Never turn your back.

Some things need constant attention. I've found that, if left to it's own devices for more than two days, a picture will always decide on mutiny.

I hold the in-laws directly responsible for the ochre-tinted mess that's sitting on my dining room table.

...combed his hair with a wagon wheel.

I was recently at the edge of the world. It's at the tip of Vermont where a long gravel drive bottoms out at a snowmobile track and a redbearded Titan stands sentinel and grins, catching those that wander. His watchdogs are beavers and geese and his children are the eastern cousins of the Alaskan lights.
It's dangerous there. Not in the way you might think. But I kept feeling that at any moment the earth would crack in the brittle cold and I would fall upwards, past his frying pan hands, through the clouds and cutout trees.

The old gods still exist. They're just disguised in red leather Nascar coats.

Great cholera will sport with the planet.

The apartment's nightly fits are becoming more persistent.

On the plus side, my 4a.m. intrigues with magnetic poetry are yeilding some profound results.

...and you know that stuff takes forever to wash out of clothing.

While I've long since forgiven Alan Lee's theft of my befeathered, shaman-Merlin, I cannot so easily dismiss his collaboration with Peter Jackson. Interpretation of Tolkien should never have been left to a director that works in clay. His hamfistedness was only bound to rub off on his artists.

"It'll take a miracle."

You learn at an early age that only the modest, fair-haired girls get the cool princes that used to be bears. Screw you, Rose Red. Screw your flaming cheeks and your courage and irreverance and general pluck. You get the leftover younger brother who wasnt interesting enough to attract the ire of Local Witch #47. And somehow, that's going to be enough for you.

yeah.

Bovinity Divinity ©

it was a toss-up between jack and the cow. and the cow won, though narrowly--the ghosting of a furiously erased farmboy is still visible. but everyone likes cows, right?

I like cows. except those chocolate milk ones.

we've got the land but they've got the view.

just so's everyone knows, modest mouse is on SNL this week. there's nothing in the world that matches the soggy melancholia that comes out of the puget sound area.

anime character drawings are the absolute funnest. one pen, one piece of cheap paper, a couple of lines, and lots of laughs.

karma

I can see them struggling on the hilltop. braids being pulled, shins being kicked. a bucket goes flying, water and all, and in the mad dash for supremacy tragedy ensues.

Or maybe jack didnt have the sense to double-knot his shoe laces.

And was it furnished?

Keep her from what? A severe case of wanderlust? Did she stay overlong chatting with the old woman in the shoe? Have one too many drinks with the Crooked Man? Dance past bedtime on the far shores with Owl and Pussycat?

I always felt for her. Relegated to pacing sticky floors, peering out into a world framed by the same set of curtains. Was she allowed into the yard? Could she tend her garden? Her geese? I mean, she had to eat, right? Or did her absentee husband make gracious periodic visits? Maybe he brought her morsels. Curds and whey or leftover blackbird pie. Or did she have no interactions other than the brief glimpse of a passing piggy or dog or candlestick maker?

Or perhaps I'm being too forgiving of someone who was really just the Hester Prynne of Nurseryland.

Hey, that Werther's is good stuff.

Funny that a day called "all saints" always looks like a battlefied. Trampled yards, disemboweled pumpkins, and bleeding heaps of discarded gear all seem evidence of a merciless colorful horde. And what else could it be called? I found a stray piece of the hard candy we had been forced to give out after running low on hershey's minis. Obviously cast aside by some tyrannical chubby hand. I know it was just one of many casualties, but it felt personal.

the third installment of this picture. probably not the last. I have an odd obsession with exoskeletons.