Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!

What kind of evil asshole would name a pair of cuddly baby white tigers "Ben Wa" and "Taboo?" That's right. MY kind of evil asshole.

Also, Goodbye Zoloft, goodbye tremor, hello Prozac!

Last night I had one of those dreams where I'm being chased by assassins with axes. Axes! They cornered me and I couldn't find a weapon to hold them off. Just a car antenna, which I yanked free and found to be utterly useless. They closed in to chop me to death, and the nightmare panic started to take over. I realized that it was too late to escape, that I was REALLY going to die, and it was going to hurt. Just before the slaughter began, I realized: Fuck that. This is a dream and I make the rules, so starting right now I am pulling rank. I regret to inform you that I will not be experiencing the unpleasantness and horror of being murdered by ax-wielding assassins at this time. Instead, I will know kung fu, and my attackers will suddenly suck ass at fighting.

And that's how it came to pass that I killed the shit out of all four of them armed with only a ripped-off car antenna.

After the massacre, I led my KICKIN' RAD NEW FRIENDS the Straw Hat pirates to safety on a gorgeous tropical beach and tried explaining my epiphany to them. I told them how I had realized earlier that I was dreaming. I told them none of this was really happening.

They just looked at me in total confusion and tried to make awkward small talk to change the subject. I realized that, because they were figments, they had no fucking clue what I was even talking about and it might even be making them feel uncomfortable to discuss the subject. So I quit bashing my fist into the poor dented fourth wall, and curled up to sleep next to my nakama on warm white beach sand. The wind was warm and carried the sound of the waves to the beach and we watched the full moon rise in an indigo sky from under our temporary canopy tent. It was wonderful.

Then I woke up with a dog's butt in my face.

January 23

Made it through another year without my mother.

Aside from some truly weird and morbid dreams about her corpse showing up in various disturbing places (and sometimes in various disturbing pieces), the second year wasn't so bad. Definitely better than the first one was, by a longshot. That first year kinda sucked monkey dicks, and I'd heard that the second could be even worse. But nah, it's just getting better.

I am very glad to be getting some peace. Her death coming after a decades-long slow motion suicide plunge might have made things easier--I was already braced for it when it came. The years of dreading the inevitable end were much worse than the real thing. At least now I'm free of the waiting, and she's free of the everything else that sucked for her.

Last night I had another tower nightmare. I have these a lot, and I hate them. Usually they involve having to go to the top of a very high building, against my better judgment, then trying to get back down again when the building begins to sway and distort and fall over. Ever since I started having them, the leaning tower of Pisa gives me cold chills.

Sometimes in these dreams, I'm clinging to rickety fire stairs outside the building. Other times I'm inside, lost on the 78th floor. Occasionally I try to take an elevator only to plunge to the bottom with that horrible sinking sensation in my belly, or I get hauled back to the top and have to get out and start all over again. Last night's was one of the latter.

If you're really into dream interpretation from a Freudian standpoint, I gues you could blame this theme on a repressed fear of teh cock, but it's not. I'm just very afraid of tall buildings. Five stories or more makes me very uncomfortable, but I can handle it. 10 or more means I will try not to go inside. Fifty or more stories and I need to drink alcohol to stop the panic, even if my room's only on the 25th. Conventions in big cities always fuck me up because of this. You just know that sucker is going to come down right on top of you. If you're, you know, me.

Meanwhile in real life, functionality is restored to my brain. Life goes well. I'm currently tired as fuck from the day's errands, but it's a good tired. An honest tired, earned with productivity and sweat. I'll spend tomorrow working on the comic so I can update on or before Monday.

Ah, Monday. A nice arbitrary day for a nice arbitrary change of schedule. You may have noticed that Saturdays appear to be cursed lately. Oh wait, that's just me sucking. Ho ho.

Zombies Are Love

Thanks to Netflix, I've got like 68 zombie survival horror flicks lined up in my rental queue. I just finished watching Fido and it was pretty amusing. Not as funny, quick or morbid as it could have been, but it was actually kind of sweet and I never expected that. Quirky, a sort of Lassie-as-a-zombie satire.

I also watched Daylight, and was a bit underwhelmed. I like claustrophobic disaster films as much as the next masochistic asshole, but I'm afraid the only character I cared about was the dog. This happens a lot lately, now that the Captain and me are a team.

Speaking of whom, I took him to the vet this afternoon for his last vaccination, a Lyme booster. On the way out I grabbed a cow hoof and a bunch of chew toys. He goes through bully sticks kind of fast with those terrifying scissor-teeth, but the cow hoof has held his interest all day and is still somewhat the same shape as before. Good deal for 99 cents.

I seem to be having a lot of those weird dreams that scratch the fourth wall lately. Last night I had one where I was meeting Jesse and another friend (who shifted identities at random) for dinner at a Chinese place. We were all really hungry but for some reason I had to stop at a fancy dress store to find shoes, and on the way back I got lost and ended up wandering around a trashy neighborhood where the skaters left their gear.

Eventually I found the restaurant but by then it was dark and Jesse and the other friend had fallen asleep at the table. They were pissed and asked where I'd been all day. I was trying to understand how time could have gotten away from me so badly, and realized that my memory of where I'd been didn't match with the amount of time I'd supposedly been gone.

I came THIS close to figuring out that it was a dream and that was why time had gone all funny, but instead I blamed myself for sucking, apologized profusely, and we ordered ice cream since the kitchen was closed.

One Piece: Unlimited Adventure

Yeah bitches YEAH. I just kicked Whitebeard's powered-up ass and got Luffy's Pirate King cloak. UNF UNF UNF!

I beat the game weeks ago, but I'm still playing it to get all the items, costumes and themes for the 100% rating. Does that make me pathetic?

Roomies tell me UA is a lot like Warcraft in the run-around-and-gather-items department. Which means I owe all you WoW addicts an apology. I totally get it now.

And Unlimited Cruise Part 1 comes out this summer. I am in so much trouble.

I'm trying something new to fix my sleep disturbance. I'm going to enforce a bed time of 11 PM for the next month or two, and see if it establishes some kind of rhythm like the one normal people seem to have. I don't need bed-time to be set in stone, just hard enough to blow that I have to choose to do so and endure drowsiness as a consequence. The way I'm living now, I get a bad-ass case of jet lag that lasts for two days or more every time my schedule flips, and during that time I'm basically incapable of functioning. This happens at least once a month, so it's got to stop.

I had a dream this morning that I was watching my mom performing an autopsy on my younger sister in the bedroom. She was taking out the organs and inspecting them. My sister had died years ago and been placed in the freezer downstairs, and now she was thawed out and for some reason it was autopsy time. The bed was soaked with blood.

That freaked me out, so I went to school, and some kid got killed on the bus. The driver took a different route than we were used to, and when he stopped, there were police cars everywhere waiting to arrest us all.

I spent most of the rest of the dream in jail, and it was boring except for the part where I had to defuse a bomb in an endcap display case of cereal boxes, and ended up shorting it out with river water. People got pissed that their prison cereal was soggy and ruined, but they can suck my butt because I totally saved the day.

This morning I woke up to snow everywhere. It's melting now, but still coming down. I think I even saw an icicle on the bird feeder. Oh Minnesota. Land of emerald lawns and big honkin' snowmans.

I am on schedule for an update tonight and about to start shading.

Lucid Dreaming

This morning I hit this amazing state of lucid dreaming. A woman was telling me her story over images of a rugged cliff over a black sea. This is the part I can remember:

"I don't know what I was thinking. I put the necklace on in front of everyone. And now all of them, the old women, the young women, the dangerous women, they all know."

I could hear her voice. I was actually thinking "I'm dreaming, but I can hear her voice and she sounds like a real person talking." I knew I was lying in bed, with my eyes closed, and that if I moved, even just to get the pen and paper I keep under my pillow for just this occasion and make notes of what she was saying, I would lose it. So I kept mental notes on the important stuff, and occasionally reminded myself of it so I wouldn't forget when I woke up.

Along with the narration, there was visual footage of a woman turning into a giant white bird on the coast of that black sea, and running to hide out in an office building. There were hands opening up a storage box to find two cats inside, looking up at her. I got the impression that the cats were spies sent by the 'dangerous women.'

Right then I was like "This is all very fascinating, but if I can do this lucid thing, I better not waste it. Let's go over and see what Kano's got to say!"

Sure enough, we left the woman with the necklace that turns you into a bird, and there was Kano. He just stood there looking at his feet for a minute, and said "Um....uh...." and was about to start talking when the GOD DAMN DOG started scratching at the door and whining to be let out, and I woke up for good. RRR.

Still, the woman's story was good stuff. I might be able to use it somewhere.

Burn Baby Burn, Disco Inferno!

Another fucked up dream. This time people were trying to cremate my mom inside an apartment building, only the fire kept going out. Then it turned out other people had gone inside the building during the cremation. There were charred corpses everywhere. I was terrified to go back in with the job partly done, but I did and the half-skeletonized mess was unbelievable. I didn't want to see my mom like that but every body I stumbled across looked like it could be her.

Almost a year later and I'm still having disgusting dreams like this. I'll blame the most recent resurgence on the curious way winter alters the quality of my dreams, and leave it at that.

Jesse made me super-warm rainbow arm socks for Christmas! I will post pics as soon as I find a working camera or get mine going again.

My change jar is almost full again. I'm thinking I might get myself a nice expensive crystal or fossil specimen if there's enough in there. It seems kinda profligate, but the change jar is my annual splurge fund and all I want for Christmas is rocks anyway.