Brian's quite remarkable blog of wonder.

I've been thinking about it lately, and it could be said that I was an intensely creative person until August 2002. That's when I got my first real job. Since then, my creative projects have been unrealized, uninspired, and generally few.

I hate work. Work is what turns excellent human beings into lame adults. All I think about now and all I have time to do are the two jobs I'm working in order to keep this shitty apartment.

Yes, that's a little harsh on myself. It's just another lonely Friday night, and I'm way too tired to do anything but write a blog entry and go to bed. There's good news on the horizon: a three day weekend, then a two day week, and then summer vacation! No more getting up at 6:30 AM!

Greenland really intrigues me, and I'm not sure why. Something is just really fascinating to me about a HUGE island that has a smaller population than Iowa City, IA.

It seems it would be one of those utopian places, like "oh, it's called Greenland, it must be really lush and beautiful" and then you go there and find out how bleak and barren and cold and dead the place is. Kind of like the planet Venus; people used to think it would be some kind of staggeringly beautiful paradise -- it's named Venus after all -- but it turned out later that it's a hellish, 900-degree greenhouse.

I'm finding out that not eating meat is actually the easiest part of becoming a vegetarian. The hardest part is trying to convince your family that you're not some kind of yuppie. It's become pretty obvious to me that my decision has not been very popular with certain people. And I wish that people didn't make such a big deal out of meat. I don't want to eat it anymore, for several very good reasons; this shouldn't affect anybody else in any way.

Phish is breaking up. Phish is breaking up. BAHAFBWERHSISbshsnsapapwy203921180`8`94523

Let me swallow my emotional despair for a second and say that I'm very, very glad that they're quitting while they're ahead (something that Cheap Trick and Jim Davis definitely could take a lesson from). Nothing is more pathetic than rock bands jumping the shark. It is not hard to imagine a huge decline in the quality of Phish's music in the near future... I mean, I guess there already has been somewhat of a decline; since their hiatus, they frankly haven't been playing as well together, and their tours have been getting shorter and shorter and their compositions have been getting less inspired. That's what I think, anyway.

On the bright side, I think the individual members are all definitely going great places with their music. I think Trey's recent visit to Africa could really open creative doors for his music, as it did for Paul Simon in the 80s. (I have always prefered Paul Simon's solo stuff to the Simon and Garfunkel albums anyway, so there you go.) Grudgingly I admit that their breakup is for the better.

OK, so today I decided to check out a certain web comic that I used to love but got disenchanted with a while ago for some reason, yes, you know the one; and I was struck by this strip, which bares some resemblance to a certain strip I did some years ago. It's unlikely, but not impossible, that David Simpson stole it from me, and it's really not UNCANNILY similar, so I'm just going to assume that he arrived at the joke independently. And it's not like I really care either way, it's just hmmm.

And look, wow, he's got a new political cartoon going, and it looks pretty good. He's a better artist than I once gave him credit for. Yet more inspiration for me to get into cartooning again.

So yeah, I'm working on character designs for a new comic strip, but I don't think I should plan TOO much, because I think the best comics start off weird and then sort of "plan" themselves. It's Darwinian as hell. The best ideas stay, and the bad ones know their place. Cool.

I saw Troy last night. It was pretty good, but I think it could have been a hell of a lot better. As huge, epic, ancient and incredible as the story is, I definitely wish this bigscreen adaptation had been put into more capable hands. The casting was all wrong. Brad Pitt? I mean, what? no. And the directing and cinematography were very dry and uninteresting. And Helen wasn't sufficiently stunning. But I think I got my money's worth, which I can rarely say when I go to the movies.

All I think about is movies.

I'm thinking of starting a new comic strip.

I fucking hate Dreamworks.

OK, so I just watched the trailer (http://www.dreamworks.com/trailers/sharktale/sharktale_tsr_qt_480.mov) for Dreamworks' upcoming CG movie Shark Tale. It's a movie about fish. And plenty has already been said about this, but really. Does Dreamworks honestly think that nobody will notice or care that they're shamelessly imitating Pixar's Finding Nemo? Pixar and Dreamworks have been playing a years-long game of "Lucy and Harpo" (starting with buggy movies, Antz and A Bug's Life; then monstery movies, Shrek and Monsters Inc.), and both studios are definitely guilty of borrowing ideas, but there's a larger issue: when Pixar makes these movies, they tend to be good; whereas the Dreamworks equivalents are just movie industry masturbation.

Here's something Dreamworks does that pisses me off: they never fail to cast the biggest and most expensive stars to be the voice actors in their movies, regardless of their vocal talents. They must honestly believe that the more popular the actors in their movie are the more money the movie will make at the box office. OK, here's another thing: in the trailer for Shark Tale it's obvious that they intentionally made the character designs actually resemble the actors who play them. The Will Smith fish is the spit and image of Will. Renee Zellweger's character is uncanny. The Robert DeNiro shark has a fucking mole. I guess so the people who were still at the snack bar when the opening credits rolled won't be in the dark about exactly who is playing whom. OK, and then there're the cultural stereotypes. "OK, Will, you be all black, you know, flamboyantly african-american; Ok, now, Robert, you be the Italian mafia don, because all Italians are involved in crime syndicates; OK, Renee, you be all ditzy and womany. Comedy gold!"

So this is the shit that we're totally giving up hand-drawn animation to produce?

Yeah, that turned from a nice little piece of insight into a totally unorganized rant, but since I spend so much time writing it, I'll post it anyway.

So I've recently gotten a metric shit ton of money (my tax refund last week, plus two huge paychecks on Tuesday) and so I've been spending a lot on movies and stuff. Today I went downtown and bought two CDs; one a compilation by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who are playing at the IC Arts Fest in a few weeks, and the other Transatlanticism by Death Cab For Cutie. I also picked up As Good As It Gets on DVD. So then I went home and "logged on" to the "interWeb" and "pointed my browser" to "amazon.com," at which web site I purchased six more DVDs (I'm really working on expanding my collection, now that I have a new DVD player). Those are: American Beauty (Thora Birch is waycool), But I'm a Cheerleader (an excellent and hilarious indie film about homosexuality in an intolerant society), Contact (the smartest and most poignant science fiction movie ever), Dr. Strangelove (the best comedies are the dark and serious ones), Love and Death (absolutely vintage Woody Allen), and The Secret of NIMH (one of Don Bluth's few non-crap films, it has the real spirit of a rogue animation team defecting from the evil clutches of Disney. Plus, it's a great 80s nostalgia fantasy movie).

Yay, when I get these I'll have 19 movies on DVD.

Last week I splurged on all eight of Christopher Baldwin's Bruno books. Those arrived in the mail the other day. Wow. Baldwin inspires the shit out of me. He puts so much work into his art - down to making blueprints of his characters' houses and drawing backgrounds in exhaustive detail from photographs - that it makes me wonder why it took me a whole summer to do 20 crappy pages of my graphic novel. I am filled with the longing to CARE that much about my art. Maybe I should start up a comic strip again, because historically that's been the only way for me to actually draw anything for its own sake.

I got my Mike Gordon t-shirt in the mail today!

I haven't eaten meat for almost two weeks. I guess I should come out of the closet here and say that I'm actively pursuing a vegetarian lifestyle. It's pretty exciting, actually. And it's really not that hard; everyone says that it requires incredible powers of will to stop eating meat (especially if you've grown up in a place like Iowa, which is famous for growing vegetables but somehow not vegetarians), but for me it almost happened by itself. I was at the public library and, on a whim, I picked up a book on the subject and then - without thinking - I just sort of stopped buying and eating meat.

My only concern about it is being a stick-in-the-mud at family meals. But there are few enough of those anymore that it's really not a serious impediment.

Blogs are awesome. I think my friends should make them, too. Don't you think so?

I was pretty silent there for a few months.

It seems like every year between late January and late April I get really depressed for no reason. Well, this year I guess I had some reasons for my depression, those being:

1) My new job as a school bus driver, which is in itself not all that depressing, but it means getting up at 6:15 every single weekday. Plus, I still have my other job at Cambus, and working two jobs really isn't the cakewalk I'd imagined. So I've been getting up early and working usually four shifts a day, which barely adds up to full time but all the running around is killing me. And I don't have much of a life.

2) I've been reading a lot about industry and the environment, and I'm very worried that either the Earth will run out of fossil fuels before humanity can wean itself off of them or that the ecological ramifications of global warming will render this planet uninhabitable by 2050.

3) Since I'm not in school anymore, my life has kind of plateaued. I'm not really accomplishing or pursuing anything, nor would I have time to if I decided to.

So I've had things to worry about while working during the day, and things to lie awake worrying about at night. But there's good news. 1) School will be out in a short two and a half weeks, and so then I'll just have one job and a lot more free time. 2) It's not like nobody's doing anything about environmental problems, it's just sort of... America. 3) I've decided to go to Kirkwood Community College next fall. Cheap education that can't possibly be that much inferior to the U. of Iowa. I'm all for it.

So yeah, things were pretty depressing for me for a few months there, but now they're getting better. I think I'm going to start updating this pretty regularly again now.

So, what has actually HAPPENED to me over the past few months? Um, really not very much. I left Iowa City twice, I think. Here's a quick rundown: I met Weird Al Yankovic and got him to autograph a picture of my brother. A week later his parents died. I've been writing and performing more pieces at No Shame Theatre, and one of them even made it to the Best Of show, which was thrilling. But a few hours before the Best Of show, I got in a pretty intense bike accident (this soccer mom backed her minivan out in front of me, and I wasn't looking) and I chipped two teeth pretty seriously. I could still perform at the show, but I couldn't talk very well and I looked like I'd gotten beaten up. Such is life. I signed a lease for an apartment that is just perfect for me, and I'm counting down the days until I get to live in it. I bought a combo DVD/VCR. So that's kind of it.

ice cream!