Shooting range

So I had an idea for a hilarious business today, as I am wont to do. We were talking about shooting ranges, and I thought it would be funny to open a derringer-themed shooting range. I've never been to a range period, so I don't know how they work. I have the feeling that mine would be the mini-golf to its regular, full-sized golf. The theme goes all the way. It's all Victorian looking and you have to rent costumes and derringers (unless you brought your own) at the door. There are different shooting galleries, like maybe with sinister men tying girls to railroad tracks or ladies on fainting couches (I want a fainting couch for the new house SO BAD.) The coup de grace is the Lincoln room, where you get to walk up to a cardboard Lincoln in a replica Ford's Theater and assassinate him as a cardboard cutout of Mary Todd Lincoln looks on in horror. There's a souvenir photo set up and every thing. (TOO SOON?)

Then with the Lincoln thing came a yet greater idea: a presidential assassination themed shooting range. There's the Lincoln room, the JFK room, the William McKinley room that no one cares about, and the Reagan room. As soon as you fire at the cutout of Reagan, a cardboard Secret Service dude jumps in front of him.

Superlemons: Gettin' Way Too Personal

Getting to know people is so strange. They learn about the present you, but the way people drift in and out of your life, they never really know the whole you.

When I was in the eighth grade, I just sort of...stopped being able to deal with people. I didn't want to do school work any more, I didn't want to see anyone, I didn't want to leave the house. My parents let me do the homeschool thing for the rest of the year. No psychology was involved. I decided that if any of my friends really cared about me, they'd call me. For the most part, they didn't. (Although two of them did come by my house once. I served them pumpkin pie which I didn't realize had gone off. (Sorry!) I've lost contact with one and am "facebook friends" with another, but I'd like to say thank you for your visit, it meant a lot more than you know.)

So the short version is I decided to remove all my childhood friends from my life, and I started over fresh in high school. If they remember me at all, it's as an awkward weird kid with a dry wit and strange outbursts. I'm sorry to them, I've been suffering from anxiety problems for quite some time now. It's too bad that they won't get to know the me who is trying to get better.

The people who know me now mostly know the me who had figured out that something was wrong and tried to act normal. How successful the façade was I may never know.

And those of you who read this are probably my best friends trying to humor me, who probably know that I have the social anxieties. And I thank you for reading. I really am feeling much better these days.

So yeah

I haven't posted in a while WHAT ELSE IS NEW? It seems as though the blog is transitioning from a nerd culture report to a crazy person's photocopied newsletter. I'm not sure I mind. I'm not quite well-versed enough in the unknown and bizarre to run a gig like the late, great Encyclopedia Obscura, and I don't really feel like I'm bringing much to the table comics- and gaming-wise. My instinct is to once again delete all that has come before, except that this time I feel that the writing is a couple tiers above terrible, and the post on Spy Groove brings in something like 90% of the traffic. Unfortunately, obscure MTV cartoons provide only so much mileage, and anyway I've only seen one episode of The Head. Does anyone remember the old Superlemons? The one that actually used the Meta-Cookbook review system? I thought not.

So yeah, I've had a lot going on recently. Coming up, probably a series of posts about going sane and having to rethink all assumptions.

A frequent element in my dreams is smoking. I have an overwhelming desire for cigarettes but am unable to get any for some reason. I get so desperate as to consider smoking half-finished ones I find in ashtrays. When I wake up, I think, hey, I can just go out and go buy some. Wait. Eww, I don't want to do that. My friend Kyle is getting all Freudian about it. Sidebar: when I was with Ben he was always a huge jerk to me in dreams and would try to get me to smoke, but I didn't want to.

Thousand Cranes

I've been through some sad times lately. As flippant as I am about it to others, I really don't think I'm dealing with it very well. Usually, people say that you need to cheer up, do things that make you feel better. That didn't feel right to me. I don't want to slather over my feelings with a layer of cheap happiness. I wanted to do something to really express my sadness.

I settled on making a thousand paper cranes. I don't suffer any illusions that it will grant my wish. It's really more about the process. I make ten cranes every day, no matter what else is going on. I'm about 450 cranes in at this point. I think what it's come to mean to me is that by working every day at a larger goal I can really accomplish something. It's a small change, achieved not through huge effort but through persistence and patience.

Small changes, followed through with, are what's going to make my wish come true.

Here's the first hundred, pictured with the knitted corkscrew of doubt and the blackwork pomegranate of shattered dreams (and pants).

Dream Diary III

The names of people I know in real life have been changed to save myself the embarrassment of it getting out that I dream hooked up with them. They will have different soap opera names each time to add a level of obfuscation. So Chad from last time is not necessarily Chad from this time.

Dimitri and I were married and we lived in a huge mansion in Hollywood. We had a lot of children, who all had soft hair and pronounced smile lines like their father. Dimitri and I were both high-profile lawyers.

We were having a large party at our house. There were some men there demonstrating some fancy novelty cigars. During the demonstration I was seated next to an African man. When it was over, he got out his wallet, as if to pay for the show. I tried to explain that it was a free demonstration, and I saw a pink flyer with a strange symbol sticking out of his wallet.

Suddenly, the mansion was under attach by people waving banners with the same symbol on them. These sorts of attacks were a frequent occurrence at our house. We were often the victims of terrorist attacks due to our work.

Afterwards, I went to check in on the children. They were unharmed but very upset about the attack. They asked me why we didn't stop so that the attacks would end, and I told them that the people just needed to know that Star Wars was a good movie, and Dimitri and I were the only ones preaching that particular gospel. I showed them a clip of it, and they agreed that it was good, but they weren't sure that it was worth risking everything for.

Dream Diary II

The names of people I know in real life have been changed to save myself the embarrassment of it getting out that I dream hooked up with them. They will have different soap opera names each time to add a level of obfuscation. So Chad from last time is not necessarily Chad from this time.

I was the main character in some kind of survival horror game, a man trying to save his daughter. The game was developed by an American game developer in English, but it was loosely based on an anime. Very loosely. It was poorly designed and buggy. I kept getting stuck in the geometry and none of the weapons really seemed to do anything. You had to rescue other characters in order to proceed but it was very difficult since their AI and pathing was so bad. In order to get new abilities, you had to beat Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz in a jump rope challenge. At some point, a hint appeared in enormous stone letters on a building in the distance, but they crumbled to dust before I could read them. I waited patiently for the animation to loop so I could read it, but I kept getting distracted and missing it.

When I wasn't the character from the game, I was also me beta testing the game. During this process, I was wandering through a building crowded with people who belonged to two opposing factions. The occasional fight would break out, but mostly they stayed in separate rooms.

During the dream, I "woke up" and decided to log this in my dream journal. I was using a highlighter that had a bit of black ink on one side of the tip. I was writing it and trying to conceal what I was doing from a man who was my lover. I was afraid to tell him about my dream journal, but when the truth came out he didn't really care. I woke up and had to write it all over again.

Dream Diary

So I'm going to try a little something different here. In keeping with my new effort to make this blog interesting, I've decided to write about some of my dreams. Now, I know what you're thinking. Nothing is more boring than listening to people's dreams. But you haven't seen mine. They are full color, crazy, story-driven productions. Once there was a musical number. The names of real people that I know in real life have been changed to protect my sexy feelings for them, and to sound more like a soap opera.

I was planning a trip back to my old college town, where many of my friends still lived. I called Chad to let him know that I was coming, in hopes of gettin' me a little, but he didn't seem that excited about it. He did mention that he had recently bought an old bar stool though. This was a big deal.

I made the trip anyway and was staying in an enormous, dorm-like structure. There were always a ton of people around, especially in the rec center on the first floor, where I was hanging in the pool with several girl friends. There was a TV on in the background, and Cassandra and a friend of hers were being interviewed about the stool and the re-upholstery job they had done to prepare it for its trip into space. The girls in the pool were all gossiping about my having had a tryst with someone before I had left college, but I wouldn't reveal that it had been with Chad. I let them speculate and ducked out of the rec center.

Across the hall, Chad and some other guys were playing a turn-based strategy game on an obscure old Sega console. He made room for me to sit next to him, and at the end of his turn he suggested that we sneak off somewhere during the other players', as the turns lasted for quite some time.

We climbed a fort made of cotton balls and there we started making out, but people were removing parts of the fort in order to get to a refrigerator somewhere within it. When it became obvious that we wouldn't be able to get any privacy, we returned to the game. They had started a new campaign in a map with different terrain, but he chose the same character as last game in his haste, which had a serious disadvantage, and he started doing very poorly.

We went back to a large compound of buildings that Chad's family was renting, hoping to pick up the making out where we had left off. Some of the buildings were very small, some had no obvious entrance, and all of them were in a state of disrepair. We went to the main building, which had been mostly restored. It was quite small and we had to stoop inside it. We spoke with the builder, who was quite large and couldn't fit inside, through a window. His dream was to make homes for little people, but he had given up on that when he realized that he would never be able to go inside one of his own buildings.

Later, we toured the launch site where the stool was being prepped for its voyage into space. The stool was somehow able to control the ship autonomously.

Why Newspaper Comics Send Me Into a Rage

I don't enjoy newspaper comics. At best they are sort of below that sector of humor that Mission Hill explores so beautifully, the zone between laughing aloud and laughing inwardly. Most of them are just bland, sanitized exercises in telling the same running gag that's been going since the 1920s. But a lot of them make me irrationally angry. The worst thing is that if I get my hands on a newspaper, I can't even pick out the meh comics and leave Family Circus to its own devices. I am compelled to read the entire page from start to finish, except, mercifully, for the soap comics.

They do things in them, though. Things that are calculated to drive me up the wall. The first thing is the callous disregard of the comic's own setting, and the worst offender is BC. Now, I know that the cavemen worship Jesus and cavort around with dinosaurs. That's okay. The secret to BC is that it does not, in fact, take place in prehistory but rather in a post-apocalyptic future.

Yeah, that's canon. And it even might make sense for the characters to reference figures from antiquity, like we do with ancient Rome and all that, but the rate and detail level at which they do so is just obnoxious. The other day a strip about campaign ads ran. Really?

The other thing is animal psychics. Red and Rover needs to get out of my newspaper and I am not playing around. It's a cutesy strip about a boy and his dog that has absolutely nothing else going on in it. It only runs on Sundays in my paper, so maybe they interact with any other living thing during the week. I don't know. It's a bit creepy, frankly. Anyway, Red talks in speech balloons and Rover thinks in thought bubbles in a conversational way in which it is obvious that they are responding to each other. Don't do this. Haul off and make it a talking dog. Garfield skirts this line as well. Also, remember when Garfield had side characters? These comics just seem to fall into their schtick and don't let go to explore new stories anymore.