Harrowing
what's that old timey nurse hat thing called?
They still wear 'em sometimes in Beijing, and the doctors sometimes wear those Dr. Horrible white smocks with the 13 buttons.
Oh gosh, reading these makes me feel so old!
This post is unusual in that I actually wrote the script for it.
Another Guest Writer
on the opposite side of her husband at the picnic table, flicking ashes from her lit cigarettes into the Folgers' Coffee tin between them."
TO START, & ON A FAIRLY UNNECESSARY NOTE : I am aware of the finer points of coffee-brewing, aware in the sense that I can tell how a cup will taste the same way someone more eminently French than I (fallacy, impossible, will not last -) will loudly suck in a gulp of wine (hint : sniffing the cork is Patrick Bateman-style bullshit devised as a way to impress and shame your table-guests, no matter what anyone says to try & convince you otherwise) : by holding it up to the light, clinking a spoon against the French press, smelling the spent & now-useless grounds. I no longer strive for perfection, & instead have started a slow clog on the fine mesh of the Ikea French press (finding the percolator untrustworthy) - reduced in price from $25 to $16 in the newest catalogue, of which two arrived in my mail - as it continues to accumulate stuck-on residue of the shit I have sprinkled in with the grounds which doesn't just rinse off the way fine-grind rinses off, with a splash of hot tap-water (it travels everywhere, up the sides of the stainless-steel sink like mud rocketed up by the tyres of a car to hop a kerb & soak bystanders). Nutmeg n' black pepper, or shavings of Godiva Easter chocolate truffles from my very own mother - ones that crossed the Michigan Border (undeclared-at-customs food products) & that were falling apart and oozing when I opened the package at the post office in the early & abnormal spring highs of 25 or 30, whatever-Fahrenheit, unusual even here, more becoming of Los Angeles which is, according to David Lynch's weather reports, becoming "ambitiously balmy". The chocolates went directly into the freezer and, since using the vegetable peeler & shaving strips of them to mix with the aromatic grounds, I have not checked to see if their remains - now-lopsided & freak-looking lumps - are still as-of-now uneaten, but my intuition says they're gone and I'll never know what happened. And finally, the best combination yet, with the black-black hot-wet grounds & Ottawa tap water : real truffles, or their shavings - aromatic like wet soil, freshly-shorn deep-green grass, a hike in the forest, subtle like the smell of tree-bark, natural and good.
THE POINT of all this is that tonight, this-night, is my third French press of coffee in the twenty hours of today's wakefulness. I am over-scooping the coffee grounds and dropping the heaping piles in fours and fives, covering them in an ounce of cold-cold water & then pouring the steaming-not-boiling stuff from very high up. (A coffee that isn't strong enough will appear translucent in front of a bright light : brown water, which funnily will also do well enough to describe its taste and texture. A coffee that is too strong will look opaque in front of a bright light : black paste. It will taste burnt & as close to carelessness as one is physically able to perceive with any one of the five senses, six if you count the tingling of yer "Mickey Rourke sense", but perhaps it's just the inborn instinct to find cover whenever cigarette-breath, unwashed hair & sweaty n' sour comes appearing. You are supposed to grimace when you drink a cup of too-strong coffee, but forget about pouring it down the sink - drink the whole thing up very, very quickly to ride out a body-buzz and speak like an amphetamine addict for the rest of the day. Coffee-drinking is a pissing contest between the purported strong coffee enjoyer (henceforth referred to as "The Pretender") and the true, strong coffee-drinking "the way I always do it at home is run this already-brewed coffee through these new coffee grounds with the percolator" line-stepping tester-of-boundaries (henceforth referred to as "I feel kind of wasted right now. Do you? I haven't been drinking. It must be the air. Maybe I snorted up too much salt-water at the beach today. Are you sure you're okay? Because I feel wasted."). The result of all this is that : my coffee has come out of the pot like the scene in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas in which Johnny Depp goes on the Gator ride with Lacerda - who doesn't even look Portuguese - thru the dunes of the Mint motorcycle circuit : before the elevator scene, "written-with-Benicio-in-mind", but after hallucinating The Film Tropic Thunder, Duke pours his sand-riddled beer out onto the ground & it makes the splattering noises of a not-quite liquid. Mud.
I REMEMBER all the bad habits of the country of France & microwave my favourite blue mug, over & over again, as it fills with my ever-cooling sludge. I feel kind of wasted right now. Do you? I haven't been drinking. It must be the air.
Join me in a cigarette?
And now it's time for...
If you want your sweet taste, you're gonna have ta click through, baby.
This is the first comic on TBTB that was wholly written by somebody else. Jordan Anderson wrote this script, copied exactly except for two words removed and whatever typos I have added.
It was fun and kind of complicated to work from a script, and of course to work from something so long. I drew homer off a bust of him, which is why his skin is gray.....
[boring technical exploration]
Plotlines part 2
Oh my god it's like Magnolia up in here with the disparate plotlines joined by a single emotionally unstable dude with sideburns.
I decided not to include it here, but it will come up later that our cat's name is Toby.
you know sometimes doing stuff like this isn't actually very easy. I work at it all the time, and only like, 10 or 12 people ever read it. Sometimes I spend hours trying to draw somebody's face and it just looks like garbage by the end.
But that window in the background? Man that looks good.
I remember reading 'the natural history of the far side' where Gary Larson does a DVD commentary 5 years before its invention, he points out interesting stories behind certain panels, stuff that had to be redrawn, stuff that got tossed out for being objectionable, panels that no one ever understood.
But there's one, which I think is two sea captains showing each other unlikely parts of their bodies that have been replaced with pegs, anyway, all he writes about it is:
"I'd just like to say that I drew a pretty cool ship in the background here"
Sometimes it's like that.
Also, my love has been legal for three years today. Tonight I get to find out what our fourth ring will look like.
Non-continuity
This comic is not part of the plotline previously referred to. Episode two of said plotline should be done tomorrow.
Plotlines!
Thus begins the first instance of a plotline on TBTB. By the way, if you have a boss or an accounting department, a styrofoam ball filled with dowels on which are impaled tiny pieces of fruit cut into attractive shapes is actually a pretty nice thing to get them.
Edible Arrangements does a pretty great job of this. They used to sell skewers containing 1/8th of a pineapple on the street in Beijing, but I was never brave enough to eat one.
By the way Firefox don't bother me I ain't capitalizing styrofoam no matter what you say.
landscape
I may add some proper text, but that proved difficult while working 'on the run'.
Also this version has some compression artifacts. Will fix
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