Such commitment I have to my public

Hey, Dana! Whaddup?

So there's an option on this thing to set a post date and time. Since I'll be out of town without the internet, how can I meet my goal of one worthless post per day(-ish)? Let's see if this feature is purely cosmetic or not!

The sketches I'm sharing are for an idea for a Halloween strip, in which the kids swap their trademark looks. The best Halloween costumes are so in-jokey that those not in the know think you are either a fool or are not costumed at all!

Up first is the boys trading off. Who would think the swapping of hair styles would cause such massive cognitive dissonance. Bud's hair spiked and Jacob's part is just... unnatural!



Not pictured: The paintbrush my blank canvas characters used to paint my spotted/blotched/freckled characters' conspicuous traits.

Time to hit the "publish post" button and see when this thing appears. It it pops up tonight... eh, fuck it.

The subconscious is one's worst critic

OR, how to start one's day in the most inauspicious way possible!

The culprit this time was a dream. Usually I have dreams of brain-numbing repetition or ones where I'm continuously hunting for candy. (Thanks, shameless sweet tooth!) When stress or gluttony dreams aren't in the rotation, it's usually mind torture in the form of anxiety dreams - where everything goes wrong for me. As noted before: My brain hates me.

In today's dream, I was shipped off the convention for people with personality disorders. The goal was to isolate us from society and teach us how to stop being drains on the world. My group was seemingly the worst of the lot. After all, our "invitations" were done in sinister black. The other defect groups had bright cheery colors linked to their disorders. Mine was black. Like, death and depressing black.

This awful group you see, was the COMPLAINERS! We were the cynics and sourpusses who lose their cool at the slightest irritant. We were mean, bitter and no fun to be around. If we didn't fix ourselves, we'd be doomed to a life of sad ostracism.

Proving the event organizer's point, I didn't take my invite well. I, well, COMPLAINED about being singled out as a bad person and admitted I felt persecuted because the black envelope let everyone else know (people who were just as dysfunctional as me - if not more so) that I was the worst of all! I was being avoided! The told me I didn't have to eat in the cafeteria with the rest of the nuts - I could help myself to candy in the guest room. (Yes, even in this dream I desperately needed a chocolate fix.)

The main reason I was upset was because they organization just didn't get it - there are two types of complainers: Zesty and bitter! I complain a lot, but I do it as a purge and I try to find some humor in it. I think running around proclaiming the sky the to be falling is FUNNY! My fellow black-labeled wretches were clearly on the bitter side. We had the old ladies who had nothing to do with their lives but yell at people for being noisy during their naps. We had TONS of repressed conservatives and Christian fundamentalists - who hate themselves because their values are so strict any deviation from them must make them horrible people, so they judge everyone else harsher in retribution. We had the general sad sacks who were so beaten down they'd lost their sense of humor. Basically, I was surrounded by BAD CONVERSATIONALISTS!

We had a private pool just for us sourpusses, but it was very unfriendly. The old ladies wouldn't get in the water for fear of getting their hair wet. The conservatives all inched dangerously close to each other in the hot tub, filled with sickening tension. The sourpusses would dog-paddle around by themselves. I was the only person to take a leap into the water and make a splash. The rest silently walked into the pool from the shallow area - doing all they could to be silent and keep the water calm. I splashed around and tried to get the people to play a game. No response. This was went I went off to complain about my "peers."

At least my brain was telling me I don't belong on that group. As the dream went on, it became clear I was the star of my crew. My fellow complainers - while still hating each other as much as themselves - all warmed to me and my charming ways. I had become a leader and I was fairly respected by everyone in the reject convention.

The next morning, I got a visit from Dana - who was wearing adorable jammies for some reason. Seems she was taken away too, as part of the "obsessive" camp. We happily chatted about sneaking off to get breakfast away from the rest of the wretches. Conversation then turned to the old lady in the bed beside mine. She was frustrated with inconsiderate people making too much noise as she slept. When Dana asked if I was causing problems - as I'm an insomniac and I toss and turn like mad - the old lady said I was the only one she liked. I was never a problem and I didn't make any noise to disturb her. It was a good self-esteem boost.

Eventually, I found some kin in the complainer group in two women. One was a pushy New Yorker whose tongue was sharp enough to disarm all those not tempered to absorb "New York charm." The other was a tall woman - well over six feet - with a loud voice and a pushy attitude. She seemed like the lawyer type. Together, we decided to write a letter to the organization explaining the two types of complainers. We might bitch and moan, but the others in the program are not our people. Line by line we laid out why they suck and why we are simply misunderstood. At one point, I sat back and wondered if what we were doing was too self-serving or something that would make us far more irritating in the organization's eyes than the wretches we found to be vastly inferior. The New Yorker could see it happening, but the other lady (who seemed less self-aware and probably wouldn't be in our group if there had been anyone else slightly worthy) got a bit self-righteous, claiming truth is truth.

At that point the dream trailed off and fell into the standard surrealism/stress dream stuff, such as me trying to reach the pool on the ground level from my floor and managing to end up hanging off a balcony a few stories up. This happens all the time in dreams, of course. Instead of going into the elevator, I ended up outside it and I had to strategically drop down floor by floor, getting me in tons of trouble for the disturbance. During this, another dream standard was at play: I was trying to travel with a gal (generic hottie) and no matter what I did, we'd be separated. I reached the pool and jumped in, only to find she had made it down with me... but forgot her suit. Once again, the pool symbolized isolation!

Overall, I think the meaning is fairly straightforward. The dream was more of a highlighter and exaggerator of stress than one hiding it in symbols. At least it was creative in handling it. I take it as failure when my brain only offers up cookie cutter dreams. Anytime I'm flying or my teeth/hair fall out, I wake up embarrassed for my brain.

Still, it's rather depressing to wake up after a dream where you are officially labeled a black-level asshole. Hey, maybe something reassuring could happen as soon as I wake up to make me feel better about myself.

I woke up to see a GIGANTIC FUCKING SPIDER on the ceiling directly above me. It waited until it was sure I saw it, before it scrambled into a vent. Thus, this arachnophobe now knows there is a GIGANTIC FUCKING SPIDER in my room that is just WAITING FOR ME!

There is no way this day can go well now.