October Experiment #30 (Belated)

Only one panel left to go to fulfill the October portion of the program. 

Thinking I might start doing a few panels to set some things up and/or connect some of these images. There are now 71 panels and only a few revisit an image or character. Have to make some sense of it somewhere at some point. Even if it's dream logic. Or nightmare logic. 

Some aspects of the "story" are becoming more solid in my mind and I have an overall theme in place to draw ideas and provide an emotional underpinning (for me, if not for any potential readers). But the plot is still a hazy mass of imagery and beats that I expect to roll out episodically...and probably remain a hazy mass of imagery and beats.  

Speaking of hazy, I've been up since midnight or so after a short nap, I have to be up to bring the new-ish used old car back to the garage because there's something wrong with it. You might remember August-September was a mess of car repairs, tickets, red tape, delays and pure rotten luck after purchasing a car to replace the death lemon. After the snow and freeze hit I cleared the ice off and the car won't start unless I continuously feed it gas. I had a car back in my 20's that had a shot busted carburetor and could only start/run if you used both feet to keep the gas pedal going and brake or it would shut down when the gas pedal was released. I put some gas treatment in the tank and it helps with the fuel pick up but the start-up is still a sputter-and-die affair, so to the garage I go, to spend some more of our dough. Carburetor, catalytic, who knows. I have had mostly terrible luck with cars. I don't buy used cars, I buy abused cars. 

I met Walt Simonson for the first time picking him up for a signing at the comic shop I worked at (The Fantastic Store) -- I was driving the bad carburetor special on the Brooklyn Bridge and I almost lost power and control of the car and I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I was already nervous as hell meeting Walt Simonson and interacting with him (huge fan), but I was stressed about handling the dumb car safely and  terrified I was going to kill one of my favorite comic artists. I sweated three ponds out on both trips. 

I's decades later and I'm back to doing the two-pedal shuffle again like a college student with a first car. Today I had to get my medication refills and run errands. I drove very. Cautiously. Indeed. It's easier when you don't have Walt Simonson in the car and you know there's anti-anxiety pills on the end of the trip. Yum!. 

I saved a lot of my recent art sale income and just sold the Milk & Cheese/Black Hammer variant cover so I should have enough for the worst case scenario. We were hoping to put that towards repairing something in the house. The car is super necessary. I'm glad we can at least handle this, but I just hope the car stays calm for a good while after this. Sheesh.