The Only

The only thing that will keep me from killing a customer tomorrow during the shopping frenzy will be the fact that I am being paid the same day. Well-played, holiday sales, well-played.

See also: The Harry Potter Incident.

Happy Über Fun Small Pox/Native Genocide/Poultry Massacre Day!
Cheers from a food coma,
c.i.

Finer things in life.

Homemade wontons, jasmine rice, random remixes, Trader Joe's Sparkling Blueberry Juice, and warm sake.

Win.

What was that

about hats again?
courtesy of: moneygami pictures
via Justin Jones

Barkley

Thank you, Babcock ♥

This darkness is just a suggestion

... I see myself blurred in the mirror by steam and time seems to fold over onto itself and I see myself as a layering of all my previous days and years and all the time that is coming and suddenly I feel I've become invisible.

Photograph taken by yours truly.
2006

Employment, Leibowitz and Old-Fashioned

Customer quotes of the day:
[A fair 20 minute period after same-said woman purchased cheesy romance novel and had left the store, she returned to complain:]

"I can't read this! It's a romance novel based in London. I hate novels based in London, can I return it?"

[Elderly Asian gentleman's response when I ran into him twice within the same 5 minute span and I reassured him I wasn't following him]
"I'm too old for you anyway"

---
I woke up to the rain, left for the day with a chill on my neck and three layers of my worn down sweaters. Mmm ... autumn.

Cut-Off

I'm not keeping "tabs". You got me into a lot of great music and amazing art. I liked that train of thought. Simple as that.
Also

re∙tract |riˡtrakt| (verb, [trans]): 2. withdraw (a statement or accusation) as untrue or unjustified.

Please excuse my insecurities and words that were spewed from same-said fountain.

Doolittle

I was somewhere in the back left portion of the orchestra pit. Somewhere towards the middle of the song, some white guy named Theo - whom I'm guessing was rolling on ecstasy - licked my heart tattoo and ran away.

You've got red on you.

When you can ask them attack you with fake blood to simulate a zombie attack.

Dia de los Muertos

These woodcuts still give me shivers, just because of the pure detail.

Also feel like if there was some kind of creature that is slowly eating away at my insides and not allowing me to focus, it would resemble something fairly close to this.

Heavily ... distracted, as it were.

Cheers fuckwits,
c.i.

Some will die in hot pursuit while sifting through my ashes

I've only gotten to see her (until recently) once every two years, and suddenly, since this past Friday, I have been seeing her every day (today being the exception). We've been playing catch up on the ten years we weren't able to even see each other for more than a few hours.
We grew up away from each other, sending letters and having three hour telephone calls, sometimes nothing for a few years.

Somehow we're now collaborating on a comic that she's written, and has been writing for the past year and I've been doing character sketches, working out the kinks together.

I've been enjoying the last few days of this indian summer smoking cigarettes in a cemetery with a girl I have fucking adored for the better part of my life.

The flip-side of these past few days has made me miss everyone else I've lost touch with/no longer speak with. To the point to where I woke up out of a dead sleep around 3:30AM this morning and couldn't get back to sleep.

And now for something completely different:

• Who the FUCK posts an online quiz to be completed by the morning AFTER Halloween weekend? Really?
  

Happy All-Hallows' Eve / All Saints / Day of the Dead,
c.i.

Tombstone [Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt]

It's been a very strange and wonderful span of 240+ hours. Ideas and projects are a-brewing and I'll post some sketches once I get the chance.

Naughty bits by Conrad Roset

Thank you, Maelie.

Maeve Winona

My niece was born on Friday morning around 5:30AM. Seven pounds, six ounces of fricken adorable caterpillar.

Momentary lapse of judgment and privacy

1. Although I consider myself an open person, I'm finding my boundaries as far as respecting others' privacy, and my own. If I let loose all the little dirty secrets of the shitstorm I've been faring for the past 18 months, I would suddenly lose quite a bit of self-respect and quite possibly friends.
   
2. I still am filled with immense joy when someone I grew up with doesn't recognize me whatsoever when we bump into each other in a public place.
   
3. This weekend brings the last weekend of the Northern California Renaissance Faire, and with it sadness and some glee. I've missed out on some events around the Bay Area that I know I will be kicking myself for (i.e. Hoodstock '09, XY Scatter playing at the Blue Macaw after a year hiatus, the hip-hop show at The Stork Club Saturday night, Alternative Press Expo '09, and even GOGOL BORDELLO PLAYING AT THE FOX THEATER IN OAKLAND), but for the ... experience of the Ren Faire (basis for LARP, Confidential) and the very gracious, gorgeous, generous and thoroughly AMAZING people I have met through Nativearth, Schulps Pottery and good ol' Patrick Morris & archery, I wouldn't trade it for damn near anything.
4. Finally, I sadly have not made the deadline for Alternative Press Expo this year (Matthew Silady had offered to sell my comics at his two booths, which you should fucking check out anyway!!) BUT I will have material available online AND I'm working towards WonderCon '10. If there are any painters, artists, vagabonds that would like to work a table with me, please email me.
   
5. I got called a dumb grownup for the first time this week by a little girl I was trying to comfort. She was getting a flu shot (made a deal with my mother that if I went and got tattoos, I wouldn't complain about vaccinations or shots) and I was trying to tell her it would be okay, and she told me to shut up, that I was just another dumb grownup. I was deeply insulted.
   

And now for something completely different; pretending like I'll be going to do homework and not be a vandal.

When there's nothing left to burn ...

You aggravate the hell out of me, but you showed me something beautiful. I can only hope you find that kind of beauty in your world. I think you have.
I'm still looking for mine.
Final thoughts before indulging in the weekend and the strange thoughts and feelings that they entail:

I'm not sorry I met you
I'm not sorry it's over
I'm not sorry there's nothing left to say.

Naughty Bits via Chagrin
[Fine, yes, I was a copycat. Get over it]

[speechless]

It's been a long time since my faith in humanity has been revived or even restored.

Someone anonymously left a fruit tart and a note for my mother, wishing her a speedy recovery with her recent surgery.

I almost started crying, it was so simple and very beautiful.

Whoever you are, thank you for making my mom the happiest I've seen her in years.

Girl Anachronism

[Excerpt from my sketchbook, opening for mini-sode for Wingnut, "LARP, Confidential ®"]

Beginning to feel like all the Faire participants are escapists in their own right.
Life crams itself into every nook and cranny within the few days we're there, and it revives my best memories of art school, building sets for theater and even childhood. The euphoria is then wrapped in a sleeping bag, deep-fried in THC, homemade mead and lust. Dust lightly with Casa Boogers and serve between 59º - 96ºF.

Besides, where else can I hammer in tent-stakes with a 4-inch heel red pleather knee-high fuck-me boots?

As of late

We rejoiced when it was 95º in the shade, I had fun losing (Thumb Wars, 5-Card Stud Poker), and have never regretted leaving my sketchbook (or even just a BOOK, I normally carry at least one) at home more than this past weekend.
Hello randomly placed sketches and portraits, I missed you.
Don't ever leave me again.

P.S. The foot was from when I had to stay in bed part of June. The face was probably someone sitting in Bay Street. I am the one sporting the Sapporo label (in my top 3 favorite beers, thanks to my Shoko Hori), and I unintentionally did a portrait of a flute player in almost the same exact manner as my brother Michael's portraits of people. Right down to the bright colors.
Gotta love genetics ...?

Zombified, and loving it,

c.i.

Zehn

It's been 10 years today that my uncle was killed down in Mammoth Lakes on a motorcycle trip on his way up to see my mother and I. We were supposed to meet him the next day in Jamestown, just outside of Yosemite and Sonora.
Instead of moping around, mourning the loss, I ditched my Algebra II class this morning to sit out in the sun, listen to music and take a nap.
When I got up I tried to find his obituary online, but instead I got a link to Santa Anita Raceway where he was the finishing photographer for the races. I had no idea, but in the same week a jockey named J.C. Rodriguez was killed. A few lives summed up in a few sentences.

-------

This second weekend of Faire made it so I would miss Newark Days - the annual celebration of suburbia that includes a cast of the same yuppies and carnies every year. Thank God.
The escape came with a price: setting up camp in a space time continuum where nakedness was encouraged, intoxication rained down like the tomatoes at the "Flogging Booth" and the unshowered heathens that I've come to love and cherish in all of our LARP-ing glory resided.

And now, dear Lurker, I sit. I drink my coffee, and try to fudge my way through my online math homework.

Cheers,
c.i.

Ciao Bella, Ren Faire [First Weekend]

I was able to tack on an extra 500 geek points for being employed, very last minute, at the Northern California Renaissance Faire with my lovely Sydney, and will be wenching Gelato every weekend until October 18th.
I realize I have given out this URL to advertise my art, be patient: I need to install my "new" scanner when I'm not bombing online math tests.
And now for something completely different: a shower.

Fractured Ulna, Full Love

You roll off my tongue like smoke, and I'm struggling to keep you in my lungs.

"alone with everybody"
the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

-c. b.

9.9.09

This is my brother and
(still feels weird saying this because I'm not even sure if it's official, but)
my sister-in-law, and my niece kinda chilling out.
I'm not sure what names they're coming up with, but I know this:
that kid is going to have some crazy hair and some insane want to draw/photograph people, or buzz their head and play bass and guitar (not like my brother and I ever did that ... -cough-).

Now accepting monetary donations to go see my brother and Melissa in New Mexico.

Also: thanks to the power of the internet, apparently there's a lot more people visiting this site. Bravo for being interested, hopefully you won't get scared off, and keep on lurking, you lurkers ^_^

Cheers,
Auntie C.I.