46th & Vern

Yesterday, I had my birthday. Everyone wished me good luck.

Isn’t that a great song? I love that album. Crispin Glover is one of my favorite people. Remember when he was “Uncle Dell” in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart? How he stayed up all night making sandwiches?

Is it just me, or is that the best part of the movie? I forgot all about the “aliens with black gloves” and the Santa Claus stuff until I went back and rewatched it! I just remembered “I’M MAKING MY LUNCH” and “puttin’ a big ol’ cockroach right on his anus”. Wild At Heart is one of my favorite Lynch movies. I just don’t watch it that often because the VHS print was tinny and shrill, and it’s not a ton of fun watching Sherilynn Fenn die in the darkness from massive head trauma. Good lord, I had that girl’s Playboy pictorial on the walls of my dorm room. I don’t want to see her with her skull smashed mumbling about lipstick. Also, Willem Dafoe trips on his shotgun and literally blows his head off, and we see it soar across the screen and go thunk against a building, then splat on the ground. And, in the first five minutes, Nicolas Cage beats a black man to death against a brass banister by caving his head in. Wild At Heart is ultraviolent as shit. How did this all fly in 1990?! Did it??

(It’s a 28-year-old movie, do I really have to call “spoilers”? I mean, I’m posting clips of the damn thing. This stuff doesn’t lessen in impact just because you saw parts of it previously. Isn’t that what trailers used to be, just sections of the film itself? Listen: I saw the “fire extinguisher beating” from Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible long before I saw the film in its entirety. Did it lessen the impact? Are you kidding?)

I went from talking about Crispin Glover to debating whether I should link/watch the fire extinguisher beating from Irreversible again.* Welcome to Bands I Useta Like.

(*It’s blocked on copyright grounds on YouTube, which means I went and looked. I guess you got lucky.)

Anyway, yesterday was my 46th birthday. Early in the morning, my “emotional support” dwarf hamster and companion Vern passed away. He made it to my birthday. That’s the kind of Great Hamster Vern was. I knew he was going, but it’s still tough, and I miss him. Despite the positive energies of myself and many others, plus my open denial, little Vern had a tumor. Even though it grew to the size of his tiny head, he somehow kept it from sapping his vitality until the very end. I haven’t been sharing pictures of him in the past couple weeks because his struggle was progressively beginning to show. Please have patience as I am working through this; I am not a typically hamsterless person.

Didn’t mean to bring the house down, I’m just dealing with a lot right now. I have a very nice donated computer that should hold me until the inevitable purchase of a next one that I dread in the form of sleepless nights. Seriously, if friends and fans hadn’t helped me out in the past week, I’d be weeping into a pillow right now like an unwilling organ donor. Oh- also Facebook. For all the metric tons of shit I talk about them, their accursed platform not only kept me in touch with people who could help me, but the site provided a reasonable text backup when I accidentally nuked the Ceaseless Fables blog. Then DreamHost, the web hosting I use for my sites, happened to have a “restore” button that literally restored the website to exactly the way it was. All of that demands recognition here.

There are also numerous fans that have reached out to me and insisted that I keep going. Since that’s really what I’m in it for, that is what I am doing. Now that the computer woes are momentarily over, productivity can resume. I don’t know if I can manage a sixth Bands I Useta Like magazine before the end of 2018, but that’s what I’m shooting for. I have a bunch of sketches and comics to mail out in return for donations. I’m not as fried-out as I sound.

Close, though.

When I came back home
Everyone had left
Messages on my machine
I felt very clean
I felt very clean

I erased the messages on my machine and the tape was clean
And the tape was clean

Then I made a telephone call
And I was mean
So I apologized
I felt obscene

I felt obscene

I brushed my teeth
The sink was dirty underneath
I could smell it
You could tell it
I saw my face in the mirror
I sprayed it and it was clearer
My expression showed “smell”.
My expression showed “smell”.

I went to the bedroom
And I fell asleep
In my dreams I was a creep.
In my dreams I was a creep.

Then when I awoke
The first word I spoke was “clean”
I fired my associates and started anew…