Shame.

You’re too fat. You’re the wrong age, the wrong height, the wrong size, the wrong shape, the wrong type, too slow, too quick for your own good. You’re too dark, too light. You’re “only pretty”. You’ll never look like that. You’re ugly as sin. You could be a model. You’re plain. You’re nothing without your makeup. The beard makes you look like a dork. You should go natural. You’re a pizza face. Cover that shit up. Why can’t you be bothered to take care of yourself?

You’re a wallflower. You’re too loud. You don’t speak up for yourself. You’re too defensive. Too passive. You’re too angry. Too aggressive. You’re much too sensitive. Too needy, too self-possessed, too self-obsessed. You’re an easy target. You put yourself on a pedestal. You’re too outspoken. Too independent. Too negligent. Too proud. Too humble. You’re too easily influenced. You’re too stubborn.  What’s your problem, anyway?

You need to speak out. You need to shut up. You need to stand out. You need to play dead. You ought to have the strength of your convictions. You should do as you’re told. Keep your nose clean. Be yourself. Don’t rock the boat. March to the beat of your own drummer. Why can’t you be a team player?

You haven’t slept with enough people. You’re a slut....unless you’re a stud. You’re an old maid. An old fart. You’re pussy-whipped. You’ve checked out. You’re too involved. You give too much. You’re completely useless. You’re a busybody. You’re always helping the wrong people, making the wrong decisions, doing the wrong thing, hanging with the wrong crowd. You need to get seen. You need to be invisible. You need the right things. All of them. Real people have the right things. The right house, the right track, the right career, the right connections, the right clothes, the right car. Wal-Mart is for the subnormals. Are you subnormal?

They saw you were weak. They didn’t like your friends. The way you dressed. Your bumper stickers. Your books. Your thoughts. The things you did. The things they imagined you did. You didn’t share their interests. Wrong faith, man, wrong practice on the wrong day. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. You fought back. You tried to ignore them. You pointed them out. You asked for it. You flaunt it. You give it away for free, so they came and took as much as they wanted. What were you expecting?

Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. You shouldn’t need any help. You’re a parasite. You work too much. You’re lazy. You’re too young to understand. You’re too old to be making these kinds of mistakes. You don’t have anything to offer. You’re sitting on your talents. You should do something popular. Sell your soul on the open market. Make something unique. Take risks. Play it safe. You should have known better. You’re nothing but excuses. Just get over it. Why can’t you get your act together?

You should be ashamed of yourself.

Go Ahead.

Fall.

See if I care. 

I'll be laughing as I follow you 



all


the


way 


until you hit



BOTTOM.

Practice.

What does it mean to practice healing?

Like practicing faith, or a craft, or a trade, you learn how to do things right by doing a lot of things wrong. You observe yourself in the aftermath of your actions to see what worked and what didn't. You take what worked and graft it to your routine.

The process functions best when you can avoid beating the shit out of yourself for making mistakes in the first place.


I’ve been learning what it means to practice healing. I think of it this way:

A mistake is a stumble. Beating the shit out of yourself for failing to be perfect? That’s rewarding yourself with a face-plant on the concrete.

You commit an act of self-healing when you throw out your hands and catch yourself.


That takes practice.

I resist doing this simple act. I’ve practiced bouncing my head off the ground after every stumble and let me tell you, after 39 years of training, I am GOOD at it. Better than good: I’m AWESOME at inflating every mistake until it’s Kaiju-sized. My brain looks like Tokyo after Godzilla’s gone on a bender.

I practice healing when I accept the consequences of a mistake without using it as a means to diminish myself.

You are the sum of ALL your actions, words, gifts and blows, your slips, your tumbles, your moments in the sun and your jail time spent in the dark. You practice healing when you choose to restrain yourself from swinging wild in your rage. You practice healing when you choose to bleed your pain away by acts of kindness instead of compounding the agony through cruelty towards yourself or anyone nearby. You practice healing when you risk opening yourself to the prize at the center of a mistake instead of turning away for another round of I’m Such A Fuck-Up.

And by you practicing healing, I mean me, too.


I’m taking it one drawing at a time.

Emerald City Comic Con

What, another announcement? Yep, I'm shouting again. This time I would like to draw your attention towards the Emerald City Comic Con. I will be seated there at my very own table, right between the uber-talented Mark Tedin and the brilliant and bedazzling Brian Snoddy. My table? Z-06, thank you very much.

And here's the thing I'm excited to announce. I finally have a sketchbook for sale. It's a strange one, a very personal one; being the strange person that I am, it fits.

The Little Chapbook of Pain is a perfect-bound book of 140 pages with 84 pieces of black and white art sealed within a color cover. It will be selling for 10.00 at the convention, 14.99 after, and that's including shipping within the continental U.S. I'll have doodles in the first ten copies.

There will be Magic prints, originals and who knows what else, but having this little sketchbook is a big deal for me.


Here's how to find me.

Ready, set, GO!

Antifesto

It's time I gave you an update. 

Something happened to me in 2010. Something huge. 

January 15th came and suddenly I was 40 years and one day older than my dad had been when he died.  

That threw a switch in me. I have pulled the plug on my professional career. Too blunt? Okay, I've put it on indefinite hold. I do teach on the side for the Laguna College of Art and Design with a wonderful gent named Bobby Hernandez. That gives me just enough to keep the engines running. 

Why am I doing this?

2013 is the year I begin busting out my own stories. This January I completed a project called the Little Book of Pain. It's an eBook at present, available on iBooks; the Kindle versions will be uploaded as soon as they're ready. My first offering may seem like a strange way to start, all personal and soul-bearing and such, but I owe some of my healing to those who have dared to let me see their pain, and I want to repay that debt the best way I can. Kay Jamison, William Styron, Andrew Solomon, the anonymous voices in "A Music I No Longer Heard" by Leslie Simon and Jan Johnson: they showed me I wasn't alone. It's my hope the Little Book of Pain will have the same effect on someone else. I call it a "Shitstorm Inspirational". I started on this quest in 2010, the year I gained the distinction of being my own dad's elder, and it seemed appropriate that my first book should be about him, and me, and the Little Kid forever caught between us by his suicide in 1976.

There's much yet to be done for the LBP. I've got the Kindle versions to complete and the hard copy of the LBP to finish for the Kickstarter campaign. I don't think I will be done with this story for a very long time. It's taken me thirty years to realize I'm living the damn thing and I can do more than cope. I choose to thrive.


I've worked with others to help them tell their stories for more than 20 years. Now it's my turn. I'm off. I've got enough material to keep me occupied for the rest of my days. I aim to catch your curiosity and hold it tight. My next project is already building a head of steam. The prologue for my tale will appear as part of the Dead Anyway comic anthology. It will mark my first dip into the terror-filled world of comics.

It may not always be a smooth ride, mind you. But I promise you it won't be dull, either.



The Facebook Page for the Little Book of Pain:

TheLittleBookOfPain

I post news relating to my book there, art and such, but I also share things I find inspirational. Videos, animation, links to resources for depression and other mental health issues. There's a lingering sense of shame in our culture around mental illness. We've got to break that down. Depression can be treated. There are people who care and places where you can get help. The LBP page is my soapbox for issues like these. 


You can find the eBook here, on iTunes. I apologize to all those with Kindles! I will have the Kindle version up as soon as I am able.

The LBP on iTunes

Lastly, here's the Facebook Page for Dead Anyway, well worth checking out:


Dead Anyway

Friday on the Downhill Slide.

It's January, 2013. I am officially four years older than my dad. I made it.

I'm not sure what that means, or if it means anything at all. 

When I first began therapy my expectations were broad and shallow. I wanted to get my professional life back under control. I was tired of feeling sad all the time. There were moments when I was so angry it frightened me. I was exhausted from swinging like a pendulum between these two poles. 

Doctor, I'm broken. My dad was a shrink so I'm familiar with the schpiel: "the therapist only points in the right direction. It's up to the patient to walk the path." Yeah, fine, whatever. Fix me already.

 

I wanted to keep looking out to the horizon, same as always, Mr. Intellectual, suspended at a critical distance from himself. My therapist made me look down and see all the ankle-snapping potholes that perforated the tarmac underfoot. Awareness of potholes in the road--stage one, check. Stage two: avoid potholes, check. One, two, one, two, one, two.

Nothing worthwhile is easy. 

I don't want to revisit my dad's death every January, any more than I want to accept that I'll be a flat-butted hairy Viking for the rest of my days, but walking backwards through life will eventually get you decapitated, right? That's the key to the trouble. Turn the problem around until it makes sense. Get the perspective nailed down, lest every step lead to a tumble. 

This isn't about dad anymore. It hasn't been about him for decades. It's about me. All of it, from the darkest moments when I think about chasing after him to the brightest, when it seems like everything is possible and within my reach, this revolving storm that hits the same point of land every twelve months is what I have become, sui paternis. I am more than my father's son. I am four years off the map and still going.

Maybe that means as much as I want it to mean.

Quit Apologizing.

Hey.

I know you fucked up. I know that you know that, too. You blunder your way though life, through people. When you're blind--and you're blind most of the time, be honest, your regrets prove you have hindsight--you leave unintentional destruction in your wake. You leave behind an emergency room full of victims. Awareness amplifies the agony. You watch as you deliver the blow and you wonder if the day will ever come when you can be something other than a spectator to your own behavior. You'd put a vise clamp on your mouth if you could. You'd stay awake 23-7 if it meant you could do all the things that would make everyone happy. You'd do anything to make it all better.

Some broken things won't ever come back together.

Accept that you won't receive absolution for the wounds you've left behind. Be thankful when someone surprises you with forgiveness. Don't wear it too thin. Do more than promise to change. Make the effort to effect the change that's needed. You can be more than play at being an audience of one to your own stupid behavior.

Forgiveness runs through a thin cord. It's not infinitely strong. It can be worn out.

Forgiveness relieves. Actions heal.

Listen to Yourself.

Last night, while speaking with a friend, I learned that a former neighbor of hers had committed suicide. He left behind a trio of teenage kids and a wife.


37 years ago, as of next Tuesday, my own father did the same thing.

This fellow tried self-medicating, with alcohol.

So did my dad.

Today's keyword is hopelessness.

I don't know what prevented this fellow from getting some help. I can imagine myself in his shoes. Dad's blood runs in me. Combine that line with the thread of mental illness in my Mom's line and I get a sympathetic vibration for everyone in this tragedy.


The stigma that enshrouds mental illness gives resistance where almost any other medical condition would invite acceptance, the debate over health care costs notwithstanding. I wouldn't think twice about letting EMTs patch me up after a car accident. I *did* resist treatment for my own depression. I hung back out of shame. I made excuses, procrastinated, and continued to trip over my own feet for decades. What made the pain preferable to treatment? I didn't see it that way. I saw treatment as a prize far above my head and out of reach. Money, time, opportunity, what did it matter? I saw myself as hopelessly broken. There was no point in seeking therapy.

I wasn't entirely wrong in thinking depression would always be with me, either. It will. Depression's my cancer. I'm treating it with drugs and it's in remission. Past that point the analogy breaks down. It's an iffy thing at best to try and wish away a carcinoma but choice plays a big role with the healing process where mental illness is concerned. Therapy's taught me how to moderate the effects of depression. I've learned how to treat myself. I'm learning how to live with depression.

I've learned that hope never leaves. I couldn't see it because I'd pushed it out of sight.

And who am I? Ordinary. One red-haired, gawkish, muddling single adult white male. It has often felt like it's taken superhuman effort to keep myself going, but that's only me swimming through my own life. I am not special in the wider world of my kind.

You can do what I've done.

Try.  Please, try.

I can't ask it of my dad; it's too late.

It's not too late for you.

Turn and Turn.

Round and Round and Round it Goes.....

...Where it Stops Nobody Knows.

That's what sticks most in the craw when it comes to inner demons: they never stop having a say in your life. You wish they'd just go and stay gone.

Our media makes us addicts to the Miracle Cure.  Have a weight problem? Try the Zone, the Paleo, the Crawl, the Butterfly, the Strain. You're unhappy? Buy a car! An iPad Mini will put a smile on your face if the iPad didn't. Just get yourself a new house, a better job, more money, a man, a woman, Jesus, a baby, a submarine, a rocket-powered elephant, and all your problems will vanish. The message says internal turbulence has an external pacifier. Wouldn't that be lovely?

Your inner demons are a part of you. You were compelled to make them. You survived by staying hidden in their twists and folds. Then conditions changed. You grew up. You got out. The folds ceased to be protection; they caught your feet, tripped you up, held you back. You sought help and met your demons face-to-face for the first time. You came to understand them a little. Session by session you regained the control you'd handed them when the world was too hard to face any other way. You learned how to hold on when they fought back. You found you were strong enough on your own. Now you don't need them any more.

The inner demons don't know that, don't want to hear it, won't ever believe it. Their reality will forever be the nightmare that gave them purpose and they will always try to make you see the world through their eyes. You can dismiss them, calm them, quiet them, but forget about getting rid of them. They are part of your framework. You don't reach peace by waging war against yourself but by achieving a detente with the little bastards. They ruled you, once upon a time. You have to parent them to keep them quiet.

Periodically you'll slip and they'll drive you for a while.

Remember what you've learned and gently push them aside.

There is no Miracle Cure.

Healing comes one twist at a time.

Stormy Weather.

Hey. Looks to me like you're getting soaked out there.

You know you can come inside any time, right?

And therein lies the problem: translating awareness into action. It's easier to hold tight and hope for clear skies. The longer you wait, the easier waiting becomes, until the day when waiting is all you know how to do.

You got stuck out in the rain one step at a time. Quit thinking about retrieving safety in giant leaps. Go back to the tried and true method that you misused. Give yourself permission to take a step or two towards a place that's dry and warm instead. Keep at it.  That's what will make it into a habit.

One day you'll look up and realize you reached the sunshine all by yourself.

The End of the Road.

Is it?

The end of the road represents a choice. You can choose a new direction and move on.

The depressive's addendum to that moldy oldie "when one door closes, another one opens" is good to remember when you're trying to change where your feet tend to take you. (Hopefully you'll forgive the mixing of metaphors. That appears to be the leading indicator of today's personal climate.) The mentally ill know better than most how the doors tend to change shape the more you insist on the downward ride; how they get to be smaller, bleaker, less inviting, until the roads they lead to disappear into trackless forest.

The doors behind you often wind up locked. That's the toll for the road you've taken.

Don't give up on creating change within yourself but let go of the need for absolution. Changing your behavior is the best thing you can do for earning forgiveness. Just don't count on it. Don't expect it. Try to be a better person right now, this minute, then the next, and again, and again. Good habits accrue as the bad ones do, step by step. The straightest roads meander. Should they bend back towards a door that was once locked and you discover it's open again, celebrate your own growth for an instant. Absorb what it feels like to recover lost ground.

Big doors lead to smaller ones on bad roads. Make yourself turn around.

A High Note on Drama.

The Holidays have come back around.

Let the screaming commence.

We hate certain cliches for their obnoxious condescending truth like we hate listening to a singer whose voice we can't stand. It doesn't matter to me that Jimmy Corrigan is a rock star, nor (more importantly, for the sake of this analogy) that he's hitting his notes spot-on. I don't want to hear him doing it. If he happens to be singing about something that speaks directly to my experience in a chiding way I am even less inclined to tolerance.

The cliche I'm thinking of is "you can only change yourself".

Yes, it's true. Sure it is. It provides little comfort when you're awash in family disharmony.

I will find my way through to loving those I care for without getting hung up on old thorns. I know how to get there. I got the basic pattern down from digging my way to Dad's self-murder and back out again and the prospect of being a disassembled motorbike scattered across my life's living room floor is endurable for the prize I know is waiting at the end of the grind. Self-work is always worth it. Whether you get the spark from Jung, or the Torah, or Tony Robbins carries less weight than the good you can do from a place of peace. I don't hold with the idea that God only shines light on those who do good in the Authorized Way. That's not the model that produced Mahatma Ghandi nor Martin Luther King...or Jesus, for that matter. Doing good is foundational more than fundamental.

It's a hard row to hoe. Sometimes I can see past the button-pushing, crazy-making family patterning to all the things I admire and love. Much of the time I'm holding the scream back right behind my teeth.

Well....you can only change yourself.

Pre-Turkeyfest Musings

The first rock opera I ever heard was Pete Townsend's collaboration with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, "Tommy". It came in a big two-record set with a full-color insert whose contents were partly graphic--illustrations in a style like Peter Max on acid, or is that redundant?--partly artfully-staged photographs. Here's Tommy's pinball machine on the beach. Here it is, nestled amongst scrub and deadwood. Here's the chrome of the pinball containing the world in mirrored backwards perfection. Here's Cousin Kevin, made out of thick plasticized strokes the width of your thumb, and here's the chair he used to torture Tommy, the stylized chunks of glass rising from the seat in jagged mountain ranges.

The metaphor of the chair was a regular feature in my therapy drawings. It wasn't a conscious choice on my part. I made the connection six years after I began drawing my way through healing. The messages in the photographs and art from Tommy penetrated deep and so cleanly I needed the shock of therapy to understand how profoundly they'd affected me. This is a chair, and also a prison cell, and a panic room with glass walls, a baby's crib and the dentist's chair from Marathon Man, where I played both Dustin Hoffman and Sir Lawrence Olivier. The chair was where I was supposed to be.

Pete and his buddies put that kid Tommy through an awful lot of crap. He witnesses his father murdering his mother's lover. Mother and father demand he blot the event from his memory. Tommy's a dutiful little kid and he does what any child desperate for his parent's love would do. He finds a way to bend to their will. He makes himself deaf, dumb and blind.

That doesn't sound outrageous to me. Adults put their kids through jarring realignments of what equals security all the time. What wouldn't you do to stay in the shelter of your parent's shadow? What would you sacrifice to keep them together if they were getting divorced? What would you willingly become to make one parent happy after the other has died? A puppet? A perfect student? A hellion? A china doll? A perpetual child?

Tommy's spell is broken when his mother shatters his mirror, the only physical thing he's reacted with since the murder. Does that mean his mirror was like a projection screen for his mind's eye? Maybe that was the idea. It sets him free. The circle is broken and he spills into the world as a prophet.

I have never experienced one overwhelming shift in self-perception from which all the days that followed were free of old weights (or chairs). My revelations have come as fast as I've been able to handle them. Sometimes that's in been in bunches, like a fistful of grapes. More often it's been a slog. I got out of my chair like an agoraphobic going to the grocery store, slowly, hesitantly, resentfully. Comfort and confinement combined make you a junkie for dependence. I hated that I hated letting go of such a crippling thing.

The chair rests discarded in the attic of my head. I stumble across it now and then. I know I don't fit there any more. You can't blame a guy for trying. It's scary out there.

May tomorrow give you many reminders of what you have to be thankful for. May you face no Cousin Kevins or Uncle Ernies over the dinner table. I wish you love and to be loved in return.

May you be free.

Here I Go.

Confidence. Does anybody have that stuff bottled?

Who's to say they'd sell it to you, if they did.

You have to go get it for yourself.

I've learned an interesting tidbit about the world, though. It's a little fact with a great right hook. Here it comes. We're all born to fall for good eventually. We come equipped with the bounce to get back up as well. It's the force that keeps us loving when there seems to be no point to living. The bounce gives you the power to make a reason for living all by yourself.

If you've got that bounce in spades, bless your little pointed head, but if that bounce is hard to find, as it sometimes is for all of us, keep on trying anyway.

Fake it until you can make it. Don't let your opponent fool you into believing anything less. Everyone is going to fall in the end. Get in there and swing like fury. You can get back up, so go.

Swing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I walked into the world and the world bit me in the ass. I walked into relationships with my eyes closed and it bit me in the ass. I walked through life and life bit me in the ass.

Problems you can't see are kin to the crocodiles you can't see--they're the ones you should worry about.

Happy Thursday! Have an Addidasaurus!

Turns out these rare beasties are found in my neck of the woods! Who knew? They tend to be a damn sight shaggier (and are hybridized with Columbia hiking boots instead of running shoes) but every bit as friendly. Feed 'em Ju-Ju Bees and they'll do Immelmanns for you!

Because I can...

...I did!

Though exactly what I did is still a source of perplexity.

Me and Red/Green are getting along pretty well these days but I think I need to start seeing someone else. It'd be good for us.

Miss a day....

....add a day. Then try to figure out something new.

And a couple hours this morning brings us a better painting and a much happier me.

Take one thing at a time. Do a thing a day. Then two things. Then three things.

Small accomplishments snowball into big ones.

Dream big....start small.

Thank you, Phil Hale and train wreckage.

Don't ask what he's after.

Imagine having to clean up after the guy. Wuf.

I'm gonna see about posting one critter a day for seven days and see how it goes. Why not break a dry spell with a new thing?