Showdown At Devil's Tower

Conflict seems to be an unavoidable part of the human condition. I don't think we can get rid of it but we can uncomplexify instances of it. We can ensure that we don't personally become someone else's cannon fodder. An "I'm not getting involved," is all that's needed. Gandhi would tell you that it works if he wasn't dead.

Space Prison

I bet futuristic orbiting space prisons will be modeled after IKEA. They have a strong WIFI connection at this one.

Dinner With Friends

Life's one enduring pleasure...

Bacchus

Bacchus… Roman god of wine, partying and tiny uncircumcised penises.

Love Meat

We all love meat. Some of us like to eat meat. Everybody loves to touch meat. What man doesn't like putting his sensitive meat parts in-between a woman's fleshy meat parts. Did you know women can grow meat inside of them? Ewwwwwww!

But we sometimes overindulge and eat too much meat and become too much meat ourselves, don't we? We need to keep our meat consumption in check otherwise our meat won't be able to stay meaty very long! We'll meat ourselves out to the max!

If we reach peak meat and don't cut back all meat may disappear from the planet. If meat disappears we'll all be bones and we won't want to do anything, because nothing is fun without meat!

The Good Times Are Back

Hooray! Boy it was rough back there. We were forced to face the consequences of our actions. It got ugly, but it's over now. We've made the sacrifice and now we can bask in good fortune.

We have a new day, a new frontier, a chance to make things right! The past is behind us now! We're free again! We won't spoil things this time! We're so much wiser now! We'll keep our impulses in check this time we promise!

Cold Showers

I always end my showers with cold water. It's a daily reminder that life can switch from warm, comfortable, womblike to harsh and uncomfortable with a half turn of a dial.

Drawing a toilet in perspective is tricky.

Chapter 2 - Fog On The Windows

Their house is the oldest on the block, a one story ranch. It used to be the only house for miles until the previous owners of the house sold their lot to a developer ten years ago. The developer divided the land into subplots. He sculpted the land into small hills and on top of the hills constructed large houses in a Georgian style. This developer was also responsible for the industrial park about five miles away on route sixteen. A large chemical company, a civil engineering firm, and a furniture retailer moved in and their employees bought the houses soon afterwards. A few of them quickly constructed patios and chained grills to them. The grills mostly stayed covered with bright blue tarpaulin.

One family installed an in-ground pool in their backyard, soon after that a wooden fence about nine feet tall and after that a row of evergreen hedges in front of the fence. This last alteration was done at the request of the neighborhood homeowners' association.

The original owners of the boy's property didn't follow the trend of the neighborhood. Instead of a large open front yard used only to display the house sitting on it they kept one screened by large oak trees and smaller sugar maples. When they put the home up for sale they debated whether to cut the old oak trees down. One of the trees had a termite infestation another had more dead branches than live ones, but before a decision was made the house had been sold to the boy's parent's who then completed the decision and left the trees in place.

The rest of the trees in the neighborhood are less than ten years old and it is apparent their placement was made for convenience. Most are placed twenty five feet in front of each front door just to the right or left of the house. So if you stand at the beginning of the walkway facing the house you can see a small patch of blue sky between it and the tree. Just enough space to ensure that falling branches don't damage the house or car or land in the walkway. The branches can then be removed at the owner's discretion. One house has a row of saplings equally spaced. Each is supported by small cables staked to the ground and surrounded by light brown woodchips edged with plastic.

In comparison to the rest of the houses on the street the boy's house looks wild. His mom keeps a garden in the backyard in one corner where she grows tomatoes, basil, and hydrangeas. The rest of the yard grows naturally. They don't have a garage or a carport like the other houses just a narrow gravel driveway in the right corner of their front yard next to the mailbox.

The neighbors on their right are an elderly Portuguese couple who moved their four years ago after winning the state lottery. They are friendly and they say hello to the boy and his family when they arrive home. They are always in the front yard trimming hedges, mowing the lawn, or tidying up the area around the statuette of the Virgin Mary. The boy likes the old man and will sometimes sit with him on his porch in exchange for candy while he smokes cigarettes and reminisces about the old country.

The boy's family doesn't have neighbors on the left side just a swamp. At night the frogs sing and the boy will sit at the desk near his bedroom window and draw slimy creatures eating each other while he listens.

Instead of taking the granite walkway the boy walks through the damp grass on the way to the car. It soaks his sneakers. His mom gets in the driver's seat and leans to unlock the door. The boy hastily tries to open the door before she can lift the lock's button. This happens two more times until his mother gives him a look that says 'relax'. The boy nods in agreement. He opens the door and gets in. His mother starts the engine and pulls out of the driveway.

Troy elementary school is a ten minute drive from their home. Most of that ten minutes is spent backed up near the onramp to interstate ninety. The boy actually likes the time in traffic. He looks out the window at the cars in the next lane and stares at the people inside. Most of the time people don't notice him. Most aren't awake at this time yet having spent their night asleep in their bed and the beginning of their day half asleep at the wheel .

He sees the same people nearly everyday. There is the woman who is always talking to herself. She gestures wildly with her hands and makes strange faces while she stares at the bumper of the car in front of her. There is the man who constantly wipes his sunglasses on his shirt. He holds them up arms length to the sunlight and then frowns at the oily smudges he sees on the edges. There's also the woman who nervously runs her fingers through her hair while her baby in the back gleefully bounces his fat legs on his plastic car seat.

The boy sees all these people and wonders if he is a character to someone else. Is he just the boy who presses his forehead to the window and breathes fog?

City Of The Soon To Be Dead

This city was once a beautiful one. In its main square people gathered and sang and danced and ate together. People made friends, memories, love, and then children. But today it has lost its liveliness because of too much life. The city has become too crowded. With so many people sharing so little space the people have become suicidal. The group survival mechanism in each individual's brain has been switched on. The socially disconnected and emotionally weak are eliminating themselves.

Some have moved from the city and built their homes on the hilltop. The first inhabitants of the hilltop were quite comfortable and happy but soon the hill became crowded too.

The great trees once so visible in the skyline whose dew covered leaves were once the source of water for the city have died. Their withered branches and crusted bark no longer give life but seem to draw any life from the surrounding soil and keep it hidden in secret compartments in their trunks.

The women of the city no longer have children and the few that do are forced to raise them without the help of their neighbors. While the women are still pretty they are no longer beautiful. The current circumstance makes living selfishly the easiest path and selfish living has dulled their natural charms. Most spend their time grooming for a special event which never arrives. Nearly all their smiles are false ones.

The men roam the streets like lone wolfs. Frustrated by their own uselessness. Some escape to the countryside. Some escape into their own imaginations in the bars and casinos that now line the main thoroughfare. Men forced to compete with thousands of other depressed and wandering men for the hearts of the city's fickle and directionless women have sex only to momentarily kill their desire for a woman in each of their pasts. A woman who they imagine, wrongly, to be free of the emotional disease which has infected all the others.

The local government has adopted and enforces a secret policy it uses to keep the populace sedentary and sexless in order to keep consumption of natural resources low. Now people line up in the square and stare up at the night sky with telescope glasses. They stare at the surface of the moon and mars through the lenses and imagine gathering and singing and dancing and eating on those barren landscapes.

Chapter 1 - The Man In The Golden Mask

Welcome to Hairy Doodle's Breakfastverse, a multisensual mythological Internet narrative. You will get to follow along as the men and women behind Hairy Doodle pour all of their creative powers into constructing an imaginary universe. A universe not that different from our shared one. One a little smaller, and perhaps a little stranger on its surface but one less complete, sort of a training wheels version of our shared Universe. You can explore the Hairy Doodle Breakfastverse over coffee every morning and then return to the shared Universe a little bit better equipped for your journey through it. So before I explain all the fun away we'll get started.

Our story begins at a breakfast table perhaps like the one you're enjoying at this moment. Well, whether you're at a sunny breakfast table or at a desk under fluorescent lights it doesn't change the one in the story. At this particular breakfast table a boy at the age of twelve is eating cereal from a small plastic bowl. The bowl was once faithfully molded in the shape of a popular cartoon turtle but its many trips through the dishwasher have left the colors faded and worn and the surface slightly warped.

The morning sun is shining through sheer curtains above the kitchen sink. The sink has two basins. One side is filled seemingly beyond its threshold with washed dishes perilously stacked on top of one another. Gravity and the walls of the basin work together as a magical invisible glue keeping this pile of glass, porcelain, stainless steel, and plastic together. The other basin smells like a poorly tended fruit stand. The trap is filled with pineapple skins, tiny bits of grape vines, orange peels, and cherry pits, leftovers from the fruit salad the boy's grandmother made for her weekly game of pinochle the night before.

The boy looks up from his bowl's crooked turtle smile to the pile of dishes to see the tangerine light slip through the curtains, refract through the drinking glasses, shimmer off the aluminum pots, bounce off the white porcelain dishes and finally sink into the grain of the kitchen's pine cabinets.

The boy's melancholy is, for a short moment, interrupted and replaced by that most beautiful sensation, wonder. Wonder, a feeling that always accompanies viewing a scene of mysterious beauty which an hour after sunrise this kitchen always is.

Slightly frightened by such an extreme feeling so early in his day the young boy represses it. He looks down back at the bits of grain and sugar suspended in the two percent homogenized milk slowly swirling in the cavity where the plastic turtle's guts should be. The poor turtle just smiles its crooked smile as it stares up at the ceiling, helpless having been flipped over on the back of its shell. The boy prefers this scene at the moment. He doesn't want to let the feeling of wonder energize him. He wants to remain a human slug excreting an emotionally toxic ooze just to spite his mother, who has just entered the kitchen softly humming her favorite tune, 'Cielito Lindo'.

His mother is an energetic woman who wakes up at dawn and greets the day as if it were a benevolent, all powerful, space traveler who arrives on Earth to personally give her some magical gift. However, she isn't a tyrannical woman who expects her son to share this admirable trait. She's soft on her son, many of her friends have told her she spoils her son but she unfortunately has never been able to fall out of love with him. Every time she looks at him she still sees in her mind's eye a tiny, pink and purple, mucus-covered copy of the best parts of herself.

Even though the prescription on her maternal love goggles is still strong she is still willing to perform the unwanted duty of ushering the boy from his serene dream world to the dystopian dream world of Troy Middle School.

"Finish up your cereal, sweetheart," she says in a whisper as she softly kisses the boy on the crown of his head. The boy lets out a fake sigh the kind he uses to let anybody who may be eavesdropping know that while his mother may love him he is his own man and not a wimpy mama's boy.

"I have to take the dog to the groomers after I drop you off at school and I can't be late this time."

Of course she could be late. The dog would be groomed whether she arrived five, ten, or fifty minutes late, but she is a punctual woman and proud of it. She imagines, wrongly, that everyone she does business with manages her time with such precision. This often leads to misunderstandings, like her last trip to the dog groomers.

She arrived several minutes late and received a look from the receptionist that she mistook as a harsh judgement of her character. The 'look' was in fact just the receptionist's eye twitching involuntary caused by fatigue from having stayed out too late the night before. She had spent most of the night in constant anticipation of a kiss from a man who she feared thought she was unattractive. She did have abnormally wide hips and thick lips after all. Sadly for her, the kiss never arrived. She went home and spent the rest of the night worrying about her appearance or uncomfortably sleeping with her eyebrows tightly knit and dreaming about worrying about her appearance.

The boy interrupts his mothers worrying, "Hey, Mom, I had that dream again last night. I woke up all sweaty." The boy mimes wiping his head with his forearm. He knew he could delay the car ride to school with a story about his dream. He was smart enough to know that his mother is a sucker for his stories. She is of course. She cherishes these glimpses into her beloved son's psyche.

"I was soaked. This time the guy in the gold mask was smiling and he had a big bump sticking out of his forehead. And I could see all these shapes and they were colored blue and pink. I say they were blue and pink but they would flash other colors too sometimes. And they would move in a big spiral like this,' he slowly traced a circle in the air with his finger, "And the shapes didn't look real. They weren't like boxes or anything they looked flat."

The boys mood improves in small increments as he continues to recall his dream. He can no longer pretend to be a slug.

"You know what they looked like. They looked like those colored windows in church except kind of floating not in a wall or anything."

"Stained glass", his mom interjects.

"What?", he asks.

"Stained glass windows", she corrects.

"Oh right. Yeah, stained glass windows. And you know what else? This time I could see the eye of this great big lizard but it looked like the moon because the lizard was so big it looked like the sky. The eye was black and shiny like an eight ball and it was huge. I was so scared because I couldn't hide anywhere from it. I wasn't standing on the ground or anything but I wasn't floating and there weren't any rocks or trees I could hide behind. And then the lizard eye started blinking and the guy with the gold mask started talking to me. I couldn't figure out what he was saying but he sounded just like grandpa well he sounded like grandpa if grandpa was a robot. Everything... he... said... sounded... like... this...", he was convulsing with outstretched hands like Frankenstein's monster having a seizure.

Her face cracks a small smile at his dramatic performance and even though the boy had started the story as a bluff his face now shows sincere emotion one that is both enthusiastic and fearful.

"Well grandpa will probably want to know that he's actually a robot," she says. She knows she can stop one of her son's stories by short circuiting his brain with a confusing remark. "Give me your bowl. Put on your jacket. C'mon."

The boy lost in the thought of what a conversation with a robotic grandpa who doesn't know he's a robot would be like obeys his mother dutifully. He puts on his jacket and without having to be told grabs his backpack and walks out the door to the car.

Wally Wood Study

I saw this panel in an old EC Weird Fantasy. The original is drawn by Wally Wood. I studied it and did this version. It's not entirely true to the original. An exact duplication is mind numbingly boring so I took a little artistic license but not too much otherwise I wouldn't have learned anything new.

New knowledge like: the composition of the figures is fairly complex so it's best to rough out the negative spaces before you even start worrying about their masses. Also, I learned that using watered down calligraphy ink is a good way to get gray values down before laying down watercolors on top of them. I didn't really take advantage of that too much here but it definitely seemed worthy of experimenting with in the future. The original is a bit bigger than my scanner so I had to stitch a couple of scans together. I suck at doing that and my scanner doesn't give me consistent scans so there are some digital artifacts kicking around if you look close. If anybody reading this knows of a good guide for stitching images together send me the link.

A New Kind Of Man

Our enhanced cognitive abilities are the result of our predatory instincts.
With them we will build a new man.
One devoid of mysticism.
One who does not need to self reflect.
One who is certain of his place in the Universe.
One who fully accepts his destiny.
One who acts completely, certainly, and without pause.

But who's going to build him? Some 9 to 5 slob? You can't have him without an even finer division of labor. Even finer specialization. That's going to leave a lot of people a bit emotionally unbalanced. It seems a bit unwise to me.

Yes deny the self is what people tell you. You want to get ahead you deny yourself now so later you can really start living. Yes, deny thyself but then satisfy thyself. Satisfy thyself greatly.

We're a nation and soon becoming a world of 9 to 5 ascetics and leisure time hedonists. That's the problem. We think we've earned the right to lose control. We've earned the right to be self destructive . We've given ourselves over to you vultures for half the day. What about us? What about what we want?

See I tricked you. That's a fool's question. We should be asking what do we really need. Most of us don't even know. Most of us don't even bother to ask that question anymore. So many questions that need answering. But what if we do answer them? It's not gonna change anything! Stressful to think about, huh?

My advice take a deep breath, eat dinner with the family, and then go walking through the woods or desert alone.

Give Yourself Over To The Divine Universal Power

No, I'm not religious but I've come to realize it's foolish to think that my life is completely in my control. Free will? I'm not convinced I have it. I have the illusion of it I suppose which makes my life ride a bit more interesting. But I do believe that we live in a chaotic system that can never be fully understood and hence can't really be controlled. Things happen, stuff moves around and collides with other stuff. That's the universe in a nutshell.

This sounds like the talk of a loser, but it's not. It will be the ones like me who have made peace with the universal rollercoaster who can enjoy the remainder of their life when they discover they have a terminal illness or after beloved family member was unexpectedly killed. It will be the Type A, controlling, egomaniacs who will have the emotional breakdown and fall from their lofty perch into the horrible abyss of insanity.

I think everyone becomes aware of this sooner or later unless you die young. If you're elderly and your body starts falling apart through no fault of your own you tend to make peace with this fact. I suggest you teach your children this lesson as early as you can, not with a lecture, but with a ceremony like the one depicted above. It may be hard to find a particle accelerator, a mayan ceremonial mask, and giant grasshoppers near your home so yours can be homespun if you like.

Camels... Uh... Diver

Usually I try to come up with an image that tells some kind of a story I understand but this collage's meaning is beyond me. I think it has to do with latent sexual urges and self identity but I'm not sure...

It's Good To Be King

I came up with this character when I was brainstorming ideas for a children's book. I thought the idea of a king with no limbs was funny / deep at the time. I don't know if I do anymore. It's probably been thought of before. Monty Python had the black night with no limbs in The Holy Grail.

The night before I drew this I did read a short story by Italo Calvino about a king who refuses to get off of his thrown and how the things he hears and doesn't hear while waiting to die on his throne makes him paranoid maybe that's where it came from.

I don't know if anybody has tried writing a children's book but every time I come up with an idea I really like I have a voice pop into my head telling me that it'll get the book rejected by publishers for being vulgar or something. It's messed up that I'm censoring myself like this, but I've gone to the book store to look at what actually gets published and all of it's so bland it gives me the fear that anything original will be deemed inappropriate, except that Giving Tree book by Shel Silverstein, that book is twisted. It's not even written for kids it's written for bitter parents who regret having a kid.

Anyways, it's a ridiculous fear that I'm trying to shake. I can self publish the thing if nobody else will and besides I have kid nephews that come up with ideas way more fucked than anything I can cook up. Everything they draw involves someone getting bitten in two.

Allusion

Of course deeper satisfaction is going to allude you if you go looking for it, dumbass. Everybody knows that.

Ultimate Boyfriend

Hitchcock's Vertigo

A friend brought this movie over the other day. It was just what I needed. The basis of the movie was the theme of my last post! Perhaps it was just coincidence or maybe it's fate.

It is the most unsettling movie I have ever seen. It has the most genius use of lighting and the musical score plays with your emotions without your awareness. You are a puppet on a string in the master hands of Hitchcock and Hermann.

Do You Wear The Mask?

I've met too many emotional chameleons lately who just behave so whoever they're with will like them, to avoid some imagined conflict, or to get something they want. For some people this goes so deep I don't believe they express any real feelings at all.

I notice this trait more in women too. I've been in the middle of heated arguments with girlfriends and ex-girlfriends which were interrupted by a phone call or someone unexpectedly passing by. When that happens this will stop the argument temporarily, the woman's tone of voice changes and they'll greet the person with a cheery, 'Hiiii'.

If I get into a serious argument with a man I at least know it's genuine. I'd much rather get punched in the head by a man than to have to wait while a woman makes friendly small talk before she can get back to complaining why her emotional needs aren't being fulfilled.

If you find your girlfriend behaving this way dump her with haste. If you don't you will be surprised when one day for no particular reason she suddenly becomes a totally different person, a person you don't particularly like, and your brain struggles to forget the character she was playing. It's not a fun experience.

And I have another theory that every playa / ladies man / swinging bachelor was once probably a hopeless romantic who had his heart broken a few too many times by women who are emotional chameleons and has turned over to the dark side himself.

So the short of it is, men, don't date actresses or emotional retards lest you become one yourself. Keep it real, everybody.