…so my wife is gonna hate me

its a down economy you know.

so to do his part, the bastard makes lunch.

and he does it well.

so well that the wife's boss wants me to hook her up with a sammich.

but it's like this.

I also do the grocery shopping as well.

and normally, I'm a by the numbers kinda guy.

but with a hurricane (read: late summer sprinkle) coming last weekend, I went a little off mission.

bought some ribs.

bought a pack of bacon.

and we made the whole pack on Sunday to celebrate NOT dying in a flood (read: HAH) with the notion that whatever bacon we don't eat we'll "save".

this is not currently happening.

OK SIDEBAR: this is how he bastard throws down a sammich. straight up on the economical tip. what you do is buy a bag of trader joes ciabatta rolls because it's the most rolls you get for the money (8). I get a bag of pre cooked chicken breast from the self same store (because it's easy when you shop for everything at the same place).


I buy some cheese for filler. I used to get lo fat Swiss but the bastard is currently not in the business of giving a shit these days (read: DEMONS) so I've been getting pepper jack for me and fooling the wife with the lo fat Swiss (did you catch the name of the blog?).


lately I've gotten my hands on some barbecue sauce and that has been the spread of choice (side note: the wife gets pesto).


now what I do is rely on the toaster ovens in the mystery science kitchen area as they have the best toaster ovens in all the land. and I toast that bitch up.

there it is.

ANYWAY: The bacon. I have been feeding it into the sammich recipe this week. there will be no bacon leftover. and I will have some splainin to do Lucy when she finds out. but I can live with that. because… you know… bacon.

oh look. there is a glass of whiskey beside me. BAI!

—the bastard

…cycle

that was twice.

twice tonight that two different illustrators have made light of the fact that the bastard is up at midnight.

answering email.

trying to get shit done.

you sir are a workaholic a new guy called me.

I've already convinced the other seasoned pro that I never sleep.

don't get me wrong.

I do after I get shit done.

and wait out the voices.

but you see,

I've become a victim of circumstances.

a self fulfilled prophecy.

a man with post traumatic stress disorder.

a goddam idiot too.

I let the toddler get to me when he tried to do me in.

it has me up at night.

like how Sunday nights kept me up at night a log time ago.

I've told me new boss about my circumstances and he says 'it's in the past mate'

but it ain't.

it's with me everyday and I can't let it go.

and I know for shy sure that it's not healthy.

doesn't make it go away anymore.

every night, I live the last 12 months over and over again and all I can do to drown it out is work.

then go home and work some more.

and relive it again and again and again.

stupid old man. stupid lucky old man.

my brother comes tomorrow and I feel relieved to have a break from my mental problems.

my only regret is that I can't stay out til 6am to exorcise these demons that come to me on my balcony every night to tell me I'm fired.

stupid fucking demons. please don't come to the gun show. I don't have it in me to hold it together around you. I may have to punch you in the face.

—the bastard

assertions…

as defined by wikipedia, 'gunpla' can be best described as 'the practice of building Gundam models, rather than the models themselves.'

this is what the bastard foes with his spare time.

I'm sure if people hung around with me, my hobby would be hanging around with people.

but people don't hang around me so I build robots and hang around them.

in my last place, I had no room for the robots and even less so when we were selling the apartment.

you know because people get frightened when they go apartment hunting and find otaku in the place.

it just stinks up the joint.

lately the wife allotted me some space for my gunpla so I've been mucking about building some models.

I started one before we moved out and finished it tonight. he's a companion piece to one I had built a year ago in my office.

what?!? I wanted to unwind during my lunch hour.

anyway, I realize that could never properly display any large number of my collection as they number in the over 75 category and are in various states of repair.

I may do a rotating exhibition given the chance but until that day arrives the bastard is content to use the space allotted for whatever.




besides, I have a new one to start on whenever I get started on it.

not to mention whatever I'll inevitably pick up at comic con this year.

shit. I have to find my flip camera for that.


—the bastard

the new way

it's been awful rough of late.

just the planning aspects here go a little pear shaped more often and the bastard finds himself doubling his efforts.

and when he is at the beck and call of others domestically speaking, he brings work home with him.

which has been a great time saver this time around.

but yesterday afternoon

after running pretty hard on all 8 for weeks

I finished what I was doing.

and it made me extremely uncomfortable.

and after what can be only described as me trying to crawl out of my own skin for five minutes, I walked over to a coworker to ask her if there was anything I could pick up.

after which the storm began anew and I became comfortable again in a busy world.

and now I'm taking a day off which may very well feel like 24 hours of me trying to climb out of my own skin.

—the bastard

premise beach…

so the bastard had a thought about the week's repast

I gained a good deal of insight into how a certain contest in my industry works by being on a judging panel for it.

it gave me tremendous insight into what we are doing right

and what we are doing wrong.

but no one in the office seemed all that interested in hearing about it.

so I think I might just keep this to myself.

you see, I've already received my reward for my hard work.

so why push it.

—the bastard

judge not…

… lest ye be judged.

the bastard spent all day in a conference room

with his editorial peers for lack of a better turn of phrase.

judging what will for one category be

the best magazine in said category.

and I've discovered one thing that I could never share with my evil ant overlords.

in many ways, we're all doing it wrong.

not in ALL ways but, some.

and it was frikkin illuminating.

just file it in the book that I'll write one day about my time here.

I wish I started sooner so I could remember all that I forgot.

—the bastard

crack in the armor

so we're finally taking the plunge.

looking for a new place in earnest.

and today couldn't have been a worse house hunting day.

the lic wasn't wearing it's best face.

and the open houses were wack.

I hope shit works out. or perhaps it's gonna be Brooklyn where the bastard lays his head for the next 10 years.

work with me queens.

—the bastard

…lowbrow

you know,

it used to be the interesting work that gets the bastard out of bed in the morning.

then it was the people.

but sometimes it's the swag.

and in this case, the most inneresting variety.

or




has the bastard ever told you about the time he found out exactly how lowbrow his tastes in fact are.

you see, the powers that be decided to have a bourbon tasting for killing stuff

because the people like they whiskey.

it ain't all budweiser out their in the field my son.

but this was a blind taste test.

9 whiskeys

8 bourbons (not all cheap ones either) and a Mickey slipped in to fuck with the cross section.

oddly enough, the bastard chose the Mickey. which was jack Daniels oddly enough.

which calls either my tastes to the carpet or it calls the nature of trying 9 different whiskies in one sittings and trying to be able to discern what is what by your fourth taste.

I think it's a little of column A and a little bit of column B.

but in retrospect, it's what I got out of bed yesterday morning.

come on,

you can't have the love every day

—the bastard

…on tunnel vision

so many dead trees.

so little time.

I think the bastard ceded defeat to his wife on two or three separate disagreements when I got home because I just couldn't care.

all I see are pages and pages and pages.

it took me 40 minutes to believe I was home eating carne asada and not my one flesh as I gnawed it off of my leg trying to break free from an imagined shackle attached to my desk.

and I'm not even halfway there.

I'm not even in the goddam tunnel at this point.

—the bastard

hey professor…

…how many bottles of seltzer does it take to fill a 45 gallon fish tank?

well young jerkface, it takes a bunch of bites of seltzer to fill a 45 gallon tank.

you see this is what it takes to deliver a concept from start to finish.

we talk about submersing a bunch of water filters into a tank in order to have a snazzy photo for our water filter test.

we draw it out.

and then we buy a fuck ton of seltzer.

the things we do for art.

—the bastard

…on basement lighting

I was tagged in a post on the book of face this afternoon by my colleague from art school.

I don't talk about art school as much anymore because when I do, people looked bored.

people i talk to at parties like to hrar about magazines and deer meat and how great it is to barely art direct killing stuff monthly.

no one gives a good god damn about sfumato,

or about arabesque,

or pendentives.

nah. no one gives a shit about how this painting was very indicative of the fall of man.

no one wants to hear about basement lighting and about Caravaggio.

but Leo did.

Leo was a broken man. born in the wrong time. hated art majors who came to class and a used tule at will.

you see Leo failed as a painter in his youth.

because no one gave a shit about sfumato in a time when Warhol was painting soup cans.

so he didn't teach so much as he seethed at you,

you young fucker.

you don't know shit.

and I'm going to make you know about it.

but once, for a week during the semester, he changed his tone, to speak about Caravaggio.

and during this segment of the course,  this angry man lit up in a way I never saw an educator come to life about a subject in 16 years of being in the educational system.

it changed me forever.

because he loved Caravaggio so much.

Leo is dead now so, I never got to thank him for bringing some light into the basement of my soul.

I miss talking about art school.

—the bastard

…the white ogre

the bastard actually started working on the ogre a few weeks ago after my bout with the 1/144 real grade.

aside from putting the hands together, this won't be too too hard to build.

however it's the paint job that'll be the challenge.

but the bastard is confident that between a screw, a candle, and a bachelors in fine art, he can figure out how to make this thing look like it's been though the ringer.

—the bastard

…on experiments

you know,

if just ain't a holiday weekend unless the bastard drives all the way up from south jersey,

to drive my car to the garage in queens,

to take the subway to Williamsburg to dine with the chairman.

sometimes it's just a thing.

how can you make the most of your city's resources to get somewhere?

so armed with google maps, I look into how to get to the Brooklyn man cave via mas transit while I walk towards it.

and it tells me that the train arrives at 4:55

and surprisingly, it does.

well god DAM e-train.

look at you.

I may still have time to buy Italian bread and beer.

whoda thunk.

—the bastard

...on otakuology part two

...oldies but goodies.


this isn't the first model i ever built.

the first one i ever built was the title character of the mobile suit gundam series.

and he looked like this.

only dirty and covered with sawdust because i worked in my parents unfinished basement on models when i was a boy.

i used some old assed testors paint which went on like spackle but, it was what i could afford on a junior high school kid's salary.

and it was before i found a store in my neighborhood that carried better paints.

the unfortunate thing with gundam was this. it was my first piece and i had never put anything together but WW II airplanes (my brother and my dad worked on this b-29 in the living room and i helped by, gluing the propellors on wrong) and i globbed the paint on,

and got my fingerprints all over it,

and glue,

and crap.

so it never looked good but, i loved it and played all the time with it. because it was a robot too and that was cool when i was 11. when i was older, i tried to fix the paint on it but using thinner and it destroyrd the plastic. and i was sad about it. but i was a teenager by then so, i wasn't that sad about it.

i think that when you're older, you lament lost things from your past more than you did at the time of loss because it is only when you're older that you realize the permanence of things lost. like innocence, you'll never get it back.

and that stings.

later on during junior high, ray and i would order from a place in massachusetts called the cosmic connection, which is long gone.

and

ray and i ordered this 1/144 of full armor gundam, which didn't appear in TOS. it was more of a suit from a manga side story.

SIDEBAR: mobile suit gundam has been putting out manga about the tv shows mythos as long as they have been putting together tv series. in fact unicorn gundam which will be airing in 6 episodes over the next year or came from manga. what is manga you ask? boy, did you come to the wrong place shiteyes.

anyway, cosmic was carrying this suit and ray and i bought two. it was kind of like book of the month club, with robots. that said, it's the earliest living example of stuff i did. i have older kits that i did later. some of which are 30 years old but, i didn't buy them until later on in life.

i wonder if aside from enriching my time on this ball, if this crap does nothing more than collect dust. most of them have collect cigarette tar as well. it's a dirty business

—the bastard

trudge...

the bastard was late to getting home last night.

spent a good bit of time down by the mystery science offices.

chatting about the nature of the future.

the bastard has these kinds of conversations with people.

you see my friend stuff, he has plans.

and he has skills.

i told him yesterday as he was playing loops in garage band that watching him work is like watching circ de soleil

"howso?", he says

"well everytime i watch circ de soleil i feel like a fat load because, really no one can do what they do. seeing what you do in your spare time makes me feel like i'm not doing enough with my spare time."

he had laughed and followed up on how this is something he's been doing on the clock.


and it hit me that since running out of the devil's work, i haven't been very productive with my spare time. hell, i spent my lunch hour watching two episodes of bullshit and downloading an anime called nausicaa.

we're shipping killing stuff and the bullet book is way ahead of schedule for planning reasons.

i'm just not using my time wisely.

time for some thinking. not the boring kind of thinking. the interesting kind.

yeah, good luck with that.

—the bastard

worried man blues

you know, the bastard had never done this before.

you know,

hired someone before.

this is gonna be interesting

-the bastard