The Great Escape

Purgatory

Sharks

Penis Santas

I made one penis santa card for a coworker, then I got commissioned to do 3 more for her, and 10 for another coworker. I have never drawn so many dicks in my life. By the end I really felt like I had accomplished something....then I thought to myself, it's 2014, why the fuck didn't you just make copies?

My sister's nursery

My sister is due in March and is waiting 'til the day of to know the sex, so I'm drawing a bunch of gender neutral animals for the nursery. Here's the first four:

My sister and brother in law are HUGE NC State fans/ Alum. I drew this for them while under the influence of hydrocodone after getting a wisdom tooth extracted.

Lemmings

Ostrich & Zebra

Rehash

Got a lot on my brain, but not a lot to say, so here's a little flashback post to images that seem to be of the most interest to viewers. I have no idea how the statistics of my blog views reflect on my abilities or character, but I'm pretty okay with that. Mainly because I'm sleepy and don't feel like going to the grocery store. 

A few songs that I dig.

Armies in Space

About a week go I was driving to work and caught a part of the program “Radiolab” on NPR (http://www.radiolab.org/story/91520-space/). They were discussing outer space and human insignificance. As we learn more about the seemingly limitless universe, it makes us feel smaller and smaller.  They mentioned our need for art alongside of science to remind us that we are important at least to ourselves. Or at least that we have value within our own human system.

What happened to the good ‘ol days when we thought we were the center of it all, the most important aspect, God’s children? Well those days are long gone, yet we manage to continue to take ourselves very fucking seriously.  We lead lives that are monotonous, heterogeneous, trite, but we have so many devices to enhance our self-righteousness and narcissism. We want so much to feel like individuals, to have purpose to have self-worth. America is a nation of a bunch anxiety-ridden, insecure lonely souls, who perpetually maintain a façade of happiness, of insincere authenticity. We convince ourselves that the masks we wear are really just our faces enhanced, and we grow to believe our own bullshit. We grow to believe we are important.  

And yet I still ask myself, is that such a bad thing? Is it bad to lie to oneself for the benefit of keeping one’s head above water? I’m fucking drowning, and it’s painful. I’m drowning in heartbreak about a lot of things. And I know other people hurt and suffer and that that’s one of the only things we all have in common. The optimistic idealist in me also believes in love, but only because my parents are the greatest people on earth.  And also because Durham had rainbow flags flying on every shop front and street corner in town during Pride week, and it made me feel like everything might just be okay, that people might actually fucking love each other. What a nice idea. Or Maybe Durham just really loves the queers. Well whatever it is, it made me like my town more.

In an increasingly post-theist world, we now create new forms of artificial communities to create a sense of kinship in interests.

Examples:

-hipsters (whatever that really means anymore. I’m a fucking hipster apparently.)

-marathon runners

-beer enthusiasts

-dog enthusiasts

-kitten enthusiasts

-cupcake enthusiasts

-bicycle enthusiasts (oh wait, I already wrote “hipsters” that’s redundant)

-foodies

-gluten-free people, the opposite of a foodie, but just as pretentious.

-gamers

-football fans who say stuff like “we won” as if they’re on the team

-the Game of Thrones obsessed

-pinterest addicts who knit shit

etc. etc. etc.

I used to think this was bad. Maybe it’s not. I’m self-pitying and lonesome and go about my small little existence feeling like I’m better than people for being able to feel. But everyone feels, they might distract themselves from their selves, but they feel. They have to, right? And what’s so bad about community building through shared interests? It’s certainly better than groups of people experiencing blood shed because their god is better than the others’ god. I don’t expect to see hipsters shooting down bros for popping their collars and driving large vehicles and consuming animal products anytime soon. Hey it might happen though. Also, I still hate all of the groups listed above, for simply having an identity based around shit I don’t care about.

I held my arm up next to my African American co-worker the other day and said “man I need a fucking tan, I’m a ghost.” She laughed. It made me think about all the barriers we’ve created in humanity when really we are just people. We are a species.  Fish swim, birds fly, fruit flies fuck a lot and die young. What defines our species? What are my limitations and special attributes due to my humanness? I feel like other animals might think very similarly to other members of their species, maybe not, I don’t actually know, but I’ve always felt like I see the world differently than most people, that I’m just so goddamn mother fucking unique, and really all it does is isolate me.  And then I remember that in the grand scheme of the universe, I’m just a speck. But I think I have a soul, I think humans have souls, and animals too probably. I saw this video back in grade school of a kangaroo mother wailing, screaming, sobbing because her little adorable Joey had died. That shit scarred me for life. I will never forget it.

I look at the moon a lot. I love the moon. Looking at the moon helps put everything in perspective; after all it does control the currents of the ocean, the fucking beautiful, alluring and mysterious sea.

A visit to the past in the present, which is also now the past because I'm writing about it.

ET and Me. Asheville, way back in 2011

I visited some old friends in Asheville this past weekend. I lived there for several years, which as much as an environment is able, played an unconsciously huge role in the development of my identity. This I only ever acknowledged after leaving that town and then returning as a visitor with different experiences in less interesting places to juxtapose with the normalized eccentricity of that small mountain town. I’d had a buzz going pretty much the whole visit, never enough to have a hang over and just enough to have a cloudy, unfocused brain devoid of any anxieties or poignant emotions, but still a sort of nostalgic sentiment was constantly felt in me and in the place itself, as if the mountains and the movements of that town, the people and the buildings as purely just objects that encompass the place carried a certain sentiment, like cells functioning in a mechanical way to keep something a whole, with an unconscious sense of purpose, that I, the now-outsider observer, could feel in a lonesome sort of way: things familiar that no longer make up the exterior world for me. All the sudden I thrust myself back into an idea of myself and my life and my world that I’d abandoned and I felt intimately estranged. Memories don’t flood back into my brain like they do for some people, just sentiments and feelings rooted in forgotten memories that create a whole idea/ concept of an environment for me. My friend Caleb kept reminding me of events past, of people I’d forgotten who still have heart beats, of people that I met who are now decomposing entities in the soil of the earth, and it reminded me that it’s easy to take for granted that people’s lives just continue onward with or without you, because they don’t necessarily, but that has no substantive correlation to my presence or lack there of.  

Things aren’t forever. But the world keeps on spinning round and round.  I came back to a town I’d left and of course it had kept on going, but businesses had changed, shop fronts looked different, there was a new biscuit place, new bars and a different coffee shop in the space where my favorite coffee shop had once been. Time goes by and things slowly change in an often unremarkable way.  The video rental store is still around. Like Caleb said "Rosebud will always be around, they have loyal customers." The girl that works there is always there, every time I've ever gone. But this time a lot of time had passed and I noticed that her face was still quite lovely , but the creases and lines of her varying human interactions had begun to leave their mark. When you leave and come back  to a place it's like time lapse photography. Nuances that took time to chisel their ever pressing and evolving marks, seem at an altogether new point, which I wouldn't have had the capacity for noticing had I remained there this whole time. 

I'm back home now. My new home. I've never left North Carolina, but I've resided in several different places.  Somehow my comfort zone seems to lie within the borders of this state, regardless of location.  Or maybe that's just how things have worked themselves out. 

...

I saw this man running in the pouring rain today. He seemed to have been doing it intentionally. He had running clothes on and it had been raining all day.  His experience appeared to be invigoratingly miserable or miserably invigorating. As I drove by him I thought about how people have these very personal, singular experiences that are cheapened once explained verbally to others. "I went running in the rain today, it was so great" just sounds kind of trite, but in his head and in his motions running in the monsoon rain, he probably felt very close to God, very close to the world, and to himself at a very real, empowering temporary extreme. We share our experiences with the world so frequently that it just weakens everything and makes individualism just another app for people to download on their androids. 

Maybe that guy was just running in the rain and he didn't tell anybody about it. Who's to know?

And here I am, sharing my experience with you, the world. 

Funny People.

I drew caricatures of my friend's "big four", aka his favorite comedians.

Letterman.

Larry D.

Stern

Louis C.K.

Dirty Martini

I’m floating in outerspace with weights on my arms. The mice crawl on me when I’m sleeping, I never know about it, so I can’t promise that they do, but I know that there are mice in the house. And I dream of bald headed eagles wearing dead dog heads as masks and I wonder what it all means. I’m not all that political.

I’m always wondering about where life will take me with a pit in my stomach that I’ll never go anywhere. But the pit feels substantial. A heavy weight of emptiness. I wish it was more motivating, but somehow it just keeps me in a passionately apathetic, apathetically passionate rut. 

I’ve done a lot of bad things, I’ve hurt a lot of good people and all I want to do is get through this thing alive, but I don’t wanna live forever. 

My co-worker said to me recently: "In the history of the human race, nobody gets out of this thing alive....I got that from a friend of mine who is no longer with us....I guess that's a bit dark."  Being "real" in our culture is always considered dark. We all pretend that this shit doesn't end. 

I’m gonna try to keep this plant alive that I bought for my ex boyfriend when  we were still together that he kept forgetting to take home with him. I have to remember to water it. Not for any real reason, I just need to prove that I have some follow through. I guess that’s a reason.

The layers of fog are so thick in the person that people are.  I believe in souls lately, but I’m not sure about ghosts. I want to be a good person but I can be so cruel. I can be so goddamn awful. I’m a shit sometimes. A real turd ball.

And the complexity of the obvious kills me. Obvious complexity is a puzzle that isn’t supposed to be solved because it’s already put together by someone higher than you, someone who doesn’t exist. The corporation is an individual and individualism is a corporation. And I laugh at myself for being sad about it, because it doesn’t really matter. But it matters a lot. But "we all just die in the end" is always my excuse and my curse. And I stand still as I get older. And one day I will just be old. Nobody cares about old people. Unless it’s your grandmother. And I have a feeling I’ll never be a mother. And if I am I will ruin that kid’s life by being too honest about life. But maybe they’ll turn out all right in the end because of it.

I get stuck in the paradoxical circles of human behavior. The whole “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” crap. I’ve always preferred people who think everything in life is shit, but I have an optimism in me that life is actually really quite beautiful, even the suffering. Then I create situations that will make me suffer just to feel my pulse again. And I‘m getting too old to be like that but I can’t ever seem to be comfortable any other way for very long.

In the end I’m trite as hell but people think I’m interesting. I think I’m probably just mentally unstable. But I always think I’m so real. So authentic. God. Oh God. Authenticity is impossible, especially when that’s what you think you are.

Koala

This was my present to my room mate on her birthday since I'm poor. She doesn't have a favorite animal, but she said she likes giraffes, koalas and baboons. She later told me she would probably pick different animals every time someone asked her what her favorite is, and that she'd never really been asked that before. I went with a koala, because they're cute and shit.

Blowfish

Postcards