Had a good Thanksgiving, did you? Good. So did I. I ate a bunch of turkey AND ham AND potatoes and even had a bunch of cheap homemade wine, the same batch that did me in several months ago at my cousin's wedding. Plus the Packers won, so there's that.

ZILLIONS OF YEARS AGO, before the invention of ham, dinosaurs roamed the Earth-planet Terra Prime, back when the world was even more savage and cruel and everyone got eaten on a regular basis. EXCEPT for the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex, who was the biological equivalent of a battletank covered in Harleys which also were covered with guns. Badass to a degree rarely seen except the occasional shark attack. This was a creature so kickass that it could cause its prey to literally debone themselves by crapping out their skeletons in terror just to save the T-Rex the trouble of having to digest femurs.

Flash forward millions of years to your dinner table. The kids are running around screaming like idiots, your auntie is fussing over the stuffing but no one cares because there's not enough silverware and WHO was in charge of bringing dessert? and your fat uncle Randy is on his fourth whiskey sour watching the football game while making a dangerously racist comment about wide receivers. Meanwhile, on the table is a turkey...THE DESCENDANT OF THE MIGHTY TYRANNOSAURUS*. A plump, delicious, dumb creature that's hardly even a shadow of its mind-blowingly awesome ancestors, dressed up and served to yourself and your squealing, pitifully mediocre human family, who probably bought it out of the freezer aisle at the supermarket and didn't even hunt and/or kill it themselves...and yet STILL probably made a huge, retarded deal about preparing and cooking the damn thing even though the job of catching, killing, plucking, and beheading the fresh carcass was long done with.

THAT is what the world is, man. Greatness reduced to a joke. So give thanks, appreciate what you have, because in one million years your descendants will be a holiday dinner fixture, and the great bloody circle of life will roll on...

Anyway, enough grimness. Me, I've been bettering myself lately, by which i mean taking classes, specifically, bartending classes. The purpose of this is twofold: First, by taking actual classes, I meet, learn, and work with people who are neither family or friends, in an effort to combat my increasingly crippling fear of socializing. This is kind of like fighting my fear of hairy spiders by drowning myself in tarantulas, but I'm still alive. (so far). Second, I really need some extra cash from a moonlight job, and i'm sick of wasting time and paper on applications at bars and restaurants that don't even look twice at what I've written before hiring someone who's either a friend of the manager or who's had 5 minutes worth of prior experience. I figure i might not go on to legendary things, but arming myself with official certification ought to at least give me some semblance of an advantage. And anyway, i guess this has been a long time in the coming, since i'm sort of enthusiastic about booze.

Beyond that, i'm still getting used to the feeling of a single-dog home. I appreciate all the nice responses to my last journal entry, by the way. It's been a couple weeks now and I sure do miss my dog, but it all rolls on, and in the meantime, i do have another much smaller dog to spoil.

So, happy late thanksgiving, stateside, now get back to work or it's the BELT for you.

ja, mata


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*take your actual science and get stuffed, fool!

EDIT: I wanted to note how touched I was by the many, many condolences and stories and commiseration shared with this entry, as well as how amazed i was and am by it all. It really made my day a bit easier and parting with my friend less painful.
A few years ago my family experienced sudden and tragic human loss around this same time of year. As time goes by the immediacy of your despair can dull and happier memories tend to become more potent, but even with the passage of time loss will stick with you. Still, I'm comforted to know that there IS a certain measure of relief that can set in, though pain might never truly be erased.

Throughout this drama I think I've neglected to mention Sophie, the smaller of my pair of dogs. (Yeah, yeah, i'm sure you're all craving to hear about my pets) Sophie was the sidekick, the miniature schnauzer who couldn't help but be overshadowed by a big, lovable chocolate labrador retriever. She and Ginger were pups in our house together, and grew up in a state of companionship and mutual one-upsmanship.
Now that Ginger's gone, the usually unsinkable Sophie reminds me of a little kid who arrived at the playground when all the other kids have gone home for dinner. She keeps looking for someone she's not going to find, and has the sad listlessness of a person who simultaneously knows the truth of the situation but expects it to change at any moment.
The situation is, to me, a reminder that some things really are irreplaceable, but at the same time, myself and my remaining dog are still around and I sure as hell am not going to turn my back on her. Life is for the alive, after all, right?

Anyway, thank you very much again for the sea of reading material in the form of comments, it made a tough situation a little easier.
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A couple times in my journal I've mentioned my dog Ginger and her struggles with health issues. even made a little picture of her to cheer me up, once: [link]

One thing about pets that I thought of today: they're a lot like dreams. They mean a lot to you, personally, but other people's care or understanding of them only goes so deep. It varies from person to person but, for the most part, your pet is dearest to you only. And when it comes to loss it can feel trivial in a larger sense, but to yourself it can feel unbearable.

I buried Ginger today. I'd been ready for it, or thought i was, for several months of ups and downs and miracle comebacks from cancer and strokes. I had thought that so many close calls would have given me a bit of tolerance for when the day finally came that she wouldn't be with me anymore. I was really, really wrong about that.

I'd decided a long time ago that I'd be with her until the very end, and if that end meant going to the vet's office and ending her pain, so be it. But when the last of her life went out of her and it was well and truly over, I fell apart completely. All the stuff I thought I'd come to grips with, or the pain I tried to preempt in the preceding weeks...the door closed, and I realized I'd never see her face again except in pictures, that she'd never bug me for anything anymore, that i wouldn't have to worry over her anymore or give her a hug...after all was said and done and my dog was dead, there was nothing left to do and every part of me went to pieces.

There's nothing you can say about the dead, animal or human, or the loss of their company that hasn't been said a million times over before. On a beautiful November day i lost my best friend, and there aren't any words that can dull the reality of how much i miss her.

I swear i'll be more comicky in the near future, i just need to grieve a bit.

At risk of continuing to turn my dA journal into some sociopolitical blog (neatly tucked in next to comics of horny pets) a friend linked this story via his twitter feed that I had some thoughts about: [link]

It seems that, socially, we're living at a time where how we express ourselves is being shepherded towards the gray area between black and white, and I'm honestly not sure whether that's good or bad. Hate speech, whether racially, sexually, or ethnically motivated, is attacked to the point of hypersensitivity, ostensibly in the service of promoting unity regardless of what certain individuals may deem to be right. Additionally, expressing certain points of view that don't promote hate but instead profess an individual's beliefs is also reined in, while at the same time we allegedly embrace all worldviews, so long as you don't wear them on your sleeve. So, in a sense, you're free and even encouraged to express yourself, so long as you express yourself within certain channels and within the boundaries of respect to others. To quote one of my favorite black and white short films: "You're free to be yourself. Just be sure it's your best self."

That being said, this particular story, I think, isn't necessarily as complicated as the people within it are making it out to be. If Home Depot, a private business, has a blanket policy that only company-provided pins and badges may be worn on employee aprons, then the issue is not whether or not the employee who was fired was fired because he was wearing a pin that said "One nation under God", but that he was fired for not wearing company-approved flare. On top of this, he was offered an alternative badge with a similar message, but refused, meaning he was given an alternative that did not necessarily run contrary to the message he was promoting, and did not value his job enough to take what I think is a very fair compromise. Finally, his argument:

"I've worn it for well over a year and I support my country and God," Trevor Keezor said Tuesday. "I was just doing what I think every American should do, just love my country."

Everyone does this at some point. "I was just being perfectly reasonable, and then THEY went and..." This is shifting the argument away from the central point. If your job forbade certain types of dress or emblems, and in defiance of this policy you continued to wear whatever you chose to work, the letter of the law is not on your side. You can make this about religious discrimination or your own patriotism, but that's beside the point. There are rules, and some rules aren't in place to rob you of your freedom or suppress your beliefs. If you wore on your apron a pin you got at a rock concert that said "NICKLEBACK ROCKS" and your manager asked you to take it off, and offered you a company-approved pin that said "Our prices are rockin", is your belief that Nickleback rocks so strong that this is no longer a matter of saving your job over a petty piece of flare, but an oppressive policy that is out to crush your beliefs?
And it's likely that individuals within the religious community will stand behind this young man based upon his faith and patriotism. I can't speak for every angle in this case or what the complete circumstances particular to the story are, having only read the article, but on paper it looks fairly cut and dried. If a company backs down in this matter, there's potential for even more gray-area headaches and arguments about what's deemed appropriate. I think they're doing right by standing by their policy.
God, I feel like a pain-in-the-ass radio talk show host. I guess i just feel like checking in now and again to make sure i understand just a little bit about how this stupid world works.
And now, taking you to the top of the hour, here's Chuck with the weather...
"Thanks, Van, gray skies today with possible showers later on this evening, tapering into another dark, starless night, and for the rest of the week we're looking at gray, gray skies and pervasive dampness that's pretty much going to soak right through your skin until the very fibers of your soul start to decay, and by this weekend expect high rates of suicide and maybe some mild to moderate arson as people begin to crave the brightness of flames as they consume the drab, accursed world around them. And oh yes, bundle up next week, as the icy hand of winter will soon be upon us, and for some of our listeners it's already here, so you'll want to brace yourself for another deadening, relentlessly bleak winter where we all take stock in our dreary, dreary lives. I'm Chuck with the Newstalk Team 4 weather, it's 12:30, back to you, Van!"


ja, mata

I can't imagine trick or treating as being much fun anymore. You jerkoffs who packed apples with razorblades and needles or pervs who lurked in the shadows waiting for children to walk by have really killed Halloween. I've got a place in Hell reserved for the likes of you, and rest assured I'm working intimately with several high-ranking demons who are experts in making sure you don't get some perverse masochistic joy out of it.

Nowadays, kids trick or treat by the light of day, which is about as exciting as delivering a newspaper, and 99% of the time you'll probably get a candy bar the size of a small ice cube, or worse, something healthy given to you by some adult who never knew how depressing it was as a kid to go in expecting candy and getting a damned APPLE. That's about as bad as going to a church get-together that promises pizza and then spending 45 minutes memorizing Bible verses.

As I lurch inexorably towards old mandom, I find more and more kinship with the old fogies who always said that kids today are soft and weak. Halloween trick or treating under a blazing afternoon sun is nothing compared to the ways we declaw the world for kids. I remember heated snowball fights at recess getting kiboshed because of the potential danger, the school principal and secretary admonishing us as if we didn't know iceballs hurt. Of COURSE we knew they hurt, that's what made it fun. Then later on at home, my dad grimacing and bemoaning how snowball fights had become taboo. Why, when HE was a kid...

Safety for kids is important. If you have half a brain you tell them the dangers of the world and the risks, that potentially hurting yourselves and others is bad, etc etc. And no adult wants their child to become a statistic or a grisly news headline, but that's going to happen no matter how many plastic playgrounds you erect or how many games of tackle football or tag you disrupt. Kids are going to fight, dare each other to do something stupid, make fun of others for being different, memorize gross limericks, and on and on. Life as a kid is lab-testing for life as an adult, and you learn through experience, not through a bunch of grownups forbidding or lecturing you. I was told time and again as a kid that making fun of a certain few classmates was wrong and hurtful, that riding a rickety wagon down dangerous slopes would break my neck. If that was sufficient enough to keep us out of harm's way, then every kid in the world would just sit at home in front of the TV or at best play touch football at half-speed with their disinterested friends.

I don't know much about Halloween for kids these days, anyway. Maybe it's all kinds of fun for them still. I can't imagine getting any thrill out of the neighbors' awesome spooky decorative display while the sun is still shining or jack o' lanterns that aren't even lit (if they've been carved at all). Are there still Halloween parties where you get together with friends and watch scary movies and play games that simulate severed body parts? Are acts of petty, mischievous vandalism still performed? Can people still lie in wait just off the front porch, dressed as a scarecrow, and then scare the living bajeezus out of kids as they approach, looking for candy? Or are kids just led around, dressed as some cartoon character i've never heard of, directed towards doors, and coaxed into muttering a half-assed "Trick or treat..."

Scary.

ja, mata

The Devil's Holiday approaches. Sharpen your sacrificial daggers for the slaughter, polish your chalices from which the blood of the innocent shall be sipped like wine. Or buy lots of candy and carve your pumpkins, I'm not choosy.

Some years ago, I made a comic about vampires. Well, A vampire, singular. It was pretty awful. It had bandit gangs, post-apocalyptic wastelands, and was painful to read even as I was working on it. But I had to finish it since me and some colleagues were self-publishing an anthology. That's very rough, forcing yourself to finish something you really, really don't have the heart for anymore.

But you know, vampires aren't even all that catchy anymore, for me at least. This is unfortunate, because on paper, they're a sweet idea for a mythological creature. And there's so many ways to render the damned things. The problem is that most of these ways have been flogged into the dust. Kind of like stories about undead apocalypses. What should be a neat idea somehow gets the ClearChannel treatment and just gets redundant and annoying. Okay, gritty survivors of undead plague band together to survive, horror/comedy/moral crises ensue, overarching theme of hopelessness and human determination against all odds...damn, i guess ambulatory rotting corpses aren't even all that spooky anymore, are they?

So it is with vampires. They've been such a fascination that they've been essentially defanged (hurr, funny). Hell's bells, teenage girls are apparently nuts over SPARKLY VAMPIRES. How do you come back from the edge of THAT abyss? We've come a long way from Nosferatu, brother. Even Bela Lugosi looks like a rugged stud of a bloodsucker next to vampires who look like they'd get shoved into lockers and pantsed by anyone wearing a jersey.

What counts for scary nowadays? Or, failing that, what amounts to something that's fascinating only because it's such a fearsome entity? I watched the first couple Saw movies for the first time the other night, and I'm not saying I expected the bejeezus to be scared out of me, but i'd say there's nothing in those films that I couldn't get out of an advanced medical textbook, and a textbook would be more freaky because it's real incidents. Torture porn is a pretty cheap shortcut to real fearcrafting, I'd say. All you have to do is dim the lights and think of ways in which to cut open or dismember people. It's "scary", but in a way more closely related to "damn, i cut my finger" rather than "the very fibers of my humanity are fraying in the winds of madness".

Where the hell was i going with this...oh yeah, vampires. Yeah, i'd love to do a vampire story someday, but it feels like it'd be an unnecessarily daunting uphill battle just to rise above the fray. There's still quality vampire stuff out there, i suppose. "Let the Right One In" qualifies as a fairly chilling concept. But then you have stuff like "Twilight" which I will condemn sight unseen, similar to the way I'd condemn any dish containing cottage cheese, simply because the ingredients are too awful to possibly have any redeeming value. (Apologies if you're a fan of Twilight or cottage cheese.) I'd love to do a scary story at all someday, but I'm damned if I can think of something scary. Maybe absurdist-scariness is the way to go. Meh. I have enough on my plate without trying to grab onto more ideas.

Afterthought: old black and white horror movies are still awesome. Maybe not always spooky, but something about fuzzy audio and deep blacks...phew...shivers, man.

ja, mata