Driving Revelations

“Why do you embrace your blindfold, you fool?”

-“ why do you want to see what cannot be stopped?”

Home Alone: Drunk In New York

(((Disclaimer: always drink responsibly! Be safe out there, kids)))

One Dollar Pizza, Up in this BEATCH!

I didn’t so much exclaim it, as I was far too busy veraciously gorging myself, slamming that juicy, lushes piece of heaven on bread down the ol’ gullet. But somewhere my inner voice found a party horn and a disco ball, getting the house jump’n on the happy-train that was rolling blissfully across my pleasure sensors. Look, I’m not Michael Crichton; I don’t know all that fancy science jargon to tie your brain up with how it all works. I just know that pizza was damned good! It was a small Italian restaurant just around the bend from Washington Square. I spent a day bathing in the summer’s heat, watching this rich-kid, transient—who probably got tired of his dad telling him to put grandma’s oxy back in the cabinet and get a real job already—break dance around the central fountain. There were pot heads blithely sparking up in the open, there were homeless people, and there were art students pretending they were homeless people, panhandling the even richer students leaving NYU. It was wonderful! And then there I was, clad in a knock-off Insane Clown Posse concert t-shirt, threadbare Walmart purchased shorts, dirty old off-brand kicks, and probably brooding with resting fuck-off face trying to hustle street caricature draws for tips. I didn’t know my ass, from my easel back then, but I knew where the good Dollar Pizza was, and I knew where the beer was. When you are a working street artist in New York, that’s pretty much all you need to know. 

I remember I had just finished the day making $100 On tips. I was pretty excited, and the blistering sun was waning on its final hours, so I called it a day. Trucked my easel and chairs on a collapsible hand cart to the pizza shop. Hadn’t eaten all day so I had me about four slices. For a dollar a hit, that shit was a drug. Then I went a little further on my way to this quaint little bar, you had to go down into a sub level entry, kind of like where everyone got killed in Inglorious Bastards. They had sports on the tube, and they had live entertainment in the back room. It was an Irish pub so I thought I’d get started with a double shot of whiskey. That night was featuring stand up comedians. The one guy was pretty entertaining. I drew a quick cartoon of him while he was working the crowd. He told me it looked like a Jewish Obama. It always looks like Obama. I wonder if Obama ever got a caricature and said, “ha! It look like Obama!”

Anyway, I got another shot. Then another, and another. Putting them down harder than Blodeuwedd and Gronw Pebr... that was a Celtic joke... you see, because I was in an Irish Bar... forget it; you’ll laugh later after you google it.

So after wandering off on a reverie about something I couldn’t begin to tell you what, I was suddenly waking up on my friend’s couch. The world was gone in a snap, and a new one had fallen hard on my head. I sat up feeling like a sack of sand and horse shit. What the hell happened last night?

Like a smart detective I referred to my phone, to hunt for clues. My screen saver had a picture of a smiling turd I must have left somewhere languishing at the bottom of a stagnant toilet bowl. I winced and recoiled. Then I laughed. Poop is funny, whatever! Sometimes I like to play pranks with myself when I get wasted like that. 

I unlocked the screen and went to my photos. I catalogued it all in my photo album. Took the subway home: “A”train to Brooklyn. There I am with a crooked grin snapping selfies as a ninja turtle rat scurried on by in the background. 

Then I was at my friends apartment; they left it to me for the weekend and I must have been bored after drawing. I was taking shots from on top the roof where you can see the shimmering skyline of the city. It was pretty cool. What was not cool is that I was standing near the edge brandishing a bottle of sickness. Who ever decided time travel wasn’t possible never knocked back a full bottle of Evan Williams on the roof of a friend’s apartment in Bed Stuy Brooklyn—all theses ingredients are necessary to bend space and time. Take heed, scientists, so you can act all omniscient about it later on your Facebook page.

I kept flicking the screen to see what all came next. I left the apartment! It must have been like 1 am. Not a good idea. There was another snapshot of me on the subway again. Then there was the Empire State Building. Did you know there is an excellent comic book store there? I do now! Then I was at the shoreline near the new World Trade Center. Then I was at the World Trade Center. A gloomily nimbus fog snaked around the then not yet finished shinny new tower. Had to photograph it. I also took notice to how dark and very much Alone I was. Not smart. 

Then I was at a bar, remembering the abundant craft selection of beers they had. Then I was stumbling out again and on the subway. Brooklyn at that hour was not a safe place. But no one bothered me. No one hectored me, or even asked for money. 

My head hurt trying to figure out how I managed my field trip unscathed. I then noticed that I was still wearing my raggedy ICP shirt, with the two infamous painted rap villains smiling crazily on the front. I wondered maybe if everyone just thought I was the psycho homeless person who needed to be avoided. That’s called a revelation!

Never drinking again...

That’s called a lie. 

Carny Cartoonist: Weather

It was that raucous alarm they used in all the video games and techno horror movies when a contagion was released that jolted me like a bolt of electricity through my senses. I sat up; my bearings whirling wildly off track. The dream I was having melted away from my eyes and my memory. It was a weird thing because I remembered it having been a pleasant one. Somehow none of it could stuck to the front of my brain. Like the callous pull of temporal gravity it yanked down the veil of fantasy to let the burning light come pouring in. I winced, and blinked, and caught my breath. My muscles were tight all around, they hurt. That was the first thing that came back to me. Then I heard the blaring tv right in front of the bed before I even saw the picture. It was Game of Thrones. I left it on before I fell asleep. That’s right! I’m in a hotel... this isn’t home... but where’s home... where am I? Oh yeah, I’m nowhere. In the middle of it to be precise.

It took me awhile to get the gunk out the gears. 

I drove six hours to get there. Deep Texas, and most of Stephen King worthy Middle of Nowhere America was like that. You know where you are going until you get there. And then you dream of somewhere better. I remembered setting up my tent before checking into my hotel. I draw caricatures for a traveling carnival company. This episode in my life was spent with an unbridled lot that operates in the wilderness. Tornado Valley, oil country: where the nearest big city is always a hundred miles away, and the featured corporation that feeds the town grows their employees. Seriously! I had one memorable encounter with a guest some time ago who was stunned that I had once drawn in New York City.

“Oh, I wish we could go there,” the 24 year old husband and father of SIX said dreamily to me. 

I asked, “why not take a vacation and go.”

He laughed it off as if the suggestion was just otherworldly absurd. He said, “we can’t leave, we’ll lose our jobs at the meat factory.”

Come to learn in that said town you had three options as a youth coming into adulthood: study for a better position at the slaughter house, study to aspire for bigger and move out of town almost like an exile, or get a job at Walmart. Before I left that town I drove along a road overlooking the holocaust fields of cows with a grim sickness stirring in my stomach.

That was awhile ago... well, maybe it was a week ago. Can’t tell anymore. When you are in a new place surrounded by a new corporate agenda driven ideology every ten days the weeks and days sort of blur together. When I was a kid there was this show called the Twilight Zone—this rout was an episode of that. These days I guess people would liken it to American Horror Story. I don’t know. Don’t have Netflix. 

Anyway, I’m sitting in bed. My body hurts from traveling all night, working all morning, and now the plague timer went off meaning it was 4 o’clock. Time to get my ass to the fair. 

In small towns like Canadian Texas (don’t ask, all these places got weird names) the annual rodeo and fest was their backyard theme park and swapmeet. The locals saved up their money all year to splurge on the carnival, and therefore it was often good business for me. “Ain’t never seen no one doing them funny face drawings around here before!” 

The hotel I was staying at looked like a shit-bomb waiting to give me an excuse to buy a new wardrobe when I checked it out on the internet. This meant that I could afford it. In Oil-Vile the hotel jockeys jack up their prices knowing their visitors would pay it, having no other option. So it wasn’t too uncommon for me to have to fork out  six or seven hundred dollars a week to work a show in town. This one was only 400 so I was relieved. Beats waking up in your tent to find that your air mattress was floating from the silent deluge had filled your campsite while you were past out drunk. Don’t ask me how I know that. But I got to the hotel and it was like a mansion. I couldn’t believe it. Newly renovated, new hd TVs, a pool, a gym, the works. Bad weather leveled the place not so long ago and they have been trying to Phoenix the hell out of it ever since. So I was spoiled that week. 

Now keep in mind, at this time I was traveling alone, and thousands of miles from my closest lifeline. Some real gypsy shit. So now and then I have some crazy moments where I just don’t know how to proceed, and get a little panicky. That day, that fucking Day was one of them goddamn days.

I noticed nervous commotion in the lobby. But I figured something new and horrible was going on in the news and I did not want to stop and see. Going outside I am greeted to the cry of an alarm that put my heart into my throat. There, before me, was a group of oil workers crowding around drinking beer, laughing, and pointing up. I looked and saw the tornado terrorizing a vacant, flat horizon, swaying blithely like a dancer on ice skates. The alarm was defining, and disorienting. But the oil guys, fresh off their shift were eating sandwiches, pounding brews, and taking fucking selfies in front of the thing.

“Umm should we be worried,” I asked the lady at the desk. She just shrugged. “What do we do if it hits this place?”

“Pray?”

It was the best disaster plan an atheist could hope for. Just then an ambulance came blazing down the street to the hospital that neighbored our hotel. 

I went outside and did the only thing I could do, watch as the fat black funnel sashayed around the Ferris wheel there in the distance, and called my mom. Then, as I was on the phone, the temperature went from hot to freezing in an instant. I turned my head up and saw the skated skies churning. The air around me went still. The party of drunken oil guys got excited. I got scared. A funnel started to form directly above me, where the heavens were turning. But it stopped and it dissipated.

Later we learned that the ambulance was carrying back an oil worker who died when the tornado touched down moments from where he was working. Nine twisters came down that night. But they never hit the carnival. I got to my stand knowing it would have been toppled by the winds. Instead I found it sucked into the ground somehow. I needed a couple of carnies to help me dig it back out. We opened the fair. Nobody came. 

That was a night I had in Canadian Texas. 

Hairy Triceratops

Three Horn Beastie! I wasn’t quite sure where I was going when I started this one, but damn it I was ready for the adventure. This one I envisioned shedding his shaggy hair to prepare for the hot summer. Mating season is almost done, and now it’s time to get hot and get fat. Enjoy! 

Graphic Design Project

About a month ago I was asked by a friend if I’d be interested in designing her “logo” for a midwives company she is apart of. She sent me a few pictures for reference to work off of, and an old fashiony flyer to try and emulate. She sent me a pic of a drawing that her friend’s daughter made and so I went off of that. 

Now at first I doubted myself. I wasn’t sure how to begin with it. I’m not all that big into graphic design, but she gave me confidence. Went and purchased Adobe Photoshop and I got to work. The end result I thought was great! Thank you, Andrea for giving me the chance, and for being such a great client.