Achewood

Ray's Place: The Cure, Crybabies, Honoring Uncles

Is there a cure for the Cure? Asking for a friend. Thanks!

—bzap

You know what, bzap? I came to terms with The Cure a few years ago, but didn’t tell anybody about it. 

It happened in the drive-thru at Mr. Honchito, that gyoza place down off highway 45. Used to be a Taco Bell? Anyhow, Téodor had fiddled with my Sirius XM and reprogrammed prefix one to be The Cure station instead of the Celebration of Billy Preston’s Nothing From Nothing station, so when I fired up the tunes that weird-ass Lullaby song came on. There I was, gothrolled, cravin’ on dumplings, all wearin’ my white terrycloth Albro Dondini moccasins and those oversize paperboard “2020” New Year’s Eve glasses because it had suddenly got bright and that’s all I could find in the glove box. The silliness of the situation hit me square and took me down a peg, and in that vulnerable moment I was like, the universe just called me out, I am a dork like anybody. It bonded me to those guys, and helped me see the humorous angle of that big rainy act they’re always puttin’ on.   

Why didn’t I tell anybody about this? Well, there ain’t, like, some “gender reveal party” format where you pop a powder-filled balloon in front of all your friends and a big piece of paper that says “I like The Cure now!” falls out. That would have confused my dudes. 

So yeah, these days I’m rollin’ Lullaby dirty in the Escalade, just diggin’ on daylight, straight respectin’ that Robert Smith has cashed a mad stack ’a scratch-offs by stickin’ to his guns (a single tear falls out the end when he pulls the trigger). Would I want to spend time with him if he showed up at my place? No. Not at all. I never wanted to know what Elizabeth Taylor looked like before coffee. 

-=Rrrr-Rrrr-Rrrrrray=-

-- -- + -- --

Ray, as a man I feel like I don’t cry enough. What are some benefits and drawbacks to me crying?

—Tommy Wingo

Wingo, 

Well, I guess you might lose a tiny amount of weight, but I can’t really endorse it as a fitness routine. Heart-rate wise, I don’t think you’d even get out of Zone 1 unless you included some hefty blubberin’. Like, shake-your-fists-at-the-sky blubberin’. 

Okay, I didn’t try hard enough on my first attempt at this answer. It’s just my masculine nature pushing back on the idea of displaying what most will see as weakness. We evolved since the beginning not to show weakness, because we’d get our asses shredded by the pack if we did, and that hard truth is why any of us are here today. But, can we lighten up a little in the modern world? No. I worry that this country is headed for a civil war or massive comet disaster, and when that happens, Crybaby Carl ain’t gonna get no beans at the tire fire. 

Stay dry, Wingo. 

-=A-Bloo-Bloo-Bloo 4 U-U-U=-

-- -- + -- --

Dear Ray. I have a bit of a nomenclature situation. My best friend just named his kid after me (gave him my first name as his middle name) and I'm super honored. Thing is, what's the best way to describe my relationship with the kid? I say "Godfather" sometimes but that has unnecessary connotations both religious and Coppolan. I also say Uncle, which honestly works fine enough, but given your gift for neologisms and such I thought I'd ask if you could come up with anything better, as an Uncle yourself.

—Chris Martin

Coldplay Chris (I know it’s you, dogg, DM me, I got a question about player’s block), 

Yeah, “uncle” is the workhorse for the non-blood man, but we can always do better. The idea is that you’re the second-tier support guy in the kid’s life, after his daddy, so you’re basically his Vice Daddy. That has a nice ring to it, and also implies you’re kind of unpredictable and into drugs, just like all true uncles everywhere.  

-=Secret R.=-

-- -- + -- --

Confidential to PattyKakes: Don't start a small bakery just because you got good feedback from the one friend you made a cake for. You will descend into madness and bankruptcy, and awaken most days on the floor of the shower where you cried yourself to sleep.

0071 — Scratchboard from "Pete's umbrage, pt 2"

I read a very small amount about sigils while researching the Dark Arts for this series of interconnected follies. I read slightly more about the life of Richard Scarry, creator of Lowly Worm, Huckle Cat, and so many more cherished squiggles. For example, did you know that Scarry was medically discharged from the military after they asked him to paint a sign that was so large he became distressed? More importantly, "Huckle Cat" ranks among the top names given to animals, in history.

Lastly, I watched part of an interview with his son, Richard Scarry Junior. Richard Junior wore a playful little silk neckerchief knotted like a butterfly, just off-center in the V of his casually unbuttoned Oxford cloth button down, and one of his lapels was curled up in a surprisingly plausible invocation of sprezzatura. It made me want to wear my grandfather's silk neckerchief to a party I'm attending this weekend. I probably won't, but that decision will make me fall back to a vest, and that will still be a step up from my usual outfit of a shirt, pants, and shoes. (I learned how to dress from the dictionary.)

So, if you see a guy in a vest this weekend, say "hi!" It's probably me!

0071 — Pt. 2 of, "Nice Pete Formalizes His Umbrage"

Outtakes and unused panels from this strip will post at noon in the In-Universe and Author's tiers!

Three men you know surprise you by appearing in your securely-locked garage late one evening. They are dressed as a Lost Egyptian Math Rock band. You have recently denied them funding for what you thought was a pretty terrible invention. Do you:

a) Berate them individually, then as a group

b) Take a moment to see what they are trying to communicate with you

c) Sign them to your foundering vanity record label

All three of these options were available to Ray, yet he chose...poorly.

Join us next week to see just what in the Dickens has become of Ray's soul, and how two bass notes opened the geometric portal to the afterlife...if that is indeed what it is.

And a dog is tied to a wagon of rain

The house down by Dekum Street, which I signed away yesterday in a title company office so bland I could not even visualize it on the escalator back down, was a haunted box to which I should never have returned after the divorce.

Tom Waits, in Whistle Down the Wind, sways and gasps through the line, "...and a dog is tied to a wagon of rain." For the remaining balance of my time in that home, I imagined myself to be that dog, coupled to a surreal, sloshing burden that pulled meanly at my shoulders, whichever direction I attempted.

My next ten years there were largely defined by two cohabiting relationships, each of which increased the groaning tonnage of that wagon significantly.

First there was L, who had two children, and smoked. It was only two years, but it was very close on the heels of the cartwheeling flame-out of my divorce, and my month in the booby hatch, so the relationship unfurled like a jumper's air cushion in the ghost-frame of that blank affordance. What color glasses do you wear when you want to filter out the good things, and isolate the negative, to see what was wrong, so you can avoid it the next time? There was her tendency to over-accumulate semi-functional secondhand material, to put it diplomatically. I also found the incoming parenting philosophy to be of the permissive and indulgent variety, which fosters both disrespect, and a yogurt-like resolve that results in endless video game dementia.

There was something chasing that person, and one day I returned home from work — this was during my one-year stint at the marketing agency — to find that their entire physical footprint had somehow been removed from the house. I do not know, but I assume it must have taken an anxious army of helpers and the largest U-Haul on the lot, all praying I would not be opting for a sandwich at home. Of course, I had my hand in that undetected denouement, and I have evaluated that under separate cover.

On the bright side, it was good to get away from all that smoking.

Then there was MLM, whose mighty tendency to over-accumulate probably-someday-repairable secondhand material equaled the one which had so recently parted. She never moved in all the way — keeping her constipated fire hazard of an apartment across town — but her things did. Was my home just an overflow facility for her stacks of scrapbooking supplies, cheap furniture, cases of outgrown clothing, and "things for the garage sale"? Was I just another semi-functional bauble who no longer brought joy? In retrospect it is clear she was emulating not just the aching mediocrity of her parents' lives, but the living void of whatever kept them together. I remember a father who woke up at 4am every day to start watching television (loudly, because he didn't like his hearing aids), and whose presence at the dinner table was a tense and demanding silence. The lonely and financially dependent mother would gripe impotently about him after he had inhaled — animated by nasal whistling and forehead wrinkling — seven pounds of unseasoned carbohydrates and returned to his television.

The final straw in that one was when she declared to me that the worst thing my father had ever done to me was tell me I had the capacity to be a writer. (My father is a lovely and caring man who understands his children well.) She wanted me to take a nine-to-five grocery store job that would teach me I was no better than anyone else...just like her parents.

One day, when it had all become too much, I found myself unwilling to attend couples' therapy, and waited at home for the firing squad. Like many self-imprisoned men, I did not perish in a hail of lead, but instead emerged into the daylight of freedom, blinking and of bounding heart. Oh, it was lovely to feel those walls melt so rapidly in the warmth of liberation.

A few years later a flood of sunshine and accumulated karma brought Lauren, with her Davy lamp and level head, and she got me out of there. Now we live together in a big, airy, sunny fixer-upper that we make better every day, not worse. (Today, for example, I'm removing the guest bathroom's old linoleum floor, which we recently discovered had salvageable hardwoods beneath it.)  

Last night I had a dream that I was at the Dekum house, and there had been a storm. I looked beneath the deck, where I had apparently been storing large cardboard boxes of Achewood merchandise: T-shirts, hoodies, posters, and the rare first-edition self-published books from twenty years ago. In my negligence, they had all become rain-soaked, moldy, warped, discolored, and unsellable. In the dream I experienced the sensation of instantly consigning them to the trash, with minimal guilt, forgiving myself the great cost of their ruin. In the dream I knew I would create more and much better versions of these things, and take care of them this time, and that helped me to let go.

Ray's Place: Self Esteem, Negroni Accident, Cakesitting

Dear Ray, I'm really struggling with self-esteem lately. I know that I'm at least a 6.5/10 guy in terms of appearance, my hygiene is above-average to excellent, I dress moderately well, and I am at least as respectful, interesting, and articulate in conversation as the next guy, but I can't shake the feeling that everyone finds me creepy. How can I get over the assumption that anyone I interact with would rather be doing literally anything else with literally anyone else?

—EndgamerAzari 

Endgamer,

This falls in the realm of self-fulfilling prophecy, my guy. If you’re suspicious of yourself, that’s definitely telegraphin’ to others that they need to be suspicious of you too. Like, if you’re trying to have a casual conversation at work, but your basket of “tells” (always slowly draw nose down and to left while talking, always register phony “shock” when they reply) makes the person suspect you have some shoplifting kink or throw tantrums at four-person dinner parties, it’s over.  

I think what you got to do is build confidence real way, not just by flossin’. Do you have a house? Replace all the plumbing, by yourself, with no YouTube videos. Just figure it out. You’ll go through hell, and have to start over a dozen times, but in the end, even though you still have a second floor toilet that flushes down the outside of the kitchen window, you’ll know you have value as a man. This will radiate in every external aspect of your behavior, and even if it doesn’t, you’ll have a new skill set for a job you can work at alone and not bug anybody.    

-=Ray S.=-

Side story: I got Roast Beef this little box that says nice things about him, like “you are valuable!” and “today will be your best day!” He did some interface thing with it and made it so it only broadcasts staticky old 1960s baseball games from a website, but the idea was that repetition will create reality. Obviously in his case nothing is ever going to work, but I got a receipt that proves I tried. 

-- -- + -- --

Hi Ray, I managed to spill a negroni into the Medium Amber Medici Cloth upholstery of my buddy's (stationary) 1974 Coupe DeVille. I immediately offered to pay for cleaning, but he won't hear of it. Do you have any tips for removing the stains? Or an idea for a gift I can give so generous a player?

Is this Father John Misty? Is that who is writing to me? Only Father John Misty would have such an experience, with such details. I mean, that situation is basically his (your) calling card. Was this in Malibu, or more of a funny Topanga thing? If they ever make a movie about you, this situation will have to occur at least three times. Too bad that Wes Anderson will probably direct it. I do not like his movies, if you can even call them that. I’m from the old school, where a movie tells a damn story, and isn't just posturing for everybody to tell it how cute it is. 

Anyhow, a good gift for the guy will be to have a nice brunch with him at a sidewalk table, but just order fruit and champagne (which you never touch), and leave halfway through. Then, just when he’s wondering what’s going on, get pushed out of a moving car right in front of him. Make sure you’re wearing a white suit with no shirt on. I don’t think Dennis Hopper ever did anything cooler — this is sure to get your buddy clapping his hands in delight (squarely together, not at the diagonal offset of opera clapping).

-=Ráímón=-

-- -- + -- --

Dear Ray, I know you can answer this for me. Say I were hypothetically interested in sitting on desserts. What's a good starter cake? Callipygian Man

Cakey Cal,

Well, the first mistake I see all the beginners make is goin’ small. Look, you ain’t a pro yet. You ain’t gonna hit that 2” petit four or 4” summer berry tart. Your ass is gonna land either on the blanket next to it, or it’s gonna be stickin’ to the side of your cheek like some kind of niche satire. You go sheet cake, or not at all. You need to get your confidence down. And no, before you ask, you can’t just use a pillow or a rectangle of mattress foam. Somethin’s gotta be on the line. You got to be afraid of ridicule and financial waste, so you’ll take it serious. You can’t un-sit on a cake, and if that ain’t a metaphor for bravery, I don’t know what is. 

Good luck. You’ll need it. This ain’t a cakewalk, as they say in the business.  

'Smucks

-- -- + -- --

Confidential to Josefina: prominent eye bags could just mean she has a really interesting life, not sleep apnea, so give it a try.

0070 — Outtakes from the Carpal Tunnel to Hell (two pages)

We seem to have a new storyline in the works. It was time. I have an idea which requires multiple installments to properly demonstrate. Enjoy the ride, as this one will get both (a) terrifying, and (b) quite silly.

0070 — Nice Pete Formalizes His Umbrage

Clearly the insults heaped upon Nice Pete's think tank's output could not stand. It appears that Pete is so steamed he is penning a manifesto, which is usually not a good sign for anyone named therein. Will the old debts and deeds keep them from killing each other? Or is it a new day — has the blade cut too deep?

Extras at noon in In-Universe and Author's Tiers! 

The Great Outdoor Fight Netflix Series that Almost Was, Pt. 3 — More Casting

Please do not share any of the photos from this post anywhere. I don't think it would prick any of these actors' dander-sheathing, but I worry nonetheless. If my experience in television taught me anything (jury's out), it's that studios specialize in sweeping litigation first, and entertainment a distant second. But only if the litigation has first flattened and bleached any delicate grasses of spontaneity and comfort.  

Voice casting was the big 🎶la-la🎶 indulgent part of the project. You swan in, a virtual nobody, and are allowed to play with the Fabergé bonbons — in this case, veteran actors who have to use the drive-through instead of the cafe when ordering the Starbucks beverage that's always on the desk next to them — like you were Anna Wintour elbowing unpaid interns in the throat. That is to say, it took a moment to adjust to a position of power that came so suddenly, and without apparent training or merit. It was another of my many sudden Hollywood insights.

When last we spoke on the Achewood/GOF Netflix series — which, to my discredit, was September of 2023 — I was waxing on the great shakes Noel Fisher had turned in when reading for Roast Beef. With Noel locked, it was time to cast Ray.

Because it is impossible, casting Ray is a daunting undertaking. Since the earliest days of his existence, I imagined him to sound a lot like Chef from South Park, but over the years it became apparent that for every reader he was very, very certainly somebody else. Pendleton thought Jack Black had the right suite of lovable, chaotic energy; others had suggested everyone from Sinbad to Bernie Mac to an Apple //c silently scrolling pi to one billion places.

(I also reminded myself frequently that if this thing actually got on the air, 99.999% of the Netflix audience would be a tabula rasa with no preconceived notion of what anybody was supposed to sound like, and I'd just stop accepting email from long-time readers.) 

So, knowing that any casting choice was certain to make absolutely everyone mad, I went with Steve Howey, who had worked with Noel on Shameless for eleven seasons. Steve's character on Shameless was very Ray: a deeply loyal, unflappable, hedonistic doofus who was often seen in a black thong and large bathrobe. I also thought their history together would be a boon in the voice booth, as their Zoom-call chemistry had been natural and brotherly.

I wasn't, surprisingly, wrong.

Because Steve was born effortlessly tall and handsome, it's easy to assume his life has been a cakewalk of limbsy models and Persols; either by nature or through studious application he turned out to be quite conversant with that modality. His performance captured Ray's easy-money, never-saw-a-challenge-he-could-recognize-as-such persona, and his inherent popular-guy friendliness played off of Noel's fifty-pound lines so well that I grew paranoid I wasn't directing them hard enough.

Next time: assembling the pilot.   

Author's Tier special: Full First Chapter of The Send-Up

It occurred to me that you, who signed up for all the rigmarole and jay-pegs of my studio, might actually want to see a bit more of my debut novel. I mean, it's right there in the name of the tier.

So, here it is. Enjoy a bit of light weekend reading! The document is attached. Please do not share it around, unless you are on a tickling basis Mr. Simon or Mr. Schuster.

I feel like this full teaser chapter is enough to give a sense of the book, but not enough for a future publisher to say, "We were about to cut you a life-changing check, but then saw that you released too much of it to your Patreon supporters, and that is just not the sort of thing we can countenance around here, within the inscrutable traditions of our industry, Mr. Onstad. Good day, and don't steal anything made of brass on your way out."

In my defense, I'm still editing this thing, and probably will be until the manuscript is shot across the sea to Hong Kong or Canada, or however that goes. (In the case of Canada, I am given to understand it will still be transmitted via the undersea Internet cables, which apparently carry 95% or so of our digital reality.)

Jetsam and Lagan from 0069 — "If This Van's a-Rocking"

When they put their heads together, Todd, Lyle, and Nice Pete are almost perfect at misidentifying the needs of the consumer marketplace.

0069 — If This Van's a-Rocking

Ray knows what it's like to get blasted in the face by an odor coming out of a freshly-cracked car window or door. He doesn't remember if the life-altering incident was a laundromat parking lot or Dollar Tree visit when he was very small; the chances are that it was Beef's mom's car and Beef's grandma's trailer, and he has done the true friend thing and actually blocked it out.

Either way, Prime Time Ventures seems to be going the same way as Prime Time Records. That is, as a thing Ray only does so he can have a really expensive Corinthian leather CEO chair.

It is my birthday!

(Don't worry, there will still be the weekly strip at 10am Pacific today, and the bloopers strip at noon)

Some people are like, "Oh, I don't make a big deal out of my birthday. I don't want anything. I don't even tell people it's my birthday. It's not a big deal."

I am like, "In this landscape of expanding alienation, I am going to let people know that it actually feels nice when people use their excuse to say, 'Hi, thanks for doing what you do, glad you made it another year, because we've all been losing people who don't get another year, and, anyway, yeah, I know about you and I think you're swell.'"

 If you want to get me a present, please subscribe to the Achewood Patreon, or consider upgrading your tier for a month! That way, we both get a present, which was the original promise of capitalism (?). 

There are dozens of hours of top-notch folly in there at this point, and I promise you'll enjoy it much more than the equivalent five dollars' worth of leathery leftover pizza you're finally going to throw away on Monday. I mean, you didn't even close the foil all the way around it, and the mushrooms have these hideous crenulations on them now.

It is my birthday! I will see you in line at Lauretta Jean's pie counter on Division, if I am lucky enough to get to go there. Lauren has some kind of surprise cooked up.

Author's Tier Chochacho! May I Request a Testimonial for Potential Patreon Subscribers?

May I ask you a small favor, as a member of Achewood's inner-est of inner sanctums?

I'm hoping to gather testimonials that persuade non-members of the Achewood Patreon that they will be happy spending their hard-won spondulicks on a subscription here.

If you believe in this message, could you please offer a membership-driving screed, either brief or voluminous? I am happy to receive them in the comments of this post, in the DMs, or via email at chris@achewood.com. (Putting them in the comments may help inspire others to set their fingertips a-preachin'.) I will attach your screen name to your quote, unless you request something else.

The Patreon game is not just one of steady, high-quality content, but also recruitment and attrition. I'm deeply grateful to report that membership numbers have been remarkably steady since I relaunched this little inflatable donut of a legacy thirteen months ago, but because Achewood has yet to be featured on Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs, it remains a fairly quiet neighborhood on an Internet that moved on long ago. Reaching out to the special sort of person who will get lost in this rarefied trove of humor and sentimentality is vital for this project to continue in perpetuity.

Thank you in advance! Words from actual subscribers carry so much more weight than those from slimy hucksters such as myself. I think the work I'm doing here is among the best I have ever done, with the most reliable posting schedule, and it is entirely thanks to your support.

-+- 

The fine print: 

Testimonials will be used in these locations: here, to reach the "free" members; on social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram; in the Achewood shop newsletters; in places I have yet to devise, such as dramatic narrations of favorite blogs, or on a satirical podcast I want to record with my friend Jaybill. I may extricate deliciously choice sentences for standalone presentation.

0068 — In-Progress strip capture from Fuck You Friday, How We Act On The Internet

(Sorry this posted late — I had made a simple clerical error.)

Noticing that we behave poorly on the Internet is hardly groundbreaking, but I have been freshly upset by it lately, and just wanted to put this reminder out there that online discourse is a terrible use of the Finite Life Resource. Most of my angst came from reading the responses to Facebook shorts about framing, plumbing, and other areas of home repairs in which I have been deeply involved lately.

0068 — Fuck You Friday: How We Act On The Internet

Outtakes at noon in the In-Universe and Author's Tiers!

I once considered installing Reddit on my phone and creating a burner account, which I would use to express the most impulsive and greedily reckless fetal kicks from my id. But then I worried I'd carry that mindset over into the real world, which is exactly what would happen, and then I remembered that "which wolf do you feed" thingy, and then I checked to see if The Onion was doing good content lately, and pretty soon I was looking for the chisel my kid gave me for Christmas, because my attention span is ruined due to the phone not being a sharpened rock or other device which doesn't outclass my cognitive equipment by orders of magnitude.

The end. Garbled moral.

Wisconsin, Part Three: The House on the Rock

Speaking of rocks, the most memorable feature of my visit to Wisconsin, and indeed of the last ten years of my life, was the extraordinary House on the Rock. It is little known outside of Wisconsin, and for that, all people everywhere should be ashamed. There should be a ten-lane highway to this thing.  

Even if you and I were to astrally project into the same DMT hallucination, I still could not adequately convey to you the experience of a day at House on the Rock. It makes no sense that it is where it is, or that it is from when it was from, or how it is how it is. To call it a massive, meandering journey through the cavernous prop room of America’s fractured national psychosis would not scratch the surface of the experience. It is everything that a child born in 1910 might have seen in a nightmare, but it is also, simultaneously, a sideways stumble through opaque wallpaper made of steam, into the place where scattering shadows have satirically regurgitated our crude machineries into distorted, gothic-scale reimaginings that quietly say, “See how near the chaos, see how fragile your trust in light.”  

The House on the Rock sits squarely opposite the fulcrum from the smothering normalcy of the rest of the state. In the same way that the emotionally abandoned children at Phillips-Andover masturbate coldly into teapots — or simply at them, if they are female — so is this beautiful pinhole into our limited eternity a proportional response to the midwest’s structure of unremitting homogeneity. I will not spoil it for you with specifics, save for the observation that you will immediately share of the place, which is that the people who run it have no idea what they’re dealing with, how to advertise it, or even, to glorious and unintended effect, how to keep up with the maintenance demanded by its innumerable complexities. Real chaos preys slowly upon the theme of chaos, adding a beautiful layer of life, a nod of respect to the dutifulness of old man Decay, to many of the installations. If you don’t get this place, the failure is squarely upon your noggin, and not these acres of discomfiting fever-dream mockery.  

I will present no pictures of the site itself. Do not seek any. Simply book your travel, and a nearby hotel, for when you are exhausted.

Ray's Place: Party Tunes, Definition of a Gentleman, Bores

Hey Ray! Nothing shits up a night like bad tunes. What’s the Ray Way to ensure you’re the DJ guiding the party action and not your friends who insist on the same “This Is Paul Simon” playlist no matter the situation? —Aaron

Paul Simon? What, are you guys sittin’ around discussin’ barefoot shoes and New Zealand? I’m sorry Aaron, but that is not a party. That is just where one of the guys has slight BO, and another guy probably thinks he looks cool with an acoustic guitar even though he looks like that dude from Jim Cramer Money Madness. (Incidentally, the third guy who's there, the one with the really soft forearms, will be dead within a year from choking. Total freak accident. I’m sorry to tell you this.) 

In basic, maybe just don't call every time you hang out low-key with friends a party. Sometimes, you're just some guys in a room, and it doesn't turn out special.

-=Ray's Got Diamonds in the Dank in his Donk=-

-- -- + -- --

Dear Ray, I confess that despite being a longtime reader of your column, your place in the Generations is an enigma. I have more respect for you as a gentleman of taste [than] to simply ask your age, but can you advise me on how to tell what generation a person is? Best, Yelahneb (Gen X) 

Yelahneb,

A true gentleman’s generation will not be evident, so classy and timeless are the elements of his style. And by style, I also mean his conversation and pastimes. But he can also be a bit of a maverick...for example, you typically won’t find a gentleman gettin’ carried naked-‘cept-his-cologne outta Top Golf, but I think I mighta’ had food poisoning that night, which interacted with this new mezcal that Mayor C was passin’ around, so I still get to call myself a gentleman. If the scene you caused was actually because the nacho chef at the driving range still had doodoocrack doo on his hands, then you are still in the club. 

Getting back to your question, though, count the wrinkles on the neck. Start at twenty, then add ten years for each one.  

-=OuCh!=-

-- -- + -- --

Dear Ray, is there a good way to tell a long time friend that they have become a bore, and that I don't care for or about their gym routine, and to suggest a more entertaining hobby such as bassoon tooting or transmutation? — Funkulus

See, I got to quibble with you here, Funkulus, and my quibble game is pretty bouncy these days. Check it: anything is interesting, if you ask the right questions. What do you think therapists are doin’ that whole hour? Some moanbag is sittin’ there goin’ all, “I can’t get anything done! Whyyyy WHYYYYYY” so the shrink has to be all, “Did you ever burn yourself when you were a kid?” The patient assumes psychiatrists know some classical reason this might be relevant to later-in-life performance issues, so they actually start tellin’ a neat story about a firecracker or welding incident, and the clock hands actually start movin’ again.

-- -- + -- --

Confidential to Marky_J: Most coffee is decaffeinated using a water-based process, so I don't think you have to worry about mites.  

The Rain Gardens

My grandfather used to steal from our country. That is to say, on fishing trips he would fill the bottom of his boat with flagstone and any other boulders he found interesting, bring them home, and build rock gardens, rain gardens, paths, streams, and other water features around his big hillside property. As a seventeen year old Marine during WWII he had been handed some rather gruesome orders, so I like to imagine he called it even.

There was little more fascinating to me as a young boy than creeks. Adults never seemed to want to be in them, and there the earth privately showed you, in microcosm, how she cast her spell through time, in the form of frogspawn animating with satisfying progress each new afternoon. A stolen box of zip-top sandwich bags, fashioned into sandbags for damming, awakened a child's love of both fluid engineering and personal agency outside of the home, and many of us even got exciting infections from mucking around in water that had flowed for miles through the schools, golf courses, and industrial districts of town.

When Grandpa Dan switched on the water for his first creek, a meandering run perhaps thirty feet long, I watched in reverence as its foremost fingers shyly felt their way around the river stones and jagged outcroppings of lava, toward the hidden drain that would pump them back to their headwaters. By his front door he placed a massive stone specimen into which he drilled three holes, and he plumbed it so water would rise through them and cascade down its crevasses during holiday parties. There's a family photo of me with my brother and sister, sitting on that rock a very long time ago, with the water bubbling up.

When we got the fixer-upper last year, I eyed a barren spot of yard that begged for a meaningfully large water feature. As has been recorded elsewhere, Lauren talked me down from a full-scale koi pond ("If you want to see how truly powerless man is over nature, just try managing a hole with water in, bigshot," her eyes seemed to say), and we settled on a rain garden. I began digging at it in earnest a few weeks ago, and yesterday I finally set in the retaining wall and underlayment. The liner (imagine a flattened bicycle tube that's 10' x 20') will go down in the next few days, then I'll "rock it in" (landscaping term for adding the boulders I have been collecting all year, in the family tradition), and then plant it. The liner is just for a wide middle section, which I want to hold a shallow, temporary, meditative pool when the rains are heaviest. The grasses and creepers and mosses are welcome to this party.

There is zero chance I won't post a photo when I get the boulders, crush, and river stones set. After writing and drawing Achewood, building this rain garden is my happiest creative outlet. Crawling around on my hands and knees in the pit I have made, leveling out beds or carving footing for blocks, spikes my blood with the early creek freedom, and I am happily nowhere but right there in the dirt. I can do whatever I want with it. We've had some communication issues about it because Lauren, of course, wants to know what the hell this giant thing I am making in our yard is, and I won't really know until it's done, but I am sure I am going to love it, because I'm just letting it unfold without pretending I have total control over it.

All the same, I diplomatically made us a drawing of it, which you can see in the slideshow above.  

Week in the Knees

Like water slowly pooling unseen beneath the floorboards of your home, here and there offering clues of itself that just barely seep across the borders of perception — an unusual humidity on the first warm day of Spring, or a whiff of cave on a cold day, when the air is shifting just so inside the envelope of those four cozy walls — a certain realization has slowly crept into my mind. I finally put my finger on it over today's breakfast sandwich: doom.

In September, Lauren and I bought the fixer-upper we live in now. It is twice the size of the last house and several years older (1913 vs 1947). We are having our wedding here on the property in three months, and there are great calving glacier bays to ford before that dawn. (The previous owners had lived here since 1975, and seemed to own only a flathead screwdriver and a roll of double-sided tape.) Meanwhile, I've spent the last five months supplicating around the 1947, replacing siding, plumbing, baseboards, flooring, appliances, crawlspace insulation — if a house needs a repair, it needs it most when you see the place through the buyer's eyes, and notice your greasy fifteen years of occupancy around every door frame, light switch, and toilet pedestal.

Meanwhile, Hayden's first trailer failed (after the winter's snow and rain, some undisclosed and comically-performed roof repairs had the place sagging and molding like a dying taleggio), so he and his mom picked up a new used one. I arrived to visit and discovered that beneath the cute checked linoleum floor, the wooden subfloor was uniformly mush — like, step too hard and you're standing on the soil — the result of ages of invisible water leakage. So, rather than let my child live in a depressing hellswamp, we tore out all the old subfloor (largely by actual handfuls), bolted down some 3/4" ply, and laid some pretty nice Pergo planks over it. We got it done in two days.

We did that the day after Lauren and I replaced an 8x12' front porch deck with reclaimed tongue and groove fir, which had to be violently fought into place, because it did not, of course, all come from the same sawmill, or even decade. Maybe not even the same century. But we're living the reuse-recycle lifestyle, and that's how we do things.

And just now my real estate agent calls and says the buyer for the 1947 wants a new sewer line and roof, plus better insulation. All of which are in good working order, but I have to do more personal crawling around and inspecting and getting bids.

Is this draining you? I just realized it might be. I'll stop there.

Wait, yesterday I tore out a 15' x 30' set of rotted garden beds and tilled them flat. We're growing the flowers there for the wedding, so I suppose it's a good thing that ZigZag and Sunny had apparently been using them as gothic-scale litter boxes. Oh, I also landscaped the 1947 and hung with the plumber while he fixed a sink leak and we diagnosed the sewer on our hands and knees in the crawlspace. ("I'm seriously in here again?" I asked myself. "Your sewer line's fine," he said. "They scoped it from the wrong place. We tradies [tradesmen] hate home inspectors because they're all burned-out restaurant managers who took a six-hour course and don't know a cleanout plug from a chicken's asshole.")

Okay, I'm done. At least until my real estate agent calls and says that the buyer wants to see me naked on a cold day.

Today I am going to dig more on my rain garden and install its retaining wall, which is my fun personal project. That's my reward for working on house stuff all week.

Back to the promise of doom: I realized this morning that I have placed myself in the center of enough moving parts — parts of entropy, of decay, of outmoded visual standards — that I may never actually be free. Getting out of the 1947 itself is like clawing on my belly away from a tar pit, the black, stringy, hardening mass stretching out behind me, still clinging to my hips and boots. (Wait, did I forget to tell you that when we were doing the trailer flooring, I somehow knocked out a circuit that needs repairing? Also Hayden wants me to climb up fifteen feet in the barn and install a hanger for his aerial gymnastics silks on a rafter.)

As you slowly sense that you are grateful none of this lies before or after you, I want to warmly welcome you to your weekend. I hope you spend it wiping your tongue across a mango frozen custard, folding blistered Neapolitan pizza into your mouth, and taking in the sumptuous beauty of an IMAX nature film.

I will be sanding and staining that new front deck, and if I'm lucky, I will fry an egg on the stove before it plummets through the floor and onto the basement washing machine, which will then send a high-pressure jet of water straight up into my face, dislodging my new Warby Parkers.

0067 — Unused material from "Roast Beef In, An Unexpected Check"

Again, not a lot of extra trim this week. It's the big strips that go to four or more rows where I am on my knees, begging for closure (or to understand what the point of the strip even is at that point), that yield the best harvest of lines that must be sacrificed. Unfortunately, I keep thinking up completed strips as I walk from my bed to the bathroom every morning. Stick with me, people. It won't always be Lean Times on Blooper Alley.

0067 — Roast Beef in, An Unexpected Check

Outtakes at noon, in Author's Tier / In-Universe Tier!

I'd been trying to write this idea — the idea that growing up without much money creates various pathologies around the reality of eventually having money — from a completely different angle, but then this strip fell into my lap while I was walking from the pillow to the toothbrush last Tuesday morning.

Every time I consider upgrading from my lame little hatchback that has no power and is generic, I go through a several-day process in which I ultimately consider the proposition existentially futile. I don't drive that much, I no longer think strangers give a shit about what I'm driving, the cost doesn't come anywhere close to the value, I don't have patience for the dealership ritual, etc. So, here I am, driving around a cheap Subaru with a broken ceiling fan and a disabled gas augur in the back (on a flattened Frito-Lay cardboard box from Restaurant Depot; the rear seats are down).

(I should note that the broken ceiling fan is laying on the bed, and not actually a strange dealer add-on that is attached to the ceiling.)

Interview With Peter H. “Nice Pete” Cropes, On the Formation of His New Band

In this unedited, unreleased transcript of Man Why You Even Got To Do A Thing's interview with Nice Pete, some news about Pete's new band project provokes an unfortunate response from Roast Beef.

0066 — The Artboard

There were no outtakes this week; I wrote the script for 0066 on my phone pretty much as-is shortly after waking up last Sunday, and the layout came together in about three hours. So, here's the gesture library I created for piecing the strip together (including the original tableau of dejected, soul-searching Lyle at the riverbank), and a full-screen shot of how my Adobe Illustrator workspace looks.

I've been off caffeine for about six weeks and things are changing. I used to drink a mug or two in the morning, but mostly because I liked the hot flavors. When I switched to decaffeinated I didn't really care that much, because I found a good decaffeinated coffee and it has all that roasty nutty jazz going on, and I always add half and half, allulose, collagen, and two drops of stevia anyway, so it's not like I'm after some sacred bean experience. I wake up fairly clear before seven, instead of groggy at nine, even though I still fall asleep between 12am and 1am. Oh, I also set my phone to not show blue light at any hour (this is way deep in the Accessibility settings) so maybe that's helping too, since I will use it right up until I get too tired to think.

0066 — Philippe In, Why Is The Sky Blue

Outtakes at noon in Author's and In-Universe tiers.

The sky is blue because the Earth's atmosphere scatters the shorter blue wavelengths of sunlight more than the other colors. If that answer isn't satisfying, just remember that everything is vibrations, which don't exist, because they are just energy, and if you're wondering how a bag of sliced ham that doesn't exist can still weigh enough to cost sixteen dollars, hopefully by now it's clear that there are no satisfying answers once you start asking good questions.

Photo Tour: Cooking Notes, My Rain Garden, More

1. Several people at P's and Q's market/cafe got up to take pictures of this dog as its owner ran inside for takeout. I was sitting there with a pretty nice breakfast burrito (it even had a McDonald's-style hashbrown patty in it) and immediately knew this was a moment that would draw all humans together. It felt very special in the room, like we had seen a new elf get born, completely out of the blue — proof that the universe still has that old knack for magic.

2, 3, 4. Several things I've cooked in the last few weeks. I've been dredging things like those chicken salad patties in corn starch, for a tighter, karaage-type crust. And remember: a hot dog may not be comfortably thought of as a sandwich, but pretty much everything is a salad, if you dump it together and correct for acidity. Also: cauliflower steaks might sound like bullshit, but when you brown nature's Wallace Shawn hard in a little oil and salt it while hot, that is some savory eats.

5, 6. My grandfather loved making water features in his yard. It skipped a generation; my father likes growing roses and camellias. Now that I have a little more yard to play with, I am laying into the rain garden thing full-shoulder. Lauren put her foot down as far as a pond with a 24-hour pump was concerned, indicating that it is the adult equivalent of the puppy you promise to feed and clean up after. While I can admit that she is right, I will not be dissuaded from at least digging a rain garden that could contain a monsoon and a deluge. The area you see here was once useless (I.e., had no rain garden). I've been collecting rocks for a few months now, and even learned about a store that sells more rocks, including some green ones.

7. This is one of those situations where you wonder what the hell is going on with the people that own this not-inexpensive parcel of land. What would I see if I went in the RV (with a guarantee of safety?). What would I see in the garage, besides a contented hen? Photo taken during an evening walk down an alley in my neighborhood.

8. One of our many beloved Makitas greeted me the other morning as I went to skritter the bristles off the pearly whites. I inquired; Lauren had been up late building a cheap shoe rack which she ultimately had to return due to missing parts and frustration.

Ray's Place: Liquor, Lotion, and Love

Dear Ray, How can we face the inevitable decay of our bodies through the slow acidic river of time while still finding meaning? Can Marijuana help? Tom P.

Dear Tom P, 

Lotion, doggie! Guys, lotion is the main life hack of our time. Couple years ago I rubbed a blob of SPF 50 on my nose and my pinna and I guess they looked all fresh and healthy ’cause Brittni at the gym was all, “Ray you look ten years younger!” 

Oh, I should clarify for you non-cats that pinna is not slang for the gravity-jazzle (which is probably getting plenty of lotion already, right Tom P?). It’s the inner part of a cat’s ear. Burns hella easy if you ain’t classin’ the chassle (chassis + castle, kind of a new word I made up, since your body is both).

Class the chassle, not just the jazzle, Tom P,

-=RAYMONDE=-

-- -- + -- --

Ray, what is love? — Sarah.

Sarah, 

I been real into hardcore mind-dimension podcasts lately, like where they aren’t afraid to question anything. (I guess this kind of borders on philosophy.) This one dude said that love was nothing more than chemical processes trained by experience and instinct, and I was like oh hell yes of course. But then the next day I was like, “screw that man who nerds away the most powerful force in life—he is just a coward! He is a dude who listens to Janis Joplin by looking at inkjet printouts of the MP3 waves and making an equation about the high parts; this dude is a leaky glass jar of warm beans in a warm pond in direct sunlight.” It was a long thought, but I wrote it all down at the time, maybe kind of as a mantra against that man and his shiddle-britches attitude on Our Graceful Mystery. 

-=HAWKRAY=-

-- -- + -- --

Ray, how can I go about creating a signature cocktail that embodies me as a person? What physical and mental traits should I take into consideration and how can I match those up with liquids? —Mitch 

Mitch, 

I accidentally got this Carlos Castaneda audiobook a couple years ago when I was tryin’ to buy some fun little castanets on Amazon. You know him? All describin’ peyote experiences in mystical ways that make you realize drugs are the most important part of life. Anyhow, there’s this one part where the mentor makes the student find the one spot in this empty room where he feels truly balanced. It takes the student guy like all night, and he has a really lame time, but when he actually finds the spot the guy was talking about he gets so turnt that another dimension of himself opens. 

What I want you to do is place a shot of each of the main liquors on a counter, and then stand ten feet away from them. Look at each of them from left to right, then right to left, then in random order, spending about one second letting your eyes settle on each. Breathe evenly — that is really important. Now close your eyes and ask your shadow self — without thinking the words of the question, of course — where you should go. A warm orange glow will appear in the blackness of the back of your eyelids; walk toward that until it is directly in front of you. (You won’t bump into the counter, don’t worry. This is a magical process.) Open your eyes. That is your spirit-liquor. Adorn her with three parts mixer and a dash of bitters, then let her teach you what she thinks you should know. 

Incidentally, if you want to know which one is your enemy-liquor, it is Marshmallow Burnett’s Vodka ($8/liter). She will make a fool of you from the moment you let her into your home. 

-=Mr. Ray-Ray=-

-- -- + -- --

Confidential to Jilly93: Like with most guys, I thought I would like the banjo more than I did. Good luck.  

Come live in my house! Open this weekend.

https://www.redfin.com/OR/Portland/6725-NE-25th-Ave-97211/home/25852977

After fifteen years of ownership (that originally autocorrected to “perversion,” which felt like a judgement from the heavens) and five months of nonstop improvements, my old home has been listed for sale. Come take a look, make it seem popular. There aren’t many homes of these parameters and quality available right now, so hopefully competition will be “seven hands on the last banana”-style.

Disengaging from this home, and my current lifestyle of toiling day-long to make it nicer than it ever was when I lived there, will take a while. Last night, when I told Lauren I was going over one last time this morning to more the back lawn, she put her foot down and told me I needed to let go. It was a Moment. (If you buy this house, can I still come over for a bar-be-que? I promise not to talk to anybody, but I may reflexively pluck some dandelions.)

Two hours after the listing went live yesterday, the agent was already letting interested buyers in. Not one hour prior, I had been up on the ladder, scraping out the gutters and flicking the odd piece of moss off the roof.

Now when I go to Home Depot, my mind falls blank. My hands hang confused at my sides. I have no tasks. Even the last to-do item, hanging the S-hooks from the pot rack I made, to imply its usage, has been completed. Their spacing has been fretted over, optimized.

Once more, with feeling,

https://www.redfin.com/OR/Portland/6725-NE-25th-Ave-97211/home/25852977

Wisconsin, Part Two

PART TWO: FIRST CONTACT: KWIK TRIP.

We drove into Wisconsin after landing in Minneapolis and meeting a friend for coffee. The coffee shop was, inexplicably, one of those smug little boutiques which had air plants instead of dairy products, so I was even more eager to get to Old Wisco, where at least the bullshit came from cows. 

The fabled rolling green hills and big red barns greeted us as we crossed the state line; highway exits began to regularly feature large, hand-painted plywood signs which read, simply, CHEESE. Gas stations featured cold cases full of “road pork”: raw chops, bacons, chubs, rinds, pickled bits, you name it — no Harald-gone-a-visiting could be excused for arriving empty-handed. Bags of fresh cheese curds in a variety of dazzling colors (well, white, yellow, and flecked) lined yet more refrigerated bins. Reserve pallets of Milwaukee’s Best, a discount-style lager congenially referred to as The Beast, lined the hallways to restrooms that had been not just freshly cleaned, but decorated with signage that earnestly apologized in advance for anything that might not be up to the standards of serenity one typically requires during a vacation-style undisclosed bowel movement. 

A kind and motherly cashier at one rural Kwik Trip — after my purchase of fuel, Old Dutch potato chips, and one of those locally-baked apple things with the large sugar pieces on top — sent me off with a warm, “See you later!” I instinctively felt it would be a genuine offense if I did not actually make the effort to visit again at a later date, and then felt doubly guilty that I didn’t come clean and admit I was unlikely to be back by there for the rest of my life. 

“You bet!” I rejoined, surprised at how quickly I’d gone native, but equally glad to be leaving that roller coaster of an exchange. She seemed happily placated, and as the door closed behind me and the next customer was rung up, she continued along, eternally braiding her daisy chain of unbroken pleasantries.

Our first stop was Madison, home of Lauren’s alma mater, The University of Wisconsin at Madison. Haunchy young farm men with beefy necks and snug Wranglers clip-clopped across the quadrangles in unironic and deeply weathered cowboy boots, crossing paths in equal number with ninth-wave hippie kids whose grandmothers had given the hides of their corduroy couches so that their progeny’s pants might flare as wide as their minds. We had dinner at the sort of place you could imagine Phileas Fogg encountering his first veggie burger: a deeply-worn, dark old pub where the creased and greasy Trivial Pursuit cards asked questions in the present tense about Ronald Reagan, and which no doubt had been sneered over by both the current class, and their parents long ago. 

The next day was thrift shopping at “St. Vinnie’s,” a campus tour (the university has a strong agricultural program; they have a lab with a living cow that has holes in it, so you can individually furtle the cuds of its many stomachs), and meals at innocent little cafes whose clumsy pastries looked like they were made by hot-palmed bumpkins with no reference photos, and loyal friends. 

Lauren’s father spent his career in Milwaukee as a union ironworker. He is man who chews jumper cables like Twizzlers while pinching the terminals of dead car batteries between his daikon fingers. As we cruised into the skyline he had pieced together by spitting glowing orange rivets into I-beams while alternating gulps of Blatz, so she began to unfurl the ugly history of white flight and urban blight, acccentuating the tale with the click-clicking of our door locks. We rolled down a long stretch of minimalist public-assistance housing blocks, and into the driveway of an opulent four-story Victorian mansion that had become a bed and breakfast. 

A few of these leviathan treasures still dotted the neighborhood, monuments to the essential fortunes of a young nation: lumber, oil, beer, cookies. Our host, Andrew, was an energetic older fellow who had cashed out of another boom economy, computer programming, to rescue this polychotomous rattery from the blind jaws of the excavator and feed French toast an endless procession of travelers. Now known as The Manderley Inn, the 1886 Queen Anne home of a coal merchant and his wife, an author, had been purchased for a song, provided the buyer paid the back taxes on the derelict property. Fairly restored to a less-severe version of its Gilded Age self, it is now possible to relax in the home without fear of gunfire or secondhand crack addiction, which we did while Andrew filled us in on the joyfulness of the “bed and breakfast lifestyle.” For example, his immaculate chicken coop featured gingerbread siding, a widow’s walk, and a mansard dormer with a large stained glass of a rooster in a Friday night frame of mind. 

It took us weeks to shake the dream of moving back to Milwaukee and restoring our own bed and breakfast. Lauren was eventually able to remind me that if you go outside in the wintertime without a gallon of Brandy Old Fashioneds, Sweet, in you, your blood will instantly freeze, you will die, and if you are near a natural feature, that feature will henceforth be referred to as “Fool’s [Rock, etc].” (The Brandy Old Fashioned, Sweet, is a uniquely Wisconsin Old Fashioned typically made with Korbel brandy instead of whiskey, plus citrusy soda, and a garnish of green olives with an orange slice. Here you may be reminded of the french-fries-and-chocolate-malt concept mentioned earlier.)

Next time: Part 3, “The House On The Rock.”

0065 — Hot Piss Siroccos off of “Fuck Craigslist Friday”

At the appointed time, at the appointed place. Unlike so may Craigslist experiences. This could have been its own graphic novel, and should be, but not tonight, for I am so very tired, and still need to sell a semi-functional two-stroke gas augur and also a mountain bike I had to clipper out of a bunch of ivy.

0065 — Fuck You Friday, Craigslist edition

As usual, bloopers strip at noon in In-Universe/Author's Tiers, etc.  

These last twelve months, in the course of moving out of one house, and into another, and thoroughly restoring both in the process, I have become compoundingly familiar with the Craigslist Experience. From maddening land-chuds who can't keep an appointment, to pleasant backyard conversations with the culturally kindred who would be friends — [if not for...well, why not? But, not.] — I consider the turf of the gamut well-pounded.

I've been the clueless asshole selling something that wasn't ready for sale, or lacked parts. I have been the purple-faced basket case, waiting for a buyer who wasted reams of biographical time, who never showed, or who bargained their way right off of my property empty-handed.

When the Craigslist exchanges go well, I am buoyed by the goodness and cooperation of mankind.  When they go poorly, I am Pat, looking into the mirror of my own malignant coping defects. I once spent a month doing pleasant little meditations, and am now long overdue to once again ground my feet against the earth, breathe with measured deliberation, and hear the space between the rustle of the trees on high and the swishel of the grass down low.