I have many stories brewing, slowly piecing themselves together, connected by page after page of giant brainstorm (no, not like Tracy Jordan’s) blobs with high-falutin’ concepts that don’t really translate to anything. And with two large web projects finishing up in the next few weeks, all I can extract from my 8-bit fingertips is that ridiculous 4-panel comic diarrhea squirt, possibly usable as court evidence of a wack job. (If not a HACK JOB! Bwahaha.)

Today I ventured to Near North Side (or so says Google Maps) to take some photos of Scott Urban for the upcoming issue of Hey, 4-Eyes!, Robyn Chapman’s venerable zine of glasses fetishism. Should be out fairly soon, despite the near impossibility to get artists, especially comic artists, to adhere to any sort of deadline. I’m nearly the worst example in this case, having put off getting a comic to Robyn forever. (My move cross-country aside, I have had plenty of time to get off my ass and illustrate something!)

I bought Apple’s new fancy in-ear headphones because my old ones fall out constantly and, as they are notorious for, sound like aural turd. Unfortunately, they only made me realize I really don’t like stuffing objects into my ear canal. (Cue up lewd replies to that zinger.) Besides, once you get a good seal so the bass kicks in, if you happen to be walking (**gasp** out and about with your portable music player?) each one of your steps sounds like a building is crashing INSIDE of your head. Why the fuck do people like these types of headphones? I should have just got an adapter so I can use my SR-80s.

In less geeky news, my clown hair and bona fide work-from-home scraggly beard are coming along nicely. I am once again flooded with the gut-sensation that I will be forever single. So will you when you look at this photo! (Realize my singledom, not that you, personally, dear reader, will be single forever.)

I didn’t intend for this to look quite so Christophe Blain, I swear, but I sure enjoyed drawing it. Perhaps I can pull it away on the next page.

I should do an anthology of 40 one page comic starts like this. I guess some could go for 2 or three pages. It’d be like the comic version of Inland Empire.

I mentioned on flickr that I’m going to have a comics section soon here on natebeaty.com, and why not? I mean, I code complex websites all day, and my personal site has turned into a ridiculously simplistic online journal that I could get out of any vanilla blog application.

I awoke at 5am this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. Instead I explored all sorts of nooks and crannies of the property that I grew up on, between Toledo, Oregon and the Siletz Indian reservation. At the time it was quite isolated and thick with briars, brush, alders and douglas firs. It’s since become more populated and, sadly, much of it has been clearcut.

It’s surprising to me what I remember, because my memory is very sparse when it comes to anything before graduating highschool. I swear I made a distinct yet partly unconscious decision to sever myself from all memories of the deepseated trauma that was public schooling. I am thankful I went through it, but I guess I don’t want to relive it.

Yet before I entered the hell that was highschool, I believe I had a rich childhood I’d rather not toss the memories of, primarily spent in the woods, or at least the woods of our 1.5 acres in the middle of nowhere. This morning I was able to explore all sorts of areas around our the home my family built when growing up. All the while, I was also recalling the belief (fact?) I heard on the radio that our memories degrade the more we relive them. What a sad and pointless thing to learn, adding unnecessary melancholy to combing the fields of nostalgia.

Anyway, rambling aside, I may explore more of this in comics. Until then, I’ll just post the barely-remembered exploits of being a meathead nerdjock in highschool!