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.

AFK! Con season

Wish me luck! I'm off to North Carolina for Animazement, and then to Texas for A-Kon the following weekend.

I've never driven 1000 miles on my own before, so I'm a little bit nervous. But I've filled my iPod with about 26 gigs of good, solid road-trippin' music (a deliciously butt-rocky melange of Rush, Grand Funk Railroad, Tupac, Jackson Browne, Jay-Z, Tom Petty and Bonnie Pink, to name a few) and fully intend to have a slamming good time.

This morning I woke up from another of my corpse-in-the-water dreams. This time I was working at a meat packing plant, and whenever I looked out the window there was this nude, mutilated human corpse half-submerged in the shallow bend of the river.

The story around the plant was that the corpse had been a tranny who surprised the wrong boyfriend and was murdered and dumped in the water. Everyone in town knew about what had happened, but nobody seemed to care about cleaning it up or calling the police. So there it stayed, putrefying and growing steadily more horrifying with every passing week. It was lying belly-up, and the face was the worst thing I ever saw.

People mostly didn't even notice it anymore. I was the only one who thought it was still worth discussing. I very deliberately turned my attention elsewhere every time I walked past the place where the body was, I could still see the shape out of the corner of my eye and smell the stink no matter how hard I tried not to.

Then there was an incredible wind-storm, and the next day the body was gone. I woke up still worrying about where it might have fetched up, and vowing I'd never swim in that river again.

In July I will be celebrating the 14th anniversary of this recurring dream. Such a momentous occasion!

Should I bake a cake? Stay awake? Swim in a lake?

Anyway.

I'll end this post on a slightly less grotesque note. Here's the spiel I've crossposted everywhere else people check for comic updates:


Kagerou will be back on the 9th of June. While we're gone, don't forget to check out the ongoing raffle for a chance to appear and die in the comic!