Love Before the Ruins, Part II

The story continues.

Love Before the Ruins

If you'd like to see me be momentarily optimistic -- and believe me, this is a rare occasion indeed -- then be sure to check this out.

(And then check back in a day or two for the continuation.)

Soccer Fashion

Shameless Plug

It's true I couldn't draw to save my life, and my comics are about as useless as man-teats. But for whatever reason I'm particularly proud of the one I posted today. Check it out.

Super Bowl Commentary

As I watched the Super Bowl tonight, at best half-interested in the game and mostly just sticking around for the commercials, I couldn't help but wonder:

Have Omar Epps and Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin ever been seen in the same room at the same time?


Because I'm pretty sure they're the same person.

Music 2000

Imagine it's early 1980s and a group sets out to predict how music will sound in the year 2000.

This, my friends, is the result:



(And for the record, that apparition is the ghost of Tchaikovsky -- one of the judges for the Music 2000 contest).

High Five!

HIGH-FIVE INAUGURATION! - watch more funny videos

Voices (a Q&A with the author)

What does it mean when nearly every voice in your head is screaming for you to get the f*ck out of Chicago?


(Only to be followed by a whisper, "But to where?")

And why, pray tell, does all this news about salmonella leave me craving peanut butter?

That Which We Do Not See

Even the most intelligent of our species fail, time and again, to appreciate the beauty of the world around them.

They rush from Point A to Point B with their faces in cell phones,


and their heads so far removed from the best of their reality that they dream only of alternates: bigger homes; bigger paychecks; more beautiful spouses.

But what of perfectly formed snowflakes, glistening on windshields? What of shadows and sunspots

-- simple smiles or autumnal leaves forever orange (frozen in ice)?

It has taken me a long time to realize that not everyone sees the world as I do.


Which isn't to say there's anything special about me; only that it's with good reason that words such as "weird" and "quirky" are so often used to describe me.


But it is this same personality trait that compels me to seek out the like-minded,


ever hopeful that I will stop to take a picture and the person beside me will understand precisely why I'm fascinated by complex equations,

or a certain slant of light.


Together we will slay dragons with our laughter, run circles around Lake Michigan, and wiggle our toes through the morning dew.


But emotion, as with life, is a one-sided beast:

a landslide that consumes the very thing it loves, leaving eternity-old lessons in its wake.

You can depend on no one in this world.

Which is to say:

You are alone.

It is this very lesson that I find myself confronting again, even as I try -- perhaps now more than ever -- to disprove lifelong hypotheses.

But am I falling again?

Failing?


Cornering myself into the circumference of infinity?


There's no denying it, I think, staring out of my window and into stained glass: this life is a loop, doomed to repeat itself.

And so I do, the record and the needle bouncing inconsolably between the bitter and the sweet;

the beautiful laughter and the desolate sigh.

Which is to say, there's only one lesson to be had here, and you already know it:


The people you love will not recognize you even as you stand before them:

And yet they will remember you, beautifully and painfully,

when you are gone.

The Occasional Stutter

My inability to create art is, perhaps, one of the greatest disappointments of my life.

Whether it involved drawing, or painting, my talents never evolved beyond 5th grade art class. I was stuck in a land of stick figures, which I continued to doodle in the margins of my poetry books.

This has gone on for years, with my drawings being a source of bemused embarrassment; something I never shared, though I seldom had reservations about posting my words under the comfort of anonymity.

But then I discovered very respectable web comics like Toothpaste for Dinner and Exploding Dog, which helped me come to terms with the terrible artist within:

I don't understand perspective or shadows, and I couldn't draw a human face to save my life... but I do understand a bit about the world, and some days I just can't put it all to words. I'm a very visual person, believe it or not (hence my obsession with photography).

So for a few years now, I've actually been keeping track of my drawings. And this Friday, something strange happened: I filled up the last page in my book.

I've also been sharing a few comics with co-workers, two of which have encouraged me to give my strip a name and put it online.

And so I did. I've scanned everything in that I've done thus far, which means there's ample material for a comic-a-day for quite some time... particularly when you consider I hope to continue the series.

So here's what I'm going to do: on days when I have a new comic to post, I'll do that. But if the muses fail to inspire, I'll have something old already triggered up and ready to go.

Next time you come to YAWP and you're disappointed to see I've (once again) failed to post, try The Occasional Stutter.

You'll be disappointed in a whole new way.

Too Silly for Sad

I'll let these images speak for themselves.

Being There

This, I imagine, is how it begins.


An entire day spent in silence, readjusting a junk sofa; laying down new rugs and wiping vomit from the old ones.

This is what you never wanted; what so many of you fear.

It is alone.

Not the adjective and not the adverb, but rather the thing itself. It is, for lack of a better description, the genesis of a solitary noun.


It is… orange leaves outside of a window.

Sirens wailing towards Devon.

The gurgle of a seldom used fountain; the collapse of a soap dish unable to carry its burden alongside the tiled bathroom wall.


It is the sight and the sound and smell of autumn; everything falling and crunching and wailing to its own chord.


It is beautiful and sad. It is solitude with little more than a waning desire to be otherwise.


It is giving up.


It is the nauseating understanding of difference; the realization that, hermit or not, there is a profound difference between having the choice of company (youth) and none at all (present).


And it pushes on your chest, dripping your lifeline into the pit of your stomach, pounding to the beat of old memories and moments. Laughs and pranks and walks and sundry other moments where you were not — by any superficial definition of the word — alone.


But time is a lion, leaving in its wake a path of beautiful destruction.


People grow. They marry. They have children. The children grow.


Everyone older and older, their faces dropping from the only circle you’ve known. And so it goes: you are alone, in the middle of everything.


God forbid you should ever wake up to realize what I have: that there’s seldom a need for a telephone. No need for stationery and blank CDs. No need for vocal chords or complete dinette sets.

You will stay where you are while the world spins on; stopping and demanding you dance at their convenience. And yet: otherwise forgetting your face; your name; your voice.


And that, perhaps, is your problem. Your Achilles heel, as it were.

You are always there.



Waiting and helping. Helping and waiting. Like a piece of furniture that brings comfort after a long day, with scarce occasion for reciprocity.


But when the world does indeed comes crashing down — as it most assuredly will — and your ears ache with the sort of silence that only tinnitus knows.

No one — no one — will be there to hear you scream. No one will rub your feet or bring breakfast in bed. No one will answer their phone or call for random hello’s.

And this, I imagine, is the replicating middle. The climax to a story with no denouement except for the endless repetition of the silence; the solitude; and the fury.

But the question remains:

How does it end? How do you break out of the cycle and rebirth yourself into the happy happy joy joy of the faces around you?


It is the hardest feat of them all. An action so Herculean in effort that you can scarcely imagine the thought.


You will have to turn to someone you love and say, anguish dripping from your cheeks, that, no

I cannot be there for you.

Not ever again.


And until you accomplish this one, great disaster of your life, there is only this:


the beginning, the middle and the end – consistent only in their unraveling.