12/02/13: ICANNOTTTHINKOFANYTHINGELSELATELY

You're probably sick of reading about my comic and my webcomic and all that jazz, but I totally cannot think of anything else lately. It's obsessing me to a massively unhealthy degree because I don't want to do anything else other than draw, and any time spent doing anything else seems wasted.

I need to get a grip on it because, although I'm used to obsession and always seem to have something on the go, it can't possibly take over my life to the degree it has without any kind of guaranteed reward. Everything about it is deferred rewards at best, and even probably nothing more than a, "huhm, that's funny" or a flick through my display copy before you move on to the next table.

But I can see it occupying me a while, and I'm brimming with ideas, and I thought today how cool it would be if my next comic was introduced by the tortoise from John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath, and I want to draw it even though I don't need to start working on that for another month at least.

I gots it bad.

. . . . .

I finished Brandon Graham's King City today and fuck me if it wasn't excellent right up to the end. It's hard to say what it's about because it's about lots of things and nothing at all, really.

But it's about a catmaster, who can weaponise his cat, and his ex-girlfriend and her ex-soldier boyfriend who may be turning into chalk, which is also a drug he uses to escape the horrors he saw in the Korean Zombie War, and about the catmaster's best friend, who falls in love with a sex-trafficked alien, and all this against a background of a world-ending incursion by a demon king.

It's pretty cool. And it's hundreds of pages for £15. Buy it.

. . . . .

In a week's time I'll have been interviewed for my own job. And a week after that I'll know if I've got my own job, or if I'll be made redundant at the beginning of April. It should be a worrying time, with an uncertain future and all, but you know what? Fuck it. What happens happens. I'm not going to starve. I'm not going to be made homeless. I'm not going to die. So bring it on. I'll smile through all of it x

11/02/13: WHATEVER'S COOL

What’s cool? I only ask because I’m trying to second-guess an audience for an experiment I’m doing for the London Super Comic Con. My idea is that if you make something featuring “cool” characters, people will buy it if it’s half-decent, more than they will buy something that features characters they don’t know and is excellent.

I’m not at the point where I’ll declare my work excellent. I never will be. But there are people who $hill their wares at these cons who are absolutely, 100% geniuses. People like Philippa Rice and Dan Berry. And like my own pal, HeyJude. And I’m sure they’re happy with what they sell, especially as it goes to incredibly discerning people, but I bet their sales are half of those of the guy selling portrait prints of Wonder Woman or Darth Vader (you might see now why I ask what’s cool…).

At the Thought Bubble convention, everything seemed to be Adventure Time. That and My Little Pony. So I made a little picture of Finn from Adventure Time riding a random pony. Let’s see how that bad boy sells. I also did a couple of others – you never know, this might pay for the table that my disappointing comic sales won’t.

But is it right? These aren’t my characters. They belong to another guy and a massive corporation! But it is my art, I drew it myself and made the pictures and everything! And other people seem quite happy doing it… I’m sure I’ll feel dirty for a bit, though, but then accept it for what it is. And I’ll just keep telling myself – it’s an experiment, okay?

. . . . .

I got thinking some more about the horsemeat thing the other day and a question occurred to me: would they tell us if they found human DNA in their tests?

I don’t think they would, because how do you do that? How do you inform a populace that, along with their Tesco Value burgers and Findus lasagna, they may have ingested the last earthly remains of some Romanian gangster who got on the wrong side of his capo?

You couldn’t! Imagine the reaction! People would be retching in the streets, scrubbing their tongues, and cradling themselves in the shower, Crying Game-style.

But it must have happened, at some point. Either by accident, where a finger, arm, or half a torso has slipped into the grinder and became impossibly entangled in the day’s meat output, or on grisly purpose, the result of a killer looking for an easy way to dispose of his victims.

Tastes like chicken, I suppose.

. . . . .

I listened to Tom Waits's first album today for the first time ever. I like Tom Waits. I like his gravel voice and his weird characters and the strange sounds he uses as rhythm on his songs. I figured he'd emerged into the music business fully grown, and had always sounded like that, but then I read the story of his first few years in Uncut magazine, and it wasn't so, it seemed.

So I listened to Closing Time and it's a fucking great album. Very singer-songwriter, and very California of its time, and all the better for that. It's already my favourite Tom Waits album, and probably nudging into my top 100, if I could ever bother to make one.

Waits is not for everyone - though I defy you not to enjoy his cover version of Daniel Johnston's King Kong - and so if you don't like him for the reasons I outlined in the third line above, then give Closing Time a try. It'll surprise you.

10/02/13: FACTORY OF LESS SADNESS

No Ripper Street tonight because of some shitty awards show. Worse still, Call The Midwife got to be on, polluting the airwaves with its saccharine awfulness – anything that employs Miranda Hart to do her usual “oh, I’m posh and rubbish” thing must be destroyed.

I don’t get awards shows. I have zero interest in what people are wearing – less still when you realize that what they are wearing has only been borrowed for the night from some hoity-toity designer. Anyone who obsesses over red carpet fashion should be declared an enemy of the state and be first up against the wall come the revolution.

And then awards themselves, hosted by a “humourous” host, making safe quips about his audience that will make them “squirm in their seats”, according to the next day’s press, although I’m sure every single joke has already been agreed and triple-checked by a cadre of producers and agents.

Who cares whether some old people think one film is better than another? What’s the value in a panel of music journalists declaring an album the Best Of The year? And no-one should ever put any value on a public vote. The public are idiots.

So if you like to watch these shows, or have ever bought, watched, or worn anything because if featured on or won something at these awards things, please reconsider your life. You’re making some terrible mistakes…

. . . . .

So Villa won a game! Their first in the league for two months! And hope has returned to the Factory of Sadness, at least until they lose their next game and the Sun falls on the once-great empire again.

I’ve started to feel physically sick when I watch the Villa. My temperature raises until my body is hot to the touch and I feel nauseous. That’s not normal, right? I should probably stop – it’d be better for my mental and physical health that way. And mostly I try not to care, but it’s soooo hard.

I can’t conceive of relegation but it is a very real possibility, although really any team in the bottom half of the table could go down. The Villa need to get on some sort of run, put a few wins on the board now, with the eventual aim of securing at least five more. Tough ask, but very possible.

I have to keep the faith. I have to believe it’s going to be okay, because anything else is a catastrophe and I don’t deal in those. Help me, Villa. Please.

. . . . .

I watched some great shows tonight. I watched the first Community of the new run, which was on par, but nothing spectacular. Par for Community, though, is still head and shoulders above most other shows, but there's a danger that without show creator Dan Harman it might slip into a pattern of ridiculousness and parody, trying to outcool itself week by week with ever-diminishing returns. For now, though, it's funny and warm.

But it's not a patch on Parks & Recreation and I got caught up on that, too. The standout characters - Ron & April - are inspired and unique comic creations that should walk straight into that Hall of Fame (if one existed), to take their place alongside George Costanza, Norm Peterson, and Sheldon Cooper. And they're just the standouts - there isn't a single joke wasted, not a single character not used to make funny, and not a moment on screen that doesn't look right. It's a pretty good show.

The Big Bang Theory is still funny, too, although there's something of a backlash that I both understand and don't. It is what it is - a network sitcom, long-lived enough to go into syndication, and with all the compromises such shows (Seinfeld aside) have to make. I got caught up on that, too, and Amy Farrer-Fowler is getting close to HoF territory, too.

So, yeah, you should watch TV. And enjoy it. And you'll do that if you watch those shows. Trust me.

09/02/2013: HORSES!

This whole horsemeat scandal smacks of a massive over-reaction. Yeah, it’s probably not the best that you don’t know where the meat came from, and that it may have gotten mixed up with other meats in some God-forsaken part of eastern Europe, but there are a few things that make me laugh.

1)       It’s meat. I’m not one to proselytise overly about my vegetarianism, but if you’re eating the dead and slowly decaying flesh of another animal, you don’t much have the right to get all haughty about it. It’s meat, whatever the species, so suck it up.

2)      Am I the only thinking this wouldn’t have hit the headlines so much if, instead of horsemeat, it was pork or lamb they found mixed in? Of course it wouldn’t, because they’re not cuddly, and we don’t give them names or bet on them down the bookies.

3)      Food is too cheap. Way too cheap. It’s why most of us are so fat. Or should I say that the wrong kind of food is too cheap? And, believe me, Tesco Value burgers are the wrong kind of food. But, if you pay pennies, you shouldn’t be surprised if one of the corners they cut to bring you the food so cheaply is that the odd horse gets thrown in with whatever mechanically-recovered bits of beef they blasted off the bones of a scrawny cow, then you made your bed. Now lie in that horse bed.

4)      Even if what you are eating is 100% guaranteed beef, you have no way of knowing what happened to it between the cow popping out of its mummy’s lady tunnel and it hitting the supermarket shelves. Unless you rear, slaughter, prepare and cook it yourself, you just don’t know. You don’t know if what that cow ate, what drugs they put in it, whether a butcher hocked up a loogy into the mincer… you just don’t know.

So, yeah, chill out and either buy more expensive food, stop eating meat, or enjoy that delicious neopolitan meat of many flavours – all of them dead!

. . . . .

Sometimes life is life a movie. Not my life. That would make a pretty shitty movie, although the star would be incredibly charismatic. But other lives, and none more so than that LAPD guy on the run in California.

Christophe Dorner is his name, and he got fired a few years ago after making an accusation of bullying against a fellow officer. To hear him tell it, the rest of the force closed ranks on him, supported his colleague and backed her story. He says this is because the force is racist (he’s black) and corrupt, and few who have had many dealings with the LAPD could disagree.

So Dorner went on a rampage, killing a policeman, the daughter of his former captain, and her boyfriend. He also wounded some other cops. Funny thing is, the LAPD actually wounded more people than he did in mistaken identity shootings trying to capture him. Funny for me, not the people shot, that is.

Dorner posted an online manifesto, ranting at this and ranting at that, but making clear – well, as clear as an online manifesto can – his motives. There is some chatter that the manifesto we’ve been allowed to see has been edited by the cops, but then they would say that, wouldn’t they?

I can’t help but think he’s pretty cool and the whole thing is exciting, but then I’m a disasterbator and nowhere near normal…

. . . . .

If I believed in guilty pleasures - and I don't because why should you feel guilty about anything you like, especially something as stupid as music or books or film - then one of them would be Take me Out.
It's not everybody's cup of tea, and that's fine. I don't like lots of shows but I don't spend much time telling you about how I hate them. Except Call The Midwife. If you like that and are under-50, you should apply for voluntary sterilisation, pretty much immediately.

But, yeah, Take Me Out is awesome. And it's not just me - Charlie Brooker claimed you could learn a lot about life from TMO and it's hard to disagree with him. What makes the girls turn off their lights? What's that secret ingredient - other than washboard abs and a gun show - that pushes their buttons? Why don't the fat guys get the loving, even from the fat girls?

I usually get a favourite girl - Gracie & Lois in recent series - who makes me laugh and who I wouldn't mind a roll in the proverbial with, but there's no-one this time around. A couple of girls have been hot in an interesting way but they've been picked and whisked off on dates with men who don't deserve them. Obviously.

Still, I keep watching. It's dating by proxy, which is all I'm allowed to do now. Not that I ever did dating when I could, but you understand. No likey, no lighty? I likey.

08/02/13: IDIOTS

Hey, I know you! You're that guy who hates "immigrants", aren't you? Why is it you hate them again? Oh, yeah, they're coming over here and claiming benefits, living on easy street in their billion-pound houses and bathing in caviar because they can afford it, what with your tax money going to pay for them. You're an idiot.

And you, you're that other guy, the one who thinks there are millions of benefit scroungers, sitting at home, happy to receive massive cheques from the government to pay for their lavish lifestyles. I bet you even heard that some bloke who knows some bloke who has a neighbour who drives a Rolls-Royce and holidays on the moon! You're an idiot, too.

And who's that hiding at the back? Oh, you're that guy, who thinks that all immigrants should assimilate, even though you don't know what the word means, but is perfectly happy to go abroad and drink in an Olde English Pubbe and never try any food that doesn't come with chips. You're the guy who worries about sharia law, and the creeping islamification of Britain, because they insist on halal meat and chopping off the hands of any non-believers. It's true because it happened in Leicester or Bradford or Luton. One of them, anyway. You know what? You're an idiot, as well.

There's a lot of things that should concern you about modern Britain. The slow destruction of the welfare state by a government stuffed with millionaires, the rise in profits and fall in wages of just about every major employer, the lack of tax paid by people who take your money and squirrel it abroad... How about the death of job security, or a lack of subsidies for public transport driving people onto the roads, where they'll pay ever higher petrol prices? You know, big stuff.

Not one of those things will be solved by the poor - that's you and me, pretty much - turning on each other. It won't help you to blame the "Pakis" or the "chavs" one bit. All it will do is use up any energy and passion you might have about politics, or at least as they apply to your life, and let the real problems go unchecked, the real villains go scot-free. Stop being an idiot.

. . . . .

Blankie Update: We now have three. Original Blankie, who's been washed and actually doesn't look much different to the others, even though when the others arrived they seemed much bigger than the blankie we remembered. He's going into my little girl's baby box, where he'll be safe and warm and surrounded by happy memories. Blankie II has been well and truly assimilated into the family, and if she ever noticed my little girl isn't letting on that he's not her beloved. And then there's Blankie III, who was ordered as a back-up for Blankie II when it looked like we'd never see Blankie again. He'll sit in the drawer, hopefully never to be needed, but ready to be given on to some deserving little girl down the line. Ah, Blankies, I love you.

. . . . .

I was reading about the making of Status Quo's Down, Down today, and they mentioned that it was one of John Peel's favourite records. Two things struck me: firstly, it is a great record, and that the Quo are probably due for a reappraisal. And secondly, how do I feel about John Peel now, post-Savile?

My feelings for Peel took a hit when I learned that he had no time for Andy Kershaw after the latter's very public mental breakdown. The two men had been friends and colleagues for years yet Peel couldn't support Kershaw when he needed him most. And then there was the whole pederasty thing, although with Peel the girls certainly seemed to have been at least sexually mature, if legally underage.

Should crimes discovered posthumously affect an artist's body of work or how you feel about a individual? WWE all but erased Chris Benoit from history after he killed his wife and son, and you try getting a Gary Glitter record played anywhere other than NAMBLA these days!

So, yeah, Peel. He was always something approaching a hero (I don't really have heroes, partly for this very reason) and I don't want to think that everything he did for so many bands is tainted by association but it's a tough one, you know? I think I'll keep the jury out on this one. For a bit, anyway.

07/02/13: ALL I WANT TO DO LATELY IS DRAW

Almost six weeks into the new year and not a lot accomplished from the master list. That's because, as regular and no doubt bored readers will know to their cost, I've been caught up doing nothing but the proper comic. It's been good in a way, because it's kept my spending to a minimum after a heavy Christmas, and has kept my mind off the job thing that we don't really talk about.

Pretty soon, though, I'll be doing other stuff, and hitting my stride to get out and about and get things sorted. One of the first things I want to do is go and visit Stereo Mike. He's not having the best time of things, what with a bum knee and a shitty job, so it'll be good to catch up, and eat at Spankys, and throw catchphrases at each other like random comedy line generators gone wrong. or right.

The last year or so - maybe even the last two - have been a bit weird for us. Not in any "friendship falling apart way" but just we've had life stuff interfering with us hanging out or even talking as much as we'd like. That and his aversion to using Facebook too much (completely understandable because I'm addicted to this social media stuff and I can't kick it), has meant we've drifted a little, but nothing that can't be set right immediately upon picking up the 'phone or meeting him at the train station.

Good friends is good friends, and I'm unlucky that two of my besties live miles away, in London and Nottingham, because there are times when that bestie is needed and they're just not around. I miss acting the twat, and you can't really do that on your own because it makes you an, erm, twat. Two of you? Do what you like! You're not twats, you're pioneers!

So, yeah, I'll get up and see Stereo Mike, and try and sort out some other trips to see Huge Pumpkin, the Tall Man, and Rx. Then the year will have properly started.

. . . . .

All I want to do lately is draw. Which is so not me because I hate my drawing. But I seem to have hit upon a style that works, and half an ability to use photoshop, and I'm really enjoying it. In another life, this would have been my job - I wanted to go to Rugby Technical College back in the day to study art but did so badly on my Art GCSE that it didn't work out.

The reason I did badly was that, even at that age, I was stubborn and cantankerous, and refused to do any sort of writing about my art, and in that first year of GCSE that was exactly what was required. My art alone got me a D, but any sort of future career at that sort of thing disappeared with my being a bit of a cunt. Ah, well, I'm not that good anyway, like I say.

But, yeah, I'm in a drawing groove. it'll probably end soon, at the London Super Con when I'm faced with whether people will actually pony up any money for my drawings and they don't and I cry. Still, strike while the iron is hot, eh?

. . . . .

Anyone got any horse/burger jokes? Keep 'em to yourself. heard enough to last me a lifetime, cheers.

06/02/13: FUCKSTICKS

So, the lesson is: never post a blog saying how you've had a cool day.

I got a message back from my printer guy saying that the print proofs had come out all blocky and pixelated. I'd been fearing it but it was a blow. It meant I had at least a couple of hours work ahead of me (turned out to be 5) to get the thing in some kind of shape to print. I'd not given much thought when I was drawing the comic to how it would print, and that's the first mistake. Turns out, draw everything at at least 300dpi and make sure that, at that resolution, your print size matches the size of paper you want to print on. From now on, I will.

The downside to all this is that work dragged like fuck this afternoon because I knew had stuff to get done at home. And then I had to give up an evening in front of the TV, watching the last Africa, to work on something I thought I'd already done. Fucksticks.

So that's your lot for today - I'm off to bed.

05/02/13: ANOTHER DAY

So today was just another day. I got up, looked around my usual sites for an hour, got ready for work, drove to work listening to Tell 'Em Steve-Dave, worked (a bit), kept people smiling, came home, pencilled my artswap for my comic group thingy, spoke to Stereo Mike, watched Ripper Street, and inked and coloured my artswap. Standard day.

But a good day. A really good day. No stand-out moments, but an overall feeling of when my head hits the pillow in a bit that I've had no dramas, no bad news, got stuff done, and watched TV I liked. Every day should be like this. But I guess we have to trade days like this for extra good days, and extra bad. Which if it is how it has to be is okay, too, I guess. I just thought it worth noting that an average day could be pretty good sometimes.

. . . . .

I'm feeling good about my comics and my art, which if you'd said that to me six months ago I'd have punched you in the eye and called you a fancypants liar, however fancy or otherwise your pants may have been. I'm brimming with ideas and like the stuff I'm throwing down on paper (and screen), but I've got to keep myself disciplined. It's just a cool hobby, because as comfortable as I get with what I do, I know it'll never be more than that, because there are people waaaaay more talented than I who can't get a break.

I have to finish up the book first, by which I mean I have to start it and finish it, because there is the possibility that I can actually make a (very) little money from that, and then I guess I can get on with drawing comics about giant astronauts and dismantling jokes until they fall apart in your hands.

But I might sneak the odd new comic in here and there. Strike while iron is hot, eh? Or while the eye doesn't hate what the hand draws. Either/or.

. . . . .

Despite enough anti-homosexual rhetoric to kill an elephant (a slow moving, easily-bored elephant, but still), the gay marriage bill finally passed the first hurdle to becoming a law in parliament today. Four hundred good souls said, "aye", or whatever it is they do, and that's more than enough to carry it along to the Lords, where the old fools are actually pretty cool on this sort of thing for some weird reason.

One hundred and seventy five assholes voted against it, but at least they make a stand on their bigotry, and that, in an odd way, is commendable, too. The ones I just don't get are the seventy five abstainers - what the hell is their game? How can you not vote in one of the most defining policy-making moments of our generation? Legalising something that, in future years, will seem as strange as not letting a white man marry a black woman? How? How???

I demand these people be named! And they will! As is parliamentary procedure! I know my MP won't be amongst them because she tends towards the right side of her party (guess which one, eh?), although I'd be pleasantly surprised if she voted in favour. But if your MP is one of the fudgers, demand to know why! Ask them why they thought they could pull that shit! The people demand answers!!!

Preach it.

04/02/13: BRYTER LAYTER

So, yeah, yesterday happened. Apologies for the dark, dark - blacker than black - tone of yesterday's blog. Just had my buttons pushed by people who really don't understand how I am sometimes. And then I made the mistake of looking at Facebook, at all our tiny lives, and fell over the edge.

Still, better now, eh?

. . . . .

I finished Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth tonight and fuck me if it didn't end perfectly. Not everyone made it to the finish, but the way they left the story was aposite and timely. Vertigo have a habit of having their series end badly, or at least not in a way that is totally satisfactory, but Sweet Tooth broke the run. You really should read it. And pretty much everything else by Jeff Lemire, too.

I also "acquired" a copy of the new My Bloody Valentine album. It's a winner, of course. How could it not be? Twenty years in the making, I've fancied girls that have been on the planet for less time. Usually, "found" albums are of variable quality, but there's so much distortion layered on this - and why would I be any other way? - that it' a moot point. Get hold of it, any way you can.

. . . . .

So they found Richard III under a carpark in Leicester and he looks like Noel Fielding. It's a mystery to me how such men - see also Napoleon, Hitler, and every tiny, deformed, piggy-eyed tyrant ever - inspire such loyalty, thousands of gallons of blood spilled in their name. There again, I know some people who would fight to defend the honour of The Mighty Boosh, as well as play you endless clips of it on their 'phone, so it's perhaps not surprising at all.

03/03/13: DESTRUCTION IS AN ACT OF CREATION

We're all of us perfect in isolation. Everything we say, everything we do, everything we are... until it encounters other people it's perfect. But like no plan survives first contact with the enemy, so none of us survive the opinions, plans, machinations, and unconscious selfishness of the rest of the world. You can see why being a hermit is so appealing, and why it's only those who meditate, alone and untouched for years, who truly achieve enlightenment.

Fuck the world. Fuck having to bend to its limitations, and its wants, and its needs, and its demands on you and your time! Damn it all to Hell! And see where it gets you. That's why you could never write On The Road today. Not if you meant it. The world isn't there to be shaped because there's too many hands in the toybox, having their own shitty input into everything you do. Still, keep smiling, eh?

. . . . .

I'm in one of those moods where I feel like telling everyone their faults, pointing out their little idiosyncrasies, and tearing down their carefully - and not so carefully - constructed world views. Destruction is an act of creation, right? And what would be left in place of their shitty little lives would be raw and bleeding and beautiful.

Anyone want to be first? Didn't think so.

How about a general one? How about I tell you that nothing you do today will mean anything in ten years, unless you make such a monumental fuck up that stains you for life? How about I tell you that you have a lifetime ahead of you, even if you think you've lived long enough to know better, and that making plans is useless because the world is going to shit? How about just living each day as it comes, and not worrying about your "life" because you really don't have one, just a half-random series of encounters and forced interactions with people who feel just as bad about you as you do about them?

It's a start, right?

. . . . .

Blankie came home today. The real one. Yay!

02/02/13: DUST IN THE AIR

If there's anything that says "Saturday morning" to me it's those tiny specks of dust floating in the air after you open the curtains to let the first sun into the room. You only ever saw it on Saturday morning because that was the only morning you were ever up first, putting the telly on to watch cartoons or T.I.S.W.A.S. or... well, it was one of those two if you didn't want to get a dutton in school.

Even now, when I'm (technically) an adult, I still get a little shiver of excitement when I see those dust specks, because it means it's a sunny day and I haven't got to go to work. If it's a work day, the curtains stay closed, just to confuse Iain Duncan Smith, and because who has time for sun when there's the drudgery of work to get to?

I see it now, in my kid, as she looks at that wondershow, that she'll have those same feelings when her brain starts storing memories, and I wonder how long it's been like that? Since the invention of curtains, I guess.

. . . . .

I read a great article in the Grauniad this morning about the slow death of club rugby in Wales. Now I usually couldn't give two flying fucks about either rugby or Wales, but the article struck a tone, and it's really symbolic of the death of something bigger - the death of the past.

When I look at the world around me it's so starkly different than the one I grew up in. I'm hardly ancient - 41 next birthday - yet parts of my childhood, teens, and even twenties, are unrecognisable to those experienced today. Sometimes for the better - and vastly so - but mostly for the worst. I can't imagine how much it will have changed by the time my kid reaches her teens and onwards. No jetpacks, no robot butlers, just complications and selfishness.

What was heartening about the Welsh rugby clubs is that there are still people keeping them alive, and I do think there is a backlash coming, when things will get more community-based, more local, and maybe if they're still there the people will embrace them once more. We've lost so much, let's cling on to what we've got.

. . . . .

This blogging thing has been a trial lately. In the past week I've missed my deadline three times, taking notes but not actually writing the blogs until the following day. It's acceptable, I guess, but the whole reason for doing it was to keep disciplined. Eh, what're you gonna do, right?

The ridiculous thing is that I have enough spare time in any given day to write a novel, I just spend most of it doing pointless stuff or reclining on the sofa watching CBeebies. So, yeah, I need to kick my ass, in preparation for really kicking my ass sometime soon to actually get properly disciplined about writing proper stuff.

A fool's errand, for sure, but a man's gotta dream, yeah?

01/02/13: TWO BECOME ONE

I have this little figure of Linus, from Peanuts. You can't really call it an action figure, because it doesn't really do much, and even if it did, Linus didn't really do much so there'd be no point if realistic play was your bag. Anyway. Since she could talk, my little girl has referred to the Linus figure as "Jack & Jill". Not Jack or Jill but Jack and Jill, like that was its given name.

I've always found this both endearing and amazing, and the sign of a healthy, if twisted, imagination. For the record, she calls a Scott Pilgrim plush "Ryan" for absolutely no discernible reason. Aces.

So, yeah, today she picked up Linus and called him "Jack". No "and Jill". She did sing "Jack & Jill" while holding him, but when I asked who he was she just said "Jack". Bummer. I don't know what happened to Jill. I figure it was an exorcism of some kind, or maybe it was Jill's time to go back into the light, or maybe Jack's drugs finally kicked in? We'll never know.

. . . . .

I've been massively sleepy today. I even took two 10-minute naps, because that was all I could fit in. Pointless, really, but my body simply needed to sleep that badly. God knows why, because I don't think anything's any different to usual, except maybe I finished up the comic yesterday and maybe the reserves I was using for that wore out?

I'm going to bed right after I write this, with the aim of trying to get a solid 8 before it's time to get up again. Life, eh? If there was a benevolent God he'd give us sleep machines or the time to do it naturally. As it is, we're fucked. Except old people. They can sleep whenever they want. And they waste it by getting up at 4am to "potter about". Useless.

I don't know what I'm saying here except I can't wait to be old. No potterer, me.

. . . . .

I gave blood today. It was my fourth time, although my first was over twenty years ago and there was a massive gap between that and my second, in April last year. That was because I got kind of freaked out by it and made excuse after excuse, before I realised that I'm really not frightened of anything except my own brain so I should probably go back and start giving blood.

My granddad used to do it, apparently. I never knew this. There's so many things I didn't find out about him until after he died, and so much that I'll never know. I can't carry on some of his works - like being a Sergeant in the Home Guard, or playing bowls for Birmingham - but I can do this little thing.

So I do. And you should, too. For most of you there's probably no good reason why you can't except you don't want to or can't be bothered. Look at me, urging you all to give your blood away, like a dumb Renfield, but you really should. Go to blood.org.uk and do it. You'll feel good about it and yourself.