#dan hogan

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The art for this one is by Dan Hogan. His website is here.

from The Line it is Drawn #296 – Sequels to Classic Comic Book Storylines!

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I’m feeling kinda grumpy today….  Everything I post will be less than traditionally beautiful.  And I’m not tired of this rig yet, so here’s another

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I Named Her Naturally Because I Love Castles

by Dan Hogan

I still don’t think there is anything like the sound of windchimes stirred by dad’s head. He’d be in the kitchen, where the windchimes were hanging, I mean are still hanging, you know what I mean, they’re still there even now, mum’d found all types with bent spoons, shiny metal cylinders, ceramic fish and these miniature teapots I swear only Snugglepot or Cuddlepie could use if they wanted tea, she loved that stuff when she was alive and I reckon she probably loves it wherever’s she’s gone, and he’d be knocking around in the cutlery drawer looking for a bottle opener at five ay em or whatever ‘cause the bloke can’t sleep for all the alcohol he needs so he’s always drinking. When I was fifteen or sixteen or wait I think I was actually twenty one because I remember asking him to leave some dosh for a bit of petty if he had any. I walked into the kitchen for some water and the bloke’s in there out cold on the lino with the mongrel snuggled up beside him. Castle was our dog then and I reckon Castle is a pretty good name for a blue cattle. I named her naturally because I love castles. And really that’s something there’s not enough of in Australia. Castles hey. I mean I don’t really know any except for the fella who tried to build one for his missus over in Budge because he loved her heaps and that. She died doing child birth and so did their daughter. Heaps sad hey. He stopped building the castle and went out on the lake in his dinghy one night. They reckon hypothermia got him but I don’t reckon it was the freezing cold. What’s made of the castle is still there but. We used to always be down there as kids having rock wars. I thought I was being smart once and wore goggles, bloody hell man, copped a fair rock to the right goggle and my eye actually went instantly black. But it was all good fun then because I was heaps into castles. I still really dig them but there’s just none around. If this government built more castles and that there would be more tourism. They could actually make so much money. The money’s in the moat, as they say. You only have to look at England to see how castles make heaps of dosh. Castle was a beautiful mongrel. True blue through and through as they say. I don’t get what true blue really means but she was blue cattle plus she loved dad heaps and I reckon he let her sleep inside when nobody was home. I was working in this big dumb warehouse place one day, dumbest job it was, you know where Chittaway is, out there near the roundabout, dad walks in one day with Castle on a lead. It was the weirdest thing hey, he never walked that dog or came to my work or like even parent teacher interviews or anything. The bloke walks straight up to me and goes “Castle’s come to say Hello,” we both stood there for ages not even saying a single word, Castle was loving it, wagging her tail and tongue hanging out and all that. Next thing the bloke pipe’s up with “Castle’s got cancer.” I never heard of a dog getting cancer before hey. Things were way different after Castle was gone. At least five times a day dad would say “It’s just you, me and the dead dog.” The bloke would be talking to me but sometimes he’d say it under his breath when flicking through the TV guide. That’s about the time dad started spending all his time in the back shed. Little thing it was with no electricity. The bloke was really down. For a while it felt like I was living on me own. Dad’d started saying “As good as a dead dog in Spring” whenever something was a bit shit. Like when he’d bash his head on the windchimes in the kitchen or burn his toast or realise there was no milk in the morning he’d go “Good as a dead dog in Spring” and then do like a sigh and a grunt. I think it was Spring the following year actually, dad comes inside from the back shed one afternoon with this deadset shit-eating grin on his face and goes straight for the fridge. Besides the dumb look on the bloke’s face I didn’t really pay much attention to him and figured he was going in for a fresh tinnie.

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hug laurie huge truck octopus house

by Dan Hogan

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we take off our rain soaked socks

by Dan Hogan

[View the story "______________" on Storify]

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a cool way to prevent frostbite

by Dan Hogan

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SHAGBUCKET SHADOW OF DEATH

by Dan Hogan

he wasn’t a good man but he was a man. he wasn’t even really that bad either i guess. not like a person who would pinch lemons from your tree when you’re at work. he definitely wouldn’t do a murder on you even if you did a murder on him first. wait. i mean he wouldn’t just go out in the rain and perform crimes on you. that's for sure. 

it was one of those strangled mornings where you walk across the empty egg carpark at woolworths to wait for a bus. i call it empty egg because it reminds me of when dad held an emu egg with the yolk blown out and diamantes stuck all over it and it was for sale and he said gee what a life.

but maybe he did do a murder. there was a flagpole at his funeral. the wet flag was wadded up the top of the pole like a clump of blu tac you know how it does that. the whole deal seemed more important and seriously more tragic than it truly was because of the flagpole. we didn’t want the guy buried a hop and a skip from the official state flag but it was the only free space in the yard. one time i was driving to the beach and somebody had replaced the flag with a pillowcase and that was pretty good.

i’m fairly sure he did a murder. but not on a human. on a tiger. a tassie one. i prefer calling them thylacines but. really don’t like the sound of tiger. plus besides some stripes nothing about them is the same.

heaps of folks said for years there were a couple of thylacines always getting into the garbage pile behind woolies. there is even some security camera footage floating around the internet. you can see some thylacine-ish looking things tearing apart garbage sacks full of expired frozen pizzas. ah mccain you've done it again. it’s hard to say though because the video quality is pretty balls and i mean pretty damn balls. everything is green and dark and lines are going up the screen. could be dogs if we’re being honest.

he’d shout at the dog whenever it’d been rooting up the garden. he’d curse it with names like flapjacket farter and mongrel motorhome and shagbucket shadow of death. one time he threw a rake. the rake pierced the wall of our above ground pool. gee what a mighty laugh watching our pool explode. chlorine completely killed the lawn. poor dog as well. shagbucket lived for a good eleven years before the morning dad found him in bits all around the backyard. it was right before christmas too. when dad had some mates over on boxing day he showed them pictures of the mess on his phone. two-litre dickie mcpherson from marrawah reckoned it was the work of thylacines because of what happened to his little jack russell once. dickie tells everyone how the little jack got on the wrong side of a thylacine out near police point one night. he always waffles on about his religious respect for the thylacine. religious respect is dickie’s only good phrase. the guy is madder than a cut snake.  later on boxing day two-litre dickie jumped the fence and called the neighbours pissy pissholes and to piss off back to sydney. i’d never heard that one before. the poor neighbours didn't want to return dickie’s cricket ball after a piece of their bird bath got smashed off.

every shop is closed on new years day except the video shop. they’re open everyday of the year so you don’t get late fees apparently. of course barely any humans know this fact. the video shop is connected to the woolworths building because people like getting breadrolls and a barbeque chicken and a copy of fun with dick and jane. i love jim carrey. my favourite jim carrey film is the cable guy because he dives into a giant satellite dish. i feel like watching the cable guy now. i had to return a fun with dick and jane on the first day of the year. it was about three in the afternoon walking across the hot wet carpark. the place was completely deserted. this was in 2006. i trod in an oily puddle wearing thongs. bloody oil probably leaked from a souped up ballsed up commodore. those things are a disease here. i left the thongs right there floating in the puddle. don’t know why. made sense at the time i think. regret it now but because they were half decent thongs. walking across that empty egg carpark there was a trolley laying sideways in a disabled space. it looked very sad and sick for the first day of the year. i always think what emotions a trolley would feel when it's left somewhere it shouldn't be. when i got right up to it i straight away chucked up my guts. no joke. and in that moment i couldn’t see her as a thylacine or a tasmanian tiger. she was something else. i’m not sure what but i know she was very far from the names we've given her. she was in the trolley like somebody put her there on purpose. can't imagine a tasmanian tiger crawling inside a woolworths trolley to die. damn she's not even a tiger. the worst part was the football fully stuffed down her throat. you could see half the bloody word sherrin poking out her mouth. i chucked up twice and you know when your hands can't stop shaking. couldn’t possibly leave her there at the front of woolies. i wheeled her to a proper dignified place. i won’t mention where but i waited ages for it to be night so nobody could see the smoke when i cremated her. i also burned the fun with dick and jane and returned the trolley. imagine my late fees now.