All Hail the Mouse King!

An icon of the Lord Mouse King riding in gallantly on his noble steed, the overburdened german cockroach. 

     Amongst the things keeping me from sleeping like a normal human being have been an army of mice slowly scratching and slithering their ways through the pastel painted basement apartment walls. We've successfully trapped and taken two mice out of the apartment, but we keep spotting more. Perhaps the original two have made their way back, as apparently mice tend to do, like little disease carrying puppies, or perhaps the fresh wall debris on the bathroom floor underneath a new, messily gnawed hole indicates a new portal for new unwanted friends. Or, just perhaps, my roommate is a Mouse King- a mythical person that is to mice what a queen ant is to its colony, permanently pregnant and dropping loiters of squishy pink vermin unknowingly as he sleeps. For whatever reason, I've taken to the latter theory. LONG LIVE MOUSE KING!

Over the rainbow

Took a long time since I've been pretty busy lately, but here's turkey jobs colored in. Was going for comic-book style coloring, not sure what it is I actually got. I've never been able to do two pieces that look the same. Guess I really haven't hit anything style wise I've liked enough to pursue whenever I sit down to draw...

Gobble gobble.

This is fowl word play.

I'm a gross follower and really want an ipad so that I can work on digital pieces somewhere other than this dark art cave.

Apparently this is what Steve Jobs does these days. Witnesses report seeing him wandering from PC user to PC user in the dead of night, showing up at the foot of their bed and whispering "one of us...one of us...gobble gobble... one of us..." On a more technical note, I had no idea turkeys had so many different types of feathers. Complicated little de-evolved dinosaur!

Running up the Ice

   
     Seems that more often than not my head is several years in the future ahead of the rest of me. That at least has been the case this summer, and its been as problematic as it might sound. Its difficult navigating your way around the moment when you don't have your head and its many useful bells and whistles there to help out. I mean, smelling the roses is kind of out of the question when your head is busy figuring out what, besides the walls, your bathroom options are when they inevitably put you in a tight white coat in a nice white room several years (being kind to myself) from now. That's been one of my toughest predicaments this season, along with moods that have been swinging more than a fifty year old man that didn't experiment enough sexually as a teenager and realizing that insomnia is not the poetic affliction so many make it out to be. My guess is that those who romanticize laying dreamless on a mattress, tormented by the sound of their own heart trying to barge its way out of their chests, at least have the benefits of an air conditioner and being alone. Being awake when you don't want to gets old fast when the person next to you turns into a sticky, snoring, drooling, chewing, screaming creature of the night. Its even better when the screaming, which sounds like the type of of sarcastic monotone noise you'd make trying to pretend that the friend in the blood-streaked halloween costume that suddenly popped up in your rear-view mirror on your three a.m. drive home didn't make you wet your pants stops for a while, so that you can finally focus on the soothing sounds of the mouse in the kitchen trying to claw open bags of your food with its little raid-covered hands.
      Last night, despite not only these obstacles but a headache which should have easily split the earth in two, I have finally managed to fall asleep while its dark and wake up in time for coffee flavored sugar and milk, and that alone has done wonders. Hopefully this more livable schedule means I'll be able to start reeling in my head from its explorations into distant, dark futures and secure it back onto my neck, where things are actually not that bad. The more notice I take of the general okayness of life, the more okayness reveals itself. Who would have thought what they say about self-fulfilling prophecies is true? I have, for instance, recently struggled to completion a picture of a roommate and friend as a wildly puking t-rex after he had an unfortunately excessive and excessively unfortunate night out, and more fantastic than the positive attention its somehow gotten me from some very talented, employed artists, (and the fact that I can come to any sort of life understanding by drawing pictures of puking dinosaurs) its reopened me to drawing and art-making for the love of it. Or for the love of the attention it gets me. Maybe my parents weren't the best when it came to curating the fridge door back in the day and I'm trying to fill that sad, magnet-less void now. In all honesty, I don't know. I'm not really sure where it is I really get my kicks from yet. However, I would not have even been able to complete the drawing at all had I not brought my head back from the future where I am wearing my hair electroshock-therapy-chique and coughing up colorful balls of wax because in this particular future I have developed a taste for Crayola crayons and back to that present moment, where the only thing going into my mouth was cold water and the only thing coming out was bad (really bad) lip synching. Everything was okay, and everything is okay. It continues to be far more difficult than I could have ever imagined remembering that, but I'm convinced that its salvation for people who are, like me, constantly struggling to hold down their stir-crazy time-heads.  Hopefully my resolution to attend the meditation sessions offered a pleasant walk away with consistency will help burn the "things are okay"  mantra more deeply into my thinking, because so far in my life its somehow managed to be the most slippery thought I've ever tried to grasp.  


Anywho, enjoy that drunken dinosaur!