This is an obvious concern. Mark and I have an impending ten-year high school reunion and we’re going to be in a room filled with up and coming doctors and lawyers. We’ve discussed the repercussions of “Me? I’m a comic artist.” I know the economy isn’t at its best right now, but I wonder if I can still fulfill the dreams of my eight year-old mind in the next year? Let me know if you see any job postings for the list above.

My day started like this.

I woke up next to her at 4 a.m., kissed her eyelids and they opened. We slid out of bed and dressed in the electric glow of streetlights through paper windows. Our boat left in forty-five minutes to take us across the sea. After a cup of English breakfast, we set out into the pre-dawn.

The ferry had sunk, or that’s what I imagine the sign said anyway.

We improvised our way across the coast, tracing the blue-marble ocean; white waves pawed at the road.  There was a restaurant where filleted octopi hung like wind chimes in the store window. They served a platter of fish that looked pre-digested.  We carved meat from the cheekbones, pulling thread-like bones from our teeth. A direct line of energy — sun - seaweed - sakana - stomach.  We slurped down everything but the oyster-green eye.

Back on the road, we opened windows (”Some music sounds better when it breathes,” Suzie Stephensen), and let the music and the wind speak for us; the Japanese language still raw in my throat.  We stopped for drinks, and found a cat, an unbroken trail of phlegm hanging from its tongue to the cement.  We bought water and sushi and watched as it choked the food down.  Another, with the same trail of phlegm dragging behind it came around the corner. The poor bastards must have some disease, I thought, animated stuffed animals with matted fur, insides lost, crawling from forgotten boxes.

At the end of the road was a place famous for whirlpools, but they weren’t whirling when we got there. We took a never-ending escalator to the top of a hill. We saw the ocean and a forest of white windmills on a brown hill. It was too cold for anything so we looked and left.

The ingredients of sublimity: sleeplessness, fingers tangled in a beautiful girl’s hair, digested fish swimming contentedly through coffee, Andrew Bird, aimlessness.

First came the crunch, then the scream, and then the car stopped. I opened my eyes and saw in the rear-view a silver car tangled with the guardrail.  The driver stumbled out.  I opened the door and led her to the roadside. She sat down, blood running over her bruised nose and into her mouth. Her head had destroyed the driver’s-side window, filling the silver car with diamond-shaped glass shards. A man in cowboy boots stopped and called the police. My girl, fingers trembling, held a tissue to the dazed girl’s head and we all waited for the blood to stop.

“Oh, that magic feeling . . . nowhere to go.”

-The Beatles

-C

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under All Comics, Incompletes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.