Friday, October 31, 2003

Well it's Halloween, and i feel like dancin', and i feel like shinin', and I fell like lettin' loose.

Why can't each day be like halloween?

I wanna fuck, i wanna fuck the dead.

I was working in the lab, late one night.

You were a vampire, and I was the walking dead.

I believe in halloween.

It ain't no sin to take off your skin, and dance around in your bones.

Love is kinda crazy with a spooky little girl like you.

I told the witch doctor i was in love with you.

Those fingers in my hair, that sly come-hither stare, that strips my conscience bare, It's witchcraft.

I put a spell on you, because you're mine.

Looks like we're in for nasty weather.

How would you like to be scared right out of your socks, whether or not you're wearing socks?

I was struck by lightning, walking down the street. I was stopped by something I spied in my sleep.

I saw the thing coming outa the sky, it had one big horn, and one big eye.

I swear they was spooks, spooks, spooks, spooks!.


No costume, no candy.

(this post brought to you by my favorite Halloween tunes. I dedicate my Halloween fun to the memory of Sheb Wooley this year. {no these aren't all from Sheb's songs})

Monday, October 27, 2003

I don't want to start off your week on a downer, But My Great Aunt Catherine passed away a few days ago. We weren't close, so i'm not devastated. I think the last time i saw her was at my Grandmother's (her sister's) funeral back in 1990. The weird thing is I was just wondering about her the week before, as i drove past her old house. This house is in a neighborhood that has become a run-down ghetto since the early 1980s, and her old block has had about five shooting deaths in the past year.

In the 1970s, I used to enjoy visiting there, where she lived with my great-Grandmother, but nowadays, (well a few months ago when i was working, that is) I hate having to go thru that neighborhood, let alone having to get out of my car, and say, deliver a Pizza.

I don't know how Aunt Catherine stayed there alone as long as she did after her Mother died. I think they put Catherine in a home in the early 1990s.

What stands more than just her passing is the milestone it creates. She was the last living member of My Grandparents' generation. I never knew any of my four grandfathers, they were all dead or in asylums before i was born. (for the complicated explanation of why i had four "grandmas", see the story in Unshaven CHI #4) So a link to family history is now closed to me. Those details about the side of the family that migrated west at the beginning of the 20th century, after a rift between brothers, and then lost touch with us, these detailss that neither my Dad or his brother Eddie are clear on, will now take painstaking research to recover, if that's at all possible.

...and my Parent's Generation is also dwindling. They're all past retirement, those that are still alive. Of my Mom's 11 siblings, only Sister Mary, and her brother Joe survive with her. Mom is 70, and has had Parkinson's Disease for over 12 years now, and I don't think she'll be around for five more years. My Dad's side of the family is longer lived. 3 of the 4 siblings are still around. Eddie is the oldest, and he's around 75. Susie must be about 62 now. Jimmy is the only dead one. He was the middle child, and the one that I'm most like, surprisingly.
Jimmy was a practical joker, and an avid hobbyist who always had a devilish grin on his face, and was always in the middle of assembling some new project. Jimmy got divorced from his wife when I was about five, and never dated again. He had a son, Scott, who left town with the ex-wife. Scott was a little less than a year older than me. I recently got in touch with Scott via e-mail, and it's a shame my limited contact with Jimmy was infinitely more than Scott ever had growing up. Jimmy moved in with my Grandmother after his divorce, and remained there until the mid-1980s, when one-day around his 50th Birthday, he went on walkabout. He just disappeared. At first, we thought it was just another Hunting Trip. A couple weeks after he left, the family got a call from State Troopers near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Jimmy's body had been found beside the Highway. Apparently he'd been walking, hitch-hiking, and had suffered a heart Attack. Maybe he knew it was his time to die.
I remember his funeral. The morticians had put that devilish grin on his face. I kept expecting Jimmy to pop up, and shout "I Gotcha!" maybe I wanted that to happen. I know I want to have my corpse animated like that at my funeral. I also want to videotape my own Eulogy.

Dad will soon be 68, and his recent hernia operation was the first time he'd been a patient in 35 years. But still, as I watched him in the recovery room, I noticed that he'd become old, and the skin near his IV needle was papery and wrinkled. I think caring for mom is really starting to age him. I'm just noticing that People in my Family are getting old. I'm on the young end of my genration, but i have cousins and even siblings that are starting to have Heart problems, cancers, Adult-Onset Diabetes, etc. It's why I've taken care to adjust my diet (Christian, That Double Cheesburger and Fries that had you worried the other day? That was the one Cheeseburger i allow myself per week), slim down, and get regular exercise. I think I'm much healthier at 40 than I was at 30. I might not be as sane, or as gainfully employed, but such are the side effects of a real Genius that resists conformity.


So, Rambling aside, People get Old. People Die. I'm a Healthy, but Insane, Genius. I'm like Jimmy. Expect me to go on walkabout in about ten more years. That will be just about after I finally get aroound to publishing my "One Last Ride on The Ghost Truck" graphic Novel, hich has been written now for about fifteen years, and has sat by my drawing board, with two pages finished, for about five years now.

Now, i have to get dressed, and go put in some Job Applications before i go to work at the Haunted House tonight. Pain in the ass. This week the Haunted Mill is open every night, no break. Now is when it starts to feel like work.

Monday, October 20, 2003

Monday, monday, monday. It's the start of My Weekend. It's Haunted MIller Time! (sorry for the bad pun. I've gotten in the habit of shouting that in my "Monster Voice" each evening as the last victims exit the Haunted Mill.)

The Boards at Slush are kinda dead. You can really tell that Chris R. is again gainfully employed as of Today.

I watched BASEketball again this morning. When this film came out, I was still on the comp list for MOJO records because of reviews I was writing for SKA-toons.
Ah, those were heady times, when i felt important because guys in Reel Big Fish and Cherry Poppin' Daddies knew my name. Now of course, I'm Nobody Famous, Dammit!

So anyway, i was watching this movie again, because it really does have as many funny, silly moments as Airplane!, and I noticed the song "Warts on my Dick".
I thought , that's a cool song, i ought to put it on my next mixtape. So i dug out my comp disc of the soundtrack, and that song isn't on it! Boogers! I guess i can still dub it off the VHS, but then I'll have all the SFX from the scene, too. That bites. way to start the day.

On a brighter note, I checked out Seattle Comics Great David Lasky's neat website this morning. He's got some strips up there i hadn't seen before, including several that ran in The Pulse. I hope he soon ads a shopping cart system to buy his cool mini-comics, so that he doesn't have to rely on ebay.

I've been using ebay to sell my minis and other stuff recently, too, in fact this past week was pretty good for a change. I guess i had the right "other stuff" up. I mean , I only sold a few of my minis. (I guess I have to get showered so I can get the weekend's purchases out to the Post Office this Afternoon. ) I have set up a store front at my "I'm Nobody Famous, Dammit!" website, thru which you can easily acquire all the minis I have in print. With Paypal, you can easily pay with a credit card, or transfer funds from a checking account safely. If you don't have a PayPal account, sign up is easy and free at the checkout. Or you could simply e-mail me with a list of books you want, and i can arrange for you to mail payment.
here's my store link: http://www.geocities.com/bent4toons/store.html

Seeing Dave Lasky's site makes me really want to re-design my site. Maybe that's how I'll spend my days off.

Friday, October 17, 2003

If you've always been suspicious of the misleading charms of Game Show Hosts, then trip on over to Something Awful - The Internet Makes You Stupid ad check out the log for today (Oct 17). The "Truth" about Wink Martindale. It will astound you.

This is the most amazing news I've read since i learned the truth about Chuck Woolery. How he took his name from the place where he used to do such horrible things to sheep as they were sheared.

Thursday, October 16, 2003

I thought I'd start using this blog as a place to jot down story ideas as I get them. Then maybe i won't forget them, and also maybe my couple or so readers can provide helpful feedback before I commit the idea to Bristol Board.

------------------------------the hurricane book idea-----------------------
I was thinking the other day about a story, where a guy in a bar watches as a girl approaches, flirts and eventually rejects him, leaving him emotionally devastated and getting "trashed" at the bar. The narrative would be like an interior monologue describing the action in Hurricane metaphor. "I feel a swell as she approaches" "These bands should forewarn me" "I'm caught in her eye, all seems unnaturally calm" etc.
Maybe the band could have a Goth following, and I could talk about "The Gathering Gloom".
My design for the cover would resemble a set of Hurricane flags, those red and black rectangles. Maybe I could make the book as tall as two flags, and cut the first half of the book horizontally, so that the two flags open independently of one another, and there's a "top story" and a "bottom story" in the first half, then the second half could be a third story that uses the whole height of the page.
i have an interesting auto-bio bar-crawl tale involving the drink "hurricane" i could use, too.
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Title Idea: "Skeletons In The Closet" This could be about anorexic fashion models, or it could be about Gay Skeletons. I wonder which would work better.

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I want to do a NASCAR mini-comic. it would be page after page of Calvin pissing on characters from other people's mini-comics.

Here's a site where you can order Custom Calvin Window Stickers.


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"Animal Magnetism" is my working title for this funny-animal project idea i have. It would be a comic strip in the vein of those refrigerator magnet poetry kits.

each individual panel and word balloon would be attached to a magnet, so that the reader can rearrange them to make up dozens of posible stories. I'd have to take care to design key panels whose lines could represent several different things. Word balloons would be designed to have multiple meanings depending on the situation.
"MMM. I Like Pie" or "Oh no! I'm Late!" could be taken many different ways, for example.

My ultimate goal for the project would be to sell starter kits, and then every six months or so produce a booster pack of new panels and balloons.

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I want to do a story about a Sock that's lost its mate in the dryer. The sock is lonely, and despondent, and considering unraveling itself, until a child finds it in the gutter, takes it home, washes it (we can explore the sock's fear of the dryer here), and hangs it by her fireplace to dry. This is when we learn that it's Christmas Eve, and Santa fills the sock with goodies. The sock is now happy because he has a reason to go on living.

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"Frustrated Genius Syndrome for Dummies"
I want to do a story about how I grew up with everybody marveling at how smart i was, and how far I'd go in life, yet at 40, I can't even keep a job as a pizza-boy. I would explain my anger at the stupidity of the world around me, how hard it is to live when you constantly feel intellectually superior to others you are stuck amidst. How I would be an Evil Genius if I could just get a handle on the whole "Evil" thing. How i blame my parents, who didn't manage to make any religion stick in me, but who did teach me right from wrong. Hence I'm just a frustrated, smart nice guy who can't stand being a nice guy. I want to be mean, and cool.

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Then one of these days I'm going to draw up my bio-piece about Screamin' Jay Hawkins that I meant to do for the Expo Anthology a couple years ago. I even collected about forty pages of notes about his interesting life. But then i couldn't think of a way to fit all the info into a good four to eight-page story in time for their deadline.
There's a lot of cool info about Jay at Screamin' Jay Hawkins (Ugu-Ugu!)
There used to be a site called Jayskids.com which had info about the 57 known children, both legitimate, and illegitimate, of the man. (He's rumored to have more than 80 kids.) but my link to that site doesn't work anymore.



Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Chris R., from NYC, is bugging me to update this thing. I wish he'd just get a dayjob, so I didn't have to entertain him all day. Jeez! I gave him a copy of my Howl-O-Ween tape, you'd think that would give him something else to do for at least 90 minutes of the day.
While I've been gone, I've been working to set up a mini-comics store with a shopping cart system. I got that done today, here's the link; A List of Current Comics by BenT
Please go there often, and with PayPal you can order my comics and pay with a credit card or have the funds directly transferred safely from a Bank Account. If you're not a Paypal member, you can sign up for free during the checkout process.


Another thing I've been doing with my time is "working" (actually it's volunteer work) at The Haunted Mill about 11 miles to the SW of York, in the little village of Menges Mills, PA. The Mill is an authentic 263-year-old building full of fright. I'm haunting the basement, in a sort of Cannibal/Shrunken Head get-up. So far I've made 5 people pee their pants, and about half of the people jump back a few feet when i get them.

Since I've been away, I'll give you another Top 10 list. Here are the:

Top Ten Pre-War Rumors that The Kree spread to build resentment toward the Skrulls
10) Jerry Lewis is a Skrull.
9) Skrull Real Estate agents are making the best buildings on Kree-Lar go "Condo".
8) Those Costumed Characters at Disney World? --all Skrulls.
7) Skrull cows make milk that turns into Tofu cheese.
6) Joey Buttafuoco? Larry King? J-Lo? ---Skrulls.
5) The Browns moved to Baltimore so that Skrulls could hide ships in empty stadium.
4) Skrulls are never denied service at Denny's.
3) Skrulls invented Reality Television.
2) Bill Jemas, Jim Shooter, Rob Liefeld, Ron Perlman? Skrull, Skrull, Idiot, Skrull.
1) Blizzard of 2003 was really an invasion force of billions of Tiny White Skrulls!


Okay I'm out of here for now!