cir·cu·i·tous

I guess it makes sense that when I started this blog, it was with the intention of scanning and sharing my old, old zines (from the early nineties) -- I am somewhat stuck in the past.  Sometimes I don't even mean to be.  This morning when I was driving to work I realized (in a stronger way than past littler versions of this realization) that on my route, I pass the library where mom used to work when I was a kid, the school I went to for kindergarten and first grade, and last but not least, the fact that I work in the same office where I worked in 2004 - 2006 before moving to Philly, thinking that new opportunities would materialize once I had the Master's I earned while there.  I am not unhappy with re-treading old territory -- it's sort of unavoidable when one lives in the town where one grew up, and my hometown happens to be the world famous los angeles, so you won't hear me complaining about being stuck in the boonies or needing to get out of dodge and see more excitement and multiculturalism, etc.  Nonetheless, nostalgia is a melancholy feeling for me, and this morning as I passed by mom's old library and my old school, I did feel nostalgic.

Along those lines (of looking backwards), you may have noticed that since I started working on this blog again, it's been a long time since I reposted one of my old zines.  The main reason for that is that I can't figure out an ideal formatting for this project -- I feel like the zines are never big enough to be clearly readable.  However, I came across a neat cache of old cards and comix I did years ago, like in the early 1990's for the most part.  I'm posting some of them throughout the day, most likely, and over the next few days.  the ones I post today are gonna be black and white unfortunately, but, we'll see, I will try to hone my technical skills.

please love me.  please justify my non-belief in god.  please make me rich.  please keep me and my family safe.

robin

Legend of Legendary band Esther 1994

This comic is an example of how people sometimes aren't their true selves when they are hanging out with someone else -- but not in any meaningful way, in this case.  I drew this one when me and my friend Janet had a slumber party (1994), we were both drawing comics as a slumber party activity, but it wasn't in my true style, like, the humor isnt' really mine, but i was trying to impress her, as was she when she drew hers.  two things I think are really funny about this are that 1) we mention a girl named Esther in our class, but Esther was like 11 or something -- it was an elective with all different age groups, but me and Janet were at least a few years older than her, so I"m surprised we cared.  second, my misconception of Saint Morrissey in this is weird.  I love everything about him, from his homo-erotic/asexual vibe to his tongue-in-cheek sense of drama, to EVERYTHING.  

some teen birthday invite, featuring 2 heroes, Kim Gordon and Louise Brooks

1997 Sticker Bomb designs

These are the designs for the stickers I made that I used to sticker bomb Olympia with my Freshman year of college, before I stopped impressing myself with my street art acumen and when I didn't care about 'feminist' 'messages' or irony etc anymore

Yesteryou Chapter 12

12.
            "What do you think we should do, George?  I’m ready to follow your lead, whatever you think.  I don't know what to think.  She’s changed from when I used to really know her.”

            “To tell you the truth, Richard, she’s always changing.  I’m really frightened.  I don’t worry about her killing herself anymore, I don't know why, I just get the feeling she wouldn’t try it again.  But where could she be?  The only money she gets is her SSI checks, which I’m in charge of.  I’ve sent her a couple checks since the accident, and then I call and check with the bank to see if she’s cashed them, and she hasn’t.  Molly stayed in Phoenix two days, sleeping on Beth’s back porch and listening for any sound coming from inside – she’s sure Beth isn’t there.  But where could she go, with no money?"

Molly entered the room carrying a big bowl of popcorn, "Come on, you guys," she said, "This is really just another typical day in the life of George, Dick, or Molly.  Raise your hand if you haven’t had to call the ambulance to have her stomach pumped, or if you’ve never had to duck from her throwing something heavy your way."  George was sitting on an overstuffed corduroy loveseat with his head held in his hands, poised like a writer overburdened with sad information in a photo on the back cover of a literary novel.

            "You're right of course, Molly, she’s always in some kind of trouble.  But I really can't stand not knowing where she is like this."  Distressed, he began a fit of coughing painful to witness and common since his latest surgery to have a new mass of cancer removed from one of his lungs. 

Shortly before Beth's collision and disappearance, Richard had been nursing an infatuation with his secretary.  She was intelligent, with a self-deprecating sense of humor he found attractive, and he also liked her looks, her pale red wavy hair and the way she dressed a bit like Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde.  But now, all he could think about was Beth, to pause throughout the day and wonder exactly what her thoughts were, this exact moment.  He'd known her to panic so bad she had trouble breathing over something benign as getting caught out in one of her white lies, and now she'd killed someone.  He found himself whispering "shh" when he was alone, and then visualizing Beth somehow telepathically registering this token of comfort, wherever she was (not dead, please god, not dead like those horribly selfish women she used to idolize so, the female literary suicides, Plath, Sexton, Woolf).

"I want to find her myself," George stated abruptly, jarring the silence the three had fallen into, "I don't want to involve the cops in this" 

"I agree," Richard and Molly said at the same time, and Richard gestured for Molly to continue her thoughts:  "None of us really feels at ease talking to the type of person cops usually are, and also mom might have a bunch of street pills or something else on her, she might just get herself in trouble if cops find her."

            "You're right, sweetheart," said Richard, "We're not really sure what your mom is going through right now.  Listen guys, how about we call it a night, worrying-wise?  How about I order us a pizza and George, you want to spend the night?"

            As they sat at the coffee table eating pizza that night, Molly replayed in her memory, more than once, a recent exchange between herself and her mother that occurred the last time they spoke on the phone, before the death of the motorcyclist.  Speaking to Beth, she usually became childishly sarcastic and defensive, and this phone call was no exception.  Her mother loved the writer John Updike, and had inculcated Molly with this love of his writing too, since she was a teenager, but then Beth was absentminded about Molly's likes and dislikes and never remembered the conversations they'd had about Updike novels and short story collections after Molly'd finished reading them.  So during this last pre-tragedy phone call when Beth had remarked, completely innocently, "I just found this Updike book I'd been looking for since last year hiding behind the dresser, of all places.  It's called "Music School".  You should read it," Molly snapped back "I've read it like twenty times, mom.  I probably know it backwards and forwards by heart."  Beth had mumbled, "You're so smart, you’re breathtaking," and Molly had not known what to make of the remark, whether it was genuine or sarcastic.

            While Molly's thoughts ran to the recent past, Richard was softly agonizing over the same horrible image he'd been agitating himself with for days; he was imagining the young motorcyclist’s bones crushing under the speed and weight of Beth's car's tires.  He was imagining the young man's skull bursting like a watermelon thrown from the balcony of a penthouse apartment to the sidewalk below.  And George, he'd gotten an old forgotten one-time favorite song stuck in his head.  The lyrics were mostly questions:  "Where did it go?  That yester glow?  When we could feel the wheel of life turn our way."  He loved the soothing incompleteness of questions, like the pale pink light of a pre-dawn sky, like touching Beth's sweatered elbow instead of her bare face.

Pointless Survey

Write your answers in the comments box

1.  What was your favorite movie as a kid?

2.  What is your favorite movie now?

3.  When did you lose your virginity?

4.  What is your biggest pet peeve?

5.  Do you like hate or love Mad Men?

6.  Who is your celebrity crush?

7.  Do you prefer to be a grown up or a child?

8.  Do you play Farmville?

9.  What is your favorite band?

10.  Where is the farthest you’ve traveled?

11.  What is your favorite novel?

12.  What is your favorite song?

13.  If employed, do you feel proud of the work you do at your job?

DREAMY

 

 

HAPPY

SAD

Yesteryou Chapter 11

11.

            Molly told the men that she wanted to drive to Beth’s apartment in Phoenix alone to look for her, and both Richard and George weakly protested, because Molly was stubborn in a way that inspired respect in both of them; she insisted on taking the hardest tasks.  She wanted to be the one to find her mom because she was in one of her fed up moods in which the men’s lenience toward Beth’s lifelong string of mess-ups seemed solely predicated on a misunderstanding of Beth’s motivations, of her entire personality.  The men thought Beth couldn’t help herself.  Molly, when she wasn’t feeling sentimental of yielding, just thought Beth was dangerously lazy, a hurricane barreling through terrains careless and deadly, ruining everything, disappearing as quick as she’d appeared.  So Molly had driven to Beth’s apartment in Phoenix the day it finally seemed too spooky not to be able to reach her on the phone, the day they received Beth’s vague letter to Richard.

            It took a day to drive from the house she lived in with her dad to Beth’s apartment in Phoenix.  She ate beef jerky and drank coffee on the road, and went over and over the few scenes between herself and Beth that she’d been most stuck on lately.  When she heard her mom screaming in the doctor’s office, for instance.  Her and George were sitting in two orange plastic chairs which were cold to the touch, in a Kaiser Permanente waiting room with flickering fluorescent overhead lights that hummed a constant, ruthless dirge.  All of a sudden, the air was pierced with a scream so rich with terror, it struck Molly as a scream that belonged in a horror film, and even before she saw the men holding her firmly and walking, half-dragging her out of the doctor’s office, Molly had already known that the scream belonged to her mother.  “Oh dear,” was all George felt inclined to say (actually, his internal voice uttered “Oh fuck,” but Molly imagined him more naïve).  Did these scenes ever shock him, or was he unshockable? 

            “What’s wrong with her?” Molly demanded of him in a whisper.                  

“I think they’re trying to make her go into a treatment program.  I think this doctor she’s seeing has been threatening to do it against her will.  It’s okay, let’s just get her out of here.”  He bent down to pick up Beth’s purse where it sat at his feet, and took Beth over, the men who had been restraining her gladly giving up their charge.  On the car ride to Beth’s home (this was one of Molly’s weekends to spend with Beth, and she couldn’t go back to Richard because she knew he was getting away to Mexico for the weekend), Beth didn’t stop screaming.  “What should we do?” Molly wanted to know, but before he had time to answer (though, was he planning to answer?), she said, “Pull over right here, behind this truck.”  It was an ice cream truck she’d bought things from occasionally, and she liked it because it sold pretty little toys, cheap things with mermaid and star motifs.  She had a dollar in her pocket and she told the short Guatemalan man behind the shallow counter of the truck, “Give me the prettiest one of these,” gesturing with a nod of her head towards the water guns.  The command amused the man, who liked that she valued the beauty of the little knickknacks, which he painted by hand with nail polish and White-Out, and he stealthily handed her one that had a dragon with the breasts of a woman and a halo painted over its head.  She ran back to the car and shoved the item into her mom’s hands.  Beth quieted down immediately.  Maybe she’d felt embarrassed at the scene she’d made in the doctor’s office, and maybe she was just content to receive the toy; Molly would never know.  Beth remained silent for a couple hours.  The sun set, George sat with Molly for awhile on the cluttered and dusty couch before tentatively getting up to leave.  “See ya,” Molly said bravely.  Beth started to make dinner.  Then she came into the living room, examined the image of her daughter there on the couch, and she could have said, “Thank you for this little toy.  It’s really pretty.”  That would have made Molly happy.  But Beth just turned around and went back into the kitchen, stubbing her toe on the chair that stayed propped against the oven door to keep it closed.

            In Phoenix, she drove immediately to Beth’s apartment.  Beth’s neighbor was outside, cleaning out her car. 

            “Molly, right?” 

            “Yes.  Your name is Susan, right?  You’re her neighbor?” 

            “Sweetheart, I don’t know what to tell you.  I spend most of the day listening for some sound coming from her place, or keeping my eye on the window to see if she goes out, and I just don’t hear a peep from her.  I asked the cops to break down the door, but they had some law they told me about, some reason they can’t interfere.  I guess there has to be a missing person report filed.  Have you done that yet?” 

            “Uh, I’m not sure.  My dad might have, I don’t know.  She didn’t give you a spare key to her place, I guess?” 

            “No, I’m afraid not.”  

            “Okay,” Molly had a short attention span for conversations.  “I’m going to snoop around a little, okay?” 

            “Help yourself, sweetie,” Susan said, and when she turned back to emptying out the papers on the floor of her car, Molly saw that Susan’s thighs were marred with green and blue spider veins, even though she was fairly young, and it was one of those brief reminders of inevitable ugly mortality that depressed Molly even more than she already felt.

            For a half hour, Molly sat on Beth’s side of the porch (it was a duplex apartment building), exhausted and unsure what further to do; she’d tried peering into all the windows, knocked for several minutes on the front and back door, and called, her lips close to the peeled turquoise paint of the front door, “Mom, are you there?”  Finally, Susan sat down on her side of the porch.  “Do you mind if I ask you what happened?” she asked.

            “You mean about the car crash?  I don’t really know the details.”

            “I was just wondering, is it true that Beth ran someone over?”

            “Yeah, a guy on a little motorcycle that I guess wasn’t right for the freeway.”
            “And do you know why she’s disappeared?  I mean, is she wanted by the law, for manslaughter or something?”
            The question made Molly feel defensive, but Susan was obviously asking out of a curiosity untainted with judgment.  She said as much a moment later, after Molly told her that the crash was rightly judged an accident that had been the motorcyclist’s fault.

            “Sorry about the questioning, I wasn’t trying to make Beth sound guilty of murder.  I’m just confused.  One day she goes to court about the crash, then later that night I hear her coming back home, then not a peep from her since then, she just disappears.  I like her.  So, I guess I’m just bewildered by the whole situation.  It seems like if she’s not in trouble – ‘

More to herself than to Susan, Molly mumbled, “Fuck, she must feel so guilty.  I can’t even imagine.”

one of my favorite films

Yesteryou Chapter 10

10.

            Meanwhile, the friendship between George and Beth was an embarrassment to them both, at times, because of its intensity and breadth.  People assumed, even though the two would have made an odd couple, that they had been secretly physically intimate, or if not, that it was inevitable.  That may have been a natural assumption to make (though inarguably prurient), because it wan an obvious fact that George was in love with Beth.  George and Beth both knew it, but unrequited love was the most natural kind for the asexual George to give, as well as the most natural kind for Beth, arrested developmentally at the emotional age of 12, to receive.  But the truths is that they were friends.  When in his last days she would be comfortable enough with him dozing off and on throughout the day on her couch to walk around the apartment naked when she found it necessary, like when she'd been putting on her underwear in her bedroom for instance but then remembered she'd left the only bra she owned on the floor of the living room and she had to go get it -- George didn't feel a sexual charge seeing her bare breasts but instead, or at least mostly, gratefulness towards her for finally allowing him so completely into her private world.

            The day after he met her, he went back to the library to see her again, and brought her a copy of a book of poems about cats.  She already owned the book, but was pleased by the gift anyway, because she liked owning things.  "Where did you get this book from?" she'd asked him, "It's a first edition, isn't it?"

            "Mmm hmm, I bought it as part of an estate.  An old English fellow passed away last week in Pasadena, and his wife is a customer in my store; I own a used bookstore.  She let me have first pick at his book collection, which turned out to be amazing.  Really wonderful stuff. If you're interested, I could show you what I got from that estate.  Maybe there's something you want."  They would soon share routines, habits and traditions, especially once she divorced Richard.  Every Boxing Day, for instance, which is a holiday celebrated in England on the day after Christmas, they exchanged one wild-card gift each, a present that hadn't appeared on the meticulous wish list of gifts they traded each December 1st.  Every year for his birthday one of her gifts to him was a bag of assorted candy, but she put the bag together from several bags of candy, and he had to figure out the theme, like one year, an easy year, all the candy in the bag was red (red Jolly Ranchers, red Wax Lips, Red Hots), but one year it was more challenging, all the candies had the names of locations in them:  Boston Baked Beans and Charleston Chews.  They had annual two-person Oscars parties that always included a spread of Pub Cheese and frois grois:  the person with the least correct Oscar predictions had to do the dishes left over from all the snacks they ate that night.  Every Easter they went to the Griffith Park Observatory, which was one of the main locations in “Rebel Without a Cause,” simply because Christ reminded Beth of James Dean.  When Molly was still a child, and came to visit Beth on the weekends, there was the excuse of laying a groundwork of beautiful images in Molly's memory to add a flourish to everything the two grownups planned, and they developed traditions they would abandon later when Molly grew up, like going to the temporary carnival in downtown that was set up every year for Chinese New Year, or burying the small rodents one of Beth's cats always dragged back to the apartment with funerary rites and solemn ceremony. 

            Beth had been so proud of herself for catching the interest of a classy and handsome man like Richard, and through that pinhole of pride, some love escaped, made its way to Richard.  But only some.  She didn't fully accept the fact that he was a person, that he continued to walk and breathe when out of her sight.  And there was her endless amazement that she'd made Molly.  But these two people, huge as their impact was on her, made her uncomfortable to be around; she dropped more things than usual when Molly was in the kitchen, and her best hair days all occurred on days in which Richard didn't see her.  It was only George with whom she didn't stutter or say unduly obnoxious things she didn't mean.  And when she moved to Arizona, it was because, in the first blush of forty, Beth realized anew that she was young, pretty and doomed, and wanted a fresh start.

            On a hot summer day in 2007, Beth, who'd learned to drive in exchange for becoming less adept at all the other adult skills she'd once taken pains to learn, like a baby attempting language, was driving on the freeway.  At this point in her life, her nineteen-year-old daughter was mostly incommunicado.  She spoke on the phone to her best friend George almost everyday.  She hadn't been working a regular job for two years, because she'd suffered debilitating panic attacks at her last job, and now she was crazy enough to qualify for Social Security Insurance.  She craved sex, pills and popcorn, all the time.  Keeping pace alongside her fragile Datsun on the freeway, a young man was riding what looked like little more than a motorized bicycle.  That the boy should not have gotten on the freeway on this contraption was obvious, because it could hardly take his weight, it wobbled and sputtered noxious clouds of gas.  The rider was wearing those canvas high-top sneakers Molly used to love to wear when she called herself a punk-rocker, a pair of cut-off shorts and a t-shirt that had “Satan’s Little Angels” printed on it in red Old English lettering.  This shirt would become a heartbreaking detail to her because of the way it so flippantly alluded to the afterlife.  He wore his hair in a pompadour.  She could see the sweat on his face and even though it would sound later like an unbelievable exaggeration, she could see the areas of skin that stretch across his knuckles made pale from how tightly he grasped the handlebars.  It was rare, to have an opportunity like this to watch a handsome, weary, nearby man careen through various levels of fear.  She imagined this must have been his first time in a situation which necessitated taking this contraption, a Honda Rebel, on the freeway, and she wondered where he was headed, and if he wished he had worn tougher clothes in case the bike tipped over – there was nothing covering his legs or arms and it would hurt awfully if he took a spill.  Then without even looking behind or beside him, he sped in front of Beth’s car, and she killed him.  Poetic irony being the common fate of poets, which Beth was, the father of the young man had been killed in a freeway accident as well. 

            The young man, whose rock band had been called “Satan’s Little Angels,” had been living with his girlfriend, Lorena, when Beth ran him over, and the young woman briefly entertained the notion of suing Beth for vehicular manslaughter, but a therapist convinced her to try to move on from the accident, and Lorena tried her hardest.  Beth disappeared, first sending this letter to Richard:

            “Richard, please just let me explain myself someday.  In the meantime, please take over.”

And that was all it said.