“Ivan! Where Are You?” (In Hyperspace…?)

 

“Ivan! Where are you?”

THAT is a good question, Natasha, when regarded metaphorically. In relative space-time, I’m in the basic NYC area—take your standard 50-megaton Hydrogen Bomb, and using the Empire State Building as Ground Zero (a la Blackie in Fail-Safe), you’d vaporize me along with the rest of Manhattan.

But where is my spirit, my drive, my energy aimed? Kinda animalistic in that I’m in total job hunt mode—and I still whip myself for not doing enough.

BASTA! I’m not letting this turn into “Fear & Self-Loathing in Hyperspace”—

Let’s talk about T-shirts and collages!

Talkin’ ’Bout T’s (Filler? Or, Showing Off?) [Designing My Own T-Shirts to Stay Sane]

THE FEAR has planted its big old self into my life, and there’s only one thing that will get rid of it:
MONEY! Got any extra lying around? Where’s Guy Grand when you need him? Why wasn’t the utter and total pursuit of filthy lucre not my raison d'être when I was younger?

SIGH…

I’m doing what I can to combat THE FEAR (got a job for me? I can keep secrets!), but it is quite the drain on the intellect and the spirit. 

But brief joys can be found at our own fingertips… Like these keeee-RAY-zee designs and collages surrounding this excessive verbiage? I made ’em! Taught myself Paint 3D and some of the Gimp system (yeah, I know, rah-rah: big deal), and as I mentioned the last time I posted, I’ve been turning them into T-shirts!

Read on, Macduff!

Psychedelic Conspiracy: COVID Collage Hijinx (and my personally designed T-shirts—sort of…)

 March 3, 2021

Jeez, unemployment and COVID social distancing/isolation has driven me KEE-RAY-Zeeeeeee; some of my creative outlets were criticized mercilessly, and I was quite depressed for a while. Jumpstarting my creativity, I’ve been making collages and designing T-shirts—I’ve been literally ITCHING with the desire for retail therapy—but why buy T-shirts when I have enough already? Any I’ve gotten tired of advertising for someone else…

So thanks to the awesome fellows at Maximum Graphics (on Amsterdam Avenue), I started creating my own shirts. 

Seditionists, Hitlerites, Insurrectionists, Terrorists: I saw the worst minds of my generation spurred on by presidential madness, overfed hysterical LARPing, knuckle-dragging themselves through the white supremacist streets at dusk looking for some meth and then blaming Antifa

Ummm, so I gotta ask, how many “let them eat cake” moments do we need?

Lock these
fuckers up!

This is my roundabout, ranting Leftie armchair quarterback way to look at the Invasion of the Maniacs in Washington, D.C. this past week. I’m hoping for the best (round up all the Fascist and bring back the firing squad—
said the man complaining about fascists), but not expecting much of anything.
And Damn it! Don’t they know they’re fucking up the stock market! That makes me pissed!

To apocryphally quote Judge Roy Bean, “I know the Law, because I have spent my entire life in its flagrant disregard!”
I understand the country because the country is like me: an immature mess who’s too smart for its own good, has too many bad habits to count, who’s been so damn lucky so damn often that we’ve started thinking that maybe we’re charmed and that the Really Big Break is just around the next corner, and who should really, really, really know better.

I really want to be impressed, I want to see politicos acting like they mean it, I want to see asses get kicked and names taken, I want the forces of good to overcome, I want redemption for my goddamn patience!

There’s so much I want to see in the wake of this Grand Shriek of the Batshit Crazies…but I’m not holding my breath….

2020 Hindsight: Yes, PLEASE! Having That Year in the Rearview Mirror Would Be a Massive Relief! ☹

Regarding this recently-paced, mere hours ago, year, immediately around July 1, 2020, I wrote the following: “I’m expecting the Love-Child of Godzilla and Cthulhu to show up at any moment now.”

Lately though, I’m just depressed and exhausted. The election of Uncle Joe relieved the depression, but only somewhat… But I do feel at least symbolically rejuvenated by the calendar clicking over to January 1, 2021.

Maybe the days will stop blurring into one another, maybe a center will hold, maybe we will get ourselves a new prescription for our third-eye-glasses…

“…[B]y just about any measure, 2020 was a clusterfuck inside a shit sandwich covered in stupid sauce.”

That pithy and succinct description of the 365 days from January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2020 (actually January 20, 2021—don’t be coy; you know what we’re talking about) comes to us from the fab political blogger Rude Pundit. He’s worth bookmarking!

Going forward…
No longer will “Twenty-Twenty,” or, if you prefer, “20/20,” ever again mean having perfect vision, or a long-running news program on ABC-TV. It will mean…

“I’m gonna get twenty-twenty on your ass!”

“Our relationship totes went twenty-twenty; she even took the dog!”

“Five-Oh is twenty-twenty twenty-four-seven!”

“Blowtorches and vice grips on the testicles? How deliciously twenty-twenty …”

NUKE ME SLOWLY—Stealth Science Fiction Films: If it’s a realistic depiction of the End of the World, it’s probably science fiction [PART THREE of THREE]

As we end this three-part series (Part One HERE; Part Two HERE), we also look at the end of the world. Kind of timely with the end of the year…and a plague sweeping the land…

If a movie has an atomic bomb explode, and mutants appear, everyone knows the film is science fiction. But if a film has generals and soldiers trying to stop an atomic war, whether they succeed or fail, if the film stays in the realm of the realistic, viewers hardly consider it SF. But it is! (Especially if a doomsday machine is somehow involved…)

The LENTIL SOUP RECIPE: Actually Lentil-Cabbage Soup, with Kielbasa on the Side (Although it could all really be about cabbage…)

My delicious lentil cabbage kielbasa soup!

During the Spanish Civil War, the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who were taken prisoner of war were fed only lentil beans. When many of them got home, they swore they would never touch lentil beans again. 

But we’re talking almost one hundred years ago, and some things have changed….