Why aren’t more people talking about that Austin plane attack? Why isn’t this news? Why is nobody concerned about an act of terrorism? Of treason? When an angry, rich white guy adopting Al Qaeda tactics (while using his own private plane–sorta hilarious, since he insists that taxes ruined him), stay with me, and strikes against a branch of the Federal Government with murderous intent, that’s not newsworthy? Is all of journalism, and are all of us, that racist that we can just write this guy off as some poor wacko who hated paying taxes?

Glenn Beck and the Tea Party and Patriot movements keep drumming these guys up into a gold-and-gun-slinging frenzy, while Republican congressmen do their best to make sure that nothing happens in government, therefore insuring that government is, as they say, bad, and now we’ve seen an act of right-wing rebellion (with actual IRS casualties), and nobody cares?? But a couple of guys with brown skin that say their prayers to the east each unsuccessfully attempt to hijack planes, and it’s all we see or hear for months, and we’re pushed into more drastic, fortress-like and closed conditions at airports and in cities all over the world? I guess this empire might go out with a bang after all.

Now that you’ve scrolled through my liberal diatribes, here’s something I drew in my sketchbook a while ago while I was warming up to do some inks.

Today, a mere week after receiving notice that an automatic loan payment had been returned due to insufficient funds, thus adding a fee from each the bank and the loan company to my mountain of debt, I say to you that today! I got a letter from my former, different bank offering me a credit card with all sorts of introductory deals! I suppose my checking account that hovers around zero makes me a special person to them!

It reminded me of my favorite New Testament story, wherein Jesus finds moneylenders doing business in the Temple at Jerusalem and…

HE SMASHES THE SHIT OUTTA THEIR TABLES!!!

And then I read about how the Teabaggers react to all this stuff and it made me scared of having to fight a civil war with them. But really, if they can all get together in a couple of landlocked states and secede, why stop ‘em?

You know, I think Rapidographs get a bad rap in our little community of cartoonists and illustrators. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe they get held in higher regard than they deserve. But mostly I think people badmouth em. Like, the other day I even found myself saying, “They’re a pain in the ass to maintain, but…” That’s the consensus talking, man! They’re not a pain in the ass to maintain! More recently, I was lovingly cleaning two of my pens out, and I thought, this is nice, it’s meditative, and it means I care about the tool I’m using.

You know what’s a pain in the ass to maintain? Try maintaining disposable pens! They run out before you’ve done like four drawings, or more likely the tip splits and you haven’t even gotten your money’s worth of ink. Or, try maintaining the ink on a page after you erase it.

Plus, none of them are color-coded for the size, so you have to search out a number on the barrel or the cap every time. On the worst, and most commonly used, technical pens, Microns, the numbers wear off and you have to compare all the tips side-by-side to figure out how big they are. Talk about a pain in the ass!

And then, when they wear out, you go and dump another piece of plastic into a landfill to sit for thousands of years, taking up space amongst decaying poisons. And then! Even worse! You have to get your ass to an art store and buy another one! What a pain in the fucking ass!

That being said, I give you a drawing of my jambox. It’s been with me for seven years or so, and the other night at a raucous good time at my house, I thought I’d lost it to the ages. But it turned out the CDs just got stuck in a space in the tray, and I just needed to open it up, take them out, and put it back together again. Praise Somebody! A month before that happened, I realized it looks like a cute little imp, and I drew it. With a Pentel Pocketbrush. Not Rapidographs.

It’s a time of transition, isn’t it? Just because some weirdos decided it would be better to start a new year at the winter solstice instead of the spring equinox? I don’t know. I just know that everywhere I go, peeps are itching to move onto something, or someplace, new. South America, Asia, California, New York, Vermont, anywhere but here. Maybe this makes sense, meteorologically, after all. Winter, even though it can look so lovely, and crisp, and pristine, is a real drag. So a person starts to think, man, I gotta do something else with my life. Which makes sense, because basically the thing you’re doing with your life at this point is sitting inside watching TV and playing video games, eating too much chocolate, sleeping late, and trying to maintain feeling in your fingers and toes. So then, come spring, you either really do something new, or you don’t. Now is when the idea is germinated. At any rate, it seems that the early twenties New York City recess is coming to a close for many of my college chums. Then what? Maybe I should move to Dublin, or London, or something.

Well yesterday while I was on a Greyhound from Vermont to New York, I started to hate all humanity. One guy was working his entire respiratory system up through his trachea a couple seats behind me. I was surrounded by iPhones and got squished by a pain in the ass college kid (am I really already hating college kids?? I’m only 24! I’m a college kid!!!) from Hartford on. Actually, this isn’t the first time college kids boarding at Hartford have driven me crazy on a holiday weekend ride. And having taken the train so much recently, I now know just how small the seats are on a bus. They’re tiny. At least for a somewhat tallish person they are. No legroom, no elbow room. Basically, I was feeling crotchety. Then the bus took the scenic route through the Bronx on down to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Lord, how I wished I was on the train. But, since there is only one train from White River Junction per day, they were all sold out for this week  by at least a month ago.

Anyhow, when I finally got to the Port Authority, I found my cell phone too dead to even let me look up Caitlin’s work number. Typically, I either don’t pack my charger or my underpants. This time I packed my underpants. I went to the Authority’s pay phones to try to 411 the New Yorker, found the first phone emitting a high-pitched tone normally used to torture detainees at Gitmo. The next was simply silent. The third asked for 50 cents, but sent my quarters right down to the coin return slot. The fourth! Took my quarters…and kept demanding 50 cents! Naturally, I banged the shit out of that thing. Then a cop let me know that he probably wouldn’t do that. So I walked the two blocks to the Conde Nast building – why didn’t I do that in the first place? Before long, all was right with the world again. And I started to feel…thankful!

Today I don’t have a drawing to show you guys. Actually, I have a new comic, but not with me. So instead, how about a little schmultz? I give thanks for the Center for Cartoon Studies, for a loving and supportive family, an equally loving and supportive girlfriend, a fluffy cat, all sorts of inspiring, funny friends who aren’t too shy or phony to tell me when and where I’ve missed my mark in my work, and for you, my dear readers, who are almost entirely made up of those people listed!

Boy oh boy was I so excited to be somewhat up to date with technology and be able to watch videos all the time on the computer. But no. Basically I’m like the kids in Wet Hot American Summer, “We’d need some kind of super mainframe computer, and we for sure don’t have one of those.” Streaming videos blow. There’s always some Flash ad in the corner taking up all my bandwidth! The timing of jokes and the momentum between them always gets ruined by buffering! Eventually I figured out that if you press Pop Out on Hulu, you can hide the other window and watch more than a frame per second. It seems like it’s a lower-res version too, which should be easier to find.

Anyhow, I wish everybody could go to cartoon camp. We play soccer on Sundays and we draw comics for homework. There are only three bars in town and one is too snooty (but I work at it, which works out well for tips), and another too scary. So there is one bar filled with cartoonists. Even if it wasn’t for it’s Goldilocks just rightness, I think I would love this place. It’s in a basement and it’s named CJ’s. They do turn the lights on pretty bright for a bar though.

In other news, in cartoon studio, the class, we all wrote down an emotion, an animal and a job and then each got one of each. I got ebullient mouse barber. The consensus was that his ears could be rounder, so as to distinguish him from a gerbil or a Guinea pig. Check check:

This ship is turning around, this new leaf is turned, this bird has flown, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! Friends of the internet, I think I’m gonna go to grad school. I’m gonna try to go this fall. That might not happen. I think I need to be at the Center for Cartoon Studies. They’re not full yet and I’m trying to get in an application in the next couple of weeks. Yesterday I was going through what I’d send in my portfolio and I was confronted with the fact that my comics output since school has been running at about four pages a year. This has fortified my resolve!

Don’t you see? I’ve been going at things all wrong! It’s crazy to try to make a freelance illustration career that can support a comics career – I’m going at it bass ackwards! First you write a hit comic and direct it, then you feed yourself by drawing.

Now I know what you’re thinking: OK Pat, why not just draw comics instead of spending all your time building websites and promoting yourself to art directors in dying media? The answer is I’m just too fed up with how things are moving now. I don’t think I can hold out much longer doing what I’m doing, and there isn’t much else that sounds too appealing.

That, and I never got a satisfying critique out of my classmates at Pratt. They’d look at blue pencil lines under black ink and say if I added red, it would be like 3-D glasses. This isn’t to say that my friends haven’t been both supportive and constructive, but I’m yearning for a workshop environment and for classes on literature and writing and the comics medium and guest critiques by real -deal cartoonists. Does this make any sense? I don’t know, but it’s what’s happening now.

And I drew this semi-Phallic, World Snake-ish whale:

Okay, okay. I forgot how long it takes to settle into a new place. It’s almost been two weeks, and obvi I haven’t been keeping up with the weekly portraits, or, for that matter, drawing much at all. But! this ain’t LiveJournal, so I’m gonna berate you with another unnecessary change I’ll make to our writing system once I enforce my Totalitarian will on the people.

Numbers. They ain’t right. Whenever I’m measuring, or reducing, or enlarging, I always end up with .125s and .8625s and I hate it. I remember my middle school geography teacher telling my class that the Maya used a base-six system, which is actually better than base-ten because it divides better. Six divides into halves and thirds and ten divides into halves and fifths, and who the hell measures things in fifths? I think we could go a step further and make our base unit also divisble by quarters.

How about twelve?? Twelve!! The perfect number! It’s actually not all that ridiculous. Think about it! We already have unique words for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. Past that, we ad the -teen to the digit in the one place, right? That means we’re already set up for making King Twelve the successor to King Ten. I’ll admit this gets tricky once we get past nineteen, but what’s so bad about tenteen, eleventeen and twelveteen? Or what about twenty-ten, twenty-elven and twenty-twelve? Or even deci-one, eleventy-two and twelfy-three? We could do worse. I mean it. Cause we are doing worse, dudes.

Now, I know what you’re all thinking. You’re thinking, how could we ever transition to this insane new system? You’re thinking it! Come on, admit it! But, just ponder a moment, please, about circles. 360 degrees. That divides into twelves. And, uh, hello? Twelve hours? Sixty minutes? Three feet? Twelve inches? Do I even have to go there?

Of course we’ll need new numerals. Don’t worry, everybody, I got it covered. Since twelve is the new ten, it is represented by a one and a zero. And I made up some passable figures for ten and eleven. Check it:

Ookaa, duu yuu get it? Xen get wix it!

I’m sick of spelling. I’m sure everybody else in the world is too. Why not make phonics actually work, especially if that’s how we’re going to teach people to read and to write? Wouldn’t it make sense to condense our language a bit? (Wudn’t it maak sens too kondens aur laqwij a bit?)

Nobody needs Q as it is. But, Q looks similar to G, so it can be NG.
X is also useless, but since it’s like a crooked T, it can stand in for TH.
No need for Z either, so turn that backwards S into SH!
C can be replaced by K or S where it makes those sounds, but we need it for CH, so it will do that on its own.
G will always be hard G, J will always be soft J.

Now, I admit the vowels are much harder. This is probably the most imperfect part of my New Spelling, and I admit it could use some work. But I’m trying to avoid accents and letter combinations, and to use only the letters we already have. Then again, the vowels as they stand are pretty freakin’ imperfect.

A alone is hard like cat
AA is long like ate
E is like ebb
EE is like pee
I is like imp
II is like eye
O is like pot (and like walk)
OO is like oar
U is like up (and like what, and at least for now, also like bird)
UU is like poo
Y is a consonant!

Ookaa, yuu kan luk foor moor uv xis in xu fyuucur. Heer’s a kupl droweeqs, boox storted wix xu litl droweeqs of karakturs II’m wurkeeq on and xen II druu giis on xu traan: