The year after that, I had the single worst teacher in the world.  I don’t really want to get into that, but it was an abusive situation that broke me down for years to come.  Halloween was a non-event that year. I had no friends due to being alienated in a gifted and talented program populated by children who had all been in the same class since 2nd grade, and my mother chose to keep me in from the usual festivities. Trick-or-Treating brings candy.  Candy makes you fat.  I was going to be made fat by candy. I was already 148 pounds in 5th grade.  Nothing on earth could have made me fat at that point.  I had already been fat for 10 years.  So that Halloween, and the next few Halloweens, I sat in my living room hiding from the kids I went to school with who were coming to my house to get their candy. Snickers bars, Reeses Cups, Kit-Kats. I wore “the costume,” which was a 4x black nightgown that was given to my mother as an insult when she was thinner.  It was an instant costume for all occasions. Elegant, spooky, slinky, and as a kid, it made me feel incredibly beautiful and grown up, even if I had to sit around and hand out candy to everyone else because I was bad and fat and not worthy of candy.

In eighth grade, my friends all had costumes put together and went out as a group.  Since I wasn’t allowed to Trick-or-Treat, I wore an apron to school and told everyone I was someone from a relatively obscure manga called “Maison Ikkoku” by Rumiko Takahashi that was…available at our local library in 2001.  Almost every girl dressed up as a sexy army girl, ignoring the fact that there are actually female soldiers in the military, because it was after 9/11 and everyone was sure to have the most reactionary costumes ever.  One boy was a ‘dead terrorist’ and he got applause from some of the asshole history teachers, but all in all no one liked his costume much, and he was changed out of it by lunch.   I’d had no time to make a costume, really, because I had been busy making costumes for my sister.  I made her two costumes that year, and sacrificed the skirt of my own intended costume to make billowing sleeves for her medieval princess whatever costume.  That night, when I got home, her friends asked when we were going trick or treating, because apparently, I had been invited all along, and apparently, they did want me to go, but my sister hadn’t told me because I was fat and slow and embarrassing and she just didn’t want me there with them.  So I had a huge breakdown, because wow, did I feel betrayed, and taken advantage of, and just so incredibly rejected.  I sat at home and hid and when the bullies from my bus came to get candy from my house, they took candy, and then one of them farted at me and they ran away screaming “fatty lives here!”

In highschool, I was always the last person to know what our costume group was going to be, and always the person that somehow got hurt.  Freshman year we tried to go as people from Fushigi Yuugi, this anime that was popular at the time, and one of my friends ended up biting the shit out of my arm and getting blood and purple lipstick all over my costume, completely ruining it (and my arm) before we’d even begun.  Who the fuck bites people, anyway?  The next year, my costume was again “the costume” and I wasn’t really going bother with trick or treating.  It was another half-baked cosplay that didn’t look remotely right and nobody got it, anyway.  I went trick or treating anyway, but my mother confiscated all of my candy and kept it in her room before “donating” it somewhere to someone, which I’m pretty positive never happened.

My junior year of highschool, we all planned to go as gangsters. It was simple enough.  Fedoras were all the rage in 2005, and we all had a cheap one from target or some such store lying around, so we threw our shit together and went like that. My english teacher and some of the other young teachers went as gangsters as well, and played along and we were rival gangs.  At lunch, all of my friends turned on me and produced badges and said they were undercover cops and made a huge scene out of “arresting” me in the cafeteria.  I was once again the butt of the joke, and it wasn’t funny anymore.  There was nothing good about Halloween, and there was never going to BE anything good about Halloween, and I quit.  I quit trying to put together costumes or find things to do on halloween night or friends to be with because it was just another day out of the year where people were going to treat me like shit, only this time with ugly costumes on.  In college, at my most active, I ate candycorn and booberry for a month , shat green, and watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show on DVD with some people that don’t talk to me anymore.

And that’s really okay.  You can keep your Nightmare Before Christmas, and your inexplicably sexy costumes, and your pranks and your candy and your parties and your scary movies and rubber masks that still give me panic attacks.  Really, it’s fine.  It’s great that you like Halloween so much.  But please, when I don’t get overly enthusiastic, don’t push me.  Don’t go “Awwwww, but it’s Halloweeeeeen! How can you not like Halloweeeeen!?” Because it’s better if you keep it in your way, and this seasonally-challenged scrooge keeps it in hers.

you can't be serious.

As you probably know, I draw.  I draw, I paint, I fart around doing art.  Deeply personal art that I am highly invested in.

As such, I don’t take it very well when little teenage shits blatantly rip off my work, post it all over the internet, and expect me to pat them on the ass for it.

my friend sarah has roughly 80 billion my little ponies. today, she brought about 55 of the things over to my house so i could see them and stare in wonderment and a hint of jealousy as she talked about each one. they were all well-loved and honestly kinda wrecked up because of it. on top of that, they’d been sitting around for a while, and they needed some TLC. naturally i forgot to take decent before pictures of all of the ponies, but i have one of one of the more easily fixed (but most impressive transformations.)

this one has palm trees on its butt, and terrible hair. for now.

a lot of ponies. colorful ponies! happy ponies! ponies playing damaging mind games with eachother and making themselves jealous

the back also has palm trees and bad hair. WHO KNEWWWWW?

the first step was washing them. these ponies were filthy, and some of them had crayon and old “snack” on them.

these were the first ones out of the tub. of course by tub i mean sink (for now) and this photo was taken after they’d been drying for a while.

the ponies as seen from chopper 4.

they’re acting like i fucking intruded on their conversation. whatever, i don’t want to know anyway.

these ponies are pale and standing near eachother. instantly a family in my mind.

just another crowd shot of the pon–WAIT HEY I KNOW YOU, THAT IS OUR FRIEND PALMTREESONTHEBUTT! YOU LOOK SMASHING, LADYCAKES.

that’s all from chopper 4. back to you in the newsroom.

all in all, they took me about five hours, a whole bottle of VO5 conditioner, half a bottle of garnier we-don’t-use-it-anyway-tisse shampoo, a bar of dial soap, an old sock from the limited too, a dinner fork, and my backup hair brush, which snapped clean in half rather impressively on one of the more tangled manes. whoo-weee.

The captain of the USS Antarctic

My world is a little bit yellow, it seems.  It’s warm, it’s sunny, it’s sick, it’s crusty, it’s running and dying and thriving all at the same time.  It is traditionally the color or cowardice and deceit, two themes that I do like to play with in subtle ways.  It’s my favorite color to use as an artist.  I play mostly with warm colors, and on the off chance that I do dip into the blue end of the spectrum, it’s to make the warm colors appear that much warmer to the eye.  As for imagery, I pull heavily from my Roman Catholic upbringing.  The imagery associated with the classical representation of saints, halos, and other religious figures is of particular interest to me, as well as the pomp and circumstance of the catholic mass, the Latin text of the mass, and the various objects that play heavily in the services, from statues to rosaries to chalices.  There’s a sort of morbidity to the Catholic imagery, in that Catholicism on the whole is strongly based on what happens when one dies.  The requiem mass in particular, and the gorgeous compositions written by dead geniuses for the mourners of the world, are one of my very greatest influences.  Whether I believe in God or not isn’t really a factor in my use of religious imagery–I have a comfortable relationship with the ethereal side of life, and I would use this imagery whether I was atheist or devout.

Halos all up in this bitch

Perhaps more recent of an influence, I gravitate toward medical imagery for similar reasons.  Due to the near constant illness of my mother and other family members and friends, over the past five years, I have spent a great deal of time in the hospital, from emergency rooms to rehabilitation centers. It has a lot to do with death and both holding it back and giving in to it.  Similar to the ornate detail of catholic objects, medical instruments, braces, and machinery evoke a certain history and painful overtone.  It’s bodily.  It’s bloody and painful and possibly deadly.  With medical imagery, I tend to lump in physical deformity, amputation, and skeletons.  Blindness, diabetes, and scars are gutting topics, even though they seem mundane on the surface.  When you get right down to it, it’s incompleteness.  It’s a lack of safety and normalcy and control, and those are very much what I adore dabbling with. In a similar vein, I have a keen interest in sideshows, in the way that they put human physical limitation and deviation on display, and make us think “What if I were born that way?” and “What if that happens to me?”  Perhaps due to our selfish nature as humans we can only ever filter such things in how they relate to our own lives, but I like to give a bit of solace and even happiness to the memory of those who were exploited.

beheadings and watercolors

I have a tendency to pull from great periods in fashion history for my work.  My greatest influences are the Rococo and Victorian periods, with a healthy portion of the 1920s and 1950s thrown in for good measure.  Included in this is an interest in steampunk, although by and large I prefer traditional and historically accurate costume from the Victorian period to what steampunk has become these days.  I dabble in goth and haute couture as much as the next guy, but elements of victorian and rococo styling, from corsetry and crinolines to panniers and powdered wigs, are my true loves, I suppose.  I sometimes incorporate burlesque and pinup elements to my work, but more often than not, I’m slapping red and yellow watercolors on some mangled fellow with a halo, or tightening the corset laces on a clockmaker with Asperger’s syndrome.

tantamount to masturbation

I prefer to work with what is now called “traditional” or “conventional” media.  I like pencils and paints and papers and pastels and the way they feel in my hands.  I might not have a lot of skill, but I do have a lot of luck, for the most part, and things sort of fall into place for me, whether they’re working according to plan or not.  I must admit that I was a problem child in all of my High School art classes, assuming that I knew better than the instructor a good 80% of the time.  I wish I could go back and show my teachers what I’ve become.  I wish I could show them what I’m doing and prove to them that I’m not really a lost cause when it comes to art.  I wish I could thank them for the things that were bullshit six years ago that I live by now.  All in all, I’m glad I had the teachers I had and that they liked the things that they liked, because years later I’m in love with Russian church mosaics and Gustav Klimt and Jayne Mansfield and Aubrey Beardsley and horse-hair wigs and I get what they were trying to do.  I’ve worked up the courage to play with oils and ruin brushes in the pursuit of multimedia conquests.  I’m using paint for texture and paper for structure and foil and collaging and everything I turned up my nose at not so long ago.  What a rotten brat I am.

i have been playing a crapload of pokemon lately. pearl, leaf green, emerald, ruby, gold, my pokemon ranch, trozei…seems like anything with pokemon involved makes me want to spend hours playing videogames.

however, in playing these games, you realise which pokemon suck, and which don’t.

metapod is the pokemon equivalent to a bicycle seat. bidoof has no type advantages, other than being immune to ghost. sentret is the exact same pokemon as bidoof, zigzagoon, and rattata. and most of the pokemon really are filler pokemon that won’t be in your party against the elite four. normal types? no. bug types? doubt it. pre-evolutions? probably not. spoink? has anyone ever taken a spoink to the elite four? is there even a point to magikarp? you can argue gyrados all you want, but if you use your water pokemon as an hm slave the way i know you use your geodude, gyrados won’t even be able to learn any of the dragon moves you want to keep it around for, and getting rid of those hm moves is a pain in the ass.

catching them all is one thing, but using any other than the five (maybe six, depending on your appreciation for your HM slave) that you choose to be in your party, is another story entirely.

i’m currently using a nidorina named wendy in my leaf green game. i’ve found, though, that her shear uselessness has made her a pretty useful pokemon. double kick? good against normal types. poison sting? poison is useful in tough battles and catching. cut? always a useful hm. and her poison barb means that when a pokemon uses a physical attack on her, like tackle or quick attack, they end up getting poisoned. the absolute crappiness of nidorina makes it a pretty interesting party member.

i tend to keep a grass starter, an electric, a fire, a water, and a flying type in my party. an onyx usually serves as a pretty wonderful hm-carrier, as it can learn rock smash, rock climb, strength, and a lot of other useful moves. a psychic type can be a real advantage, and sometimes it’s good to train up a pokemon just to defeat a specific gym, like needing that fighting type for the normal gym, or a psychic type for a fighting gym. train up more than just your six favorites.

and give them names. it’s not necessary, but nothing in pokemon is freaking necessary. for fuck’s sake, you’re practically having dog fights every three minutes—at least give the dogs a name and a warm ultraball to sleep in.

2) “Hump like badgers” is apparently not a widely used saying.  Apparently, NOBODY says it.  Can we get this fixed?  Can someone start saying it so that I don’t sound like a weirdo?

3) Math

4) The amount of time I can tolerate Atlantic City.  Spoilers: it was less than I’d thought.

5) The usefulness of TiVO!  I was sure that wouldn’t last a week, but now everyone and their mom has it.  Everyone but me, of course.  I have principles.  

7) Eli Manning.  Early in his career, I disowned him for being a pretty shitty football player.  Turns out, though, he was just in the wrong sport.  I’m a supporter of the Double Stuf Racing League, and his work within the sport has been tremendous.

Clearly I am a moron.