swerve of shore to bend of bay

Boring. 40. Los Angeles.

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Farewell to a friend

My friend I moved to LA with introduced me to Joe Matt when I first moved here. They had met on Myspace and she said I should meet him. Coming from a small town and growing up conservative, I was introverted and had a hard time meeting people, making friends, or even talking. So when I met Joe, I was immediately swept away by his huge personality and inviting nature. He'd ask questions and be intensely interested in the people he met; it made me feel for once like even I might be an interesting person. It was so comforting to find someone I could so easily talk to, someone who was brutally honest, always willing to offer criticism, but never judgemental.

And oh how we talked. The initial shared interest in films (I was thrilled to find a fellow Buster Keaton fan) and literature was a constant binding force in our friendship over the years. Having mostly ignored comics after my childhood, Joe Matt rekindled my love for comics—both because I found his comics so refreshingly honest and insightful and because he introduced me to so many other great works, from his Toronto pals Seth and Chester Brown to Charles Burns to E.C. Segar's brilliant Popeye comics, a whole new world opened back up to me and I started to find myself interested in drawing again.

I could go on and on about how much he influenced me, not just in comics, but in life: getting rid of my car, discovering my love for coffee, always searching out the ridiculous in not just life around me, but in myself as well. He was one of the funniest people I've ever met, always able to find something to laugh about. Truly, Joe was a singular man, and his time he shared with me made my life so much better. I miss my friend. I regret not having had at least one more conversation with him, but then I'd have wanted at least one more…and so on.

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Experimented with watercolours. I hadn't used them since I was a kid and I remember just being disappointed that my paintings looked like garbage. Well, I am old enough now to embrace the garbage for what it is: a nice relaxing activity. Special thanks to Cecilia for teaching me a thing or two about painting (but just enough to let me fumble around) and getting the supplies for me.

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Decided to make a comic that wasn't so hyper-focused on the details of my personal life. Not that my cats aren't part of my personal life, it's just more relatable and possibly entertaining for a wider audience, not to mention less draining for me.

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Getting back into drawing. I recently got grey brush markers, so I experimented with them here with mixed results. Anyway, apologies to Natalie...she's much more beautiful and wonderful than I could draw and write her, but I did have a big sinking feeling when I realized she really was moving away.

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It's been a while...

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The cover of a mix CD I made for my friend, George. The photo is based off my friend, whom I didn’t quite capture (he looks fat in this picture, which he’s not), but I think I got some...essence of him anyway.

Anyway, here’s the tracklist: 01. Sparklehorse - It’s a Wonderful Life 02. Belle & Sebastian - Electronic Renaissance 03. Blood Candy - Surf Lion 04. Damien Jurado and Richard Swift - Sincere Replies 05. House of 1000 Corpses Soundtrack - Dr. Satan 06. Death in June - The Calling (MK II) 07. TOBACCO - Video Warning Attempts 08. Why? - Ape in Cage With Wire Cutters 09. Tricky - Hell is Around the Corner 10. The Stone Roses - Waterfall 11. Master Musicians of Bukkake - Elogia De La Sombra 12. Injury Reserve - Whatever Dude 13. Mogwai - The Sun Smells Too Loud 14. Broken Social Scene - Backyards 15. Odd Nosdam - O l y n n 16. Skip James - Jesus is a Mighty Good Leader

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Here it is, a sneak peak at Toy Story 5!

In other news: I’m still alive and no one cares. 

In other news: I’ve been feeling sad, depressed, downtrodden and despised. Overcoming slowly, but it’s a difficult world. There must be a solution.

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Here are my picks for the best films of 2015 (as in films released theatrically in the United States in 2015):

About Elly Anomalisa Carol Clouds of Sils Maria The Forbidden Room Girlhood Li’l Quinquin The Look of Silence A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence Stations of the Cross

Other ones worth checking out: Diary of a Teenage Girl, Dope, Hard to be a God, Heaven Knows What, Macbeth, Mad Max: Fury Road, Maps to the Stars, 99 Homes, Sicario, Spotlight.

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Another year, another Villaintin’s Day compilation that I did a cover for. Go buy 500 copies. 

My tumblr is really dead. I’m not quite dead yet though. In other news, here’s my list of books I read in 2015:

The Waves - Virginia Woolf - 211 Cities of the Red Night - William S. Burroughs - 332 The Place of Dead Roads - William S. Burroughs - 306 The Western Lands - William S. Burroughs - 258 The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion - 227 The Makioka Sisters - Junichiro Tanizaki (tr. Edward Seidensticker) - 498 Them - Joyce Carol Oates - 546 Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald - 265 The Peripheral - William Gibson - 485 Lit - Mary Karr - 386 Sanctuary - William Faulkner - 380 Requiem for a Nun - William Faulkner - 286 Finnegans Wake - James Joyce - 628 Gilead - Marilynne Robinson - 247 The Short Fiction of Flann O'Brien - Flann O'Brien - 156 Notes From a Dead House - Fyodor Dostoevsky (tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) - 304 The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut - 326 The Metamorphoses (Book X-XV) - Ovid (tr. Allen Mandelbaum) - 225 Consumed - David Cronenberg - 308 House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski - 662 Inferno - Dante Alighieri (tr. John Ciardi) - 295 Purgatorio - Dante Alighieri (tr. John Ciardi) - 364 Paradiso - Dante Alighieri (tr. John Ciardi) - 363 Carpenter's Gothic - William Gaddis - 262 Walden and Other Writings - Henry David Thoreau - 769 Black Snow - Mikhail Bulgakov (tr. Michael Glenny) - 200 The Pale King - David Foster Wallace - 547 Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi - 343 The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann (tr. John E. Woods) - 854 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - 380 The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick - 274 Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman - 703 Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo - 243 The Melancholy of Resistance - Laszlo Krasznahorkai (tr. George Szirtes) - 314 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - 624 Letters to Milena - Franz Kafka (tr. Tania and James Stern) - 189 The Waste Land and Other Writings - T.S. Eliot - 234 Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon - 776 The Character of Physical Law - Richard Feynman - 167

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“The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World the vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity--most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid to waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide...”

-Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

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Peace, Love, Death Metal

Keep on rockin’ in the free world...and be kind.

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I must come across as an incredibly negative person based on my tumblr posts, but honestly I’m happy.

At FYF this year I danced my ass off to Run the Jewels... I love how bad this Lil Wayne song is (as in, I honestly love the song), especially considering he did songs like this and this and Nicki Minaj has done some amazing stuff too, but this song is so bad I can’t help but love it... But as for capital-G great songs, I recently discovered a Spiritualized song I hadn’t heard before and it’s so beautiful and amazing and makes me want to write and make music and draw and live and love and breathe. Actually I saw Spiritualized at FYF too, and I was in tears throughout... Then Death Grips beat the shit out of me and reminded me that I’m alive and left me with bruises... But here I am. No matter how depressed I am, I’m happy, I’m fine, everything is fine.

PS - This picture is supposed to be a deadbird monk walking on Burt Reynolds Wrap(TM) with a shitty portrait of me.

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This may be forever.

“To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood’s limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress — this will happen, mark me. Childhood’s end. The first of many deaths. Hesitation is natural. Doubt is natural.” -The Pale King  David Foster Wallace

One of my coworkers was going to recommend me for a job that started out around $65,000 per year...and I likely could have got it, but I immediately turned it down because it wouldn’t allow me to go school. You know...school, that thing I’m doing because I have no real prospects and I’m just killing time until...until...until what exactly? I’m kind of kicking myself because I know I’ll never amount to much of anything and that is a lot of money to me and I just celebrated my thirty-first feeling all the deep-down worthlessness proper for an individual of my station. My station. Don’t make me fucking laugh. Don’t make me fucking sick. Still here laughing and sick. Bring on another year if you can possibly bear it.

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Reader, if you seek truth, sharpen your eyes, for here the veil of allegory thins and may be pierced by any man who tries.

-Purgatorio (canto VIII, 19-21), Dante Alighieri

All these tears of blood from cold-blooded reptiles. I’m a lush, I’m a worn-out, dried-up husk. No poetry for this corpse.

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How I came to it I cannot rightly say, so drugged and loose with sleep had I become when I first wandered there from the True Way.

But at the far end of that valley of evil whose maze had sapped my very heart with fear I found myself before a little hill

and lifted up my eyes. Its shoulders glowed already with the sweet rays of that planet whose virtue leads men straight on every road,

and the shining strengthened me against the fright whose agony had wracked the lake of my heart through all the terrors of that piteous night.

-Inferno (canto I, 10-21), Dante Alighieri

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Last weekend was great...Sleep, Om, Author & Punisher, True Widow, Earth and lots of alcohol and friends from far away and watching Sleep and Om backstage. Life is funny. Life is sad.

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Hip hop is kind of ruling the music scene right now. Kendrick Lamar and Death Grips in ONE week? And next week Earl Sweatshirt’s album...daaaaaaang!