Infinite Stupidity

I’m sitting on my front porch with a cigarette and a glass of wine, and I feel disconnected. Not too bad at the moment, but still slightly wrong somehow. I know that as soon as I leave my house, it’ll get worse.

I lost my cellphone today.

There’s something kind of gratifying about being able to get in touch with someone wherever you are. Knowing that it doesn’t matter if you’re at work, on the bus, doesn’t matter where, if someone has something important to tell you they can call you or flick you a badly written/spelt message.

I mean, it’s not as if it were a good cellphone. It’s a bit battered, totally cheap and outdated, but it kept me connected. That network is the key. It’s a way of never feeling lonely.

I guess I’m a little bit of an antisocial person. When I’m spending time with most people in meatspace, I feel a little out of sorts. I’d rather talk to someone via textual communication rather than face to face. Even the telephone doesn’t do it for me, because I’m a little underconfident flapping my gums at someone even when they aren’t in front of me.

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Out culture as a whole has a love affair with love.

I know, that’s a stupid fucking phrase to use, or it could be the best fucking turn of phrase to ever slither its way down my nervous system through my fingers and into a collection of ASCII characters. But it’s true. We can’t watch a movie, or read a book without some kind of romantic subplot wedged in there like the author was trying to balance their writing table, and half the time the pile of crap they wedge in there ends up tossing the whole shebang out the window and metamorphosing as so much horsecrap on the carpet. Most of the time anyway.

We can’t listen to top 40 radio or watch a music channel without seeing or hearing some whinging 20something writhing their way around something while lip syncing overproduced lyrics about how much they love (or as is invariably the case these days lust over) the boy/girl/creature of their dreams. An entire musical subculture - emo - has risen from the inability of some people to fathom that a girl (and it always is a girl) might leave them, causing them to get up on stage wearing sprayed on jeans and t-shirts and whine about loss and how they will never get over whoever (until of course the next time someone leaves them). Disclaimer, I like some emo, I probably know a lot more about the genre than you, I’m just working with the stereotype.

So, what does this mean? We have the concept of true love fired at us from all angles. We’re all taught from an early age that Prince Charming will come along and fuck the sleeping princess or whatever, and everyone will live happily ever after. Even though Mommy and Daddy hate each other and only see each other when it comes time to pass you on to the other, we still make googly-eyes at the girl with the budding boobies, hoping that high school romance will turn into marriage, just like on TV. Even those of us who have worked out that scoring a bit of booty every few nights and never talking to them again probably get the feeling that one day they will settle down with a single vagina, avoiding that messy escape route in the middle of the night.

I don’t know if I can say what love is. From what I know it’s meant to be all happy and squidgy and fun, meaning that we probably end up relating it to playdough. There’s nothing wrong with playdough, it’s fun. From the moment you make a blob with a couple extra blobs stuck to it and call it a racecar, to the time you’re sculpting a fairly realistic, if not to scale, portrayal of your own genitalia, it’ll never let you down. Not like love.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is fuck love. Don’t listen to the media producers and the sycophants. Go out, have fun, meet a companion. Hey, maybe you’ll find someone who makes you happy, and doesn’t end up annoying you so much after spending more than a few hours in their company that, hey, you could say you’re in love. But know that everything has a drastic possibility of changing, and live with it.
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Now playing: Mogwai - I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead

I’m still on this Derek Hess fix. And feeling emo.

Only took about 10 minutes to do this

Going a little emo I guess. I did this in A3 resolution in Photoshop, so I may see if I can get some posters of it printed.

Well, I haven’t got around to getting a new sketchbook lately, and I seem to have lost all of my mechanical pencils. And being that I’m on the mother of all budgets at the moment, I can’t really afford to pick up new gear.

However, I’ve been getting back into doing things digitally. I’ve got one and a half pages of the new comic drawn, and I would like to announce that anyone who happens upon this page should keep December the 26th marked on their calendar. Being as that is the third anniversary of the first The Other Goths strip, I think it’s only fitting to launch the new comic, tentatively entitled 20something into the world.

(Small aside. It also happens to be the third anniversary of the Boxing Day Tsunami, but I’m sure the two aren’t related)

To prove, however, that I haven’t been completely slacking off, here’s a little doodle I’ve done for a class assignment:

It’s a bit of a quick and nasty self portrait, in a new style that I’m trying for this piece. Don’t worry, I’m not going to keep this style for the new comic. Unless it works out….