Adventure Into Relative Obscurity

Pulling Punches.

2011-05-13T22:40:00.005-04:00

I'm currently drawing my way through the middle of after-prom season, which means two things: 1) it takes me two or three days to recover from staying up all night, and 2) I spend hours at a time trying to avoid the awkwardness presented by the ever-growing age disparity between me and high school kids. When I was twenty-five, it wasn't really that big of a deal. Now, it's getting a little weird.

"Where did you learn to do this?"

"I was trained at an amusement park called Geauga Lake when I was fifteen."

"Wow. When was that?"

"Uh...1993."

"Whoa! I was born in 1994! Ha ha!"

"(Sigh) Yeah, that's great, kid. I guess New Kids on the Block jokes are off the table."

"Who?"

"They're...uh, they're kind of like...an earlier version of N*Sync."

"Who?"

"Never mind. Hey, listen, it's gonna be easier for me to draw your girlfriend's mouth if you take your tongue out of it."

I mean, I'm not going to lament any generational ignorance of boy bands, but that's one of many examples of how I have less and less in common with high school kids as I get older. Which, of course, is supposed to happen, and is a good thing. Which is precisely why most adults that aren't the parents of high school kids tend to try as hard as they can to stay the f*ck away from high school kids. About twenty hours out of the year, I don't really have a choice.

There are a lot of things that haven't changed much with high school kids, though. Most of the kids I come across are very friendly and polite. I will admit that the ones jacked up on energy drink at 3 in the morning can be a little hard to handle.

"Hey, whoever's next can sit down. Ladies?"

"Hi."

"Hi."

"Hey. Just the two of you?"

"Yeah. Draw us hugging."

"Uh...I'm just drawing faces tonight. You know, because there's a line of like fifty kids behind me, and I gotta keep my sketches under three minutes so I can draw as many people as possible..."

"Aw. Okay, just draw my arm around her."

"I'm...uh...not drawing arms. Just faces."

"Draw us holding hands."

"Wait, draw me punching her in the face. Like, just my hand."

"I'm not drawing your friend getting punched in the face by your...floating...ghost hand. Besides, your hand is technically part of your arm."

"Wait, draw me like I'm thinking really hard. Like this."

"Okay, your hand is on your face. What did I just say ten seconds ago about hands?"

"You don't know how to draw hands?"

"No, I know how to draw hands...smile real quick...I'm just not doing it tonight because it takes too long and because if I draw your hands, then the kids behind me will want me to draw their hands doing something too, then the kids behind them will too, etcetera etcetera, causing a chain reaction that ends with me averaging four or five minutes a sketch, and then less of your classmates get one, which means that there will just be more of them around to whine at me when I quit drawing at 5 AM."

"Yeah, but..."

"There's also an outside chance that I'll get in trouble because some of your suburbanite poseur friends will try to flash gang signs, and I'm drawing you guys on school property. So, yeah. I can draw hands. I'm just not going to right now. Smile again."

"Make me holding her tongue with my fingers."

"No. Please stop talking."

"Can you write our names on it?"

"Yeah. Right next to our face. So we know it's us."

"You can tell it's you by looking at it. That's pretty much the whole point of caricatures."

"Yeah, but it's a cartoon."

"Kid, I didn't spend the better part of...smile for me real quick...the last two decades studying facial features and meticulously trying to work out the kinks in my sketch so I could come here to your high school and draw smiley faces with prom hair and earrings. If I did, I would hope to God that people wouldn't pay me to do this, and if they did pay me, I would hope that they wouldn't be stupid enough to keep bringing me back here every year to draw crappy sketches instead of finding a new artist. It will look like you. I can write your names on it if you want, but that shouldn't be the reason that you want me to."

"Wait, don't write my name. Write 'J-Dizzle.' With three 'z's."

"Yeah. Write 'B-Dogg' on mine. No wait, write 'B-Money'. Or 'Brizzle Drizzle'. With six 'z's."

"I'm totally hanging this up now."

"Put hearts all over it."

"Somebody please kill me."

A pessimistic view, yes, but I can say with honesty that, from my experience, most people that aren't artists either lack the spatial awareness to be able to tell if caricature artists capture their likenesses, or they just don't care. I've known this since I was a fifteen-year-old rookie trying to fake my way through drawing people. If I sold most of those sketches, and I did, it meant that either people couldn't tell that I didn't know what I was doing or that they were too polite to tell me how much I sucked.

Of course, back then, I assumed the latter, but now I think that maybe I was giving people too much credit. I think that this is why caricature artists draw bodies. The fact of the matter is, most people don't care if you know how to exaggerate the proportions of their faces. They don't care if you draw their cheekbones accurately and they don't care if you notice that their nostrils flare slightly when they smile. They do care, however, that you can accurately draw Kevin Harvick's stock car off of a picture, and they care that you can write the correct number on said car. They care that you can draw them throwing dice against a brick wall "with all my gold in it". They marvel at your ability to draw a simple golf club, because then, and only then, it "really captures me." Drawing bodies on caricatures, in a sense, is a total copout.

This isn't to say that bodies are a copout without purpose. People do care if a representation of them, regardless of accuracy, is characterized by performing an action that they like. Most people don't care if you know how to draw faces, because they can't really tell what they look like. They just want to look cool. I think of it as kind of the same basic principle as paintings of European royals I learned about in Art History classes, where Napoleon Bonaparte, depicted on his horse, looks like a commanding badass of totally average height in David's "Napoleon Crossing the Alps." Or every painting of the Spanish Habsburgs that gently airbrushed out the crazy underbites and other grotesque genetic deformities resulting from centuries of inbreeding. Carreño did an especially admirable job painting portraits of Charles II without making it look like his jaw was trying to escape from his face.

It's not like this is a brand new conundrum. Artists have been idealizing portraiture for centuries. What does that make us, artists that pull our punches in an effort to make our clients happy? Caricaturists and portraitists are selling a product, so are we engaging in a form of customer service, or are we just selling out in the most base way possible? Are we diluting the art form, if we can go so far as to call it that? I'll tear people apart if that's what I think they want, and some of them do, so I do it. That doesn't mean that I don't feel a pang of annoyance every time I have to draw shiny pretty pictures of high school girls because I know that if I really pronounce the one girl's overbite or the other one's wacky eyebrows, odds are that they'll freak out on me because of the stigma that, on prom night, they just might be as pretty as they get.

I've drawn alongside other artists that don't care about pulling punches. In fact, a couple of them make a point to tell people this specifically, and I respect the hell out of them for that, because that's the closest thing that we can do to "keeping it real." I can't. I drew in retail for too long to not have a knee-jerk reaction to draw people the way that I think they want to be drawn, even when the opportunity to upsell them on mats or frames is non-existent.

On the other hand, people might not care if you can draw them accurately, but they sure know what ugly looks like, and they sure won't be afraid to tell you that you drew something that doesn't look like the idealized version of how they visualize themselves. I found that out the hard way working in amusement parks.

"Okay, here you go."

"What...what the hell is this?"

"Uh..."

"Why did you draw the gap in my teeth?"

"I...uh...you...have a gap in your teeth. It's there."

"Yeah, but why did you draw it?"

"Because...because it's there. It exists. You have a gap in your teeth."

"Yeah, but you drew it on there. That's mean."

"I...I wasn't trying to be mean. I was drawing your face. That's part of your face. It's one of the things that distinguishes you from the hypothetical mean that...uh...that caricature artists envision to differentiate your face from...from everyone else's."

"Hypothetical what?"

"The hypo...the average. What the idea of an average face looks like."

"Who has the average face?"

"Well...no one. No one does. It's hypothetical."

"Hypo...do you think I'm stupid?"

"N...no. Of course not. I..."

"Why the hell would I want to buy a picture of me with a gap in my teeth?"

"Because...uh...because that's what you look like? You wanted a caricature drawn of your face. I drew one. That's what caricatures are."

"I'm not buying this. I wanted one like that one." (points at demo on wall)

"That's...um, but that's not you. That's not your face. That's Angelina Jolie."

"Can't you make it, like, half me and half Angelina Jolie?"

"Wha...why would....why would you want to buy that?"

"I don't know. Why would I want to buy a picture that just looks like me? That's dumb."

"BECAUSE THAT WHAT CARIC--*ahem*--Sorry. Because that's what caricatures are. We draw an exaggerated version of your face. Yours. That's the product we sell. We don't have a stand where you can mash your face and a celebrity's together. That doesn't even make sense."

"Well, I'm not buying this."

"Yeah, I could see that coming. Look, I can redraw it without the gap if you want."

"Hm...okay. Could you do me a favor though?"

"(sigh) Yeah. What?"

"Don't make my eyelids so heavy. And make my cheekbones higher, Oh, and make my lips fuller. Make me look thinner. And I want blue eyes, not brown ones. And put blonde highlights in my hair."

"Okay. Fine. Whatever."

"Why aren't you looking at me anymore?"

"No reason."

The Reign of the Rotorman.

2010-10-04T21:57:00.001-04:00

One of the more interesting, and occasionally baffling, aspects of working in an amusement park is dealing with the regulars, the season passholders that come to the park every day. Most of these regulars are junior high school kids who received their pass from a parent or loved one that wanted to legally kick them out of the house for the summer. Of course, after the first few weeks, they become dangerous, not because they're bad kids, but because the they're bored. And if you're a bored thirteen-year-old and you've run out of things to do at an amusement park, the next logical thing to do is to try your hardest to annoy the shit out of the high school and college kids that work there.

Yeah, the kids are annoying, but they're relatively benign unless they're actively trying to break things in your stand. It's really the adults that you have to worry about. Some of you reading this may have read my previous post about the most awkward interview I ever had to conduct, and I wasn't lying the first time when I said that season passholders who aren't kids and don't have kids of their own should be handled very carefully.

Not surprisingly, the crazy ones were always the most famous. I would like to think that every park has them, these kind of urban legends that manifest themselves as people. Back at Geauga Lake, we had Country Joe, who would watch the same country show four or five times a day, every day. There was Handshake Steve, who, upon entering the park, would smile and compulsively reintroduce himself to every employee as he walked down the midway. But the real mascot, the beating heart, the best-known of the regulars at the park, was the Rotorman.

Let me take a second to explain, for those unfamiliar with the Rotor. It was one of those spinning rides in which the circular outside rotates rapidly, and the centrifugal force from the spinning causes you to stick to the wall as the floor of the ride drops out from underneath you. I was never much of a ride enthusiast, and the discovery of the delicate nature of my own stomach stemmed directly from an experience I had as a 5th grader, when I rode the Gravitron, a similar ride, twice in a row at Blossom Time and then threw up behind the bushes into the Chagrin River moments afterwards.

Rotorman was in line at the Geauga Lake front gate every morning that it opened. He was one of the first people through, and he would make his way as fast as he could to the Big Dipper, which always opened a few minutes before his namesake, and after his obligatory Dipper ride, he would get on the Rotor. The most prevalent legend that I heard about Rotorman was that he simply wouldn't get off of the Rotor until the park closed thirteen hours later. This was somewhat confirmed when I overheard a Rides supervisor in the break room explaining where Rotorman's hiding spot was, behind the entry/exit door of the ride.

In 1995, I would have said that he was middle-aged, but I was a teenager, so I could have been overestimating at that point. From what I remember, he had a heavier build and the paunch usually associated with ex-football players. He walked quickly, but with a slight limp in one leg, which was probably the reason why he ambled along at a quick pace instead of flat-out running down the midway with everyone else when the park opened. He had a receding hairline and shaggy hair parted on the side, straight out of a 1970s yearbook. His eyes were kind of a piercing light blue, but what made them noticeable was that his right eye was fixed down and away from the center of his face, regardless of where his left eye was looking. It was easy to pick Rotorman out of a crowd because he usually wore the same royal blue t-shirt that had a stylized "R" on the chest and said Rotorman underneath it, yes, like a superhero.

A few of my previous entries focus on my being fifteen and the awkwardness of not knowing what the hell I was doing. In 1995, I was seventeen, and at this point, it was pretty safe to say that I had become accustomed to drawing and selling caricatures to the point of actually liking it. I had been promoted to Lead Artist that year, which basically meant that I was good enough at making money and not antagonizing guests to the point where I could be trusted to count inventory.

I was opening the "B" satellite umbrella stand one morning and decided that I was bored. There's a period of time in mid-July, after the crowds from the holiday weekend leave, that forms a sort of temporal no-man's land, because it's dead center in the middle of the summer and going back to school isn't even on the horizon yet. During this period of time, the park gets relatively quiet for a couple of weeks, the temperature starts climbing into the low-to-mid 90s, the days start running together into a haze and and most of the employees get start getting burned out. Morale worsens and self-motivation falters, so avoiding apathy is important if you still want to make money. Worse, the opening shift at B stand was solitary for the first four or five hours. I was bored. I had to do something notable. I looked over and saw Rotorman making his way down the midway.

I waited until he was within earshot of my stand to strike.

"Hey, uh...Rotorman!"

He turned his head to look at me. His pace slowed and he began to adjust his course towards my stand.

"Yeah?"

I hadn't thought this far ahead; in fact, I hadn't even expected to get his attention. I suddenly felt like one of those naturalists on television after they attract the curiosity of a potentially dangerous animal. This was a pretty stupid stunt for me to pull, I thought. I didn't know anything about this guy except for the myths I'd heard about him. For all I knew, he was a violent sociopath. But I had already started this. I was going to finish it.

"Uh, could I draw a practice sketch of you? You won't have to pay for it or anything..."

He stopped in the middle of the midway and glanced at the Big Dipper. He looked back at me and winced.

"Ummm...I don't...uh, I have to get on the Big Dipper soon."

"Come on. It'll only take me a couple of minutes."

He looked back at the Big Dipper, and then looked back at me. They hadn't opened the ride yet. He started walking towards me again.

"Uh..." he stammered. "Yeah, fine. But when people get on the Big Dipper, I'm leaving."

He approached. Part of me panicked. There were many theories about how Rotorman became Rotorman, and I had no idea which one, if any, was true. Some of the Games supervisors were convinced that he was a Vietnam War vet with a Purple Heart and a metal plate in his head, and that the only thing that could alleviate his constant migraine headaches was riding the Rotor. This theory would have also accounted for his slight limp.

Another theory was that, as a baby, someone had left him, covered in a bag or something, on the Rotor, and that no one had noticed him for the better part of a day, and by the time that someone found him, his brain was scrambled and he subsequently became addicted to the Rotor for life. This supposedly accounted for his right eye, but was one of the more implausible theories; Geauga Lake had at least been there since the turn of the century, and the Rotor was a very old ride, but I doubt someone could have gotten a bag or backpack on the ride in the first place, whether there was a baby in it or not. Plus, I don't know what the effects of centrifugal force are on babies, but I doubt that they are described above.

I also remember there being some speculation that he was an ex-NASA test pilot who took too many Gs while flying experimental aircraft over Area 51, but that sounds like something that I would have made up when one of the rookies asked me who Rotorman was. Regardless, it made no difference to me at that point. I was going to be the first and only Geauga Lake caricature artist to ever draw Rotorman.

He sat down in my chair, still glaring at the entrance to the Dipper. I could tell I had thrown a serious curveball at him by interrupting his daily morning routine. His polite compliance with my demands had limits; he had already told me that he was a ghost as soon as that ride opened, so I knew I had to work fast. Still, I had questions.

I started drawing the side of his face. Temple, cheekbone, right jaw.

"So...what's your name?"

"Huh?" He looked at me with his primary eye.

Chin, left jaw, cheekbone, temple.

"Your name. Besides Rotorman, I mean."

"Fred." He looked back at the Dipper.

"Hey, I'm Jamie. Nice to meet you."

"Yeah. You too."

Left ear, right ear, inner hairline. Ask him. Wait, not yet.

"Have anyone ever drawn you before?"

"Nope."

Outer hairline, inner left ear, inner right ear. Go ahead, ask him. Do it.

"So, how...uh...how did you become Rotorman?"

"I...ride the Rotor a lot." He smirked. Diastema, check. Damn it. He had deflected my question.

Hair detail, sideburns, left nostril. Try again.

"No, I mean, like...why do you ride the Rotor all day?"

"I like it. It's fun."

Septum, right nostril, philtrum.

"Yeah, but you...hey, smile real quick for me...you spin around on that ride all day. Don't you get sick of it?"

He smirked again and shifted in his chair.

"No. Don't you get sick of drawing pictures?"

Upper lip, top of lower lip, top teeth.

"Uh...yeah. Yeah, sometimes I do."

I heard some excited yelling behind me, signifying that the Big Dipper had opened. As promised, without a word, Rotorman was out of the chair and ambling as fast as he could towards the entrance, leaving me sitting at my easel staring at an eyeless sketch of my new acquaintance. It didn't matter. I'd spent just enough time staring at him that his eyes and eyebrows were committed to memory. Mission accomplished. I had successfully drawn Rotorman.

As I drew a generic superhero body on him, I thought about our conversation. I felt cheated. When I decided to try and hold a conversation with him, I had expected to learn all of his secrets, the unanswered queries about his psychoses that made him ride around in rapid circles all day, every day. I wanted to take a peek inside this guy's brain. I wanted to stare into the mouth of madness and ask it questions. Maybe I thought that learning about Rotorman would somehow educate me, indirectly giving me a new understanding of people. Or maybe I just thought that I would come closer to learning the truth about what makes them crazy.

But the only truth that I had learned was that Rotorman was probably one of the smartest people that I had ever met. I thought about the countless times people had told me, "Do something you love, and you'll never have to work a day for the rest of your life." Well, Fred was doing that in the most literal sense possible. Sure, he wasn't technically working, and he might have had a pretty severe case of obsessive compulsive disorder, but he still seemed pretty happy to me. I dare any of us to be that satisfied with the daily routine of our lives, with or without mental illness. I asked Rotorman why he rode the Rotor all day, and he told me. Maybe the rest of the answer didn't matter.

The afternoon shift came in, and I went on break. I took my Rotorman sketch with me to the Main stand to show my buddy Rob before we headed out to Sirna's for lunch.

"Hey, check it out. I drew Rotorman."

"No way. Weird. Did he sit for you?"

"Yeah. He got up halfway through and ran away when the Dipper opened, but yeah."

"Nice, man. You could put that up as a demo."

"Nah. I was going to, but...nah. If he saw it, he might not like how I drew his eye."

We started walking towards the employee gate.

"Was he like, psychotic, or mentally challenged or anything?"

"I...I don't know. I don't think so. He was all right."

"What, like, was he normal?"

"I...I wouldn't say that, but...I dunno. He was a little off. He was pretty friendly, though."

"Well, what's...like...what's wrong with him?"

"Uh...he's...hm. I dunno. I asked him, but he didn't answer. Nothing, I guess. He's just some dude named Fred who really likes riding the Rotor."

• • • • •

After I closed my stand a few nights later, I was walking down the midway on my way to the money room and saw two shadowy figures collecting cans in a giant garbage bag. As I got closer, I saw that one of them was Rotorman. I said hi.

"Hey, Fred."

He looked at me with only a vague sense of recognition. Maybe he couldn't see me in the darkness.

"Hey."

Or maybe he just didn't give a shit about who I was. I was okay with that. Maybe, I thought, he actually was like Batman, obsessively devoted to a cause. Maybe there was only room in his heart for the Rotor. At least part of the issue of Rotorman's sustainability had been answered. I mean, the guy obviously didn't work. He rode the Rotor all day. Who knows where he lived, if he survived off of government disability checks or was in assisted living. Maybe he was just retired. I knew now, at the very least, how he saved up enough money to afford a season pass every year. He collected cans at night. Part of Rotorman made sense now.

Thinking about all of this now, I kind of wonder what happened to Rotorman after Geauga Lake closed down a few years back. I would like to think that he bought the Rotor at an awesome layaway price when Cedar Fair was selling off GL's roller coasters, but I know that was probably impossible. It couldn't have been easy for him. That park closing affected a lot of kids and their summer jobs, for sure, but that place was Rotorman's whole life. I would like to think that he found a new dedication to his life's work, like building gyroscopes. Or playing Roulette. Or maybe even something that has nothing to do with spinning around rapidly.

Wherever he is now, he was legendary then. We should all be so lucky.

Fear and Loathing at Geauga Lake.

2010-08-16T12:18:00.006-04:00

GEAUGA LAKE, JUNE 1993. I was fifteen, working a shift at the Computer stand on a weekday, which, like most amusement park caricature stands, was named for what it was closest to. In this case, my stand was between the Big Dipper and the Computer Photo stand, where customers had their photographs taken by an early digital camera on a template with a hole or two cut into it for the face(s).

I was sticking to my normal daily regimen of standing under my umbrella with my chair and easel behind me, which was par for the course among caricature and portrait artists. My personal routine, however, was the added challenge of appearing as accessible as possible while avoiding the performance of my actual job at all costs.

My motives stemmed more out of cowardice than laziness. I was still in the early stages of picking up the drawing part of my job...drawing, and I was under the impression that every sketch I did had a 50/50 chance of an awkward exchange where my customers had to tell me that they didn't want to buy my sketches. This didn't happen too often, but Geauga Lake had a pretty honest crowd back then. In comparison, a lot of my rookies at Kings Island drew sketches that resembled Sloth from The Goonies during their first few weeks, and people rarely ever complained aside from a wince here and there. They almost always paid for their sketches, whether they were good or not. Such was not the case at Geauga Lake, and I was terrified of getting rejected.

I had been through some pretty rigorous training that spring, sure, but the weeks since hadn't done much for my sketch. In most parks, rookie caricature artists usually learn by working alongside veterans. For whatever reason, the Geauga Lake Caricatures department from 1992 must have imploded; on the rare occasion that I actually worked alongside someone else, the entire crew of nine or ten artists was comprised entirely of other rookies, except for one second-year vet. My supervisor only worked at Geauga Lake on Saturdays and Sundays, and was at Sea World, across the lake, on weekdays. So the opportunity to learn was there, if you were okay with learning from someone who didn't really know how to draw caricatures either.

So I would just stand there. If someone would approach me to ask how much caricatures cost, I would answer them with a smile, but I would make no effort whatsoever to sweeten the deal or try to get them to sit for me. I secretly hoped that everyone would just walk away so I could just collect my minimum wage in peace until I somehow magically got better at drawing. When guests decided to buy a sketch, I would try my hardest to feign confidence during my panic-induced nausea, awkwardly moving my marker around the paper and silently praying that I didn't forget anything. Like earrings. Or eyebrows.

I had ways to pass the time when I was trying not to draw. I would people-watch, and when that got old (which, believe me, takes a while in amusement parks), I would watch the weight-guesser across the midway, another high school kid trying to learn his job like me, narrowly avoid getting slapped by the women who demanded that he guess their weight or age. This usually made me feel a little better, as he was far worse at guessing than I was at drawing caricatures. I would watch the aging monorail make its way into its station, evaluating its status as the "transportation of the future." I would stare at clouds. I would fantasize that the Skyscraper, the space-needle-esque observation tower in the middle of the park, would fall and crush my stand as I dove out of the way.

One day, as I was staring out into space, I heard some shouting behind me in the Big Dipper line, and I turned around to see two men yelling in each other's faces. At the risk of sounding demographically insensitive, one was wearing Cross Colours and the other was wearing NASCAR and a mullet, and both were each surrounded by many more men dressed as they were. I couldn't quite discern what they were shouting about, but I could see their faces as they grew increasingly more aggressive. I could see them gnashing their teeth at each other like rabid dogs. I could see the sunlight reflecting off of the saliva being ejected out of their mouths as they screamed.

The escalating cadence of their voices was made all that much more terrifying by the fact that they were in line for a roller coaster, and when I say "they were in line," I mean that they were inside the confined area where the line is winding between steel railings, banking from straight lines into 180-degree corners. And it wasn't like they were near an edge of the area, either. They were right in the middle, practically dead center.

I remember wondering, as I watched these grown men start shoving each other in slow-motion, how this could possibly end well. The line was pretty tightly packed, and many of the guests were far too overweight to climb over or fit through the railings that were cemented into the ground. The people a few rows away from the action were craning their necks, trying to get a better view of the the developing situation and relaying the play-by-play back to their shorter party members, but they certainly weren't moving.

This was bad. For the people surrounding the two groups of angry men, there was no way out. For the security guards that would be called to break up the fight, there was no way in. This wasn't going to be like the other scuffles, the quickly-dissipating glorified slap-fights that I'd seen while working across the midway from the Beer Garden. This was going to be a vicious, sweaty, no-holds-barred cage match, complete with innocent bystanders in peril. I took a step towards my sales counter to call Security before I remembered that my cart didn't have a phone. And then NASCAR threw the first punch.

Cross Colours took the blow to the side of his head and reeled backwards, his lower back hitting the railing. Almost instantaneously, he straightened his backbone and, in a Weeble®-like motion, sprang forward and transferred all of his upward momentum to his fist in a right hook. He hit NASCAR square under his left eye, a blow that would have surely would have knocked him down, had there been anywhere for him to fall. NASCAR bounced off of the people surrounding him like a pinball, regained his composure, and lunged back at Cross Colours. At this point, it became a free-for-all. The groups of men who had been taunting one another started blindly throwing closed fists at anything that moved. Women were screaming, children were crying, and people were being forced against the railings by others desperately trying to escape.

A paper cup half-filled with lemonade slush exploded as it hit the blacktop and brought me out of a trance; I realized that I'd been standing motionless, staring for a good five to ten seconds. I looked at my stand again. No phone. I looked at the Computer Photo stand, which had a phone in the back room. Closed, as the computer had inexplicably frozen up the day before, and locked, to protect the equipment. Calling Security clearly wasn't an option right now. The shouting and screaming grew louder, as the back of the line began to break up, clearing a path for the melee to bleed into the midway. The fight was going to be on my doorstep in seconds, I thought, and my tiny umbrella stand would be at the mercy of intense, perhaps racially-based animosity, and preternatural levels of testosterone. What was I going to do? What the hell was I going to do?

And that's when I hurdled over one of my chairs, ripped the cord out of the power strip, picked up the register, and started running.

Let me pause here and make the point that, in my naive, diseased 15-year-old mind, this seemed like the most logical course of action. Escape was imperative, and even though I probably hadn't made much, if any, money, there was still a $170 beginning bank in the register, and I wasn't going to leave it. In my mind, it was a hundred yards or so between my stand and the office adjacent to Portraits, and I had to call Security as quickly as possible before the proletariat started looting the Dipper Gift Shop and the Sand Art booth.

Of course, what I failed to realize then was that if I had encountered any security guards, and thankfully, I didn't, it was unlikely that they would have understood my reasoning for sprinting down the midway with a cash register in my arms. I imagine these events now from a third-person perspective, and I'm sure it didn't look like i was heroically saving the company's money from an angry mob. More likely, it appeared that I was attempting to rob my employer in the most idiotic way possible.

By some miracle, I made it to the Portrait stand without getting tackled by Security and thrown in handcuffs. I slammed my cash register down on the back counter next to a completely bewildered Portraits cashier whose mouth dropped open, seemingly having trouble forming the words to ask me what in God's name I was doing. I flung open the office door, picked up the phone and used the rotary dial to call Security.

Security: "Security."

Me: "There's...uh...whew...a, uh..." (breathing heavily)

Security: "There's a what?"

Me: "A fight...Big Dipper..."

Security: "Yeah, we got that. We already sent them over."

Me: "Uh..."

Security: "Anything else?"

Me: "I...uh..."

Security: "Jesus, kid, get off the phone. You're tying up the line."

Me: "Oh. Yeah. Sorry." (click)

I hung up the phone and caught my breath for a second. What the hell had I just done? I had to get back to my stand. The situation was being taken care of. Had I completely overreacted? I had to get back to my stand. It occurred to me that, since the portrait artists were all drawing, no one seemed to notice me run into the stand except for the one Portraits cashier. This worked out well for me, I thought, since there probably wasn't any way to recount the events of the past ten minutes without making myself seem like some sort of lunatic. Which, it now occurred to me, I probably was. I had to get back to my stand.

Yes, I decided, any attempt to vocally explain my behavior to anyone, especially management, would only result in disaster. The Portraits cashier stared at me in silence as I grinned at her, picked up my cash register, and slowly walked out of the building.

I returned to the scene, expecting to find a bloodstained, smoldering crater where my stand used to be, only to find the area completely unchanged. There were no medics bandaging the wounded and carrying them out on stretchers, the railings containing the line for the Big Dipper weren't mangled or ripped out of the pavement. They weren't even bent. In fact, the sweeps must of just been through, because the area was even cleaner than it was when I left. The entrance to the Dipper was temporarily roped off, a few security guards were still milling around, one of my chairs had been knocked a few feet over, and it looked like someone had bumped into my umbrella, but that was it. It had practically never happened.

I plugged my cash register back in and walked over to my easel, where a little kid had apparently used my color sticks to draw a stick figure, some sort of vehicle that looked like a tank crashing into a train, and his name, "Jason." I wondered if he had sat down and drawn it while his chaperone was being questioned, attended to by First Aid, or in the preliminary stages of getting ejected from the park. I wondered, to that end, if that kid would remember being booted out of an amusement park when he got older.

For that matter, I wondered if I was ever going to really like this job, like the veteran artists from Sea World who trained me. They genuinely seemed to enjoy drawing caricatures. Maybe it was because, at their Anheuser-Busch family-themed utopia, they didn't have to worry about drunken goons punching each other in front of them when they were at work. Maybe the last twenty minutes was a good indicator that my naivete and paranoia deemed me unsuitable for working with the general public. On the other hand, I thought, there was no sense in evaluating my feelings about my job, or the seemingly dangerous people around me, until I practiced enough to get better at this. I had to practice so I could get better. I had to. But not now. Maybe tomorrow.

I settled back into position in front of my chair, imagining the Skyscraper falling towards me.

How to Make the World a Better Place.

2010-04-12T21:07:00.001-04:00

I think that the news on television should be read by robots.

But we'll get to that later.

I've been pretty open about myself in some posts on this page, but I generally make a point of avoiding any mention any specifics regarding my personal life or political views on this page. It isn't that I don't feel strongly about things, it's just that I started writing this blog (and have been consistently less consistent about writing in it regularly) to tell stories about stupid things I notice from day to day and the mind-numbingly awkward occurrences that have befallen me in my life as a caricature artist. I haven't intended to eschew my views completely, it's just that I don't think that anybody would really care about what I think in terms of politics or worldview. Which is probably why you've stopped reading this by now and resumed watching videos of wiffle-ball induced crotch injuries on YouTube. Hey, I'd be doing the same thing if I wasn't typing this right now.

Anyway, I've decided to violate my own rule. I know that I'm not, in any way, an authority on the subject, and I'm about as qualified to talk about politics as a violinist is to talk about aeronautical engineering. But I have my reasons.

The biggest reason is one o my new responsibilities at work: comment moderation on the cincinnati.com message boards. You know, at the bottom of articles posted online, you can choose to comment on said articles. Now, I'm one of the people that deems whether or not the comment that you have posted is appropriate in a public forum.

This means that if any comments are:

unnecessary personal attacks on other posters or anyone that isn't in the public eye,

making use of language typically considered vulgar,

racist,

sexist,

homophobic,

or in some other way a violation by the standards of the Terms & Conditions,

then I am one of the people that blocks said comment from view of the public. Personally, I'm not easily offended, but I generally agree with said Terms & Conditions in what I think is appropriate to post in a public forum. I have only been doing this for a week now. And I've already decided that I hate a whole lot of people that live in Cincinnati.

Seriously. I've seen some of the most backward, idiotic, insensitive statements that I could have ever imagined, and that's not just the comments that I've removed. There is something very, seriously wrong with people.

Fortunately, I think I know how to fix everything. Except, that is, for the spelling. Apparently, the strength of one's opinion is inversely proportionate to the person's skill in spelling and use of grammar. Ironically, these are usually the same people that feel that everyone in the U.S. should learn English. Go figure.

Anyway, I have it all figured out.

The news on television should be read by robots.

I'm not saying that robots would do a better job than news anchors; as a matter of fact, I think that most news anchors, especially the network ones, are extremely talented. It's just that any subtlety in facial expression or vocal intonation can be interpreted as a political leaning by people f*cking crazy enough to look for such things so they can discredit it. And believe me, they do.

I'm also not saying that opinions and/or political leanings can't still be expressed in writing. I don't think that has to change. I just think that the subtleties of the written word can be interpreted in more ways than speech and body language.

Therefore, in order to retain the journalistic principle of absolute non-bias, the news needs to be read by robots. Faceless, emotionless robots that look like Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Except that the light is exactly 50% grey, instead of, say, red or blue or white. Otherwise, the color of the light could be interpreted as indicative of a political leaning or racial bias by people f*cking crazy enough to look for such things so they can discredit it.

You might be wondering why I think that the news should be read by cold, unfeeling mechanical beings. I'm not finished quite yet.

Secondly, television or radio shows with any bias towards a political viewpoint, especially those on channels themed after news programming, will be outlawed. All copies, digital or otherwise, are to be destroyed immediately. The time slots will be replaced by 50% Grey Newsbot.

I realize that, as you read this, might ask, "Hey, what will this fix? Because right now you sound like a total sociopath." And you're right. This topic is, admittedly, making me talk and think like a crazy person. I've come to the realization that the problem isn't with the left or the right. The problem is that people aren't listening to the news and then forming their own opinions based on facts. They're just listening to someone else who tells them what to think, because they're either lazy, stupid, or both. And the people that are spouting rhetoric on television are getting about as close to mass misinformation as you can get.

This is why this country is currently so polarized, politically. I mean, come on. People are either behind our president and what he's trying to accomplish, or they actually believe that he's a Kenyan-born Muslim sleeper agent that dabbles in Marxism. That isn't normal.

Yeah, the recession has been hard on a lot of people, and I understand that. But health care reform does not make us a socialist country, people. It's just health care reform. About health care. Reform that only affects your freedom to not pay for health care. You're overreacting. Lots of other democratic countries have socialized health care. The rest of your freedoms remain unaffected. No one is going to show up and take away your precious guns. Storm troopers are not going to come to your door to shake you down for your tax payments. Inversely, the Bolsheviks are not going to invade the White House to round up the First Family and execute them, and, if they did, they should have come during the last administration, for no other reason than that Dick Cheney is a practically flawless analogue of Rasputin.

I guess what makes me the angriest is that the American public is being taken advantage of right now, and I don't think that many people realize it. People are unemployed, underemployed, and stressed out. They're looking for answers, so they turn on the news. They turn on the news looking for facts, but they don't get facts. They get speculation. They get opinions that, rife with exaggeration, rile them up and make them angry, regardless of political leanings. The news networks see that people are watching their batsh*t crazy shows, and the high ratings that result from it, and keep pushing. They push and prod the people that watch these shows disguised as news programs, and viewers start freaking out more and more. The rhetoric starts getting more and more intense, further away from logic.

Then it involves me, because the comments under a news story on cincinnati.com, about the opening of an ice cream shop, somehow start with people talking about the economy and ends with people arguing about how we need to rise up against our socialist president who is actively ruining our way of life because he and his family hate white people.

Come on, think about it. That's f*cking crazy.

That's crazy, and this can't keep going on. People in the American television news industry, you need to realize that you can only push people so far before they snap. All it's going to take is one of these jackass pundits to say something that can be interpreted the wrong way, and some Michigan militia of lunatics is going to plan an attack on the Capitol building, or an unemployed factory worker is going to shoot up a police station, or something equally f*cked up is going to happen. Actually, check that, it's already happening.

And the saddest part is, people are going to get hurt or killed because cable news networks want the ratings that guarantee advertising dollars. It's about money. Let me repeat that. IT'S ALWAYS ABOUT MONEY. You people out protesting with your picket signs need to calm the f*ck down. Television is making you crazy, and we all know it's television because the clever sound byte you've hilariously misspelled on your sign came straight out of the mouth of someone who was paid to antagonize you so you keep watching their stupid show.

Maybe if television news channels focused on other things, like, I don't know, the two wars we're involved in, or maybe even an occasional reminder of how totally f*cked Africa is, we would even out a little bit with our priorities, as far as things we should really care about. We need to remember that other people have real problems in the world. People in other parts of the world are starving, or running from death squads, or getting blown up in subways. They aren't whining about losing a nearly insignificant amount of their personal freedom.

So, my theory is that, if you actually force people think for themselves instead of telling them what to think and how strongly to think it, then they'll calm down and we can avert the chaotic breaking point that we're swiftly headed towards right now.

I know, I know...this doesn't give the American public a whole lot of credit for not being mindless sheep. But hey, does anyone remember the lady that told John McCain on live television that she could prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that presidential Barack Obama was an Arab? Not even a Muslim, not even a Muslim extremist, an "Arab". How about that guy the yelled "Kill him!" while Sarah Palin was speaking about Obama at a rally? That's a whole lot of conservative talk radio right there. We're not mindless sheep, but we have to admit to ourselves that:

1. There is a scary number of people that believe everything they hear on TV or on the radio.

2. There are personalities on TV or on the radio that tell people crazy, crazy things so people keep paying attention to them.

3. Television networks and/or radio programs that theme themselves after news programming have an ethical obligation to offer non-biased factual accounts of current events and little else. Some people might call this "news".

Let me gently make the point that I know that the government tends to screw us over from time to time, as taxpayers, citizens, or just people that place trust in our elected officials. I'm not saying that I think the government is perfect, far from it. Even if I lean left of center, I'm still not saying conservatives are wrong. Every effort deserves a look from more than one angle. I just think that we need to concentrate our efforts on concepts based on truth.

The truth.

The truth, as in, not theories that the country is undergoing a complete redistribution of wealth to black people so they can buy crack and abortions with their health insurance. You stupid, awful bigoted backwards redneck idiots.

And yes, a lot of people will come to the same delusional conclusions without any help from television or radio programs. But I think that it's a step in the right direction. Remember fifteen years ago, before the internet was as popular, when there was a certain stigma attached to living off the grid, in a log cabin in Montana writing angry letters to the government? I doubt that doing this sounds anywhere near as crazy today.

In the meantime, I will avoid paying attention to biased programming and continue to take a non-politically-biased stance on moderating comments on the cincinnati.com message boards, even if makes me want to move into a log cabin in Montana and spend my days writing angry letters to people that make idiotic comments on cincinnati.com.

An Open Letter to the Guy who Merged onto I-71 in Front of Me Last Night.

2009-11-18T14:10:00.002-05:00

Dear Guy who Merged onto I-71 in Front of Me Last Night,

I couldn't help but notice that you shouldn't be allowed to drive on the same roads as the general public. Maybe it's your sense of adventure or your devil-may-care attitude, but merging onto a busy highway at 35 miles per hour while it's raining after nightfall with no headlights on while you're talking on your cellphone is typically enough for me to lament the fact that you, presumably, are legally licensed to drive.

I've come across a lot of idiot drivers in my time, but I've never come across someone that has made this many dangerous errors simultaneously. I know Ohio drivers aren't the best. Sure, they don't drive like Jeff Gordon on PCP, as Michigan drivers do, and they don't drive everywhere doing 25 like a lot of folks in Florida. I've had run-ins with moronic thugs on crotch-rockets weaving in and out of traffic on 75, and I've nearly collided with redneck meatheads who think that having four-wheel-drive in their giant stupid trucks means that they don't have to be careful on top of six inches of snow. I won't go into any specific rants in this post about people and their inability to drive in snow around the greater Cincinnati area. They know who they are. Still, none of these people have astounded me quite as much, in terms of total ignorance of their surroundings, quite like someone who, say, might merge onto a busy highway at 35 miles per hour while it's raining after nightfall with no headlights on while talking on a cellphone.

Let me gently make the point that, while I don't consider myself to be an advocate of suicide, I can still think of many, many ways that you can off yourself with no involvement of the strangers around you, other than, for instance, merging onto a busy highway at 35 miles per hour while it's raining after nightfall with no headlights on while you're talking on your cellphone. As a matter of fact, I can even think of at least three other ways you can kill yourself with your car, off the top of my head, that don't involve jeopardizing the safety of those around you. You f#$%ing idiot.

If anyone should notice a man in his early-to-mid 40s that drives a maroon sedan like a jackass and looks kind of like Dante Hicks from Clerks, make sure you take down his license number so we can report him.

Sincerely,

James W. Rockwell

The Most Awkward Interview Ever.

2009-09-16T19:08:00.004-04:00

One of my more prominent responsibilities as an assistant manager for Kaman's Art Shoppes was the interviewing and hiring of employees. Since most of the positions could be performed by high school students, the interviewing process was comparatively fast and simple: make sure the kid that you're hiring a) seems like they'll be happy enough at work to talk to people, b) won't prove to be a liability, and c) can draw, if applicable to the position. I don't think that I was all that difficult of an interview, which, I feel, was appropriate, considering that I was the first interview that a lot of these kids had ever had. I, for one, interviewed with Kaman's when I was 15, and I'm pretty sure I almost threw up when Sandy Fogel asked me what my name was.

I probably hired way over half of the kids that I interviewed during my four years at King's Island, and over half of those kids would work more that one season because they liked it. I still feel really good about the kids who we took on that ended up having a great time working at the park, because they prove to be stories about a successful hire. This is not one of those stories.

2004 got off to a rocky start for the Caricatures department at King's Island. Despite being in the capable hands of Nolan Harris, we had hired five artists from the same art school who had all gone through training and had either gotten fired within their first week, not shown up at all, or, in the case of one of them, whined enough about basic job responsibilities to make the rest of the crew hate the f#$% out of him. Keep in mind that a crew at full strength was somewhere in the 20-25 range counting part-timers, so this was a pretty sizable recruiting failure. So when Lisa (Evert, another KAS assistant manager at the time, and my girlfriend) called me, bragging about how she had set up a caricature interview for me, I was pretty relieved.

And so I walked up to Security Post 3 later that week to pick up my interview. I spotted her off of Lisa's description, and introduced myself. She said hello, shook my hand, and handed me her application, which she had already completed. As we walked back towards the office in Mining, I started reading her application while we were making smalltalk. I noticed several warning signs that this was not going to go well.

1. King's Island season passholders who a) are not kids and b) don't have kids of their own are to be handled very carefully.

2. AGE: ___22___ (do not fill out if you are over the age of 18)

3. When you interview high school kids on a regular basis, you get pretty used to misspellings on their apps. This was different.

WHY WOULD YOU LIKE TO WORK IN THIS POSITION? I love Kings Iland and i have always really liked drawling since I was little.

DESCRIBE YOUR BACKGROUND AS IT PERTAINS TO YOUR POTENTIAL POSITION. My art teacher has said that I was the best at drolling in my class this is when I was in Art 2.

Sure, misspellings are forgivable, even if the former copy editor in me (Editor's Note: Before I worked for a real newspaper, I thought I knew what copy editing was. I didn't. I can check for spelling and basic grammar. That's about it) shudders when I see them on a job application. But if you can't spell the name of the place that you want to work correctly, and you not only misspell the primary function of your occupation, but you misspell it in two different ways, then we're going to have some serious problems.

4. I know that we aren't interviewing you to put pieces of your artwork up in the Louvre. Having said that, there are many diverse and appropriate ways to transport your portfolio. Tossing it all in a garbage bag, even from a postmodern or Dadaist perspective, is not one of them.

You know when someone on television or in movies comes to the sudden realization that something is horribly awry, and the camera simultaneously zooms in on their face and zooms out on the background? Well, I actually had a brief out-of-body experience and saw this happen to myself as soon as my brain had quantified the above information and added it together. But, being the consummate professional that I was (I wasn't), I didn't have the option of cutting the interview off early, although I briefly considered faking a seizure or lighting myself on fire as a diversion. No, I decided, I should look at her portfolio, in case she's some sort of artistic genius. I had to give her that chance.

Penny and I (we'll call her Penny to protect her anonymity) walked in to the office and sat down at the desk, where John Roessner was working on one of his infinitely long inventory reports for the Rivertown Mining Shop. I introduced the two of them, and he dutifully reverted to typing numbers in as I sat down next to him. She took a seat on the other side of the desk, and we continued the interview.

ME: So, tell me more about yourself.

PENNY: Well, I really, really like King's Island, and I love drawing. My teacher said that I was the best in my class!

ME: Yeah, I noticed that on your app, that's great. So, you're talking about high school, which was a few years ago...how many years of art classes did you take?

PENNY: One!

ME: ...uh...huh. Right on. And this "Art 2" class you were talking about...was it more geared towards illustration, or...

PENNY: We made pottery! And I drew Garfield! It's in my portfolio...I'll show you in a minute.

ME: Ah. Right. Yeah, let's go ahead and get started.

She opened her garbage bag, rooted around in it for a minute, and pulled out her first portfolio piece. Any hopes that I had that this girl was some sort of artistic idiot savant disappeared rapidly, as I realized that it was a series of cat heads drawn on lined notebook paper, complete with torn fringe on the side. She handed it to me.

ME: Ah...so, these are...uh...cat heads?

PENNY: Yep. Bobcat heads. I like bobcats...not like, a pet or anything, but like...I don't know. I just wanted to draw their heads. Not their bodies.

ME: Yeah, I can see that. Um...yeah. Very nice. Let's move on.

Now, I realize that those of you reading this that aren't caricature artists, or never have interviewed caricature artists, probably think I'm some kind of elitist asshole, but let me assure you that I'm not. Please understand that a typical interview portfolio for this job contains art projects, typically completed in either a high school advanced placement course or a college-level drawing class, that show a definitive understanding of facial anatomy, or at least human heads in general. A lot of kids actually give caricatures of celebrities a shot and bring them to the interview. Sure, there are going to be projects in there that show a broadness of talent; a pastel landscape drawing, or a first crack at oil painting that won a Gold Key award, or something to that effect. Point is, most of the people that we interview show us original, completed pieces. There have been many notable exceptions. Again, this isn't one of them.

She pulled out another sheet of paper. This time, I was relieved that it wasn't drawn on notebook paper, but I was again perturbed by the subject matter. It was a vertical green oval with two horizontal black ovals on top of it, drawn in crayon. I recognized it as a crude drawing of an alien head, but, in retrospect, I really didn't have to put that together myself, because she had scrawled "Alien" next to it and drew an arrow pointing to the head.

ME: Hey...an alien...head.

PENNY: Yeah. I draw aliens sometimes!

ME: Really. I've...um...I've always been kind of scared of aliens.

PENNY: I'm not!

Next, she confidently handed me a cut-out piece of paper. I unfolded it and saw that it was a pencil drawing of an elephant, again on lined notebook paper, that she had cut out with scissors.

ME: Wow, an elephant. What...um...what made you cut it out?

PENNY: I don't know...the rock, I guess.

ME: The rock?

PENNY: Yeah, the big rock at the end of his trunk.

ME: Ah. right. What about it?

PENNY: Well, that used to be a baby elephant, but I cut it out so it was a rock instead. Check this one out!

ME: Oh. Uh...cool. It's Snoopy.

It was about this point that I noticed that John had stopped typing and was staring wide-eyed at the computer screen. I looked at the drawing of Snoopy, which had been drawn off of a sticker. I know this because the sticker itself was stapled to the drawing.

Next came the Garfield drawing that I had heard so much about. The drawing of Garfield was probably the most accurate reproduction that I had seen thus far, but she had gone through the trouble of adding Jon Arbuckle, Garfield's owner, who was now portrayed with a lazy eye and a prominent hunchback. I began trying to think of questions to ask about her drawings, just so I could feel confident that I had conducted a full interview once this was over. This was probably a mistake on my part.

PENNY: Look, here's Garfield. He hates Mondays!

ME: Yeah, I...uh...I remember that about him. You also wrote it on here, "I hate Mondays." Very nice. What's next?

PENNY: Here, it's Tweety Bird.

ME: Oh, right on. Uh...why did...um...why did you choose to draw this one on...uh...blue card stock?

PENNY: (visibly excited), Oh, I'll show you in a minute! But first, look! A horse!

John Roessner had stopped moving altogether and was visibly shaking, presumably trying to try to contain inappropriate laughter. I looked at the drawing of the horse. It was a comparatively accurate pencil drawing of a horse in the sense that it had a head, a tail, and four limbs. What disturbed me about this particular piece was that she had obviously drawn and erased the horse's penis multiple times, and at varying sizes.

ME: Yep, that sure is...a horse. You like horses, don't you, John?

JOHN: Y-YES...YEAH. YES I DO.

PENNY: Look!

Penny had pulled out a picture of a reclining Mickey Mouse, also drawn on light blue card stock to match up with Tweety. As I wondered what these two might have in common besides being a "Cartoon Characters That Adults Really Like When They're Off Their Meds" diptych, she grabbed the Tweety drawing off of the desk. As she picked it up, I noticed that it had handwriting on the back of it. She held the two drawings side by side, one in each hand, and began reading dialogue off of the back of them, moving them up and down as each one "talked."

PENNY: "Hey, Tweety, could you help me get up?" (pause) "No, Mickey, I won't...you get up yourself."

(a good five seconds of silence)

ME: ...

JOHN: *cough COUGH...cough* w...WOW.

ME: Oh-kay!....we're good. Thanks for showing me your stuff! Lot of good stuff in there.

PENNY: So, am I hired?

I thought for a moment about how to respond. The normal thing to do would be to give an honest critique of the portfolio, tell the interviewee why you don't think they're quite cut out for drawing strangers for money, and tell them what they need to work on. That's what you do when you're interviewing someone and you think that, if they work on a couple of things and come back, they have a shot at getting hired. Penny here was a notable exception, because she, for whatever reason, seemed to have an emotional maturity level way, way, WAAAAY below what would be normal for her age. I could see that being honest would likely result in seriously hurting her feelings and, possibly, severely damaging her self-image.

Plus, I didn't want her going to the park to complain that we didn't hire her, resulting in an angry inquiry as to why we would interview a barely functioning adult to perform an extremely specialized job involving relatively high and complex levels of customer service. What would happen to Penny the first time she drew a $30 sketch of a couple as Garfield and Jon of Notre Dame? People are only nice to a point, and typically that point falls well short of shelling out $30 bucks for a drawing that doesn't look like them. Amusement park patrons would uncaringly devour her, whether the park understood that or not. So I did what I thought was the right thing: the wrong thing. I lied through my teeth.

ME: Uh, actually, we're pretty...uh...full in Caricatures right now.

JOHN: *COUGH* WE JUST HIRED SOME PEOPLE...EARLIER THIS WEEK.

ME: Yeah...yeah, we did. I'm going to keep your resume on file here, and if a spot opens up, we'll call you.

PENNY: Okay! I really want to work here!

ME: I know...well, do you want me to walk you back out to Secu--

PENNY: No! I'm going to go on the water slides! And the Vortex!

ME: Okay. Thanks for coming in, it was really nice meeting you!

PENNY: Yeah. Bye!

I shut the office door. I looked at John, whose face was completely flushed. He looked back at me. I opened the door, looked out, and shut it again to confirm that she was gone.

JOHN: *GUH!!!* (gasp) How...how did...you keep a straight face that whole time?

ME: God, I don't know. That was completely retar...oh. I...I mean, ridiculous.

JOHN: Nice.

ME: Oh. Oh, man...am I a total asshole?

JOHN: *cough* I don't think so. Do you think that she would have been able to do the job?

ME: Of course not.

JOHN: Then you have nothing to worry about.

ME: Yeah...I guess so.

And so ended the worst interview I have ever conducted, and certainly one of the most awkward scenarios that I was privy to while I still worked full-time in the parks. And that's saying something. I, of course, wind-sprinted over to Portraits, Roessner in tow, to yell at Lisa for what I had assumed was a mean practical joke of some sort. Lisa thought the whole thing was pretty funny, but amidst her laughter, she told me that honestly thought that this girl was on the level. "Stop yelling at me! God, she said that her teacher told her that she should draw here. How the hell was I supposed to know?"

Obviously, I still feel pretty awful about the whole experience, but I still can't put my finger on why. Some things just stick with you, I guess. I'd like to think that Penny promptly forgot about coming in for an interview minutes later while she was enjoying the mind-numbing speed of the Vortex. I can only hope.

Why My Generation Should Be a Lot More Screwed Up Than It Is.

2009-05-18T21:06:00.015-04:00

Some friends of mine had a '90s-themed party last weekend that I couldn't attend because I was working. I did see some pictures, and while the costumes were painfully accurate, I can't say that I see all that many radical differences between the '90s and the '00s. Maybe that's the most surefire sign that I'm getting older in my relatively young adulthood, and, as you're reading this, you might be thinking about what a ridiculous, f$%&ed-up thing that is to say, considering all the massive cultural changes that have taken place. I have my reasons.

I was born in 1978, meaning that while my more socially formative years took place in the '90s, my early development took place in the '80s. Sure, maybe denim shirts and high-waisted shorts seem dated now, but come on. I grew up thinking everyone wore leotards and Hawaiian shirts to high school, and my biggest heroes were two rednecks with a confederate flag airbrushed on their car and Mr. T.

All things considered, I can't believe that my generation isn't more screwed up than it already is, just based on what we were watching when the logic centers of brains were developing. At this point, I'm kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop because we all simultaneously lose our minds, the delayed result of the mental conditioning we were subject to. Don't think my fears have any basis in reality? Well, here's this.

TEN EXAMPLES OF FLAWED '80'S LOGIC THAT MADE MY CHILDHOOD A LIE:

1. Spastic dancing will never make you look like a complete idiot.

I don't know what it was about dancing in the '80s, but flailing around wildly was so cool and deviant that it was banned in entire towns. What the hell happened in the '70s that dancing became so risqué? Apparently, everyone hanging out doing 8-balls at discos was Amish. I wasn't in high school in the '80s, but when I was in third grade, I heard that some freshman had a seizure, and they gave him a Trans Am and elected him senior class president based on it.

2. Technology evolves at breakneck speeds, and computers are capable of anything.

Sure, it's one thing when a scientist devotes his entire life to building a time machine out of an obscure hatchback sportscar, and in the event that you accidentally discover artificial intelligence, there's a 50/50 shot that it'll go rogue on you and kill your whole family. That's almost plausible. But Weird Science? Two high school kids created Kelly LeBrock out of thin air using an Apple IIe. Of course, this is also the same decade when MacGyver was on, and I'm pretty sure there was an episode where he built a particle collider out of a Pogo Ball® and a couple of ketchup packets.

3. Every hero needs a useless sidekick, who occasionally presents him/her/itself as a dangerous liability.

He-Man has Orko, and the Super-Friends have Marvin, Wendy, and a dog with a cape (or Zan, Jayna, and that blue monkey thing, depending on the episode). The Transformers hang out with a ten-year old kid with no discernible talents. The Thundercats...oh, sweet Jesus, the Thundercats.

Scenario: You and your friends are all anthropomorphic talking cat people. You already have two preadolescent talking cat children that do little else than fly around on hoverboards and get kidnapped. For the love of God, why would you keep Snarf around? Snarf isn't even a person-shaped cat. He's a cat-shaped cat. Not only that, he doesn't really talk, he just whines loudly and incessantly. I realize that sidekicks are good for merchandising, and that 80's cartoons were little more than 30 minute commercials for action figures. But really? Snarf?

Marketing Guy #1: "All right, we've got Lion-O, Tygra, Panthro, Cheetara, and a couple of kids. Lemme double check the universal 1980's marketing formula here...hm...muscular male protagonist, check. Girl on the team, check. Couple of relatable kid sidekicks...wait, we need a minority."

Marketing Guy #2: "Panthro's black...well, kind of. He's grayish. But the voice actor is black."

Marketing Guy #1: "Awesome. We're all set. Let's make some money."

Ronnie the Intern: "Wait! Wait, I have an idea! What...what about...a cat who kind of looks like...uh...like a fat lizard?"

Marketing Guy #2: "Wh...what? Why?"

Marketing Guy #1: "Ronnie, come on. Why would we need--(sigh). Fine. What does he do?"

Ronnie the Intern: "Um...he...uh...he says his own name over and over!"

Marketing Guy #1: "..."

Marketing Guy #2: "Jesus."

Ronnie the Intern: "My dad owns LJN!"

Marketing Guy #1: "Yeah, we know, Ronnie. Your dad also said that you're not supposed to take your helmet off, even--check that, especially--during creative meetings. You know what? Fine. Ronnie's goddamn fat-ass whining lizard-cat-thing is in."

Ronnie the Intern: "Yaaaaaay!!!" (bangs head on table)

4. Antagonists are always blonde jocks with money.

5. Nerds are only a two-minute montage sequence away from complete social dominance.

Sorry, you're a nerd. BUT WAIT...you can immediately redeem yourself by taking your glasses off, blasting yourself with a can of hairspray, and ripping the sleeves off your shirt.* Don't worry, everyone will accept this newfound coolness immediately and unquestioningly, except for that blonde jock and his sycophant sidekick toadie bastard friend in the corner, who have, by now, rapidly tumbled all the way down the popularity ladder as a result of their inexplicable hatred of you.

* - Bonus cool points are awarded if you're wearing a headband, and/or are covered in glitter.

6. Analog strap-on keyboards are the music of the future.

Because nothing matches asymmetrical plastic sunglasses and red leather pants better than a piano stuck to your chest.

7. Doppelgangers of you, of alien, robot, or mystical origin, look, sound, and act exactly like you down to the finest detail, except that they're either evil or socially retarded.

8. Any altercation can be resolved quickly and peacefully with breakdancing.

This especially includes any situation involving gang fights, orphans, fundraisers, or gangs hosting orphanage fundraisers. You'll be able to tell the difference between each gang because their colors are always bright pastels.

9. Leg warmers are useful for...something.

And, last but not least...

10. The leading cause of social alienation and missing persons is post-traumatic global amnesia, a result of sustaining a massive head injury.

But not to worry. This is always invariably cured, with no side effects, as a result of another massive head injury.

THE BABY SKETCH CHRONICLES, PART II: The Happiest Baby in the World, or How I Learned the Art of the Matador.

2009-05-12T19:07:00.005-04:00

It was a perfect, temperate morning in the summer of 1997, and I was a couple hours into my shift at the Caricatures main stand at Geauga Lake. Despite my predilection for working outdoors in the summer for most of my life, I don't do well in high temperatures or direct sunlight, being both Irish and kind of hairy for a blonde guy. Regardless, I always appreciated the days when the heat and humidity kind of evened out, because it meant less discomfort for me. It was bad enough that Kaman's Art Shoppes uniform shirts back then were hot pink, but sweating through both my undershirt and my pretty fuchsia polo was just insult to injury.

My bitterness in the workplace had, at that point, finally subsided; about a month and a half earlier, I had been forced by my manager to get a haircut, lest I be demoted from my Lead Artist position and given a 1% pay cut off my commission. My hair had been about down to my shoulders at that point, and, admittedly, was getting kind of out of hand anyway, but since the decision to chop it hadn't been mine, I was pretty pissed for a while. Regardless, my hair was now about as short as it is currently, and my whiny, anti-fascistic streak of anger was over. I was idly staring into the midway wondering how many people at college wouldn't recognize me when I went back for sophomore year, when a young woman entered my field of vision, after unsuccessfully trying to get my attention a couple of times.

She seemed a little annoyed for a second, but she seemed to understand when I apologized for zoning out. She asked about pricing for a drawing of her baby, who was in a stroller in front of her, about four or five months old, wide-eyed, and staring at me. I read the prices off the sign, and was silently deciding in my head whether or not I felt like drawing her baby; I was fairly used to drawing babies at this point, but it was kind of a pain in the ass. I hadn't really been busy that day, and I decided to give it a shot.

I sat down at my easel and quickly realized that this baby, still staring at me, couldn't stop smiling. This made my job a lot easier, because while it's difficult to make a non-smiling baby smile, it's even more difficult to get them to look straight at you. This kid was totally helping me out, so I started talking to him, to which he responded by laughing at everything I said. I smiled at him, he smiled back. I laughed at him, he laughed back at me.

Now, those of you reading this that know me probably also know that, in situations where I get nervous, even slightly, such as when I draw strangers with a permanent, non-eraseable marker, I tend to use humor as a defense reflex. This hasn't always worked out for me in the past; as a matter of fact, many people that I've drawn have sat through the majority of their sketch in awkward silence after I bombed by making some obscure Star Wars reference, or started talking about drawing mullets while someone with a mullet has been behind me watching me draw half the sketch, or actually drawing someone with a mullet and talking about anything other than NASCAR, Skynrd, or Stone Cold Steve Austin. So, to recap, this baby in front of me was:

a) Looking straight at me,

b) Smiling, and

c) Laughing at my stupid jokes, even when he obviously lacked the cognitive capacity to understand them.

These three factors meant that this baby in front of me was, on all three counts, a better customer than most of the adults that I had ever drawn at Geauga Lake. So, this kid was my new best friend. I finished drawing him, and started coloring in his sketch. He was still the happiest little guy ever. I finished coloring. Still ecstatic. I signed the sketch and tore it off the drawing board. Pumped to be there. I held up the sketch in front of him, feigning that I was seeking his approval to make his mom laugh, which she did. Everything was going to plan. And that's when he opened his mouth, and, I swear to God, launched a four-foot long stream of vomit straight at the sketch I had just finished drawing of him.

Understand that I had just recently finished my freshman year in college, so it wasn't like I was any stranger to people throwing up in front of me. Maybe it was living in Porter Hall, experimenting with so many of my fellow borderline alcoholics, or maybe it was more of a universal thing at Miami, or just college in general. Regardless, I had become so used to it, that anybody vacating the contents of their stomach in my presence might as well have been coughing or scratching their nose. I had seen yack in pretty much every color in the spectrum, including curacao blue, Guinness black and wine cooler pink. So I was completely jaded to vomit at this point. I was, however, still vastly unprepared for this.

Things slowed down to Matrix-esque bullet-time. I remember that my first thought wasn't so much the fact that the kid was hurling, in the most literal sense, but that such a disproportionate amount of liquid was coming out of him. I swear that this kid must have had a hollow leg or something, because, while I was used to seeing puke, I wasn't accustomed to seeing a human being forcibly eject a third of their body mass out of their mouth. Amazed, my next assessment regarded the trajectory of said spew, and quickly came to the conclusion that it was headed straight for my sketch.

Instinctively, I yanked my drawing up and out of the path of the incoming barrage of churl, the weight displacement of my arms nearly causing a total loss of balance in my chair. The stream hit the ground behind me in a series of successive thuds. I quickly regained my composure and looked at the sketch to see if I still had a sellable, barf-free product in my hands. I did, and, almost impressed with my own reflexes, looked back at the baby, who promptly laughed again and smiled at me as if nothing happened.

The mother apologized, clearly embarrassed by her son's involuntary bodily outburst. I laughed, and assured her that it was no big deal, sold her the sketch, and hurriedly called Park Services to clean up the pool of upchuck, which had slowly started making its way across the cement in front of the front of the stand, which was on a slight hill. As I absent-mindedly watched the poor kid from Ecology pour pink flaky powder on the fluidic projectile that almost claimed my sale, Clay, the supervisor of the Guess Your Weight stand, walked across the midway.

"Dude, that was awesome!"

"What? Oh, uh...yeah. That was pretty f#$%ed up. He almost got my sketch."

"I know, I saw it happen. You pulled it up like...like some kind of f$%&ing bullfighter or something. A matador. Ha ha."

"Yeah. Yeah, I guess I did. Heh. Vomit matador. I don't think that one'll stick, man. God, I hope not, anyway."

And, despite minimal effort to keep it going, "Vomit Matador", or "El Matador Vomitos," was, thankfully, a nickname that didn't stick. I will say that I think of that happy, happy kid every time I draw a baby under a year old. And even when they scream, cry, wiggle around, or are otherwise difficult, I try to remember that it could always be worse; at least they aren't slinging Gerber's® and stomach acid at me.

I will also say that, to this day, I've never received a more blatantly honest, if not constructive, critique of my artwork.

How to Succeed in Drawing Babies Without Really Trying.

2009-04-01T22:36:00.005-04:00

This weekend, I was drawing at Cincy's Growing Family Expo, which was probably good for me, considering I haven't drawn a whole lot in the past couple of months and I need to warm up for after-prom season. Since it was a family-oriented expo, I pretty much drew three or four adults and about fifty children under the age of three.

When I was training the kids at King's Island, I said that it was easier to have a stock generic baby sketch readily available as part of your arsenal, because babies all have similar facial proportions. But, if you were comfortable enough with your sketch, babies deserved the same treatment and proportion analysis that anyone else does. Understand that saying this to rookies was completely hypocritical on my part. I had a really hard time drawing babies for the first two or three summers when I drew in high school, usually to the point of just refusing to draw them, citing that, "Uhh...their facial features haven't really developed enough yet." There are several reasons for this:

1) I could never get the eyes right. Since I had trouble enough drawing eyes on adults, I had a habit of drawing babies with fully dilated pupils. And nobody thinks that it's cute when babies drop acid, even if you think that's relatively appropriate when dancing in a field with Barney the Dinosaur and the Teletubbies.

2) I had a hard time getting babies to look at me, and this was back before I had learned to do quick studies of the face before I started drawing, so it took me forever if a baby fell asleep while I was drawing them, because I wouldn't have any reference for the eyes. This was also back before people regularly carried cellphones on them, which now apparently have enough storage space for a couple thousand baby pictures.

3) One of the first times I tried to draw a baby when I was fifteen, it was almost emotionally scarring. The following is an account of that story.

A lot of my friends are caricature artists, and a lot of them were completely confident in their abilities, right off of the bat as rookies. Each had their own specific reason; it could have been obviously superior drawing talent, or rampant egotism, or, in a few cases, complete ignorance of what caricatures are supposed to be. I've also known caricature artists that were completely nervous wrecks starting out. A lot of these kids were hired a little too early, at fifteen or sixteen, and the fact that they lack any formal art training makes the learning curve a little too steep, which can stress them out pretty quickly; this is one of the reasons that, as a manager, I very rarely hired fifteen-year-olds to be caricature artists. Most of these kids are very timid, get burned out really easily, and end up quitting. Some of them work through their own personal anguish, focus on a more gradual learning process, and finally get to a point where they can finally keep their inherent resentment of their own drawing style down to a dull roar. This is the category that I fall into.

When I was fifteen, for my first couple of months as a caricature artist at Geauga Lake, I was pretty much completely unnerved by the first time I had to draw anything when money or strangers were involved, even if it was something that had been covered in training. So, I had trouble drawing freckles for the first time, or drawing Asian eyelids for the first time, or coloring in a black person for the first time, or coloring in a really pale white person for the first time. You get the picture. Fortunately, my shaking hand would eventually stop shaking, and I'd get through the sketch of that specific aspect I hadn't drawn yet, and after that, I would feel better about it, like I had conquered it. In my paranoia of screwing anything up that I hadn't already drawn, I was pretty much keeping a mental checklist as I watched people walk by. Around mid-season, my mental checklist looked a lot like this:

x Black person with cornrows and a hat tilted to the side
x Black person with gold teeth that have words "East Side" carved into them
x Overweight white soccer mom with giant Jersey hair and dangly earrings
o Japanese tourist kid with weird stereotypical Bruce Lee shag haircut
o Young Republican-looking kid with newscaster hair and braces connected by rubber bands
x Redneck with mullet/lines shaved into side of head/confederate flag on trucker hat

...and so on and so forth.

I had drawn a couple of babies up to that point, so when someone (Young brunette mom with glasses and fanny pack, with Marlboro Light 100 Grandma in tow) asked me to draw her baby, I didn't even look into the stroller when I said "yes." I had drawn a baby before, so in my mind, I was all set. So I sat down in my chair and looked at my subject.

Now, I realize that this might start some arguments, but I don't think brand new babies are all that cute. Two-month old babies are cute. Six month old babies are cute. Toddlers are cute. Brand new babies are not cute. Brand new babies look like swollen, wincing, puckered strawberry-human hybrids, and, if you're reading this and you aren't a caricature artist, then let me be the first to tell you that they are f$%&ing impossible to draw with any accuracy, without making them look like old men who just finished twelve rounds of a heavyweight boxing match.

And this baby was brand new. I mean, brand new. After laughing nervously, I asked the mother how old the baby was, and while her answer was two and a half weeks, I was admittedly surprised that this kid wasn't born in the parking lot a few hours earlier. Also, I have to say, if your baby is only two weeks old, what the f$%& are you thinking bringing him/her/it to a crowded amusement park? What, you couldn't find a quieter activity, like hitting up a sports bar or a monster truck rally? I don't know much about babies, but something tells me that bringing them to a place where sugar-buzzed kids are darting in and out of foot traffic, drunks are stumbling around yelling about getting kicked off of the Tilt-A-Whirl, and security is running after a crew of gangbangers that just looted the Balloon Dart game isn't a good idea.

Woman with Fanny Pack: Hi there! I'd like a character picture.

Me: Sure. What kind of sketch would you like?

Woman with Fanny Pack: I want....I want a full face and body. Color. Of my baby.

Me: Okay...uh...where's your baby?

Woman with Fanny Pack: Oh, she hasn't been born yet. Can't you tell that I'm still pregnant?

Me: Oh...ha ha...my apologies. Working across from the Budweiser stand, I see so many massive beer guts. Welp, have a seat and put your legs in these stirrups. Now, what did you say Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s number was?

I just kind of stared at the baby in the stroller for a couple of minutes while trying to come up with a game plan. The baby was trying to open his eyes wide enough to see something, but they were still too swollen. Finally, I just started drawing, and for the first time, I truly felt like I was driving blindfolded. This sketch was a goddamn disaster from the start. The head shape started out lumpy. I didn't draw the head with enough a high enough cranium, and, while it was fairly accurate shape-wise, it looked asymmetrical and dented, probably because the kid's skull hadn't solidified into shape yet. The eyes were narrow enough that, when I drew pupils on them, in my usual dilated fashion, they looked like slit pupils, like cat eyes. The nose was too high on the face, and the mouth was basically a crooked line, because the kid couldn't smile yet. I finished the sketch, sighed, tore it off, and finally turned around to face the mother.

She looked at the picture, looked at me, and looked at the picture again. "I'm not buying that. Do you really think that looks like my baby?"

I looked at my drawing, feline alien abomination it was, and looked at her baby. It actually did kind of bear a resemblance. "Well, uh...yeah, kind of. It's...it's a caricature. It's supposed to be--"

"That is not my baby. Why doesn't your picture look like that baby?" She pointed at a demo sketch on the wall. It was a Dino Casterline baby sketch, and, of course, an impossibly good one, as all Dino sketches are.

"Uh...I think that baby is, like, eight months old. Your baby is--"

"That is not my baby, and I ain't paying for it." She grabbed her stroller, her baby, and her mother and stormed off, disappearing into the crowd. I looked down at the ground for a little while. I was no stranger to rejection as a rookie caricature artist, and my rejected sketches were admittedly pretty bad, but it still bummed me out every time it happened, mostly because I was so slow and a reject meant that I wasted ten or fifteen minutes on nothing.

"Excuse me." A raspy voice to my left caught my attention. Marlboro Light 100 Grandma had returned. "I'll buy it."

"Um...ma'am, I appreciate it, but you really don't have to. It's not a very good sketch."

"Well, she asked you to draw her baby and you did. I tole her that he was prolly too young fer it. His eyes ain't even open yet." She smiled. Her cigarette seemed like it was stuck to the side of her lower lip.

"Uhh..."

"Just put it in a bag and give it to me, honey. Here ya go." She handed me six dollars, the going rate for a black-and-white face sketch back then. I put Zargos, Pride of the Cat Children in a plastic bag and gave it to her.

"Thanks, ma'am."

"Don't worry about it," she hacked. She winked at me and walked away. I smiled at her, thought about how nice she was, and then promptly decided that I didn't want to draw babies anymore because of the pressure. And so I wouldn't draw kids less than two years old for two or three years after that. Of course, I was drawing them again before I was in college, when I almost decided to stop drawing babies again for entirely different reasons.

TO BE CONTINUED

THE BABY SKETCH CHRONICLES PART II: THE RECKONING.

Who Watches the Director of Watchmen?

2009-03-08T21:52:00.010-04:00

An open letter to Zack Snyder:

Dear Mr. Snyder,

Thank you for doing an overall great job with Watchmen. The movie nearly felt as epic as the graphic novel, and the overall themes of human nature, paranoia of a Cold War nuclear holocaust, and the insane psychology of vigilantism remained markedly faithful to Alan Moore's book.

Also, thanks for almost ruining the whole fucking movie with, quite possibly, the absolute worst choice for music accompanying a sex scene that has ever been made. Sure, forcing in Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower with a shoehorn during the Antarctic crash can be forgiven. Even closing it out with a My Chemical Romance cover of anything can be overlooked. But Hallelujah? Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah? Really? Whatever the hell it was that you guys were smoking during post-production, I want some.

Seriously, what the hell was that about? What, you couldn't get the rights to The Final Countdown by Europe for your sex scene? You couldn't get Whip It by Devo? Jesus, if you wanted to keep the 80's theme and make it hilarious to the point of being unwatchable, you could have just gone with I Want to Know What Love Is by Foreigner. Why didn't you just go with Is This Love by Whitesnake? How could Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen have possibly made any sense to you for that scene? I think I'd rather watch people having sex to Eye of the Tiger, for fuck's sake. Could you have chosen a song that was less appropriate? What is wrong with you?

Sincerely,

James W. Rockwell

P.S. - Berlin? Take My Breath Away? Funnier, and would have been more fitting.

P.P.S. - (sigh)...Leonard Cohen? What the hell?

P.P.P.S. -

...

I can't believe that this still bothers me.

Unfinished Business.

2009-02-22T14:16:00.015-05:00

When I was in Kansas City a couple of weeks ago for Cripple Con, a couple of my friends told me that it was strange that I wrote more on this blog than I posted artwork, and that it was surprising that I don't draw all that much (presumably not because I'm all that talented, but because I regularly associate myself with people who are). While it is true that I don't draw nearly as much as I should, it's also true that there are very few sketches that I work on for fun that I ever think are finished. I always go back and mess with them, but I still save them and close them, always planning on finishing them later.

Anyway, I was sorting through my hard drive while trying to finish up the overhaul on the Over the Line Productions site, and I found some stuff that I thought I'd post, even if I'm not particularly proud of any of them. Yeah, I know that the whole "self-loathing artist who hates his own artwork" thing is super-cliché, and I should probably just stop whining. If anything, maybe posting this stuff will motivate me to spend my free time more wisely instead of drinking and playing video games. Probably not, though.

Here's a couple from last year: Daniel Craig...

...and Alan Tudyk.

I also found some sketches from four or five years ago that I had completely forgotten about; I especially don't think these are even close to feeling finished, but I still have an interest in them stylistically. I had remembered my Marimekko bedsheets from when I was little; they were mostly big primary-colored circles and rectangles in the shapes of cars and trucks on white sheets. I was thinking about Marimekko-type stuff while I was drawing these, using shapes in Illustrator. Here's Thom Yorke...

...Conan O'Brien...

...and myself. Note the awkward stage in hair growth.

If anything, looking at this stuff is a pretty harsh reminder that I need to find out what I like to draw, from a stylistic standpoint, and stick with it, instead of drawing all over the board. Pun intended.

Grocery Store Black Ops and How to Admit to Yourself that You're a Kleptomaniac.

2009-02-21T16:46:00.012-05:00

I'm not sure if everyone has little moments where, like an out-of-body experience, you look at what you're doing at the time and realize that you're behaving in a disappointing way. I don't have these moments very often, but I think that when I do, it's basically my brain acting as an emergency failsafe and telling me to stop acting like a jackass. For example, this happened to me on an airplane last year:

"Hello, this is your brain speaking. We're currently traveling at an altitude of 30,000 feet, which doesn't matter to you because you can't see out the window, which would have probably taken some of your attention off of your knees digging into the seat in front of you; Northwest Airlines apparently designs the interiors of their planes assuming that everyone has the same body type as Danny DeVito.

I wanted to make the announcement that, while the guy sitting next to you is apparently totally cool with looking at porn on his laptop, the girl sitting on the other side of you is completely creeped out by it, and can tell when your eyes are wandering towards the screen. This announcement is to instruct you to keep your eyes on the book you're reading, because if there's one thing that's creepier than a guy checking out porn on a crowded airplane, it's two guys checking out porn on a crowded airplane. Thank you.

So, while these brain overrides don't happen on a regular basis, they do happen from time to time. Here's what I caught myself doing at the grocery store this week:

"Hello, this is your brain speaking. This announcement is to inform you that you've been standing at the olive bar for eleven minutes now, and, while the sample cups and tiny plastic spoons are there for a reason, that reason is not so you can eat as many olives as you want as long as you're staring at the price sign, pretending like you're interested in blowing seven bucks on olives.

You're not fooling anyone, and you're only staring at that sign in case grocery store security catches you eating too many samples, and that's only in case grocery store security guards actually exist. Please dispose of the sample cup and spoon in the garbage can to your right immediately, vacate the area, and forget that this pathetic event ever happened. Don't pretend that you didn't notice the guy with the beardnet behind the deli counter make eye contact with you when you were taking seconds of the teriyaki mushrooms. You should be ashamed of yourself."

You know how you walk past grocery store sample trays, and they're empty, and you think, "I bet some jerk took four samples instead of one?" I'm that jerk. I don't know what it is about free food samples, but I pretty much lose my mind around them. I'm not kidding. I black out. I black out, and when I come to, my shirt is covered with pretzel chip crumbs and half of the Uncle Remy's Cajun Salmon Dip® container in front of me is empty. This brain intervention last week happened less than ten minutes after I ate three full servings of Jarlsberg cheese near the Organic section. You know how everyone says that you shouldn't go to the grocery store on an empty stomach? I think I'm pretty much the reason why they say that.

I don't know when the premise of free food began to have such a hypnotic effect on me, but I think I've been plagued by sample attacks for a while now. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I'm inherently a big eater, and the fact that I have to control my portions because my metabolism has divebombed in the past five years or so. I think about it now, and I can't even imagine how much money my parents must have blown on food when I was in high school, when I was swimming two hours a day for almost half of the year.

"Hey, mom! I'm home!"

"Hi honey! How was practice?"

"Pretty good. What's for dinner?"

"I already ate, but for you, half of a Family Size-pan of Stouffer's lasagna. It's not quite out of the oven yet, but you can eat a can of Pringles while you're waiting for it to cool off, and then you should probably eat some salad.

"Sweet! Do we have anything for dessert?"

"Well, you ate most of that carton of ice cream last night, so you should probably just have an entire sleeve of Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies.

"Thanks Mommmph. Rmmm hmmph (crunch crunch)."

I didn't even notice that I was doing it at the time. Sure, I was always on cleanup duty for the family at restaurants, and sure, I beat my dad in a White Castle-eating contest when I was eleven (it was a tie-breaker for the previous Skyline Coney-eating contest), but it never really occurred to me that I was eating about twice the amount of what is usually accepted in society as a meal.

I finally developed an understanding of how much food I had previously been able to put away when I was 25; I was staying at my grandparents' while waiting to move into my first apartment in Mt. Adams. I came downstairs for breakfast before work, and my grandfather had cooked the following:

6 eggs (scrambled)
2 pancakes
8 strips of bacon
4 links of sausage
1 English muffin
Coffee
Orange Juice

Understand that Papaw eats one bran muffin for breakfast. Mamaw has a cup of decaf and not much else. So it's not like they're actually going to help me eat any of this food that they had prepared for me to eat. So I ate it. All of it. Every morning for three weeks. There was, obviously, a huge part of me that was in absolute heaven; I love breakfast food. I'm not so sure about loving breakfast food when I have to lie down after I get to work in order to take a breather from digesting it.

Of course, after the first breakfast, I'm driving to work and thinking to myself, "What would ever possess Papaw to make such an insane amount of food for me?" This was immediately followed by a Usual Suspects-esque montage sequence that unfolded in my mind after asking myself this question; my brother and I yelling "Eat 'till it hurts" at each other during Christmas and Thanksgiving, my cousins Megan and Marnie watching in horror as I inhaled six Sloppy Joes in less than five minutes after we got out of Sunday School, me going up for fourths during my relatives' birthday dinners, etc. It almost made me feel guilty, because I, up to that point, couldn't remember thanking anyone for buying twice as much food as a normal person to feed me. I called my mom that day to do exactly that, and, while she did mention that it was pretty expensive, she didn't mind at all.

So, the next time you see some guy standing in front of a HoneyBaked Ham sample tray with his eyes completely glazed over, don't judge him. He probably used to be able to eat a lot more than he lets himself eat now, and this is just an unfortunate side effect. On the other hand, if it looks like grocery store security both exists and is on their way to eject him from the premises, make sure you wave your hand in front of his face and snap your fingers a couple of times.

Tales of Blackjack Failure and Why No One Should Care about Steroids.

2009-02-11T20:06:00.002-05:00

Here's a drawing I did at work today for an article in the Gaming Guide about gambling etiquette. Special thanks to Kevin Necessary for the texturing advice.

I would like gambling a lot more if 1) I had a lot of extra money lying around and 2) I was any good at it. I recently discovered that, while I'm good at blackjack in theory (thanks WiiWare Casino Blackjack), I'm worthless when it comes to clinical trials, to the point of officially declaring myself a financial liability. One year ago this weekend in Vegas, once I actually found a five-dollar table on the strip--which wasn't easy, by the way--I blew through $100 in about twenty minutes. It's not that I don't know how to play blackjack, I do. I just forget everything I know once I sit down at one of the tables. Maybe I'm intimidated by the prospect of gambling with real money. I had a pretty good streak going when I was in Niagara Falls* once, but I was playing with Canadian money, which is so many different colors that I can't help but think of it as Monopoly® money. Maybe I'm preoccupied with trying to act cool sitting next to the bikers and mafia underboss-types that typically haunt five-dollar tables in Vegas. Or maybe I just crack under pressure like balsa wood.

So, I was listening to news radio on the way home yesterday, and one of the more prominent stories was Alex Rodriguez's admission that he had used steroids at one point in his career. While I was kind of glad to hear something that wasn't about our crumbling economy and how screwed we all are, I quickly decided that I didn't care whether or not Alex Rodriguez used steroids six years ago. I really, really don't care, to the point that I would say that I feel fiercely indifferent about it. It's not that I think that professional athletes should cheat; in fact I feel pretty strongly that they shouldn't. It's just that, in Alex Rodriguez's case, I don't care whether or not he doped himself up, because, comparatively, I'm far more concerned about the fact that, despite the fact that we're all doomed financially, people feel that it's perfectly justifiable to pay a guy a quarter of a billion dollars to throw a fucking ball around.

Oh, I know he hits the ball with a fucking stick too, and he's super good at it, but come on. Really? This story came on right after another news story about how Congress is jumping all over Wall Street CEOs for being irresponsible with money, and rightfully so, but we, as a society, feel okay about this? You know what? Maybe we all deserve to be punished for letting things get this unbalanced. How much are we paying the teachers that educate our children every year, or the scientists that are trying to cure deadly diseases? If it's less than a quarter billion dollars each, and it is, then obviously we can do better. It's not even about me hating the Yankees, as I've been brought up to do. Paying anybody that much to play a fucking game, yes, even in front of people, is so hilariously indicative of our social instability and stupidity that I feel dumber living in a world where that seems acceptable. I'm already pretty amazed at reports of the impressive avarice that has led the world to ruin lately; I'm sure that I'm not the only person astounded at the fact that we've been kept so preoccupied with the threat of terrorism for the last decade that we forgot how dangerous stupid people are with money, and how greedy people can be when they already have too much. I don't need to hear about some jackass earning more than the GDP of a third world country because he's good at baseball and we're idiots. Right now, everybody's asking where all the money went. Maybe we actually have to look at what we're spending it on.

...

Wow, that went from zero to bitter pretty quickly. My apologies; didn't even see that one coming. I'm going to go find a beer somewhere.

* - This streak ended soon after I was accepted by the cigar-chomping middle-aged men sitting in the other seats at the table, when my mom, who had been watching intently from ten yards away, came up to ask me if I was winning. After explaining to the rest of my inquisitive table that, yes, that was my mom, yes, I was 20, and no, I had never played blackjack before, I subsequently lost $120 in ten minutes. After walking away from the table, I left the casino, but not because I was embittered by my experience. I left because my brother, who was 19 at the time, became bored playing slots and decided to drink nothing but whiskey shots and Molson for two hours, resulting in, predictably, his forcible ejection from the casino after showing his ID to a bouncer that didn't ask for it.

Why the hell not?

2009-02-06T19:14:00.000-05:00

Editor's Note: Since I already wrote this on Facebook, I figured that I'd post it here too, just because it's been almost exactly six months since I posted anything. Which is ridiculous, even by my standards of laziness and procrastination. So, being that this is a nice place to talk about myself, here's 25 things that I wrote about me that I think are pretty noteworthy, pertaining to the glory that is being me. I held a brief press conference with myself ten minutes ago and I agree with me, that this post relates to me in a way that only I can.

Me, me, me. I'm done now.

Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

1) My full name is James WIlliam Rockwell. If my middle name had been Edward, I would have been James Edward Rockwell III. So while my name racks up some serious WASP points, it could have been worse. I also come from at least three generations of Jims, which prompted my parents to give me the unisex nickname that I still go by today.

2) I have always had horrible eyesight. I started wearing contact lenses in 5th grade, which would have improved my confidence level as a kid if I could have avoided getting clocked in the face during 5th grade after-school Bombardment (Dodge Ball). When your whole grade has to stop doing something to crawl around on the floor looking for a tiny piece of transparent plastic you dropped, it's gonna be a little awkward.

3) Speaking of, when my friends are over and they put my glasses on, they say they can actually see through time.

4) My favorite movie of all time is The Big Lebowski.

5) My favorite album of all time is Radiohead's The Bends.

6) My favorite book is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

7) I once high-jumped over a bar at my actual height (6'1). I only did this once, but fortunately, it earned me second place at a conference meet, so I got to pretend to be really good in Track for a week or two. Which is ironic, because the primary reason that I did that event in the first place was so I could take a nap in the high jump pit after school instead of running.

8) I shaved off all of the body hair outside of my bathing suit area three times for swimming district meets in high school. I definitely don't recommend it. Inversely, I spent a lot of time in high school around girls who purposefully didn't shave their legs for months at a time for the same reason, one of whom was proud enough of her leg hair to keep me updated on a regular basis.

9) Some people have irrational fears of things that probably don't exist, like vampires or zombies. I have an irrational fear of aliens. I think it's because of too much research for a book report I did in middle school about alien abduction, and the movie Fire in the Sky, which reminded me of said book report. There's probably also a hint of The Last Starfighter in there, which bothered me because if I do get called upon to save the universe, apparently they would replace me with someone who has even more potential for social awkwardness than I already have. Get it right, alien android science.

10) I don't like clowns for similar reasons, mostly the movie Killer Klowns from Outer Space. I told this to a friend of mine in Colorado once, and she responded indignantly by saying that not all clowns are creepy, and that she had gone to clown school. I felt bad at the time, but now that I think about it, she was probably lying.

11) Apparently, I'm pretty gullible.

12) Speaking of, for some reason, there is such a thing as clown porn. Thanks, college roommates/the internet. Oh, wait...this is supposed to be about me.

Uh...when I was in college, I lived with the type of people who laughed hysterically at clown porn for at least the better part of an afternoon. Hey, it wasn't little people or farm animals. Well, that time, anyway.

13) It affects me emotionally when comic book superheroes die.

14) I keep wishing for superpowers, and I keep getting continuously disappointed when I wake up without the power to fly unaided or the ability to shoot concussive force blasts out of my eyes.

15) My brother and I drove an '87 Pontiac 6000 in high school named the Gray Ghost. The Ghost had all sorts of special features, such as stapled ceiling upholstery, a hilariously inaccurate fuel gauge, perpetually cross-eyed headlights, and one of the first, and certainly the most literal, prototypes for keyless ignition.

Since there was a snowball's chance in hell of getting the car all the way down to Oxford from Cleveland in one piece, my brother drove it in college at Muskingum, where it was more of a community car than anything else. When he was about to graduate, he sold it at a graduation party to one of his buddies for $27.61, which was the exact amount the kid had in his wallet at the time. The Ghost's new master had intended to paint the number on the side of her and put her in a demolition derby, but since she was too much of a rolling firebomb to make specs, the kid, s#!#canned out of his mind, put a brick on the pedal and drove her into a lake. So, the Ghost's final resting place is completely submerged underwater somewhere in eastern Ohio.

16) The Ghost wasn't the only car I've had a part in naming. There was also the Green Machine, the Red Baron, Black Magic, Black Beauty, the Toy Car, the Party Wagon, and my personal favorite, the Flying Swede, which was Mike Eshelman's grandma's Volvo.

17) I was an amusement park caricature artist in various levels of management for 14 consecutive seasons since I was 15. I'm still on the payroll, even if I only really go in to help out the rookies every once in a while. I can say that the customer service aspect of the job really showed me the best and worst that people have to offer. I still draw on the side at festivals, birthday parties, corporate events, wedding receptions, bar mitzvahs, etc. through a few different booking agents. While I'm pretty proud of my quick sketch, I feel like I've been standing on the same artistic plateau for years now, and the fact that I rarely make any art for myself these days doesn't help.

18) Because of my working experience with Kaman's Art Shoppes, working in climate controlled environments is still a pretty new thing to me.

19) Even though I like drawing them and it's a nice source of incremental income for me, I believe that caricatures are pretty much the closest that the visual arts can get to prostitution. The fact that I'm good at it only makes me a better whore.

20) My first concert ever was Nine Inch Nails at the CSU Convocation Center.

21) The last concert I went to was Ra Ra Riot at the Southgate House.

22) I regret that, even though I graduated with decent grades, I didn't apply myself to academics as much as I should have in college.

22) I've lived in ten different places in three different cities in 2 different time zones over the last ten years. Ironically, I hate moving.

23) I drank more malt liquor in college than you did. I didn't say that I'm proud of it.

24) The most important thing I've ever done was giving a eulogy for one of my best friends at his memorial service, written by his mother.

25) I can't do simple math in my head to save my life. When I was a senior in high school, my only non-AP class, besides gym, was Trig, which I took with mostly freshman. At the end of the first semester, when I found out that I didn't need to take the second semester to graduate, I told Lonchar that I was quitting. I was kind of expecting him to put up a fight and tell me to stick with it, but he said, "Yeah. That would probably be best." Trig and SAN 163 (the only class involving math that I took in college for a requirement) were the only Ds I ever got in school.

Tales of The Red Barbarian.

2008-08-29T16:30:00.001-04:00

THIS SUMMER MARKS THE FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY of the epic struggle between one man and the forces of oppression that could not bind him; a living embodiment of liberty, and a leader of the common man; an inspiration to those downtrodden by the yoke of tyranny. This is his story.

That man who fought insurmountable odds that day was Eric Smith. Here's a picture of him. He's red.

Actually, that's one of his more recognizable features: redness, or varying shades of redness. Eric considers himself to be his own minority; perhaps this strange skin pigmentation was common among his Viking forefathers, maybe it's the tragic result of Eric's self-proclaimed ability to draw power from Earth's yellow sun. This is all inconsequential. Eric is, and will probably always be red, pink, maroon, magenta, or crimson, and it will always be easier to see him on the battlefield because of it.

Sure, you're probably saying, "Battlefield? You're not making any sense, and this blog is stupid. I ask to read a tale of triumph over adversity, and all I get in return are racially insensitive insults to the noble Scandinavian people that brought us our IKEA® furniture and several different variations of death metal. Get on with the story, you hack."

And so it will be done.

Lollapalooza 2003 was held at the Riverbend Music Center, known for it's stately fake two-dimensional statues and giant columns blocking nearly 65% of the view from lawn seating. I was admittedly excited to go to a giant arena rock show, but not quite as excited as I was to be somewhere that wasn't King's Island, where I had been working ten hours a day without a day off for two or three weeks. So I opened the park and left at one, only to arrive at Eric's apartment, where he had started drinking three hours prior. You know what they say, "It's gotta be noon somewhere." Well, at Eric's apartment, drinking beer at ten o'clock in the morning wasn't all that strange of an occurrence. Needless to say, he was well-prepared to spend the day stumbling around an outdoor music venue.

We arrived at Riverbend, promptly bought more beer, and set out for the lawn, only to find an orange plastic mesh fence, set a good fifty yards behind the front of the lawn; apparently it had rained during Ozzfest a week beforehand, and the excessive moshing had ripped out most of the grass in the surrounding area. This was a disappointment; it was hard enough to see the bands as it was, and being even further back wasn't helping. And this is when Eric, drunk, sweating, and turning an interesting shade of purple from a combination of overexposure to the sun and the nonsensical avoidance of sunscreen, began to build his army.

Jurassic Five was on stage. Eric started approaching several different groups of people, mostly by utilizing a dance move of his own creation that can most closely be described as "kick-walking," and for what he lacked in rhythm and coordination (mostly rhythm), he made up for with dedication and force. He would stop walking once he started talking, but he wouldn't stop moving while music was playing. While I was actively pursuing my normal concert-going hobby of comparing the gyrations of the Red Man with the actual beat of the music, I noticed that people were patting on the back, laughing, and nodding. Once Eric got this reaction, he would move on to the next group of people and repeat the routine.

During Eric's sojourn around the lawn, a couple of guys jumped over the fence and ran down the lawn. The first of these poor bastards started laughing as he changed his running trajectory to avoid one security guard, and mistakenly ran head on into another flanking him, who hit him so hard that you could hear the wind escape out of his lungs forty feet away. Once he was down, he didn't get up for fifteen minutes, or, I should say, couldn't get up for fifteen minutes. The next was tackled nearly as quickly as the first, and tried to feign nausea in order to make a last-ditch escape attempt. This, too, was met with a shoulder to the solar plexus, and the second was carried off the field like the first.

Eric, paying only minimal attention to these events, returned to the group with an announcement.

"Hey, I got a...

...a-uh...

bunch of uh...

...

(breathes through nose)

people together, and we're taking down the fence when Queens of the Stone Age comes on."

Realize that telling the goons that I use to work with that their brilliant ideas were doomed to end in failure, and possibly self-inflicted injury, was a fairly common occurrence. Most people realize that climbing on top of buildings, punching themselves in the neck, and lighting dangerously flammable liquids on fire are bad ideas, and I found, for some reason, this logic was a foreign entity to a lot of the friends that I made when I moved down to Cincinnati. So, of course my reaction was fairly predictable.

"You're not serious, are you? Come on, man. You'll get kicked out of here."

"No I won't. F#$% that, and f#$% them. This blows. Don't you want to get closer to the stage?"

"Dude, have you not been paying attention? The security guards hit that one guy so hard that one of his shoes flew off in mid-air."

"No. We're fine. I've got, like, a whole group of people."

"There's like twenty security guards down there. I think I saw blood come out of that kid's mouth while he was on the ground."

"The kid who tried to pretend he was sick? Dude, that was Jager, or a blood capsule or something."

"Why in God's name would somebody have a blood capsule in their mouth at Lolla--You know what? Do whatever you want. I'm just saying that those security guards are going to beat your ass."

"Whatever, man. Watch."

Eric, fueled by defiance, kick-walked his way back into the crowd, careening from side to side with even more tenacity. Jurassic Five was nearing the end of their set, and strangers pumped their fists and jumped around in the presence of the Red Barbarian. Jurassic Five went off the stage, the crowd applauded, and energy ran high. I was surprised to find that Eric was talking to people further away from the group than he had been, and when he returned, a bass guitar strum signaled the beginning of Queens of the Stone Age.

Eric made eye contact with the closest security guard, raised one foot, and stepped on the slumping orange mesh fence. The security guard started to open his mouth to warn of an impending beat-down, but couldn't get a word out before Eric did.

"FRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOM!!!"

The second that Eric cleared the fence, I was sure that he was done for, and for that split second, I actually wondered how much it was going to cost to bail him out of jail. That's when I heard a rumbling behind me, followed by the deafening battle cries of what must have been 150-200 people.

The Great Red Army rushed by on both sides of me and over the fence like an avalanche. Eric, out in front, continued to pump his fist in the air while running towards the highest concentration of security guards. Six or seven of them started running towards him and, upon seeing the size of Eric's infantry, immediately turned around and started screaming the call of retreat while they ran for the exits.

Eric was the first to get to the fence at the front of the lawn, and while I calmly walked over the fence with everyone else that didn't join Eric's strike force, I looked down at the army, who was patting Eric on the back and pouring six-dollar beers on his head. Eric had succeeded in crushing the evil tyranny that had put that fence up, and he was ecstatic. I still, to this day, have never seen anybody get so many people united behind a common goal that quickly.

And that, my friends, is first and only tale of the Red Horde. But the next time you're at an arena rock show, and someone approaches you with a complexion somewhere between scarlet and fuchsia, do whatever he tells you to do. You'll be glad you did.

Eulogy.

2008-08-19T20:21:00.000-04:00

I lived in Denver, Colorado for a year, from June of 2001 until June of 2002. I shared a two-bedroom apartment with my best friend from high school, and, from time to time, we would get bored and drink. A lot. Of the incredibly random ways that we passed the time, we would either play a known drinking game, or make up new ones. Not very many drinking games are that much fun with two people; Two-Man Asshole gets pretty unfair when there's only the president and the asshole, and Drinking Monopoly is a game that never, ever gets finished, due to one player passing out or both players ending up in a wrestling match. Thus, my roommate and I devised a card game which was kind of a mutant hybrid of Slapjack and War. We probably played this game at least five hundred times, over the year that I lived with him. I didn't win this card game once. I never even came close. It didn't have anything to do with speed, dexterity, or luck. It was as simple as this: my roommate could count cards. Even with half a bottle of vodka in him, he could count cards as easily as most people can count to ten. My roommate cheated. And I let him do it, because I was amazed.

Mike Eshelman was my best friend, and he was probably the smartest kid I've ever known. I don't know what kind of scale they judge the SAT on now, but in 1995, when it was based on a scale of 1600, Mike scored 1440, he only took it once, and he probably wasn't trying all that hard. Intelligence has a funny way of manifesting itself in certain people, and Mike was no exception. He had a way of being the smartest guy in the room, and yet, he never once made anyone feel stupid. In fact, he usually was willing to help out whoever he could with his vast intellect.

Case in point: Mike took Calculus as a sophomore in high school, and one of his senior varsity soccer teammates was in his class, and this kid (who we'll call Kyle, to protect his identity) was usually on the verge of being ineligible to play, specifically because of this Calculus class. By the second or third week of class, Mike had figured out that he was setting the curve by light years. By the fourth week of class, Mike had adopted the following strategy in order to keep Kyle on the soccer field: he would take the quizzes and tests all the way through, and then he would go back to the beginning and change some of his answers to wrong ones, also making all of the necessary changes so that his work looked like he was coming to the wrong conclusions by accident. Mike still maintained the highest grade in the class, and Kyle stayed on the soccer field.

Mike was known as being a relatively quiet blonde kid, but you'd never know it if you got him started on something he was interested in. He spent a lot of time just looking around and sizing things up. He would get this smirk on his face when we were at parties in high school--he didn't start drinking until college by choice, so he was my designated driver on the rare occasions that I drank--he would get this look on his face, and I could just tell that his brain was moving at a thousand miles an hour. The 1440 earned him status as one of three National Merit Scholars in our grade, which, as we all know, is a definitive benchmark of maturity and respectability.

So, it came to be that it was a National Merit Scholar who would hide my car because one of the doors on it didn't lock and you didn't need a key to start it. When I would call his house to ask where my car was, it was a National Merit Scholar laughing his balls off in the background while I talked to his mom. It was a National Merit Scholar that would invite me over to watch Don Cherry's Rock 'em Sock 'em Hockey, a Canadian videotape collection of the best hockey fights of the 1980's. In the summer, I played golf with a National Merit Scholar, where the only rule was that the golf cart couldn't stop moving. To earn our Senior Service hours, we taught third grade Sunday School, where a National Merit Scholar and I would blatantly lie to 9-year-olds, that the book on the shelf was, instead of the Disciple Book, the Discipline Book, and if they screwed with us, we would write their names down in that book and show it to their parents.

It was a National Merit Scholar that taught me how to play Beer Pong. When we were living in Denver and I almost shattered my tailbone on the Bunny Hill at Keystone trying to learn how to snowboard, it was a National Merit Scholar defending my honor to the laughing nine-year-olds on the chairlift, who were trying to spit on me. I created a game called "Hot Tub Bottles" in Texas with a National Merit Scholar that involved holding a beer bottle, upside-down, on the floor of the hot tub, and the bottle that hit the surface first was the winner. Believe me, this seemed ingenious at the time. A National Merit Scholar wouldn't stop writing my cellphone number down on the bar tab whenever the waitress was hot. And it was a National Merit Scholar that I got into a drunken wrestling match with, in the snow, behind the Old Hole in Glendale, Colorado, while we were both wearing pajamas on New Year's Eve of 2002.

Mike went into the hospital a few years ago when he woke up one morning and had trouble walking. While the doctors initially thought that he had bruised his spleen playing intramural hockey, an MRI revealed a fast-growing tumor in his lower back right next to his spinal cord. When they took the tumor out in surgery a couple of days later, they had, out of necessity, taken his spinal cord with it, and Mike was paralyzed from the waist down. Mike, in addition to being the most intelligent person I have ever known, was also the most stubborn, and he put his head down and fought his way through chemo and radiation treatment for what probably seemed like an eternity, before it went into a brief remission.

Mike learned how to get around unaided, driving with his hands, and succeeded in being completely self-sufficient despite his disability, and returned to work as the Vice President of the retirement community developer that he made a lot of money for. He always made the best of his situation. He actually called me last Halloween; he was going to a party and, me being a comic book geek, he wanted to ask me what Professor X from the X-men looked like, besides being bald, because he needed a costume. Mike drove across the country, from Denver to Pennsylvania for a wedding, by himself, stopping in Columbus to hang out at my brother's house. Again, Mike was extremely stubborn; in fact, he drove because he said that getting on and off of airplanes was a huge pain in the ass.

I called Mike the week of my 30th birthday to tell him that my girlfriend had bought me tickets to Las Vegas, even though I knew that he and I had always said, that if I ever went to Vegas, I was going to go with him. I felt like I was cheating on him; in fact, I felt a little less guilty when I called him the day of, and he told me that he and Mish were at The Hole in Denver getting hammered, and that he wished me a Happy Birthday. Little did I know that he was on his cellphone at the Sports Book at Caesar's Palace, and when he, his brother, and his posse showed up to surprise me at the Hyakumi Sushi restaurant inside Caesar's, I was dumbfounded, ecstatic, and impressed at the same time, that he was such a good liar under such a heavy influence of vodka tonics.

Despite my initial resistance, Mike picked up the tab for my 30th birthday dinner. To paint a picture, this was eleven people, about twenty-odd pounds of sushi, and drinks for everyone. The tab was over $750 without the tip. Now, I know that Mike did very well for himself at work, but I felt extremely guilty about letting him do this. At least, I felt extremely guilty for it for about the hour and a half it took him to win his money back, threefold, at the Blackjack tables at the Bellagio. Afterwards, he made a joke about playing on the tables with the eight-deck shoes, because he "didn't trust" the automatic card shufflers. I laughed, but I still don't think he kidding.

The last time that I really spoke in person with Mike, it was at Caesar's, and it was in the suite he was staying in. We were at least twenty floors up, the windows were gigantic, we were drinking the surprisingly tasty combination of 7UP and Crown Royal, and we had a direct view of the fountain in front of the Bellagio. I told him how much it meant to me that he was there, especially because I know how much he hated planes, and he told me that he wouldn't have missed it. He said the same thing then that he said every time I visited him in Colorado, the same thing that he said when I went in to see him in his hospital bed the first time; that being sick sucked, and that he could go in ten years or ten days, but that the present was what mattered, and the fact that we were there, in the here and now, together, was what mattered most.

Mike called me weeks ago to tell me that the doctors had found spots on his spinal cord, inside of his neck, and that he would be going through treatment again. After we agreed that, since he had kicked cancer's ass before, he would do it again, we resumed our usual conversation about what was currently happening in our lives, specifically, my state of unemployment and his continually recurring dreams about rap battles with Snoop Dogg and finding himself in the body of Burt Reynolds during Smokey and the Bandit. Mike stopped returning my phone calls about three weeks ago, and I called Ryan, his brother, to check up on what was happening. Ryan said that I wasn't the only one that wasn't getting phone calls back, but that Mike was very sick, and he would keep me posted on what was going on. The next phone call I would get from Ryan was to tell me that the cancer had moved in and settled in all around Mike's brain. Chemo and radiation treatment could no longer combat it, and, three weeks ago, Mike was moved into a hospice facility in Denver, and that the doctors had removed his IVs and were trying to make him as comfortable as possible.

While Ryan never directly told me not to fly out to Denver on Friday, he told me that the cancer had affected Mike's brain to the point of his nearly being non-responsive to his surroundings, lapsing in and out of a blank stare. Ryan said that his brother just wasn't there anymore. I thought about how, when I had gone out to visit him, even though he was happy to see me, I could tell that he hated me seeing him when he was really sick. I decided that, even if he were still in there, he wouldn't want me to see him weak; in fact, due to his stubborn sense of pride, it would have probably just pissed him off. I know that he would want me to remember him, strong and happy and independent and hilarious, and up over two grand at the Blackjack tables in one night, not even counting what he won at the Sports Book, in that suite at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

Michael Robert Eshelman died August 7th, 2008, 31 days short of his 30th birthday. Cancer took his vigor, his natural mobility, and finally, albeit briefly, his incredible intellect, before it took his life. But cancer never took his courage, his determination, or his optimism. Nothing could possibly stand up to his unbending will without killing him. Mike Eshelman is the bravest man I have ever known, and I loved him like a brother.

If there is any justice in this world, I'd like to think that when I go, Mike will be waiting for me with a bottle of vodka and a deck of cards. We will play that same stupid card game for an eternity, and he'll still count cards. I will never win. And I won't care.

Shattered Glass and Crystal Meth.

2008-05-12T01:53:00.004-04:00

As I opened the door of my car after enjoying Bangers and Mash and a couple pints of Guinness in Newport, I casually wondered why both car seats were covered in broken glass and the glove box was open. I looked up and realized that this was the result of my passenger's side window being intentionally smashed from the outside. Upon a quick further inspection of the interior of the Honda Element that I bought in December, I found that the back right cab window was broken as well. This immediately struck me as hilarious for two reasons.

One, the only window on the right side of my car that wasn't broken was the small window on the right rear door, which I had just replaced on Wednesday at the expense of Nolan "Oh Shit, That Did Not Just Happen" Harris, the consequence of his intentional collision with Eric "Iron Elbow" Smith and Eric's subsequent collision with said window. I suppose there's probably also something to be said about the colliding of various shots and their respective livers, but I don't need to go into graphic detail.

Two, I had apparently gotten so used to seeing shattered glass all over the interior of my car, that it took me a good three or four seconds to realize that this shattered glass was not the repercussion of my meathead friends sparring instead of peacefully getting into my car. So, honestly, I should have been a lot angrier at the thought of my car getting fucked with, but I was so angry on Friday night that, tonight, it didn't really seem like that big of a deal. The fact that I'm actually jaded, at this point, towards my property being destroyed, struck me as funny. Not, like, "Ha ha," funny, but, like, "Wow, I'm pretty impressed at myself, that I don't give a flying fuck about broken windows anymore," funny.

There were things stolen out of my car. I've taken the liberty of listing their possible uses to the irredeemable bastard responsible for the expense of paying my insurance deductible.

1. One (1) Suction Cup Car Mount, for use with iPod® or iPhone®.

While I can't imagine that anybody destitute enough to rob my car probably has any use for something compatible with portable Apple products, or, for that matter, a car to use it in, there is the benefit of the suction cup. Sure, with only one suction cup, you might only be able to mount a hanging planter on a window or rabbit ears directly on your television screen. But, if you're a really dedicated car thief and you forcibly remove more than one of them, you could potentially move up in the seedy underworld of Newport, Kentucky as a supervillain with the ability to stick to any smooth surface. Two suction cups, with enough upper body strength, could easily move you up the side of whatever liquor store or gas station you need to reach to roof of. Sure, I know you're thinking, "That's a really stupid gimmick for a supervillain." Go ahead, look up Rainbow Raider on Wikipedia. That's a guy that fought the Flash with the power of rainbows. I don't know about you, but if I had to make a choice between getting my teeth kicked in while wearing suction cups on my hands, or getting my teeth kicked in while trying to shoot rainbows at people, I'll take the suction cup beating any day of the week.

2. One (1) Auxiliary Input Cable.

3. One (1) Auxiliary Input Cable Adapter, compatible with iPhone®.

Again, I can't imagine how somebody who probably doesn't have a car, an mp3 player, or an iPhone could use these for the purposes they were created for, but you can't really underestimate crackheads or meth addicts. Maybe the wiring could be melted down for use in a meth lab (do they have pipes?), or, for pure street cred, could be made into some form of copper "grill" to put in your mouth. I don't know what the long-term effects of oral copper poisoning are, but if you're already too stupid/addled with substance abuse to find your own fucking job in order to make your own fucking money so you don't have to break my car windows and steal my fucking things, then brain damage is probably the least of your worries at this point.

Fuck.

4. Approximately Forty-Five (45) Keybank® Checks, Labeled James Rockwell and Listing the Address of My Mom's House in Cleveland.

Since I've already begun the headache-laden path towards suspending my bank account and changing my account number, no one can really use my checks for much outside of rolling papers. While I'm not worried about a petty thief actually taking the time and effort into finding my mom's house two hundred and fifty miles away from here, I am admittedly concerned that the staff of whatever pawn shop or check-cashing place might, upon receipt of one of my checks, mistakenly think that James Rockwell is either a meth addict, a crackhead, mentally retarded, or, at least, committing a fashion faux-pas by trying to match up a necklace made out of an auxiliary cable with a drool-stained wife-beater.

5. (And this is the kicker) One Windsor-Newton Steel Portable Easel with Vinyl Carrying Case, Property of My Girlfriend.

This one is especially notable, as there is a statistical improbability that whoever stole my girlfriend's easel knows what the hell it is or what it could be used for. While I'd like to entertain the thought that somebody could be on their way to a new appreciation for art, I know that the easel is probably just going to be used to beat some other poor bastard in an alley for whatever reason. It does have retractable legs, so I guess it's kind of like a four-pronged retractable billy club. Actually, that could be pretty formidable. Maybe the guy should consider basing his supervillain career on that instead of the suction cups.

And that's all that was taken. Probably a hundred and twenty bucks worth of stuff, and that's a healthy estimate. There are more ironic factors in my fun-filled experience tonight; I will say that it was strange that there was a police station so close to my car, that the officer who took my statement didn't even bother bringing a cruiser with him and just walked over. Also, in the extremely unlikely case that the person who broke into my car tonight was the same person who broke into my car in Mount Adams in 2003, while they seem to share my taste in music where Gomez and Jane's Addiction are concerned, they obviously aren't huge Portishead fans.

C'est la vie. I'm going to bed.

Shamrocks and Shenanigans.

2008-03-17T19:58:00.008-04:00

Today is St. Patrick's Day, commemorating the death of the man responsible for driving all the snakes out of Ireland, even though there's no physical evidence of snakes ever existing in post-glacial Ireland, and St. Patrick, born in England, only really ended up in Ireland after being sold into slavery. Anyone that needs more of an explanation of why the only widely-celebrated Irish holiday is based on falsehoods and exaggerations can watch me, being roughly half-Irish, drink after work today. As a representative of Ireland, not only will I talk about the above legends because I forgot about them being untrue, I'll probably tell you that I'm a race car driver and/or a professional assassin and/or the inventor of the ampersand.

I was at the gas station yesterday morning and, as I was trying to keep myself from being visibly frustrated by the price of gasoline, I realized that "Too Legit to Quit" by the legendary MC Hammer was playing over the loudspeakers. This made me laugh. First, I realize that this particular Shell station probably relies on satellite radio for its gas-pumping musical accompaniment, and therefore they probably can't really control what song is playing.

However, somewhere in the world, there is a booth, and in that booth, a deejay is saying to himself, "You know what would be badass? 'Too Legit to Quit'. That would be awesome to hear right now. Let's do this." The end result of this decision is me, a complete asshole stranger potentially hundreds of miles away, looking at the speaker above his gas pump and saying "What the fuck?" silently to himself. It isn't so much the cheesy baselines or the ridiculous premise of a man singing about how he has amassed far too much credibility to quit performing, and then promptly quitting. It's not even the fact that, at one point, MC Hammer stepped in front of a mirror wearing a fitted four-button suitcoat, no shirt, and really, really, really big pants, and said to himself, "All right. Time to go on national television. Let's do this." It's that MC Hammer, his music, his popularity--his existence--is indicative of our collective fickle nature towards entertainment. We thought that MC Hammer was talented enough that his music was worth adding to our collections. We saw his album at the record store and said "I want to listen to this. A lot. Let's do this."

Sure, I had Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em, but, in all fairness, I was twelve, and I was probably wearing Umbros and a Hypercolor T-shirt. I also was the proud owner of Vanilla Ice's transcending To The Extreme, right there in my cassette case, alongside Motley Crue, Slaughter, Queensryche, 3rd Bass, Skid Row, Megadeth, and other music that I haven't touched since middle school, including but not limited to House of Pain, once famous for the title of this entry, alongside a song about jumping. If Grunge hadn't shown up when I was in eighth grade, there's a pretty good chance I'd be driving around in a leopard-interior Trans Am with lines shaved into the side of my head right now.

It's not like I've been above embracing trends since I've been old enough to know better, especially in the 1990's. I wore Abercrombie and Fitch clothes on top of Nine Inch Nails shirts to high school. I rocked out the floppy Zack Morris-esque wave until I decided to grow my hair down to my shoulders. I still have the same sideburns I grew when I was a junior in high school. All of this behavior seemed to be pretty average at the time. I suppose it probably always does. My editor, Joe, brought in Prom pictures from 1989 showcasing his mullet. Upon my asking the obligatory, "What the hell were you thinking," he answered by saying that at that point, mullets were somewhat fashionable. I thought about it, and that's about right. Mullets were basically passed from David Bowie to Bono to MacGyver to Joe Martin. He had no way of knowing that the hairstyle would suffer such widespread ridicule in later years, unlike people that proudly wear mullets now, who somehow haven't heard anything about how hilarious mullets are in 2008; in fact, not to show off my amazing prediction skills, but I pretty much knew the mullet was a damnable offense in 1993, and that was fifteen years ago.

The other day I was talking at lunch about something that somehow led to me mentioning hacky-sack as being something that I participated in while in college, and the high school interns looked at me like I was dropping acid. One of them mentioned that he hadn't seen anyone play in seven or eight years, and the other hadn't even heard of the term. Regardless, they both called me a dirty hippie and went on with their lunch. This leads me to ask, what are we, as a society, doing now that might become a laughable atrocity in the near future? What is our generation doing right now, in 2008, that Generation Z, or whatever the hell comes next, will look at in 2015 and think, "Oh my God, that's lame," or whatever slang term is an appropriate substitution for "lame" in 2015?

Actually, more to the point, what am I doing right now that falls into a category of being a dated activity? We've all seen our parents do something ridiculously trendy that we laugh about later. One of my first stealth sips of an alcoholic beverage was out of a Zima bottle, for God's sake. Yes, Zima®, like wearing giant pants and shaving lines into the side of our heads and wearing British Knights® (or L.A. Gear®) shoes and using a Thighmaster® and watching American Gladiators all seemed like pretty good ideas in 1991. Sure, we can claim irresponsibility for those decisions because we were younger then, but what happens when we're fully-fledged adults and somebody catches us wearing neon pink soccer shorts and drinking Zima?

Yes, all of these questions are meaningless for the time being, but I'm almost kind of glad that I'm recording them for posterity's sake. That way, when I'm reading this in 2020 on a transparent hard-light screen in front of me while I'm flying to work by way of my rocket belt, I'll say to myself, "I know now that I never should have assumed that cargo pants and Rockstar Energy Drink® were going to be around forever."

Time to go drink green beer.

Cristal and Offensive Facial Expressions.

2008-03-10T19:45:00.022-04:00

Here's another illustration that I've done in the past couple of days; it's for a story from one of our contributors about how he and two of his buddies ran into Mark Cuban, dotcom billionaire/Dallas Mavs owner/reality television dance hero. They subsequently became part of his entourage and got shitfaced drinking Cristal out of the bottle.

I can't really say that I've had very many brushes with celebrities, at least any really notable ones. I was sitting in the lobby at the Mid-Ohio Comic Con a few years back and, upon accidentally making eye contact with David Carradine, I managed to stammer out, "Hey, how's it going?", to which he responded by winking at me on his way to the men's room. Yeah. David Carradine. "Kung Fu" David Carradine. "Kill Bill" David Carradine. Winked at me.

According to my major internet obsession Wikipedia:

The wink is an intentional facial expression made by briefly closing one or both eyes. To wink is to close and open either one or both eyelids with a rapid motion; to blink suggests a sleepy, dazed, or dazzled condition in which it is difficult to focus the eyes or see clearly. A wink is a form of semi-formal communication, which indicates shared, unspoken knowledge.

A “naughty wink” can silently indicate a shared secret, such as if a salesperson gives a customer a brochure and says, “Here you go; it’s free”. Infrequently, it may also mean “got it” or “yes, I understand”.

In Western cultures, women may wink to men they are interested in dating, but this has grown out of fashion, though still used occasionally. Winking is also done by men to women, often to convey a message of “I like what I see here” or “Hello, I am interested in getting to know one another if that is agreeable with you.”

In Latin American cultures, winking is also a romantic or sexual invitation, but can also be used a casual sign of recognition or of acceptance of behavior among friends.[1] In Nigeria, winking is a signal for children to leave the room.[1] Many Asians, especially Chinese and Indian women, consider winking to be rude.[1]

I would take to time out right now to rip on whoever wrote this Wikipedia entry for their hilariously robotic sense of casual slang, but...well, I'm just not going to.

To the point, I don't mean to say that David Carradine was hitting on me, because that wouldn't make any sense; he probably just wasn't thinking about what he was doing with his face while he was politely trying to avoid talking to me. As a matter of fact, in college, I'm pretty sure I used to wink at people on a pretty regular basis for no apparent reason, which I'm pretty sure was a conversational side-effect of my ever prevalent mass ingestion of alcohol. Unfortunately, this gesture carried over, on accident, to my job working in amusement parks, and I often found myself winking involuntarily at people in situations where it could easily be considered inappropriate, especially since most of the people I was accidentally winking at were high school girls that were anywhere from five to ten years younger than me.

Me: "Hey, what's up with your cash register?"

Oblivious High School Girl: "I don't know...it kept beeping at me. That cash register hates me."

Me: "Cash registers feel no emotion and lack the cognitive capacity necessary to judge you. Here, look...judging by your log tape, you've had it set on 'void' for your last twenty-seven transactions. I'll fix it."

Oblivious High School Girl: "Oh...oh God. You're not going to write me up, are you? I'm already covering other shifts to make up for being late."

Me: "No, it was an honest mistake. Just don't do it again, or we'll have to work you (wink)."

My Inner Monologue: (Oh, no...did I just wink again? Oh, shit, did I just say 'work you' to a high school girl and then WINK? Fuck. FUCK! What the fuck is WRONG with me? How could I possibly...

Red Alert! Shields up! Port and Starboard Eyelids, blink uncontrollably. All right, good, keep it up. Right hand, jam Right Index Finger into Right Eye on my mark! And...MARK. Good. Index Finger, rub Right Eye. Dammit, be careful around that contact lens, Index Finger!

Okay, okay...that's it. Right Hand, abort the operation, I repeat, stand down. We've done all we can. All we can do now is wait.)

Oblivious High School Girl: "Okay. Thanks! Hey, what's wrong with your eye?"

My Inner Monologue: (False alarm, false alarm. Jesus, that was close. Legs, take us out of here, three-quarters maximum walking speed.)

Me: "Nothing. My contact lens has been bothering me all morning. Make sure you call if you need anything else from me (wink)."

My Inner Monologue: (DAMN IT!)

In retrospect, things like narrowly avoiding potential lawsuits because of misplaced facial miscommunications probably made me the paranoid reactionary that my employees had to deal with on a regular basis. So I have to forgive David Carradine for winking at me, because I'm just like David Carradine, except for the extensive background in Tai Chi. And the acting. And the age difference. All right, I am, admittedly, nothing like David Carradine, except for the tendency to accidentally wink inappropriately at people.

Wow. I dare myself to make less sense.

Sympathy for the Devil.

2008-02-15T14:01:00.007-05:00

I did an illustration yesterday and part of today for an article about blues musicians, including but not limited to Robert Johnson, who allegedly sold his soul to Satan for the ability to play anything he wanted on the guitar, before being poisoned in 1938, at the age of 27.

For more information about Robert Johnson and/or the Devil, look them up on Wikipedia like I did.

No other things to write about today, although I did do a double-take yesterday because I thought I saw the Guy Who Threatened to Kill Me For No Reason Outside of the Mirage in Las Vegas at the gas station, out of the corner of my eye. Thankfully, it wasn't him, but now I'm more worried about the psychological impact of that encounter (see previous entry).

Avoiding Death in Las Vegas.

2008-02-13T22:15:00.005-05:00

Well, somehow I managed to come back from Las Vegas with both legs intact, without hitting my KeyBank overdraft account, and with a wonderful sense of fulfillment gained from transcending an unavoidable age milestone without having a psychotic episode or a dream about futilely outrunning the icy cold hand of Death. Actually, I did have a dream where I was playing blackjack at the same table as Optimus Prime of Transformers fame, but I have yet to decipher the meaning.

So, I am back in Ohio, after Frontier Airlines decided that, even though our flight was delayed by a few hours, and we didn't even land until after 2 am in Indianapolis, I didn't really want my luggage to end up at the same place as me. I know that, deep down, Frontier Airlines is just trying to teach me a lesson about casting off the heavy shackles of the need for material possessions, and why I don't need hair gel and shaving utensils to appreciate my own existence, and for that reason, I'm not all that angry. I do think that it's fitting that Frontier's mascots are all animals living in environments untouched by civilization, and they're directly responsible for my looking more like a caveman at work today. There will be more news about my luggage and its adventure across the country in the screenplay I'm pitching to New Line--Forsaken: The Story of My Dirty Laundry and the Long, Largely Uneventful Journey Home.

Vegas was incredible, and I had a great time with my girlfriend and the surprise guest appearances of a lot of my close friends who flew in from different parts of the country. I walked around the Strip and downtown, or Old Vegas. I won money in Roulette and lost it at Blackjack. I made the discovery that on the Strip, each casino is, basically, a medium-sized town. Moreover, I got to see an atmosphere that differs from any previous experience I have had, and I got to see it with friends. This wasn't without at least a couple of tribulations.

Casinos are gigantic. If you're standing outside of Caesars Palace, and decide that you want to hit up the Venetian, you'll undoubtedly say to yourself, "All right, let's head across the street and check it out." Three hours later, after you've walked eleven miles, you've run out of water and supplies, and your Sherpa has died, you truly appreciate the scale these buildings are on and curse your lack of depth perception. Exaggerations aside, the buildings are deceiving, and walking around inside and between casinos can be pretty draining, which is the condition I was in when we decided to walk into the Mirage.

The Mirage was kind enough to put moving walkways at the front entrance of their building, and we were on one when I accidentally made eye contact with some dude staggering down the parallel walkway leading out of the building. He was all tagged out in Giants gear and carrying a bottle of Bud Light, which would normally set off a mental alarm, but since Nevada has no open container laws, he wasn't in violation of any state regulations. He started talking to me at about ten yards out, and as he passed me, the conversation went something like this. Remember that this is a vague translation:

Shitfaced Stranger: "Heeeeeeeey!"

Me: "Hey."

Shitfaced Stranger: "Well, you could give me a job! Ha haaaaaa..."

Me: "Uh...yeah...what?"

Shitfaced Stranger: "Yeaheah. That...that way I could make some money, and I'll get ta kill ya!" (maniacal laughter)

Me: "Ha ha...wait, what?"

(He and I are passing each other at this point. He keeps laughing wide-eyed, and I pretty much just stare at him in confusion. I turn back towards the entrance to the Mirage.)

Me: "Dude, am I hallucinating, or did that guy just threaten to kill me?"

Eric: "Uh...actually, yeah. I think so. I'm pretty sure he did."

Now, this was a pretty strange occurrence for me. I don't think that a stranger has ever let me know that he would like to murder me, let alone see the obvious black humor in killing a stranger in broad daylight for no apparent reason. I thought about what he said as we were looking for the lion exhibit inside the Mirage, and I came up with a few things he might have meant. I've also taken the liberty of listing what I think the odds are that I'm correct in said assumption.

Scenario 1: He is out of work and earnestly asking me for a job.

Vegas Odds: 20 to 1.

I don't dress like much of a high-roller even when I am wearing a suit, and not only was I not wearing one at that point, I hadn't even showered yet, so I can't say that approaching me for employment makes much sense. Also, if he was, in fact, out of work, he was drunk enough to break two of the major rules of unemployment: A) Stay the fuck away from casinos, and B) Try to refrain from telling a potential interviewer that you'd like to kill them after they hire you. Regardless, if that's what he said, this is the most literal interpretation of it.

Scenario 2: He is trying to solicit sex from me.

Vegas Odds: 15 to 1.

Las Vegas is pretty unique for a lot of reasons, and the abundance of people openly and legally offering sex for money is no exception. He did use the word "job" in what he probably thought was a full sentence. And while it's true that I regularly refer to myself as being "ruggedly handsome," and I did make eye contact with him, albeit accidentally, he may have seen some sort of erotic connection between the two of us, or at least between himself, me, and my girlfriend, that I missed. I'd still say the odds are against it. Understand that in Vegas, the dudes that are openly offering their services to other dudes are typically wearing hot pants and tiny bullfighter shirts, and I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Plus, there's still the whole death threat thing, and even if this guy was drunk enough to chance getting his ass kicked by soliciting gay sex from guys that aren't gay prostitutes, it takes a lot of liquor and logic avoidance to forget to not tell them that you're going to kill them instead of paying them.

Scenario 3: He's blacked out, and has no control over his inner monologue.

Vegas Odds: 2 to 1.

This, even if it's not the most exciting reason, is easily the most probable. People say a lot of crazy things when they're blacked out. My freshman year of college, I was told that I went off on a tangent about fighting a dragon that kind of looked like Steve Buscemi, and I was witness to a host of lunatic soliloquies, ranging from accusations of beating up someone's grandmother to claims that a significant other had slept with someone they had never met. And that's just things I've seen associated with too much alcohol. For all I know, this guy was on his way out of the Mirage to watch tapes of Giants games while maintaining the chemical balances in his basement meth lab. The possibilities are endless.

So, I'd have to say that overall, it was a great trip and an even better 30th birthday experience. Having said that, it has been tempting to answer every inquiry of how my trip was with "Oh, pretty good. Some guy threatened to kill me outside of the Mirage," every time. But hey, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. That is, except for scars resulting from stab wounds with a crude shiv formed out of a broken Bud Light bottle, courtesy of a blasted Giants SuperFan.

Countdown.

2008-02-08T09:23:00.000-05:00

Well, I knew it was going to happen, mostly because time passes in an unalterable constant, and I'm still here. In about 14 hours and 45 minutes, I will legally be 30 years old. Fortunately, I will be distracted by slot machines and free booze in Las Vegas, where I will be in roughly 23 hours and 15 minutes, courtesy of my girlfriend being awesome. While I am excited to explore the various establishments trying to screw me out of money, I feel admittedly apprehensive about ditching my twenties and entering a new decade of existence, even if I can't quite pinpoint the source of purported dread.

Everyone gets older at pretty much the same rate, so getting bent out of shape about it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. I think the last birthday that I had any reservations about was my 21st, but, at that point, I was more driven by a fear of alcohol poisoning, which, thankfully, didn't happen, despite my asinine willingness to do shots of 151. Maybe I feel that I have more responsibilities that would demand my attention now that I'm older, and maybe the concept of taking care of those responsibilities instead of spending my free time doing what I normally do is a little disheartening. Maybe I feel ashamed, because up until I was 26 or 27 I thought of 30 as being so old. And while it was somewhat flattering to be invited to college parties pretty regularly up until a year or two ago, it does kind of put things in perspective when a group of people demand a keg stand out of you, and you catch yourself saying, "No way, man. I haven't done one of those in, like, ten ye--uh...oh. Wow."

I know that 30 isn't really that old. Having said that, the idea that the next milestone birthday after this one will be my 40th is staggering, and then comes 50, 60, and, with any luck, on and on. I know that technology will probably have advanced when or if I get really old, to the point where they'll sell human kidneys (now with transplant kits!) in the pharmacy at Walgreens. Human life expectancy rates have been climbing steadily for the past few centuries, and don't show any signs of stopping. Therefore, I'm being a big baby about the whole goddamn thing and should probably stop whining. I will, however, go ahead and compile yet another list to try to make myself feel better about getting older.

TOP FIVE FICTIONAL MALE CHARACTERS THAT MAKE ME FEEL BETTER ABOUT TURNING 30.

5. Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt/Edward Norton), Fight Club

Even though I go into a state of self-loathing every time I realize that it's happening, every once in a while I tend to be tricked by our media and advertisers into thinking that I am measured by material wealth. Yes, I was forced to buy a new car this year, but then again, I bought a Wii and an iPhone during what I like to call Things I Don't NeedFest '07, and even if I don't feel bad about either purchase in the least, it's encouraging to realize that you really wouldn't require any of this stuff to survive; it's also nice to recognize that I don't have another personality that makes soap and beats people within an inch of their lives. As far as I know.

4. The Dude (Jeff Bridges), The Big Lebowski

I love the Dude, because he proves that it's never too late to not care about having your shit together. He also is a great reminder that, no matter what, you can always just blow off life and go bowling. You just shouldn't.

3. Blondie (Clint Eastwood), The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Clint Eastwood was 36 when the last of the Dollars trilogy was filmed. This means that the possibility exists that I'm not past my prime yet. Then again, Clint Eastwood has pretty much been in his prime for the last 40 years, so that's kind of nonsensical.

2. Mitch Martin (Luke Wilson), Old School

Example: When I think about going to bars for Halloween, I immediately think of when my tequila-saturated goon friends were throwing drinks and ice at each other and wrestling around on the floor of Longworth's. The night ended with a broken window and a trip to the hospital for one, who had his nose broken by a wayward barstool. What year of college was this, you ask? Well, this didn't happen when I was in college, it happened a year ago, and these weren't testosterone-fueled meatheaded college kids, these were testosterone-fueled meatheaded men in their mid to late-twenties. Old School is a nice reminder that you're never too old to watch your friends act like idiots. I should make a point of saying that, while this is a wonderful sentiment, it doesn't make me any less furious at them for this type of behavior.

1. Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), 24

According to Wikipedia, Jack Bauer was born in 1966, making him a almost twelve years older than me. Despite this, Jack Bauer can run faster than me, think quicker than me, punch people in the sternum more forcefully than me, and shoot interrogation suspects in the kneecap more insensitively and with higher accuracy than me. Actually, I forget why this is supposed to make me feel better. Oh, right--Jack Bauer is 137% older than me and he's a total badass.

Well, that's about it for now; I'm off to Vegas to meet my destiny. In about 24-36 hours, when I'm having my legs shattered by some mafioso with a crowbar for welching on a debt, we'll look back at the abject whininess of this blog entry and laugh.

Arrivederci, me in my twenties.

Paying Attention.

2008-02-04T10:10:00.000-05:00

Ah, Monday after the Super Bowl. There's always a certain feeling of loss and the passage of time after the Super Bowl is over; this has been something that I've noticed since I was a teenager, and even though I haven't really cared about any teams that have played in the Super Bowl since I can remember (I was really pulling for the '85 Bears because Jim McMahon wore Oakley Razors and there was a guy named Refrigerator on the team. Also, I was seven). I suppose that, even if I'm not even close to being emotionally invested in either team playing, I always jump at the opportunity to kill some brain cells, and the Super Bowl is an excellent reason, right up there with the NBA finals, St. Patrick's Day, and the passage of another Friday afternoon.

That being said, there are consequences to the actions that we take, and I do make an effort these days to avoid being hung over at work, and if anybody reading this ever worked with me for Kaman's, you'll know that this is a relatively new concept for me, and I hope you're proud. I had sort of an epiphany a couple of years ago, when I had to fake a phone call from my brother at the first KAS @ King's Island 2006 management meeting to go to the secret bathroom behind the Fudge shop to throw up. Sure, I'm Irish, and sure, it was the morning after St. Patrick's Day, and sure, tequila and Jager have nothing to do with Ireland or driving snakes out of Ireland, but I felt insurmountably guilty about it. And yes, I missed ten good minutes of a team-building exercise where your biggest enemies are the weight of a tennis ball and the structural integrity of a garbage bag, and yes, I and everyone else on my team had done this same exercise at least four times in previous years. It doesn't make any difference, because I'm not Jim Morrison and I shouldn't drink like him when I know I'm going to have to give a short presentation about the interesting idiosyncrasies that accompany handling guest complaints from rednecks the next morning. I digress.

So, I kept myself in check for the most part last night, but helping my girlfriend move this weekend and the constant, slow ingestion of beer that accompanies any move took more of a toll than I expected, so I was moving a little slow when I got to work this morning. I decided to take out the garbage while I was waiting for the caffeine in my coffee to kick in, and on my way back from the dumpster, a Buick Century pulled up to me. The window rolled down to reveal some kid with a chinstrap beard and giant zirconium earrings, and a guy in the driver's seat that looked like he was probably his dad. The kid asked,

"Hey man, do you know if there are any lawyers around here?"

I replied that I was pretty sure that there was one on the corner, but that I didn't know what kind of law he/she practiced. He said thanks, and they went on their way. On the rest of the way back to my office, I looked at the other doors in the office condo complex, and sure enough, a full 90% of them had placards right next to the door that had names followed by "Attorney at Law." So, this kid's question struck me as being odd for two reasons:

Reason #1: If you have some sort of run-in with the law, I'm not sure that making your dad drive you around until you happen to find an office with a lawyer in it is the best method of securing defense for your case. When I'm cooking spaghetti and find out that I need to buy sauce for it, I don't wander door to door in my neighborhood, assuming that the odds of eventually ending up in the International Foods aisle at the grocery store are in my favor. It isn't hard to find lawyers. You can use the internet. You can open a phone book. You can even sit on the couch and watch World's Strongest Man reruns until a poorly edited television commercial featuring a lawyer pops up. The lawyer is the one who isn't a Scandinavian giant with a semi-truck tied to his ass.

Reason #2: I work in an office complex where I'm one of the ten people who actually aren't lawyers, and reading the signs next to the door will a) tell you which of the people that aren't me are lawyers, and b) save you the trouble of admitting to me, a complete asshole stranger, that you've done something stupid requiring the services of a non state-appointed lawyer. I know that the word "attorney" is confusing because it doesn't specify what the occupant is an attorney of. Oh, wait, I forgot that all attorneys are attorneys at law. Guess that fires that reason out the window.

This situation, like pretty much everything else I come across in life these days, is perfectly exemplified by the sociological microcosm that is the modern amusement park. I realize that people don't come to amusement parks to read and/or pay attention, but as I, as stated above, was usually fighting off the diuretic effects of alcohol from the previous night, I probably didn't show the patience with the American public that I could have, and therefore was less tolerant when they said or did something idiotic in front of me, which was about once every ten minutes. When you're making rounds on International Street and someone asks you where the Eiffel Tower is, and you don't really have a choice but to say, "Uh, it's the big blue tower dead ahead that's shaped like the Eiffel Tower. You can look at it on the map that you're already staring at right now, and that tower that you're pointing directly to is actually a fairly accurate drawing of the tower right in front of you," you start losing faith in your fellow man. When you're busy trying to fix an exploded cash register at an Airbrushed Tattoo stand, and someone is pointing straight to the sign that says "Temporary Tattoos" and asks you if they're permanent, you're going to reluctantly chalk up another negative point for Social Darwinism. When you're sitting at an easel at a caricature stand covered with pictures of caricature sketches, and you're drawing a caricature of a person sitting in front of you, directly underneath a sign that has more pictures of caricatures with their prices next to them, and someone asks you if you sell ice cream--you get the point.

People are developing shorter and shorter attention spans, and I'm not sure I want to live in a world where every sign is a pictogram with an arrow pointing in a direction that you can find the crudely drawn action in question. Maybe it's early exposure to television and internet browsing, like the psychologists on TV and the internet say. Maybe getting by in society is getting to be too easy because the lowest common denominator keeps accidentally driving off of cliffs because they don't know what the squiggly arrow on the yellow sign means. Maybe it's because people assume that they can maintain the same ignorance of the world around them as the self-absorbed idiots on reality television shows. Maybe I'm the idiot because people have always been like this, and not only do I not know any better, I actually behave in the same manner and fail to recognize it. Maybe.

But then again, maybe people have to look around and find things without assistance once in a while. We can only hold each other's hands for so long before no one knows how to read anymore.

The Seven Deadly Drunks.

2008-01-23T14:04:00.001-05:00

Here's an article that I wrote at work today for the magazine, which may or may not drop on Friday, possibly depending on whether or not I decide to pull an all-nighter this week. It should probably be noted that, copy-editing wise, this probably isn't the final version. Anyway, pulling from my wretched wealth of experiences as a bar patron...

THE SEVEN DEADLY BARCHETYPES.

Whether you're out for a night downtown or just out on a leisurely stroll to the neighborhood bar for a drink or ten, the faces might not always be familiar, but the archetypes typically are. Here is a list of seven types of people that we've all met in bars.

The Meathead.

Aliases: Biff, Jocko, Cro-Magnon, Beef Supreme, Captain Destructo.

Drinks: Light Beer, Jager.

Likes: Yelling, headlocks, punching holes in the drywall in the men's room, throwing friends into tables, throwing friends into barstools, throwing friends at other people.

Dislikes: Swatting glass shards out of own face, Getting thrown out, thinking.

M/O: Fun to observe from a distance, meatheads almost always travel in packs and can usually be identified within minutes of their arrival by the sound of glass shattering on the ground. The alpha male is typically the most clever of the group, maintaining dominance over the collective by shifting blame to compatriots upon notice by the bar staff. Meatheads aren't known for conversational skills and become easily frightened and confused when approached, especially by bouncers. Remember the guy last week who decided that it was a good idea to take a swing at a cop? You get the picture.

The Party Girl.

Aliases: Glitterati, Squinty McBlinderson, The Flash, The Walking Wardrobe Malfunction.

Drinks: Lemon Drops, Tequila Shots...actually, the Party Girl is about as picky with drinks as most goats are with food.

Likes: Dancing on dance floor, dancing on chairs, dancing on barstools, dancing on bar, guys that treat girls like pets.

Dislikes: Buzzkills, blacking out, waking up with mystery bruises.

M/O: While the Party Girl rarely travels to bars alone, it isn't uncommon to find one dancing by herself, sometimes to low volume music, if any. Give caution to proximity, as a strong increase in localized gravity usually follows Party Girls wherever they go. Party Girls are not above making out with others of their kind to impress you. Conversations are typically one-sided, and if you leave their line of sight, they probably won't remember who you are, regardless of how many shots you did together, how many times you helped picked her up off of the floor, or how much of her last drink ended up getting mixed with her stomach acid and somehow got on your leg. Guys, beware...Party Girls make surprisingly formidable stalkers when they aren't at the bar.

The Loner.

Aliases: Second Stool on the Left, Bob Seger SuperFan, Resident Evil, Kaiser Permanente.

Drinks: Wild Turkey, PBR.

Likes: Mildly offensive trucker hats, Cowboy Killers (Marlboro Reds), NASCAR, darkness.

Dislikes: People messing with America, getting up off of his barstool, the wife kicking him out of his own %$#& house.

M/O: The Loner knows that people go to bars to hang out with friends or meet new people, and he doesn't care, because he hates people and he thinks you're stupid. The Loner typically inhabits sports and/or dive bars, and, presumably, gains some form of photosynthetic sustenance from the light emanating from neon bar signs. Whether the Loner is drinking before or after work is a time-tested mystery, if he works at all. Maintaining the same basic function in the bar that Black Holes have in the universe, The Loner has a tendency to warp or completely absorb all forms of fun, and much care should be taken to avoid his event horizon.

The Hipster.

Aliases: Captain Emo, Johnny Thriftstore, Skellington, French Cuff, PDSD (Post-Dodgeball Stress Disorder).

Drinks: Coffee drinks, if that.

Likes: Clove cigarettes, plastic eyeglasses, uncomfortable sweaters, women's jeans, leaving bar early to go home and write in diary about going to bar.

Dislikes: Movies you like, music you like, getting thrown like a javelin by the herd of guffawing Meathead mouth-breathers in the corner.

M/O: The Hipster is cooler than you, and isn't afraid to make sure that you know that, even if it means eavesdropping on your conversation just to tell you that he doesn't like what you're talking about. Fortunately, if you actually pay attention to current alterna-music and/or independent film, hipsters can be fun to argue with as long as you don't cross the line that hurts their feelings; unfortunately, if hipsters get to like you, you'll end up knowing more about their innermost thoughts and feelings than you wanted to, probably during a poetry/photography exhibition you got roped into attending. Be very careful when buying hipsters alcohol, unless you don't mind consoling them about their cheating ex-girlfriends from six years ago.

The Viper.

Aliases: Sub-Zero, Medusa, Dr. Claw, High Maintenance.

Drinks: Cosmopolitans, whatever's expensive.

Likes: Open hostility, tanning.

Dislikes: People, other people.

M/O: Eternally prodding, Vipers can usually be seen making rounds in search of her next victim. Stock moves include accepting a ten-dollar drink from some poor sap before returning to her pack of harpies to rip on him, or pretending to walk to the bathroom with the intention of pointing out an article of clothing on someone that they think is outdated by at least a few weeks. Vipers usually don't speak to anyone besides other Vipers and Frat-Guy Metrosexuals (nominated, not listed). Vipers are usually attractive, but should be regarded with caution, as they have sharp and/or abrasive edges.

The Train Wreck.

Aliases: Mr. Hyde, The Smashtronaut, Bomberman, The Escapist, The Time Traveler.

Drinks: Omnivorous. Will drink the Wounded Soldiers left on the table by strangers.

Likes: Vomiting, gravity.

Dislikes: Following advice, public intox laws, public urination laws, indecent exposure laws, etc.

M/O: A lot of us have friends that function in a complete state of alcohol-free normalcy during the week, only to have the peaceful coexistence of brain and liver loudly interrupted by the induction of a little Stupid Juice. The Train Wreck has limits, they just can't recognize those limits within a hundred miles. It should be noted that any attempts to put the Train Wreck to sleep when you get home from the bar will eventually end in an escape attempt. A mixture of this archetype and alcohol will result in all of your neighbors' potted plants ending up on your front porch at 3:30 in the morning last night, but will not help him explain it to them when they find him sleeping in your driveway the next morning.

The Liar.

Aliases: The Chameleon, The Politician, Jerkstore, El Chacho Grande.

Drinks: What are you drinking, Honey?

Likes: Talking to women about a fictionalized awesome version of himself.

Dislikes: People that talk to him long enough to call him out for contradicting himself. For non-Party Girls, this takes around fifteen minutes.

M/O: It isn't that The Liar lies...we all typically do that to some extent. When you cut yourself shaving (face or legs), and then you told everyone at work that you were attacked by the League of Shadows on the way to your car, or when you told your nephew that he has to take a nap because that's when when you do your levitation exercises, or when you tell a stranger that your job title is "Russian Cosmonaut" but that you're a part-time celebrity body double, that's lying, or more specifically, that's fabricating. The Liar, however, doesn't tell creative sarcastic stories, in fact, they're usually pretty boring. The problem is that a) they're purposefully believable and b) that purpose is luring unsuspecting girls back to The Liar Lair.

...and that's pretty much it. For reference, I think I probably fit somewhere between Hipster and Meathead.

Names.

2008-01-11T12:31:00.000-05:00

Today, one of the interns at work was looking at an article for one of our magazines, whose name was something like "Radha Amir," or something to that effect. When he said, "Man, that's a weird name," I didn't correct him on his ignorance of people that speak languages other than English. Instead, I was immediately reminded of an experience from my first season in the glamorous world of amusement park caricature artistry, when I was fifteen. This is also a story that I relayed to pretty much every rookie I ever trained, in relation to my rule that you shouldn't write names on sketches unless someone specifically asks you to.

Drawing identical twins sucks, and it sucks even more for first-year artists. It might not seem so, but there are several factors that can contribute to your eventual failure. First, when you're a rookie caricature artist, and you're just trying to hold it together so your sketches don't look like the mutants from Total Recall, you're basically tasked with drawing the exact same sketch twice in a row, like it's some sort of test. Then, there's always the backseat drawer aspect of the parent(s) watching, and assuming that you're some sort of hack because you don't see the tiny facial anomaly that differs one twin from the next, like an ear freckle, or a slight cowlick on the back of the head, or a half-inch rat-tail, or some other such nonsense. Most times, the kids are going to look exactly alike to you, because, for some reason, parents of twins have the somewhat sadistic tendency to make sure their kids dress exactly alike and sport the same hairstyle. This actually also applies to kids that are pretty close in age; my brother and I are thirteen months apart, and my parents fell susceptible to the same temptation. This is pretty hilarious, as I've always been about five or six inches taller than my brother, and, given my impressive head size, it looked like my parents were constantly traveling with a tiny ventriloquist act.

So, yeah. Anybody remember Tomax and Xamot from G.I. Joe? No? They were twins that could be easily differentiated, as they parted their hair on different sides and one had a hideous facial scar. Caricature artists are never that lucky, but I digress. The first time I drew a set of twins, as soon as I collected myself mentally and did some breathing exercises, I fumbled my way through drawing these poor kids, and, thankfully, their mother didn't know enough about facial anatomy to hate my sketch. "Oh, I LOVE it! Could you write their names on it?"

"Uh, sure. What are their names?

"Orongello and LaMongello."

Keep in mind that the spelling is approximated at this point. Now, I try not to judge people for the ridiculous things they do to their kids, because they have every right to raise their children in any logic-confounding way as they see fit. This includes names. My name, James William, is really about as conservative as you can get, so I feel like I'm on one end of a spectrum, the other end being, say, "LaDainian" or "Anfernee". When my family lived in Tennessee, we lived next door to religious zealots who did their daughter the service of naming her "Thankful". Thankful used to come over and try to play with my brother and I, and trust me, trying to mesh Dukes of Hazzard action figures and David and Goliath figures into a coherent plot line isn't all that easy for first-graders. "Oh, no! Goliath and Boss Hogg are trying to...uh...surf on top of the General Lee back to their base in...uh...Damascus. Um, Uncle Jesse and Jesus be praised...?"

We've all been in situations of immediate stupefaction when someone tells us something, and we wait for that person to tell us that they're kidding, and when that moment never comes, we realize that we're just staring at each other. This was not an exception for me. But believe me, this isn't over. I, of course, had to ask how to spell the names so I could write them onto this jumbled collection of irreconcilable facial features that I had just drawn. The mother spelled out the first:

"O...R...A...N...G...E...J...E...L...L...O."

If you have friends that have kids, and then they tell you that they've named their firstborn Ethel or Gertrude or Morris, and you tell them it's a good idea, chances are it's because you don't really care what the hell their kids' names are, or at least you don't care enough to tell them that it sounds ridiculous. We like our friends enough, that if we feel like their signature on that birth certificate is a huge joke, we don't tell them. This isn't even close to being an issue for me anymore.

At that moment, from then on out, when my friends tell me what they've named their kids and it sounds ridiculous, my immediate mental response is, "Hey, at least they didn't name their kids after FUCKING JELL-O." That's right, this woman had named these poor little bastards Orangejello and Lemonjello, word for word, letter for letter.

I didn't react. I put the sketch in a mat, threw it in a bag, rang her up, and sent her on her Jell-O loving way. Even if I wanted to, I don't think there is a constructive way to tell someone that they probably shouldn't name their kids after food. Can you imagine trying to get a job later in life?

HR Person: "Thank you so much for coming in, but I think we're going to go in a different direction."

Orangejello: "I...I can understand that, but, as you can see from my resume, I'm already vastly overqualified for this position."

HR Person: "I've looked at your resume. I actually passed your resume around to every person in this office, and then I Googled you to make sure you actually exist. Even then, I thought I was being pranked by Ron down in Accounting."

Orangejello: "I don't see how that makes me a poor candidate for this job."

HR Person: "It doesn't. But the CEO had the entire office cram into Security right now to watch me tell you--here, wave at the camera--'I'm sorry, but you don't fit the mold.' Good luck, Jell-O."

So, the next time someone tells you that they've named their kid Oglethorpe, just think of poor Orangejello and Lemonjello. Sure, names are just names. But some are also novelty desserts.

Ouroboros and Severe Beatings.

2008-01-08T14:58:00.001-05:00

I did an illustration at work today for an article about cutting down on consumption and conserving more, and it looks exactly like this:

...it's the first one I've had the chance to do in a couple of months. Also, nothing of particular note has occurred since my last post, except OSU getting their asses handed to them last night. Actually, I could go on to write about the academic requirements of the SEC and how the only reason I could understand JaMarcus Russell in the halftime interview is because I lived in a remote part of southern Tennessee in first grade, and that equated to taking a crash course in backwoods English dialects while still learning a first language. So, I can speak two languages, it's just that they're both English. I can also speak about thirty words of German from three years of class in high school.

Yeah...I'm just angry at LSU, so I'm picking on Southerners for talking funny, which is pretty far below the belt, as, if my outgoing phone message is any indication, I sound like a newscaster with a severe sinus infection.

We'll get'em next year, Buckeyes.

Horse vs. Board of Education.

2008-01-07T09:38:00.000-05:00

It occurred to me, while rereading my most recent post about being screwed out of money by the Arby's Corporation, that even though I felt justified in my anger at the time, 1) I might have overreacted and 2) I really hope that no one who happens to read this thinks I hate mentally retarded people. Bobby the Mouth-Breathing Idiot Man-Child was not retarded, at least by conventional or legal standards, as far as I could tell. My anger wasn't wasn't necessarily directed at his cognitive capacity, as much as directed at his lack of motivation to function on the same plane of conscious existence as the people surrounding him. Bobby might have had some brain functionality issues, but I don't think it was anything that didn't have to do with smoking a bowl fifteen minutes beforehand behind the dumpster. Let me put it this way; if you're interacting with someone, and you're thinking about who would play them in a movie (am I the only one who does that?), and the most obvious choice is Kevin Federline, then it's probably going to set you off a little bit when they do something stupid that results in you losing a small amount of money. Hmm. Obviously, I haven't come to terms with my anger yet.

But, I also wanted to mention something I thought of when I was driving to work today. Every morning, I drive over the Ohio River on my way to work in Florence, Kentucky, and today I looked a little more closely at the obligatory "Welcome to This Different State Than the One You Were Just In" sign. It's changed since I moved here in 2003, and it now reads "Unbridled Spirit," or something to that effect, with a gestural sketch of a horse on it. This represents the state very well, as Kentucky is known for its horses. This would have bothered me a lot less if I didn't remember what the sign used to say, which was "Welcome to Kentucky, The State Where Education Pays."

Now, when I think of Kentucky's relationship with horses, I don't think of herds of mustangs galloping across the countryside unchecked, because I'm pretty sure that they don't. No, Kentucky breeds horses for riding and, usually, racing. And people don't go to horse races to witness the majesty of muscular odd-toed ungulates and the diminutive men that ride them, they go to horse races to bet on horses. So, essentially, at one point, Kentucky officials had the following meeting:

KY PR Guy 1: "You know, we really need to change our slogan."

KY PR Guy 2: "Why?"

KY PR Guy 1: "Because we're focusing on education, and no one really cares about education, especially tourists."

KY PR Guy 2: "I guess that makes sense...I mean, did you see that Bobby kid that works at Arby's? I asked him for some extra ketchup and I think he had an aneurysm."

KY PR Guy 1: "Yeah, that kid even existing means any pride in our public school system is a laughable atrocity. So let's go back to the drawing board. What can we push that's as honorable as education?"

KY PR Guy 2: "Uhh...how about gambling?"

KY PR Guy 1: "Done, and...done."

KY Jelly: "Hey, don't I even get a say in this?"

KY PR Guy 2: "Jelly, we've gone over this. Your time to shine will be soon...but now is not the time."

So, yeah. I can see it being a little one-sided. Actually, if Gambling vs. Education had a boxing equivalent, it would be Mike Tyson vs. A Shoebox Full of Evander Holyfield's Ears. I don't think it's the best idea, but I guess I understand it.

Fast Food and the Apocalypse.

2008-01-03T17:53:00.000-05:00

I don't intend the title to mean that I hate fast food. In fact, I love fast food. Actually, I'll eat pretty much anything but garbage, and even then it's an issue of how long it has been since said food became garbage, and even then, you would need to give me a pretty clear definition of "garbage" while I eat whatever the substance in question was. Maybe it's my antiestablishment streak that makes me want to eat whatever my girlfriend, television personalities, or the Surgeon General tells me not to. It's not an issue of respect, I just habitually wish to do the opposite of what people tell me in a lot of situations, for no apparent reason. In fact, my respect for the Surgeon General is pretty much the only thing keeping me from eating cigarettes instead of smoking them.

But I have a special place in my heart, or at least the stomach part of my heart, for food that is really, really, inedibly bad for you. If someone would have cast me as an additional control test subject in Super Size Me, I may have gained thirty pounds and had serious heart problems at the end of the month, but I would have been perfectly happy about ingesting a month's worth of McGoodness, plus all of the White Castles I ate to take a break from McDonald's food. So you can imagine how hard it is for me to a) not eat fast food for lunch almost at all anymore and b) eat healthier, smaller portions of food so I can drop a few pounds before my 30th, specifically in my face, where I seem to gain most of my weight. Most of the photographs taken of me over the last year or so make me look like I have a bocce ball lodged in my thyroid gland, but I'm straying from the topic.

So I've been trying to be good. Given, however, that it takes me forty-five minutes to hit up a plane of functioning consciousness after I get out of bed in the morning, I routinely forget to pack my lunch, which causes me to slap myself in the forehead when I finally do wake up while driving on the highway. Yesterday was one of those days, so I went to eat lunch at Arby's with my buddy Joe from work. This probably wasn't the wisest decision, because it's one thing if you avoid eating fast food, but it's another, far more perverse thing to go to a fast food establishment to order a salad, which, for analogy's sake, is the closest thing I can think of to walking up to a bar and ordering gasoline. The only reason that these places offer salad is so they don't get sued when someone holds them responsible for the wall damage caused to their houses when they have to be forklifted out of bed. So, I was kind of on edge, just on general principle, when I walked into Arby's.

And then I placed my order with the cashier, who we'll refer to as "Bobby." Actually, let's go ahead and make that "Bobby the Mouth-Breathing Idiot Man-Child." Let me force an interlude here by saying that I don't think that grooming at work is a big deal, and, despite my willingness to observe uniform code during my time in the service industry, I really don't think that the clothing you work in affects your work ethic enough to make a significant impact. But, for some reason, that thing where dudes turn their baseball caps slightly to the side just bothers the shit out of me. I have no idea why; it just always has, since people started doing it, what, twenty years ago? Maybe it all stems from my learning how to draw regular baseball caps when I was fifteen, and when I started at GL someone wore their cap to the side, and that threw me a huge curveball. Actually, that kind of sounds like me; I've overreacted to far less.

Anyhow, Bobby the Mouth-Breathing Idiot Man-Child was rocking out the Arby's hat tilt, his eyes half closed and his greasy blonde crustache glistening under the fluorescent lights. Even though BMBIMC's hat bothered me for a split-second, I really wasn't trying to vengefully test his mental dexterity when I ordered a salad combo. Despite this, I recognized the expression on his face when he looked down at the cash register as one of fear and confusion. It was the same expression on my face when I was taking my AP Biology test my senior year of high school, and realized that I had no business taking that test when I looked at the first question and couldn't name ten ways in which water acted as a solvent.

As BMBIMC's brain began a self-destruct sequence in front of me, it occurred to me that maybe I was being unnecessarily harsh and judgmental when I decided that the man before me was a total waste of gray matter. It's not like a prerequisite for jockeying the register at Arby's should be the ability to discuss thermodynamics with Stephen Hawking. Luckily, he still had the cognitive ability to call in the cavalry, namely his shift manager, who acknowledged his request by rolling her eyes so far back into her head that I'm pretty sure I saw an optic nerve or two. She came over to the register, pressed two buttons, and left. BMBIMC, grateful for the intervention, haphazardly hit a couple more buttons, and gave me my total. "Uh...that'll be $8.31."

I can barely do simple addition or subtraction in my head, but even I can immediately surmise that Kentucky sales tax on $5.95 probably isn't over two dollars, and if it is, I hope it's going to their public schools in order to save kids like the poor bastard drooling all over the cash register in front of me. I didn't want to be overcharged. "Um, I think you entered it in wrong. It's supposed to be $5.95 plus tax." The same look of confused terror crept over Bobby's face, but immediately disappeared to make room for smug self-certainty. "That's what...what she told me to do."

"Yeah, I saw her come over, but my total's wrong. That's like two dollars more than it's supposed to be." Bobby reacted by looking down at the register, looking at me, looking back down at the register, and staring at the drive-thru window where his manager was. "Uhh..."

I assessed the situation, and decided that even though I didn't want to reward Arby's Inc. an extra two dollars for hiring the gum sticking to the bottom of the shoe of humanity, there was a line behind me, and I wasn't about to lose my shit, or, for that matter, anger the hungry truckers standing behind me over such a minimal amount of money. So I told him not to worry about it, and I grabbed my salad and walked away.

As I sat down and ate my salad, which tasted like over-ripe tomatoes and defeat, I thought about how the two dollars didn't matter to me as much as the realization that we are all doomed. Melodrama notwithstanding, think about it. I mean, two or three hundred years ago, you either needed to be mentally strong or physically strong to survive, and now it's way too easy to get past the system that God set in place and Charles Darwin discovered. This principle, of course, would also have killed me off with the rest of the genetic misfires, given my horrific eyesight and lack of corrective lenses, but I digress. It's a sad day when you see that a lot of people aren't even trying anymore. We, the human race, are not going down in a blaze of glory. We aren't going to witness the three years of harsh Norse winters before the End of All Things. We aren't going to be around for the Last Resurrection before Judgment. We will be at Arby's, staring blankly at a cash register trying to comprehend the near impossibility of pressing three consecutive buttons in order to make the drawer open, hopefully without overcharging some embittered jerk who just wants to eat his McHealth Food in peace.

Also, if anyone from the Arby's corporation ever reads this, better dumb down your register training a little bit.

Figure Drawing.

2008-01-02T22:25:00.000-05:00

Some friends of mine hire up a figure drawing model every week or two, so I went this time around. It was good to get back into something that actually makes me feel like I might have been involved in fine arts at some point in time.

I haven't drawn a figure from life since college, and that was longer ago than I'd usually like to admit, but tonight did remind me of one of the more formative studio experiences I had my freshman year of school, and since I started this blogging stuff today in order to document stories from the recent past as well as ten years ago, I thought it was appropriate. I will say, in advance, that the following story, while not as intensely offensive as other anecdotes that I've seen online, is not for the faint of heart, so if you happen to be offended by male figure models, nudity, creepiness, and the watery thing that happens in your mouth when you think you might throw up, then I suggest you stop reading this. Still here? Good, I thought so.

Ah, the mid-to-late 1990's. Oasis was, though making a strong attempt, failing at being the self-proclaimed greatest band on earth, techno music was unknowingly somehow paving the way for the shitty pop music that the kids are listening to these days, and a lot of things didn't quite make sense. I, as a freshman art major, for example, looked like this (taken by my roomate for a Drawing II self-portrait assignment):

...which seemed like a good idea at the time. Ridiculous ponytails notwithstanding, classes seemed to be going really well heading into second semester, and my grades were the best they would be until halfway through my junior year, when I started going to studio before the bars.

Understand that I didn't really think that figure drawing would be that big of a deal. I'd seen a minimal amount of naked people by the time I was nineteen, and I had spent the last four summers drawing insulting sketches of wasted redneck troglodytes, so spending some time drawing naked people didn't really seem like it would be all that challenging. That was until I witnessed my first nude model experience. The following is a true account. I can't stress that enough.

I don't remember his name (nor would I write it here if I did), but he walked into the room in a zipped-up one-piece speed suit, which stayed on for about fifteen seconds after he entered. My first thought was that even if I was going to be naked in front of a group of people for three hours, I think I'd afford them the courtesy, or, for that matter, respect, to keep my speed suit on while I was stretching. The model apparently had no such compunctions, and let me say that watching a pear-shaped naked dude do lunges four feet away from my easel wasn't really what I had envisioned an hour beforehand when I woke up. And so the students set up in a circle around the model, and class began.

For those of you that haven't taken figure drawing, gesture poses are short, fifteen to thirty second poses to loosen you up and get a feeling for the space and proportions of your model. This is much more difficult to do when the model is pulling off poses from what I think was a combination of an After-School Special about epileptic seizures and Madonna's Like A Prayer video. There were a few awkward glances between classmates, but we sojourned on in an uncomfortable silence, with the exception of some classical music in the background that seemed inappropriate for various reasons. The long poses followed.

Understand that drawing the human form is a lot like drawing a still-life, in that you're analyzing a combination of light patterns and shapes in relation to each other and committing it to paper, which is probably why I didn't notice that our model, in a reclining position, was in a dead stare at my friend Stephanie for at least ten to fifteen minutes before she left the room on the verge of tears. She didn't leave the room because he was staring at her; she left the room because he was staring at her and obviously reverting back and forth between flaccidity and a pretty mean semi. It should be noted that the speed between reversions made it seem like the guy was waving at her, so I don't really blame her. Also, watching a guy headbanging his wang to Mozart made it a lot harder for the class to continue sketching without making uncomfortable grunts and throat-clearing noises.

Our professor, a very astute and attentive one, either wasn't paying attention to ErectionFest '97 going on in the center of the room as she made her way around us, or she didn't know what she could say in broken Korean to stop this from happening. I mean, what can you say? "Uh, sir...aaah, if you could just do us a favor and think about baseball...or, uh...your grandmother or something, we'd...um...well, we'd really appreciate it." A couple more girls and one guy fell casualty to the multiple awakenings of Mighty Kong and had to leave the room. Finally, our instructor, to our relief, gave the kill sign on the pose and told him to switch up.

And this, and let me stress here that I can't even make this stuff up, is when he laid down flat on his back and grabbed his ankles. Thankfully, his head was toward me, but remember here that the class was arranged in a circle around this guy. I know that, at that point, we had a semester of drawing still-life under our collective belts that taught us a lot about the importance of objectivity in drawing anything, including the human form. I know this. But when you're in class at eleven o'clock in the a.m., things take a turn for the worse, and you're staring straight up someone's asshole, it's going to affect you personally. Some of my compatriots couldn't look away until it was far too late. One of the kids from my dorm gagged, and the guy next to him put his hand over his eyes and looked down. Everyone on that side of the room immediately used their drawing boards as shields and disappeared behind them; the model might as well have been firing arrows out of his starfish. A tall girl was the first to take action; she stood up holding her drawing board in front of her face and slowly walked to my side of the room, and the mass exodus followed. Half the class quietly got up, boards to their faces, and made their way over, where they remained for the rest of the class. The kid from my dorm was later quoted as saying, "That was...aw. That was like...like looking into the sun. That shit is burned into my retinas forever. Gimme another cigarette, man."

So, yes, there were other figure drawing adventures in the following semesters. There was the first-timer who started crying a little bit, there was the girl whose boobs were bigger than her head, and not in a good way. But I'll always remember my first. Thank you, creepy guy who proudly walked out of that room in his speed suit. Thank you for teaching me that there will never be a situation that I can absolutely trust not to be awkward ever again.

FIN.

New Year's Resolutions '08: New Year's Resolutions '07 Part II: The Reckoning

2008-01-02T13:01:00.000-05:00

I realized after checking in on my myspace profile blog (after the obligatory measure of deleting several friend requests from what appear to be strippers who happen to be infatuated with me; hey, why wouldn't they be?) that, as I was fumbling my way through 2007, I really only hit up about 25% of my New Year's resolutions. While this is, statistically, a vast improvement on previous years (up 25% from 2006!), I am admittedly disappointed in myself. It's not like I'm coming up with resolutions that are really all that difficult or life-altering. Of course, I'm also not coming up with resolutions that are pretty easy to adhere to, e.g. 2003's "Try not to make any more 'late' beer runs to Mount Adams UDF at 5:30 in the morning when they open and everyone else in there is getting coffee on their way to work," or even 1999's "Don't do any shots after pounding three 40 oz. bottles of Mickey's, and if you do, make sure you have a 'buddy' with you so you don't wake up unable to find your shirt or your shoes in a house at the other end of Oxford from where you live. Jackass."

Regardless, there are three particular resolutions that I did not adhere to last year; I did keep one promise to myself and found myself gainful employment outside of the amusement park industry. Which is good, because that was the big one. The others were, and I list them now as resolutions for the second year running:

1. Quit Smoking Cigarettes, Unless Drinking.

Yeah, it's pretty safe to say that the smoking has gone on for way too long, regardless of cutting down, starting up, quitting, chaining, etc. This has actually been the tenth year that I've been smoking cigarettes on a semi-regular basis, and it's been about the fourth or fifth year that I've admitted to myself that I'm actually addicted to nicotine. I think quitting smoking was more of a difficult issue when I was working a job that regularly made me want to douse myself in gasoline and light myself on fire in protest of the unintentionally idiotic American public and the mostly intentionally ignorant teenage employees I had to deal with on a regular basis. Smoking cigarettes, at that point, was a welcome alternative to the incarceration resulting from beating a minor to death with a mop handle for falling asleep in his car and coming back two hours late from break. And, cigarettes costing what they do these days, I'd probably be better off health-wise rolling up dollar bills and smoking those instead. Actually, that would probably make me way less addicted to nicotine and way more addicted to cocaine resin.

2. Don't Start Drinking Constantly Because of Resolution #1.

My hilarious lack of self-discipline makes it surprisingly necessary to list this as a follow-up. Found that one out the hard way back in '04.

3. Somehow Miraculously Get Back In Shape While Abiding #1 and #2.

I know I'm a far cry from becoming one of those people that gets to go on television because they have to be forklifted out of their house. But, believe it or not, ten years ago I weighed about thirty pounds less than I do now, and I just lost ten pounds in November. I know that my head weighing 90 pounds is going to offset the scale a bit, but seriously.

And now for the newer resolutions:

4. Pay More Attention to World News, Even If It Infuriates You. And It Will.

If anybody reading this remembers when our government had enough respect for the American public to at least cover its tracks when it did something drastically unethical, they'll remember it being awesome. And sure, those were also the days when the news wasn't dominated by suicide, matricide, patricide, infanticide, parricide, genocide, and American Idol recaps, but even then, you wouldn't usually catch me paying attention to current events. It's not that I don't think that local news is important; I do. It's just that I find it hard to believe that dressing dogs up in reindeer costumes is more important than the semi-annual church bombings in Kenya because they happen to be in an election year (thanks, NPR). There is a whole world out there and even if the world seems to be on a surprisingly fast track to Ragnarok, I should probably be paying attention, if for no other reason to not look stupid when other people are talking about current events, such as fire and brimstone raining down outside while I'm indoors playing Wii bowling.

5. Try Not to Alienate Your Friends And Loved Ones With Your Multiple Neuroses Arising From Turning Thirty This Year.

Self explanatory.

And, I suppose that's all I'll charge myself with for now. Coming up next year: New Year's Resolutions '09: New Year's Resolutions '07 Part Three: Now It's Payback.