Sometimes Things Suck

As Holly Golightly would say, I’ve had a case of the Mean Reds all week. I’ve had 4 visits to the dentist in the past 3 weeks -most recently on Wednesday and Thursday. That really sucked. It could be worse of course -my mouth was pretty okay and only needed a new transmission, clutch, and I told them to do the water pump while they were in there, since you need to take all that stuff off to get at it anyway.

I was really hoping that all the dental work was going to clear something else up though -my perpetually clogged-feeling ear. I thought it might be related to a molar in need of a filling. It was not. I had a hearing test a couple weeks ago and my hearing is excellent (despite the phantom thumb stuck in my ear). So that leaves muscles, tendons, and nerves. My vote is on nerve damage because recently eating has become extremely painful. Not in a “boy my tooth hurts” way because those are fine. It’s like . . .inside and in front of my ear -where the jaw meets the skull.

As a kid I spent a lot of time in the emergency room. It was usually for a head wound of some sort, though not always. Just off the top of my head I can recall; peeling all the skin off the right side of my face from just inside my eyelid to my lip right under the nostril when the skateboard I was “knee riding” (kneeling on the board) hit a rock on the freshly paved street and sent me face first into the still warm asphalt. There was talk of reconstructive surgery. Then there was the time I got impaled on a spiky old Victorian wrought iron fence through my forearm -I was left hanging for a few minutes while help was found. NYC is full of sharp and pointy Victorian shit. Someone should do something about that. Then there was the time I got impaled again, but in a very sensitive place for young men. I’ll spare you the vomit-inducing details. There was the high speed impact with a solid wood door frame, and the twenty foot fall off a rope swing in the “woods” near my house. (There are no woods on Staten Island anymore, unless you could the malarial wetlands of the Greenbelt. It was just an undeveloped chunk of trees next to the golf course.) I broke my tailbone on that one and it hurt to pee for a few days. Not sure why . . . There were also the countless “should have gone to hospital” events that were called off because our neighbor was a highly skilled nurse and would preform everything shy of open-heart surgery right at her kitchen table.

So I think somewhere in all that I did the damage that has left my jaw clicking when I eat, and now producing excruciating jolts of pain when I bite down on stuff. I’m thinking that the pain is nerve related because it changes a lot depending on how hard I push things. I can never resist biting a canker sore, so I’ll be damned if I’m not going to agitate a raw nerve. At first it just hurts, like a sore tooth. Then it burns, then it feels freezing cold, and finally it feels like a water balloon exploded in my head. I seriously feel  “wet”. I suppose it’s remotely possibly that I am bleeding internally, but the “wet” feels ‘cold” so I don’t think so. In the name of science I shall keep eating and taking notes.

This is where being self-employed is different from working for The Man. In the past I would have immediately made a doctors appointment and simply informed work that I wouldn’t be in that morning. Or possibly all day. The world would not end if I missed work. My pay-check would still come through and be no different because I had earned that time off. While the day-to-day reality of working at home is fucking awesome (I can’t lie), it is times like these that it sucks. Because if I don’t work my world will come screeching to a halt. I will not get paid. And shit will generally get fucked up. So not being at work is a point of stress for me -quite the opposite from most other people I assume. Even when I do take time off there is always this ticking clock that only I can hear, reminding me of everything I have to get done as soon as I finish relaxing.

So I have to schedule this burnie-freezie-wet-nerve thing for after I finish TORCH and maybe even after I finish the next two issues of ATOMIC ROBO. In the mean time I’ll just eat pancakes, egg creams, and pudding.

Ranking highest on the “THAT SUCKED-O-METER” this week was a horrible miscommunication that my wife and I had the other day. I promised her that I would not blog about it, but three days out it’s looking more like a comedy of errors rather than the marriage shattering event that it appeared to be at the time. So I’m just going to leave out the gory bits, because the rest is really quite funny.

If a marriage can be broken down into a series of different jobs Dorinda has one major function and several minor functions. Before anyone starts making bad jokes about wedding dresses being white so that the dishwasher will match the other appliances let me stop you right there. Nothing Dorinda does has anything to do with washing dishes, cleaning toilets, folding laundry, or anything else you might associate with domestic bliss. Those are generally left to me, and thus generally left undone up to the point where you have to wear a hazmat suit to brush your teeth. I do like a clean house, but I don’t need one to be happy. I do however, need to finish x-number of pages so that I can pay rent and continue to have a house to live in. So cleaning takes a back seat most of the time. While I can tolerate a mess Dorinda is simply a pig. And I say that with all the love and tenderness that ten years of cohabitation can bring to a relationship.

Where was I . . .? Oh yeah, Dorinda’s mission in life. Her primary role in our marriage is to keep my ego in check. I keep telling her that my inability to earn more than minimum wage and the low likelihood of my ever being truly successful at anything accomplishes this goal without any special effort on her part. But no, she is a dedicated wife, and she loves her work. And to be honest, I like it. It keeps me (I hope) from turning into one of those asshole “rock star” comic artists who thinks they are the shit because they are “famous” in a niche market that no body in the real world gives a fuck about.

So several days ago while keeping my ego in check Dorinda let slip that she had never quite read Atomic Robo. Wait . . . what? Now, I have several close friends who don’t read Atomic Robo. And I make no secret of feeling that they are complete dicks for not doing so. It’s not like I wrote a fucking novel that’s going to suck up weeks of your life reading it. It’s three bucks and five minutes of your life. Once a month. Its less time than you spend waiting in the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru line every week. And about as much money as one medium turbo-ice. But less delicious I will admit. Dorinda knows all this, but because she’s under a LOT of stress lately so her guard was low and out it came. Some careful Robo Triva probing revealed that she actually had read 90% of ROBO, but that she’d never sat down with the TPB and read the entire thing through. That’s fair. It took me about three months before I sat down with Vol.1 and read the whole thing.

Later that day I got an email saying that ROBO was going Euro, and would Brian and I be willing to go to Italy for a few days for book signings and a convention. Brian and I had the same exact though -FUCK YES. His girlfriend and my wife also shared a though at exactly the same time. “We’re going to Italy!” In sterio Brian and I replied, ” . . .what’s this ‘we’ you speak of?” Of course, this was the wrong reply. But look at it from our perspective -we’re dead broke and never in a million years would we suggest a domestic vacation -never fucking mind crossing the Atlantic Ocean. We won’t make any money on a trip to Italy -it’s possible that I might sell a bit of art I guess, maybe some sketches. But only enough to keep Brian and me drunk for a week. So here comes that self-employment thing again. We are crunching numbers and print dates in our heads, and our female counterparts are already planning the pre-European vacation shopping spree. Lydia, Dorinda, and the Widget are all psyched because they are going to Italy. Brian and I don’t want to go anymore because it’s going to cost us thousands of dollars that we simply don’t have. WTF?

Taking a different tack, Brian suggested to Lydia that when she writes an Eisner-nominated comic she too might get to go to Italy. I told Dorinda that people who don’t read Atomic Robo don’t get to ride the Atomic Robo Bus to Italy.

The Bus?

It floats.

. . .

IT”S A BOAT-BUS, JUST ROLL WITH IT!!

Obviously, while in man-world Brian and I are both totally within bounds to offer these reasons for not bringing anyone along with us, in girl-land we are wrong. And we knew that we would be wrong. But sometimes you just have to poke the bear with that sharp stick you just found, y’know? I haven’t heard from Brian since then, so he’s either dead, or Lydia took a hammer to his precious Eisner-nominated writing fingers, in which case I should hear from him in a few months. I have enough scripts to keep me busy until then.

Dorinda grabbed her ATOMIC ROBO TPB and locked herself in the bathroom.

Now this is where things really got fucked up.

I asked her what she though. And she said, “I don’t get it”. What I heard was “I don’t like it (you talentless bag of hammers). ” I ask for clarification while trying bravely to hold back the tears. “It’s the way you guys tell a story. It makes no sense.” To wrap up a very long story, it was one place in particular that was confusing and I think most people who read the TPB first had this same issue. It’s right after the Carl Sagan story where Robo wakes up in Egypt and the giant monster pops out of the ground. On the next page we are in Italy (Ironic fucking Italy) and what the fuck is going on?!? This was our mistake. We didn’t put clear page dividers between the stories and it threw a lot of folks off. We fixed that in Vol.2 by the way. So Dorinda is reading 1.5, the first issue with giant brain -in-jar-Helsingard and she is constantly wondering when the monster from Egypt is going to appear -perhaps behind the big Boss Doors? No? Hurm . . .

Now the way I tell it here it’s sort of funny. I hope. But in reality there was a period of many hours between having my little heart crushed and then counter-crushing Dorinda’s heart by telling her that I wanted a divorce. Did I forget that part? Oh, well . . . nevermind! It all worked out in the end.

Needless to say, Dorinda will be going to Italy next year . . .

RANDOM SPLENDOR

-KOD on Attack of The Show’s Attack of The Blog.

-KOD on METEOR.

-This Is Real News. . . In Atomic Robo World.

-Are Violent Video Games Preparing Kids For The Apocalypse?

-Tom Baker Doctor Who “Dead Ringers”.

-Let Your Nerd Light Shine.

Okay. . .uhmm. . .okay, so here’s what we do . . .!

Brian found these on TheDoberMan’s DA site.