In Babylon

It is so fucking weird to find Planet P's music on YouTube. Weird and awesome.

I grew up on his stuff... hell, I still play the Pink World album through from start to finish a couple of times a year, and it never disappoints. Pink World was my only friend when I lived in Missouri. I had a walkman and I'd play the album every single morning on the two-hour backwoods bus ride. There was also Floyd and Kraftwerk, Men Without Hats and Hawkwind, but this was not their standout era.

When I listen to that album, I remember one-lane mountain roads that crept past layers of flat morning mist that buried the Ozark mountains for miles. I remember the horrible cornhusker's lotion the driver used to bathe in before work each day, the rotten smell of the seat covers, diesel fuel. Sitting alone in the back of the bus, so every bump in the road gave my brains a stir. Somehow, the memories are never bleak and miserable. That era in my life was pretty black. The worst things that ever happened to me all took place in Missouri, but Planet P only brings back the good stuff.

I also remember deciding to be a comic artist because I wanted to tell stories. Planet P did it all solo for Pink World, and while the music itself didn't age well (turns out synthesizers taste better in moderation), for me it was always all about the story. And wanting to tell my own.

It's really cool to know he's still making music, telling epic album-length stories, mostly solo. I'm rooting for him. The Go Out Dancing project reminds me (favorably) of Roger Waters in one of his apocalyptic moods. I haven't gotten to know Levittown yet, but so far I'm digging the hell out of it. Waiting for the right time to play it to death with my full attention so I can digest the lyrics.

Wake Up

I had been putting my life on hold.

I was a terrible student. People said I was smart, told me I was going to be somebody, urged me to live up to my potential, but I skipped school as often as I could get away with starting from the seventh grade. I didn't do my homework, which stacked up. I started missing crucial stuff in math class, earned a reputation as the weird kid, made enemies and alienated potential friends. I fell behind. I gave up. I dropped out.

Then college happened, and for one semester I felt like I was really going to accomplish my goal of getting a degree and leaving my shitty life behind. My anxiety got in the way--I didn't have a pen, but I couldn't bring myself to approach the nice girl sitting next to me and ask to borrow one of hers. I didn't have a study partner because I was terrified of strangers. The professor had a thick Korean accent and his descriptions of Venn diagrams would have gone right over my math-deficient head anyway. I skipped all study groups to avoid talking to people. I flunked the class, gave up on college and switched to part-time at a different school. I used my scholarship to take Japanese and Composition instead. Then I "took a semester off" because I finally realized I was having too many issues to focus on schoolwork.

For the next five years, I maintained a holding pattern. Work on the comic, do the art, hide in the bedroom, shelve the books. My only social communication was with my few friends or the people I helped at work. We moved out of the apartment where my Mom and I had weathered 9/11, and I retreated into my one-room hovel in my sister's backyard, shrugged off the lack of running water and heat, wondered if I might be autistic, came out as transgendered, dissociated and ranted on the internet and injured myself for kicks. I remember it as good times but it was really kind of pathetic. All alone in a little party house with my bad music and the undefined substances crusted into the carpet. Chest strapped flat, nails through my ears while my right eyeball flared up red and swollen every day from the layers of dust I swam through. Family drama alienated me from all relatives except my Mom. I kept in touch with the world outside through my modem.

I started going to cons. Met Seebs, Rah and Jesse for the first time at Anime Central 2004. I had been planning to stay with Rah, but when we all started talking at the tables it was nakama at first sight and we stayed in the same hotel room for the rest of the weekend. I didn't buy my next $80 bus ticket to Canada; instead Jess and Seebs brought me home from the convention to stay at their place in Saint Paul. They extended pseudopods and replaced my plans to go back to Nebraska with the urge to go native, which I did. Told my Mom I wasn't coming home except to pack my shit. She was sad, but my brother was getting out and she wanted to live with him anyway. I gleefully jettisoned my home life and never looked back. I didn't call her enough. I still feel sad that I didn't call her enough, but I just forgot. I knew I'd regret it very soon but I forgot.

Then Mom died. I went back to Nebraska to be with her during the end, got sick, came home, went back but I was too late. She died the night before I returned, and I was on the phone as it happened. The funerals weren't bad. She was polyfaithful so there were two, plus the wake where I wore an offensive T-Shirt to piss off the relatives who didn't like me anyway. My brother and I made up and I gave him a wad of money from comic fan donations to pay the funeral director for one pitiful box of ashes with a side of shitty attitude.

Now I had no connection to my past. Now I've been kissing-close to death and I realized I was wasting my life. Everything I felt was now under scrutiny as suspected bullshit. Two months later I had a petty disagreement with my childhood friend and he dumped me. I couldn't muster the willpower to apologize first like I always did, and because he never learned how to apologize at all we ended up never speaking again. One more piece of my old life fell away. Rain moved to North Carolina a few months after that, and I got depressed. I adopted a dog to force myself out of my head and being responsible for him got me through the worst of the sadness. Dogs and cats do their best to cure the blues by being small and pettable and needy, and in return we make sure their bellies stay full. It's a good trade.

The household moved to a small town where the atmosphere is much more laid-back. There are two colleges here, and I started thinking about going back to school. Thinking I didn't have what it takes to be a student, I was too old, too dumb, too anxious.

Then the accident happened, and I guess almost dying must have knocked some sense into me. Suddenly I was making plans instead of daydreaming about them. Small plans at first--see a dentist, find a good vet in town--and then larger ones followed from that. I got a therapist and a psychiatrist because I was overwhelmed, instead of hiding in my room and hoping the world would forget about me. The therapist hooked me up with health care and pointed me at assistance programs. Things became possible.

I re-established contact with my Dad, and we're slowly getting to know each other again. I really love the guy, but we've got to tread lightly for a while at least. I've always hated the idea of wasting my life, but now I feel more like there's something I can do about it. Medication helps with a lot of this, but some of it was just plain good luck.

So where am I now? Making plans. Establishing normal living activities like schedules and chores. Learning to work with the ADHD meds, and I've just started Zoloft for the social anxiety and OCD. I'm creating a new routine to replace the flawed one that was more of a prison than a refuge. There is comfort in routine, and just lately mine's been changing quite a bit and creativity has taken a backseat to the real world. I figure it's now or never--I either ride this wave or spend more years in the holding pattern. I'm impatient to get back to the old habits that I enjoy--comics and writing being the two major ones--but so far they haven't found where they fit in my new life. Creativity is kind of like a cat that will curl up in your lap if you stay put, but if you move around too much it gets pissed and wanders off for a while. Luckily creativity and cats are also sort of stupid, and will eventually come back for another try.

Hopefully within the next month or so I'll wake up with that cat back on my lap so I don't have to go chase it down like I've been doing. My comic is about to go awesome places and I'm getting annoyed by how slowly it's unfolding compared to the four-pages-a-week powerhouse of yesteryear.

Things go well at home. The Captain's nose is turning pink at the base. I still haven't mailed off the buttons for the folks who donated to get his vitiligo diagnosed, but I've got all the info here and will be getting to it as soon as I can. This damn cold isn't helping much, but it's slowly getting better.

Also, I've begun to think about college again. Scary stuff, but why not? "Too old" is bullshit anyway. I feel certain I'd make a better student in my 30s than I ever was in my teens.

That's it for now. Musings on a quiet Wednesday morning while the sky is gray and the snow is a few layers thicker than it was last time I blogged. Hope you're all well.

When I Was A Kid...

One of my earliest memories is of acting up in church during the service and my Mom taking me out and spanking me for embarrassing her. She walked me all the way back home and sent me to my room. I was humiliated and five years old.

When my brother and sister came back later that morning, I had to stay in the room, but I was bored. So I opened the second-floor window, whose screen had long since been removed, and devised a clever plan to smuggle cereal to kids on the sidewalk below, using an Easter basket on a length of string. I was an enemy of the state, and it passed the time.

I used to look forward to going to church every Sunday, even though I hated the boring, endless services. The reason I liked it was because there would always be refreshments in the community area after the service, and we never got sliced cheese and crackers at home. It seemed like a good reward for letting Mom drag me to the house of God every weekend when I'd much rather be at home watching NASCAR racing with Dad and trying to use telekinesis to make Dick Trickle crash.

I wanted to harvest all the cookies at the end of every service, just so I could have my very own clever little snack spread. Each week, I pilfered a few of my favorites in the bright red napkins and stuffed them in a pocket or my Mom's bottomless, mysteriously aromatic purse, where they'd get crumbly and turn the napkin spotty with grease. They never tasted as good later.

I also loved the taste and cuteness of the tiny cups of grape juice we had for communion. The tray had rows and rows of little holes so the cups wouldn't tip over. When the collection plate was passed, I wondered what God would think if I put food stamps in it instead of money.

On the most boring days, I would go hunting for art supplies from the craft closet, even though it never had anything good, just butcher paper and cheap markers with half-flattened white caps that bore unmistakable signs of having been chewed on by small children.

There were rhododendron flowers in the courtyard, and I liked to pick little bouquets and give them to my Mom. The courtyard was perfectly green, like a fantasy forest, but the hedges were all mercilessly sculpted and even then I didn't care for their artificial geometry.

The halls of the church were full of locked doors and mysterious stairways, and I liked to explore during fellowship time while my Mom was mingling with the other Presbyterians. There was a playroom with miniature household fixtures. You could pretend to wash little plastic dishes in a little plastic sink, or play with baby dolls near the bunk beds and cribs that were probably used the for day care or sunday school. I liked to pretend the crib slats were prison bars, and I was locked up.

Next door to that was the preschool, with its large tub of rice. I liked to pass my hand through it and feel the grains slip through my fingers over and over again. The rice was old. It smelled musty and stale and there was always some scattered across the floor.

Even as a child I was already nostalgic for the mornings only a few years before, when the big maroon van would come and pick me up and take me to this very preschool. I loved to zone out in the rice tub. There were little plastic buckets and shovels stuck in the rice, but you couldn't really do much with them except scoop up and dump out the grains, pretending it was beach sand.

I especially liked to bury things and excavate them from the rice, a fascination which would later develop into a rather morbid hobby of disinterring long-expired family pets to see what they looked like after being buried for months.

When I was 10, I started refusing to wear dresses to church and would only go in jeans, hoping desperately to be challenged by an adult so I could throw a righteous fit and get kicked out and thus become a rebel against the sexist dress code. The confrontation never happened, and I never quite got over the disappointment.

I used to sit in the pews and struggle with flashes of hardcore pornography I'd seen once on the cover of a magazine at a pawn shop. I thought I was committing a terrible sin every time I tried to clear out the unholy thoughts and the image of a wrinkly, hairy nut sack clamped between a woman's teeth appeared yet again in the forefront of my mind. I wondered if Jesus could read my thoughts and see the picture too. I wondered if you would go to hell if you weren't even sure if you were sinning on purpose.

One day my siblings and I were running around the fellowship hall after services, wild with energy and desperate to get Mom's attention away from the stodgy quiet-voiced church wives. She had long since lost her authority over the three of us, and we paid no attention to her escalating threats and scolding. The new pastor stepped in and ordered us all into his office. He then shut the door and said he wouldn't let us leave until we handled our family conflict and learned to respect each other and listen to our mother.

We didn't like this new pastor. Our old pastor had been a family friend, a nice guy with a pretty wife. They took long walks together and had once comforted me after a vicious bully beat me up and sent me running down the street in tears. They had moved to Japan and still kept in touch, sending us little souvenir boxes (which is how I got addicted to Pocky).

This new guy was bland and unremarkable. He just didn't do it for me, and I think Mom was offended by his particular approach to Bible interpretation. We'd been giving him the benefit of the doubt up until this point since he was still new.

Now, though, I could see the rest of my family were all thinking the same thing I was. This dude thought a little hyperactivity and scolding was bad enough for a Heavenly intervention? Good thing he never came over to our house on one of Mom's drunken blackout weekends! We were united in solidarity against this well-meaning stranger, who clearly had no idea what he was up against with the four of us, and had rather overestimated his powers of peacemaking and problem-solving.

We chose to express this unity via further squabbling, complete with mutiny from all three children against the new pastor and his dubious authority. Eventually, I think the poor man just plain gave up. He let us go with a lecture about family bonds and togetherness, and was probably as relieved to see us heading out the door as we were to be leaving.

All of us were bristling with indignation at the pastor's bumbling efforts to fix our broken family. Mom was the angriest of all. She never made us go to church again.

The lessons I learned from the Bible have since mostly faded from my memory, but the image of a woman biting a man on the nut sack remains vividly in my mind's eye to this very day.

My Gimp Finger

This is my gimp finger.



Once upon a time when I was 11 years old, my phys ed class was doing dodgeball in the gym. I was having fun up until the point when someone hurled a ball right at my face. Instinctively, I put up my hand to knock it away.

My little finger was the first officer on the scene and was frankly no match for a spinning ball thrown with such force. The ball won the fight and my finger snapped to one side like a dry twig. I seem to recall the kid who threw the ball apologizing after I got back to school.

After the initial CRACK! moment it didn't exactly hurt, but I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw the way the finger was sticking off sideways, turning purple, and swelling up. The gym teacher came over and assured me that I had merely 'jammed' the finger, and helpfully gave it a few times.

I have the worst luck with random asshole men aggravating my injuries with brute force, don't I?

Anyway, his attempts to pop the finger back in place caused the actual pain to kick in, and because I was a socially retarded little psycho-boy, I didn't know how to tell him to fucking quit it. He finally allowed as how he guessed it might not just be jammed after all, and sent me to the school nurse.

The nurse took one look at the finger before she cursed my gym teacher's stupidity and promptly called my father to take me to a doctor. By the time he showed up on his motorcycle (which was our sole family transportation in the years before the infamous Yellow Rolls Canardly), the finger was nearly twice its original size, dark grayish-purple, and sending jolts of spectacular pain up my arm. The ice packs, they did nothing.

The doctor took a few X-rays and then informed me that (gasp!) my finger had been borked to the sky and back. He made comments regarding the unexpected severity of the fracture, and then set me up with a cast.

Not a splint--a plaster cast that bound the broken finger to its neighbor in a sturdy half-Hook'em-Horn gesture and went all the way up to my elbow.

I had to wear the damn cast for weeks, and I frankly loved it. I think every lonely kid wants the glamour of a cast, even if only your blood relatives ever actually bother to sign it. I was irritated that they wouldn't give me a black one like a boy at school had, but at least it wasn't PINK like my sister's had been when she broke her arm.

Anyway, after a while the glamour of your very own plaster cast wears off. I think that's right around the time the vinegar smell of unwashed arm-sweat starts to overwhelm your person.

I lost a copper penny down the side of the cast at some point, and was unable to retrieve it with pens or chopsticks. By the time the cast came off the coin had oxidized and turned a circle of my arm green. It was awesome.

Anyway, long story short: the finger healed, but was not fixed. To this day, it sticks off as if to point out the direction that long-ago dodgeball had been spinning.



My gimp finger is not anchored to the other digits and does not follow their rules. It has decided to do its own thing and screw the so-called convention of symmetry.

Not only that, but it also has its own soundtrack! The knuckle makes what my friends and family have described as a creepy and/or disgusting TOK TOK TOK noise whenever I bend it. The sound is accompanied by mild pain from the finger joint, which I stopped noticing long ago, but which has recently become problematic enough to warrant my renewed attention.

This past January, when I was down in Omaha watching my Mom die and be turned into a garbage bag full of ashes, I took to wearing her favorite cheap-ass ring on my left hand. I'm not big into jewelry, but meh.

Anyway, I noticed that whenever I'd wash my hands, Gimp Finger would hurt like the blue blazes when mashed together with my ring finger. I figured the excruciating burning sensation meant I'd hit a nerve or something and resolved to be more careful in the future. Nothing in the world feels as horrible as that escalating burning pinching feeling you get when you fuck up a nerve.

Well, it's now almost April, and I haven't worn a ring in over a month. But still, the pain is getting worse and worse. It's isolated to this area:



All it takes to set it off is touching the outlined area. If I pick anything up in that hand, I have to watch that it isn't touching Gimp Finger, or else I'm apt to drop it from the blaze of agony that follows. It also hurts like a bitch to press on the knuckles, but only of Gimp Finger.

A case of bonsai arthritis, maybe? Seebs suggested it might be bone spurs, but I know next to nothing about the phenomenon.

Splinter Thumb (you remember him, from last February?) and Gimp Finger are now in direct competition to see who can be the most irritating minor injury to my left hand.

I just wish I knew why, all of a sudden, Gimp Finger has betrayed me. I've been nice to it. I spent years indulging its eccentricities with nary a complaint. And now it is a COMMUNIST FINGER, rejecting all my values and hurting like a bitch when I try to put on my seat-belt. Down with the bosses!

Anyway, there's the story of Gimp Finger. Look out for flying balls, kids. D: