July 2005

Workaholic, thy name was Crawford.

Still, I did get this out of the period where I always seemed to be at work, and on the webcam.

I really like this one. It’s done in a few strokes of ink, which I was experimenting with in my teens. The color was added first with marker, then when I was disatisfied with the richness and vibrancy of the color, I added a layer of pointilistic pastel marks.

It’s interesting what 20 years (well, 19) will do to an image. The paper has begun to discolor and it shows its’ age, albeit in a subtle way.

I suppose people do that too, they age and discolor with time.

This morning Leah and the three younger kids are playing the board game Sorry. I put on an iTunes smart playlist of “Fiona Apple” and Frou Frou.” Right now what’s playing is Shadowboxer.

The theme of aging and maybe the subliminal thought of “boxer” made me think of a quote from Pulp Fiction. Something said by Marcellus Wallace as he’s telling Butch to throw a fight:

I think you are gonna find, when this sh*t is over… I think you’re gonna find yourself one smilin’ mother****er. The thing is Butch, right now, you’ve got ability. But painful as it may be, ability don’t last. And your days are just about over. Now that’s a hard mother****in’ fact of life. But it’s a fact of life your ass is gonna hafta get realistic about. See this business is filled to the brim with unrealistic mother****ers. Mother****ers who thought their ass would age like fine wine. If you mean it turns to vinegar, it does. If you mean it gets better with age, it don’t. Besides Butch, how many fights you think you got left in you anyway? Two? Boxers don’t have an “old timer’s day.” You came close, but you never made it, and if you were gonna make it, you woulda made it before now.

Even though I am aging, I definitely have more fights in me.

Later in the movie, Butch says to himself:

That’s how you’re gonna beat ‘em, Butch. They keep underestimating you.

Amen.

In 1995 I was living in Los Angeles. I had moved back to California after having gone to school and worked as a Respiratory Therapist for a while. I was back to figure out how to get into the movie business somehow. I took classes at UCLA Extension and was not sure what to do, exactly, but I was doing it. It was on this path that I would eventually find the web, web programming, and graphic design.

I always enjoyed Comic-Con. I remember when it was held down on the Civic Center, before there was even a trolley. I remember being driven there by my Mom and picked up at the end of the day. I always enjoyed it.

There was one year, though, that I really didn’t enjoy Con. I went, but it fell flat.

This was before cell phones were common, but I had the habit of calling my home phone to check my messages. There was a digital woman’s voice who would say, haltingly, “YOU HAVE TWO MESSAGES” then I could give touch-tone instructions to the phone to play, rewind, replay messages.

I was compulsive about checking my messages. I was working per diem as an RT, and would sometimes get offered extra shifts to work, or get cancelled if they didn’t need me to work. Once I was in that habit, I used it all the time.

I left for Comic Con on a Saturday morning, driving the hundred plus miles from my studio apartment to San Diego. I checked into Con, I think I had bought a pass so it went by swiftly.

But after getting set up at Con, I checked my messages.

I can’t remember if it was 12 or 15 messages on my machine, but it was more messages than I had ever had on the machine, and higher a number than I thought the machine could say. The readout on the physical machine was 2 digits, so I suppose there were digital recordings from none to 99 messages in there.

I could not for the life of me imagine why I could possibly have that many messages.

The messages were from my Mom, my cousin Leeman, and I think my Grandmother (on my Dad’s side). I can’t remember who all called. My memory is fuzzy, unreliable, and full to bursting with emotion. It’s like a haze of bad memory. They all said there was bad news. It had to do with my cousin Eddie. I don’t think they came right out and said what had happened, but it was very bad. I could tell that much, and he was dead. Whether they said, implied it, or I inferred it I do not remember.

I got ahold of someone on the phone, maybe I got Leeman on the phone? I know I talked with my Mother. She was devastated and crying. I could not fathom what I was learning. My cousin, just a few months younger than me, had killed himself by hanging himself in the shower. He had kids. He was married. And now he was dead. I remember thinking immediately that we should be talking about him in the past tense. But when someone dies they still are there in the present tense. “He is married.” It’s funny what you remember when BIG STUFF happens to you in your life. It’s never what you expect.

I was angry and shocked and pretty much dumbfounded about the whole thing. Why would he do it?

Well, the easy answer was that Ed had problems. He didn’t finish high school. He couldn’t hold onto a job. He had gotten involved with drugs and was getting into trouble.

The last time I vividly remember Eddie he had been working at a convenience store, and I think he had gotten fired or they hired him back or something. He had a bag full of car stereos he wanted to know if we wanted to buy. We? I think Bronson and I were offered that deal. We declined I think. I think we tried to give him advice, but we really didn’t think much of it. Eddie was always into shenanigans of some sort. Ed was a survivor, a scrapper. Always in trouble, but always managed to get through it.

I have photos of Ed and his smile glows at me. Big giant grin, like everything is so funny, everything is so wonderful. He used to tease me a little bit. With him, and with Shannon, the 1970 babies in my Mom’s Mom’s house, we used to get fed at the same time, and grew up together. Eddie was the clown, always happy and entertaining. We had much fun. I miss the boy. I miss the man. I wish he had not done what he did.

I decided then that I thought that suicide was not the way out. All the romanticization of suicide is so much bullshit. I decided I liked Joy Division a lot less. I had always found Ian Curtis, their lead singer, a romantic figure. Actually facing the suicide of someone I knew though, that was something else. It was just sad. And not sad in a Morrissey-song kind of way, or in a Walt Whitman kind of way, but in an eternal way.

As my marriage fell apart, I had many thoughts of suicide. It seemed like the way to end pain. the equation was: I hurt, and I will stop hurting if I do this. I don’t think I was very close to it, but the thought would cross my mind and linger there. That’s usually when I would try and do something. I saw a counselor, I go for a walk, I go for a drive, I read a book, I sleep. Self-destruction is not productive. That’s a nice tautology there, eh? Self-destruction is not productive.

So when Comic-Con comes around, though I have been a dozen or more times, I always think of Eddie. Comic-Con is coming next week to San Diego. I will miss it this year, but I vow to go the year after. This year I’m really focusing on making sure this home is a good one, and I’m taking care of me.

I left Con immediately after I found out about Eddie. I went to the my Grandma’s house and the family was collecting there, we prayed and cried and it sucked but it was the process. That house was in mourning, as we all were.

I miss Eddie.

O, callow youth!

So here I am at my Prom, with my date, a friend of mine I’ll call “G.”

In truth, we were just friends, G and I. We spent time together, but her sights were on older, more experienced men. I was such a kid in many ways. At my Prom I was only 17 years old. She was a year older, worldly. She did not go to my high school. I met her while working at the Bank.

I had a terminal crush on her. I had no earthly idea what it meant, or what I wanted, but I wanted nothing more than to be around her and touching her and doing things for her. I was like a puppy dog. I remember taking her to a bar for a bikini contest once. I didn’t care for it, but I would dutifully go with her wherever she wanted me to take her. She did not drive, at least that I can remember.

She cared about me, I think, and liked the attention I gave to her. We would go to the movies or to the beach and hang out and go to Denny’s. I took her to my Homecoming Dance in my sophomore year in high school. I had managed to bring along. It was held on a boat – I think it was a San Diego Harbor Cruise thing. We went to Wendy’s before and she wore this beige sweater dress that clung to her in the sexiest way. It was a chilly fall night and we sat in the back of the boat pretty much the whole night. She sat in my lap. It felt great to cuddle with her all night. I also got mad accolades from my friends for having a beautiful blonde sitting and giggling in my lap for the whole night.

I remember one time I was picking her up at her house, to go to a movie or some thing, and she had just gotten out of the shower. She was in a terry robe, hair wet, and had me come wait for her in her room. I have the most vivid 16-year old memory of her changing right in front of me, like, down to nothing. Naked, right in front of me. It was exciting to be around her. There she is, nude, slipping on her underwear, jeans and a shirt. I was frozen, was she coming on to me? What do I do? The theme of my teen years seems to be ignorance and naïveté, and that moment was no different. I did nothing except watch. I suppose the reason she was so comfortable with me was that I was so harmless. She knew she could be herself. I think it must’ve been like I was a girlfriend to her. We hung out, talked, but not more. We were friends and no more.

G was fun, but there was also a sadness to her as well.

G was proud of her body and hoped to be a model and an actress and a singer. As much time as I spent with her, I don’t really have a good idea of why she was sad. I know her father had died when she was young. And I know that while she was always being told how beautiful she was by people, she also had many objections to how her body looked.

Several years later she let me know that had had a breast augmentation done. She also had a perfect Cindy Crawford/Marlyn Monroe mole removed from her face. The mole was really cute and added to her beauty, in my opinion. And more importantly, it was her. She was born with this lovely quirk, but she had it removed. Eventually she started doing modeling, exotic dancing, bachelor parties and the like. We drifted apart, I moved away. I would catch up with her when I came back to San Diegos in the summertime, but we were living very different lives. Me, I made my own mistakes and had more adventures.

...

The paradox of a beautiful woman thinking she needs to be “improved” still glares out at me. Why would she do that to herself? I don’t know. I can guess it’s something about the tendency we all share, to not love ourselves all that much. To think that if only we could do that one thing, or be better, our friends, our family, other people will like us more. That we’ll fit in. That we’ll be normal.

Well—screw normal. I want to be myself. My unsolicited advice to you: “Be yourself”.

I may not have a perfect body, but it’s mine, and I want to take good care of it regardless of the judgements of the rest of the world.

I kind of like this photo of me. I’m working away on my iBook.

We lived in the Woodland Hills apartment for just a few months. It was a good time.

J/G was a pretty great place to work. We made websites and digital stuff at a time when it was still pretty fresh and new.

We played Tekken on a big machine Namco had given us. We played for free and enjoyed it.

“Take that you Tiger-headed Freak!” I once exclaimed during a bout with my pal Joe T while he was playing whatever character it is that is the Tiger-Headed Freak. It’s King.

We built some cool stuff, they got bought by Keane, and they faded away.

This morning I’m riveted to the news of the London Bombings via web radio. Readers who do not wish to be exposed to my political opinions but instead would prefer some more fun scans of Star Wars Characters should skip this entry. Expect a new scan before the end of the day.

The Wikipedia entry: 7 July 2005: London bombings is excellent and thorough. After reading through this (took about 4 minutes), much of what the radio says is redundant, and the new bits and pieces stand out. It’s astonishing how fast flickr images, news, and blog postings have spread news of this. kottke.org as usual has an excellent array of links.

The irony is that reading about this is in a sense precisely what those claiming responsibility want. Or wait, is what they want actually knowledge about the attacks, or terror and fear. From the Wikipedia article, there’s a quote of a claim of responsibility.

The heroic mujahideen have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic [emphasis added] in its northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters.

Extremist Islam that inflicts itself on other people is a force that must be dealt with, in some cases with eye-for-an-eye style justice. That means killing and carnage.

It’s a pity that the American government chose to divert attention away from Extremist Islam, who also were responsible for the attacks of September 11th in New York.

Instead we have made the focus Iraq. This appears to have been a terrible mistake. I am happy for the newfound freedom of Iraq, but the cost, of thousands of lives of Americans, of tens of thousands of Iraqis, this cost is troubling. I wish the Bush administration had been more honest and forthright about all of this. I do not have the confidence in my government that I think I should have.

My deepest condolences and best wishes to all in London.

“May The Force Be With You”

And I love my stylized signature. My seven-year-old self seems to have been going for a futuristic rounded rectangle look.

I have always loved letters, lettering, and typography.

I mentioned before always seeming to draw the same hair on these women / girls. Here’s a morose-looking woman. She sure is androgynous. Much more androgynous than I remember. At the time I was inspired by the work of Patrick Nagel. His work involved beautiful women, rendered in a graphically austere way. I think I aspired to doing work like this. Though looking at his work now, the feeling I get to the work is detachment, ennui, and coldness. I suppose those were points in their favor to my teen self. These days I prefer a bit more joie de vivre in the art I like. Well, at least the art depicting beautiful women.

About the drawing: people would often ask me, then, “who is this”—the answer then, as now, is “it’s not any one.”

There’s an impression people have that drawings must be of someone in particular, that they must have a subject that they can link to to in the real world. In truth, the muse was inside my head, and the drawings were not based on anyone.

I believe I was taking a drawing class at the time of this paricular drawing, but it concerned itself with still-lives: fruit and baskets and vases. I have never taken a figure drawing class, and I suppose the naïvté about the human body shows that.

I don’t have a burning desire to take a proper figure drawing class, but I suppose it’s something I want to do more of. I think the beauty of that is that is that all I really need to do to do that is get a pencil and a pad and just go out and start drawing.

Last year, or perhaps the year before, I picked up a nude drawing reference at Comic Con. Con is coming up, by the way. I may go, but just for Saturday. I have other priorities these days. If there were a way to do it for all four days and not have it impact work, I would do so. However, I want to save my vacation days for some San Diego time in August, when my family will be in town. I also want to save some for the Holidays as well.

I did some scanning of some objects into my flickr account yesterday. These are objects about which I want to write more.

Time to start the day. Be well.

I forget when this photo was taken, but it makes me smile.

In case you can’t read it, it says:

WELCOME TO
WENDY’S
THIS SCREEN IS
DESIGNED TO
IMPROVE ORDER
ACCURACY AND
SERVICE TO OUR
CUSTOMERS!