Achewood

Ray's Place: Pornography Addiction, Insomnia, and Impotence

No, it ain't Pat's diary, it's the return of my column! You asked, and I answered. Thinkin' this will be a weekly thing! If I didn't get to you this time, I got lots more saved up for next.

Here. We. Go!

-- -- + -- --

How much is too much to spend on OnlyFans subscriptions? 

—Omnithea

Dear Omnithea,

It really don’t matter, so long as you’re not playin’ video games. Charley plays damn video games all day long, and he’s so addicted, he even has this little plastic video game machine he brings to the dinner table. He tries callin’ it “e-sports” or some nonsense like that, so I come back at him all, "You got arms like a boneless eel, Popeye gonna eat your ass." But I guess people his age all eat ass these days so that didn’t mean to him what it meant to me.   

-=RAY=-

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Dear Ray, I have recently started experiencing insomnia for the first time. You seem like a man who has never suffered for lack of beauty sleep. What are your tips for getting a guaranteed snooze on?

—Jon

Well, Jon, it used to be pretty much a lifestyle guarantee that I’d pass out every night, full from kisser-to-wisser on Tanq and ribeye, or whatever we were skompin’ downstairs. Usually I’d wake up to find The Police blasting on a bluetooth in the downstairs bathroom, with the door closed and nobody in it (those were scary moments, openin’ that door), or discover that somebody with a Sharpie had written BOCEPHUS real small on the white leather couch, which still ruined the whole thing. 

These days, I’m livin’ a little healthier, and I got this boss nighttime routine dialed in with my energy trainer Clariñgo.

• First, I set my iPhone to minimize blue light at night (the screen for this is buried way deep in the settings, but he drew me a flowchart of how to find it).

• Second, I go outside on the lawn and do Spiderman Vs. The Volcano for ten minutes. If you don’t know this one, you get buck naked and lay face down, spread eagle, touchin’ the earth. This helps neutralize the blood so it ain’t all cloggy.

• Third, I go in the kitchen and eat some brominated artichoke dip with a glass of negative water (ionic charge thing).

• After that, I get in bed and fall asleep listening to The Great Equations on my AirPods—somethin’ about huge equations just totally opens the mind up to the wonders of the universe, and I am out like a light. 

Hope this helps, Jon!  

Smackitude,

-=SMUCKLES=-

-- -- + -- --

Dear Ray, As an all-around dude who naturally excels at everything you do, have you given consideration to advising on classic simple foods that are easy to make while shitfaced, like the bologna tortilla or cold canned soup shooters? J.   

Dear J.,

I would never drink cold soup. N-e-v-e-r. You ever had gazpacho? I’m like, “nope.” That’s salsa. Try again, Spain or whoever. It’s kind of like that “is a hot dog a sandwich” Buddhism riddle: “is cold soup a soup?” No. It’s just obnoxious. Callin' cold stuff soup is like tryin’ to pass off ketchup as the jelly on your PBJ, since a tomato is a fruit. Which it ain’t, because get this: nobody thinks a tomato is a fruit, ‘cause it tastes like frog ovaries. Science can suck me hard above the fist when it comes to classifyin’ a tomato. 

Sorry to get cranky on this one. I don't dick around with soup.

Ray.

-- -- + -- --

Ray, How's it going with the balding thing? Have you accepted or managed to reverse it? And what does accepting baldness look like for you guys - is it whatever the fuck Pat's doing? Thanks, JR 

JR, 

Man, a few years back I went on a real jag with the chemical method of regrowin’ hair. Minoxidil, fluozepam, doxatremaline, formazecan, maltesealol, and even this trendy new one called He’s A Boy (boycaldelyde). I was pissin’ hot Vaseline fragrance and havin’ heart palpitations, plus I couldn’t log out a peter to save my life (embarrassing, but I was single at the time, so I let it roll a while). I’d get maybe some silky fuzz on the pate, but it’d go away like one hour after I stopped it with the trick-or-treatin’. 

Once I finally got fed up with all the tinnitus and shudder-knee, I flushed all that crap. (Sorry, impotent fish.) After about a month of bein’ hair-sober, I went on a walk through the forest one afternoon, and stepped on a mushroom (accident). I felt this warmth at the top of my head, and normally I would have been nervous about the connection, but there was just this real calm assurance-type energy all around me, and for the rest of the afternoon I basked in the realization that absolutely nobody cares if I’m a little bald. I even asked some hikers if they cared that I was a little bald, and they said no, but didn’t elaborate.  (I was trippin’ a little, too, I realized later.)

So, think about it. You ever seen a nice-lookin’ lady out with some hideous golem orc man, veiny old dome straight outta Thanos’s shorts? You sure have. Hair is like socks, dude: if you got personality and confidence that radiates vitality, nobody notices your socks.   

—Raymòón The Owl

-- -- + -- --

Confidential to Marcus M: On salads I prefer blue cheese dressing. 

Wisconsin: Supper Clubs, the Cavernous Prop Room of America’s Fractured National Psychosis, and a Death in the Family

I have been exposed to Wisconsin several times in the past few years, and my fondness for the state and its people has surprised no one more than myself. In this multi-part Author's Tier series, we'll take a look inside my trips — water parks, supper clubs, cultural events, and a death in the family — as I plumb for insight about the unlikely attraction of this place. 

I'll be releasing installments every few days, email-style. That is to say, not as one big PDF. Read it right then and there, enjoy a pleasant "huh," get on with your day. I've been enjoying Lev Grossman's regular email updates, so I'm trying out this informal format. I also don't want every installment you get here to be bog-down long.  

— — — — — — + — — — — — —

Part One: Prelude. 

Europeans have a jokey old chestnut about America, which goes, “Americans are great magicians: if you want to make the rest of the world disappear, simply pick up one of their newspapers.” Our global neighbors, you see, hold the conviction that not only do Americans look like Tweedle Dee on laundry day, but that, for us, the world beyond our borders simply blurs into a cacophony of yelling and paprika. I am unimpressed by this, because as a son of California, I know an even more powerful magic trick: open one of our local papers, and the rest of the country disappears. The typical Golden State rag is a reverse cloak of invisibility.

Or was, anyhow. I don’t read those anymore. I live in Oregon now. The paper gets wet too quickly to make much out, but I imagine the stories are about various seasonally-depressed branches of the animal kingdom, and muffler theft. 

When I met my partner, Lauren, she mentioned she was from Wisconsin. I got that same nonspecific geographic mental image that children get when you tell them that Santa Claus is from the North Pole. I smiled; I figured it was a nice place full of honest people whose food was speckled with umlauts instead of pepper. She had blonde hair, a long German last name with a repeated consonant at the end (it hadn’t snapped off during the long winters, apparently), and the merciful nature not to ask me to locate Wisconsin on an unlabeled map, so things went well. 

That night, after our first walk together, I looked it up. There Wisconsin sat, smack-dab in the middle of the country, the jewel in the crown of the “guess I’ll go warm up the car” belt. 

Wisconsinites like to think their state looks like a mitten, but this is untrue. It is no degrees where they live, and they are just happy at the thought of insulation. Wisconsin, no matter how you look at it, doesn’t look like anything. Italy looks like a boot and that is universally accepted; if aliens who had legs landed here, they would look at Italy and go, “Wow! It looks just like what we in our galaxy call a boot.” American states look like a bored person with a ruler was forced to honor a few rivers.  

A feeling of rootlessness — imagine the bareness of a rental cabin’s cupboard, where the goofy seasonal textiles and fairy-tale books born of our regional carnivorous fauna should be — pervades many west coasters. Our families haven’t been in America for more than a few generations, and have been out west even fewer; we don’t have centuries of tradition tied to the land we inhabit. We have accrued no heritable gravity, save the vague archetypes of cowboys and surfers, and those are just emotionally underdeveloped people who think their distaste for walking constitutes a personality. 

As a west coaster, the idea of Wisconsin culture comforted me: it may have been all triangular foam cheese hats, football, and sausage, but if you haven’t got a tribe of your own, any flag feels like safety. And the ghosts of my father’s heavily western-European side of the family, whose primary surviving tradition was to steam wads of dough in a wet margarine bath and find the low spot where the umlaut could settle, seemed to smile warmly upon Lauren’s and my union. 

Before our first trip to Wisconsin — my unconcealed excitement at visiting America’s Dairyland genuinely surprised not just her, but most of my friends and family — I was briefed in the subtle linguistic differences I would face. You don’t go to someone’s Packer party, you go by it. (Perhaps it feels presumptuous to insert oneself into another’s home, even verbally, so instead you suggest that you were merely standing by the house, in the snow out front, making demands of no-one; more likely, though, is that it’s a German language carryover.) Drinking fountains are called bubblers, even though they are not carbonated. The paper cup that your ice cream comes in is referred to as a dish, even though it is not at all a dish. And…actually, upon reflection, that might be about it, as far as notable linguistic differences go. 

Before we left for my first visit by her motherland, the only other major culture shock I experienced was hearing that they dip their french fries into chocolate malts, and often order these items together for the express purpose of doing so. To mitigate my displeasure at having to taste a dish (sorry, “abomination”) that was clearly invented by people who smoke in humid Oldsmobiles with the windows up, I was routinely reminded that I would get to enjoy many “kringles” while there. The kringle — a mythical, bountiful filled pastry the size and shape of a toilet seat — became the golden ring of my hungry Hobbit’s journey. I envisioned beaming, gap-toothed Bavarian maids placing one around my neck as I alighted from the plane. Hopefully raspberry.

(If you want the real goods on Midwestern culture, written by a pro and native, I strongly encourage you to pick up How To Talk Minnesotan, by former Prairie Home Companion writer Howard Mohr. It’s a loaf of buttered pumpernickel in a sea of Wonder bread.) 

Next Time: "First Contact: Kwik Trip."

0064 — Screeches & Suppurations from "App Dating For the Elderly"

And in this corner, the return of Animalicious.

0064 — App Dating for the Elderly

At noon PDT today, the extra panels from this strip's production will post in the In-Universe and Author's Tiers. 

An aged member of my extended family recently announced his intention to re-enter the dating pool after several years' absence. (It is not certain if this truancy was noticed.) When asked which app he was going to use, he mentioned that a friend had heard of one especially for seniors, called, "OurTime."

When recalling this exchange some hours later, I misremembered the app's name as, "One Last Try," chuckled, and wrote this strip.

Fan strip: Philippe, in "The GAMBLING GAME"!

Platinum Knucklehead-Chochacho Spencer Harris created this riff on those Philippe strips where he writes little stories at a typewriter. I liked it so much that I asked to post it here, and he was all too happy to share it with you. I humor myself that the tone of this type of strip is a delicate thing to capture and sustain, and he did not make a single misstep.

My mini-interview with Mr. Harris:

"I remember finding out about Achewood somewhere around 2008 via a few people who were slightly older and cooler than I was - although we were all on IRC together, where the yardstick for “cool” looks a little different. As I was 17 at this point, most of the more refined references would take a while to click for me, but there was so much else in the writing that appealed to me immediately that it didn’t matter. I always liked that there was room in the world of the strip (even under the same roof) not just for burnouts like Lyle and sadsacks like Téodor, but also for a sweet little guy like Philippe who draws out aspects of each of them that - I don’t expect it’s too outré to suggest - they may never have otherwise known they had."

Fifty dollars a card!

An unexplained appearance by Lyle!

Ray Invites Celebrity Chef Jerry Ontario to Recreate McDonald's at Home

In the following illustrated account, Ray hires San Francisco celebrity chef Jerry Ontario of RESTAURANT 10-SION to recreate McDonald’s food in his home. Unfortunately, the entire thing threatens to collapse when Beef shows up and starts making a fuss over an upsettingly authentic ingredient, which insults Ray’s temperamental guest.

A version of this story originally ran on Assetbar October 28, 2009. It has been greatly improved and reformatted for use in an unrecognizably advanced technological landscape (png instead of gif).

Announcing My Debut Novel - Patreon One-Year Anniversary Surprise!

Friends of the Library, 

What happens when a time-traveling, Gilded Age robber baron accidentally strands himself in modern day Portland, Oregon? In this expansive and colorfully-peopled story, our subject demonstrates all the vicious instincts which won him his industrialist fortunes, but quickly comes up against forces of nature every bit as ancient, powerful, and irreconcilable. The question is simple as ever: "Who will win, and will the story be any fun?" So many novelists forget that second part.  

I began my debut novel — working title, "The Send-Up" — in the wake of the Netflix project collapse, and have quietly brought it to shop-for-a-publisher status during the first year of your Patreon support. Yes, it is specifically and directly thanks to your membership here that I have been able to devote the enormous amount of time it takes to crafting this tale. 

Clocking in at over 450 pages, I like to think that the spirits of Vonnegut, Wodehouse, and Toole are honored in its structured absurdity, love of language, and leery eye to the human animal.  

Please enjoy these sample pages. I am currently in pursuit of a literary agent, so that I do not trade the manuscript for a handful of magical beans. Oh, and I thought it would be fun to lay it out on pictures of paper, to help augur it into physical being, so you have to deal with that.

Thank you everyone! This is an accomplishment for us all, as it is your literal patronage that not only gave me the time, but also the encouragement, to believe this could be done, and be enjoyed.  

0063 — Roughs from "Return of Ray's Place"

It occurs to me that maybe I should have been placing these "blooper" pieces in the Author's tier, since they're part of the writing process, and not "in-universe" per se. Too late now, I suppose, but does anyone in the In-Universe tier not want to see fourth-wall-breaking stuff? Please let me know.

(Edited to add that I am quite happy that In-Universe readers are seeing these too! I do not regret the classification choice.)

0063 — Return of Ray's Place

Since I don't want to put any spoilers here, let's just figure out where Ray went when he was out not locking his computer. He's got either a wax paper soda cup from a fast food restaurant, or a sporty reusable workout cup, so we can't know for sure that it was an errand in the service of diabetes. Perhaps he was out for a long walk — long enough for someone to sit and compose at his computer for at least ten minutes (assuming the prose was already seething in the hidden author's veins).

He seems in good spirits, which is not how a man with his bloodwork would feel immediately following a Smashed Buttery Double with Cheese at Jack in the Box. So, here, as Mother Spring shimmers the bough and riffles the heading grain, let us feel renewed hope for our magnanimous friend.

Except for that last panel.  

Puzzle Time: Philippe!

From a file dated March 27, 2009.

[fixed] Big Anniversary Surprise! Plus scary photo of dead opossum, etc

Dear Author's Tier-chacho, I have a big surprise to unveil this weekend, and I am telling you about it first.

One year ago, on May 5, 2023, the Achewood Patreon debuted, and with your generous support I was able to inhabit, for the first time, the happy, healthy, and sustainable production mode that had eluded me the previous quarter-century. I would put the best moments of the last 62 strips and pieces up against the best of any of the previous thousands.

While I was creating the last twelve months' worth of material, I also had a stealth project going on, which I will debut this Sunday. I mention it here early because I think it's the sort of thing a person who would join the Author's Tier might particularly appreciate, and I want you to be excited. I surprise myself with the excitement I feel at the prospect of sharing it.

It was the strong membership numbers in this tier that helped convince me there was an appetite for the sort of thing to which I allude, and so it was on the tide of your next-level support that I rose with the sun so many mornings and bared the keyboard to the shadow-self, as it were.

Thank you again for being among the most ardent supporters of my work. Your contribution truly does translate into not just the time for me to do it, but to my belief in its ability to bring happiness and meaning to this life we share.

C

Puzzle Time: Ray

From a file dated March 27, 2009.

Puzzle Time: Cornelius Bear

From a file dated March 27, 2009.

Cornelius Bear — Fast Facts

Last saw the light of day in Assetbar. File dated December 30, 2008. Archive pieces posting M-Th this week.

You Can Star in Ray’s Place!

Post your questions for Ray’s Advice Column in the comments below, and if something about your predicament tugs at one of Mr. Smuckles’ many differently-angled heartstrings, you may feature in either an In-Universe column, or in the weekly strip itself! Become canon, impress your friends.

Ray reserves the right to paraphrase long questions, while preserving clarity. He will try to do a good job, unless he straight fucks around, which is, honestly, an 8/10 possibility.

Ray will also, almost guaranteed, not be able reply to all of your questions. This is not due to dickishness. Sometimes he just has no relevant wisdom/is golfing with the mayor.

0062 — Incorrect Writing from "Pat Gives Ray a Gift"

I was intrigued by the angle of Ray putting Pat's MLM out of business by competing with a superior product wherein you could cry onto actual famous crying faces, but ultimately didn't want to make this into a whole storyline. It was once a crutch of Saturday Night Live to base a whole sketch on one funny idea (what staff writer Al Franken called, "The title tail wagging the content dog") and I always felt that method of story development quickly revealed itself as stillborn. Except perhaps for Chris Farley's "Pepper Boy," which was pure magic in real time.

0062 — Pat Gives Ray a Gift

Personal note at bottom. 

A full-page collection of outtakes and unused panels from this week's cutting room floor will post in the In-Universe and Author's Tiers at noon Pacific today, as is custom.

Inherently sensed in a friend's cheery announcement that they have just begun a "side-hustle" selling essential oils, makeup, or loud peplum tops from New Zealand is that your financial participation, and even deputy evangelization, is assumed. In fact, your name was probably on their short list when they were finding ways to justify their hello-and-faceplant into the world of multi-level marketing.

You are not wrong. The moment a half-cocked American decides to play-act entrepreneur — because so did our Rockefeller and our Carnegie and even Bezos started somewhere — a lifetime of low-resolution capitalist pomp strikes up in their heart and their birthright of easy riches beyond imagination is all but assured. You will not only be their customer, but you will become so moved by the jazzy fabrics and de-ionized eyeliner that you, too, will become a salesperson, and a portion of your monthly income will tithe their way. The essential trick of the MLM is the conflation of friendship with leverage.

It's a sorry thing to see a friend go through this — like the fungus that invades the brain of the ant and drives his body around like some nightmarish rough draft from Boston Dynamics — but go through it they do. And Ray Smuckles, bless his wealth, can just bat the handsy zombie of amateur ambition back with his dollars. Does his decision ultimately fuel the delusion? Yes, of course it does. But Ray Smuckles is one to avoid problems, and that is what I wanted to tell you today. Maybe that's why he's still single.

Has an MLM ever threatened your own life and well-being? Please describe it in the comments.

Personal note: I once dated someone who joined an MLM, and it was a point of great contention that I would not use the Achewood platform and readership to advertise their shlock. It was, perhaps, the initial audible cleaving of the fibers of our union. My commitment to spend fifty dollars a month on a small bottle of laundry detergent was ultimately not enough; the entire ill-begotten relationship collapsed several hundred dollars later.

0061 — Bloopers and Outtakes from "Shadow Puppets"

It's true, sometimes I reverse-engineer a blooper or "unused panel" after completing the original work. It's a fun wind-down, now that the pressure is off. "Shadow Puppets" is no exception, except there is an even deeper truth to today's excavation: I built the whole thing off a false start (in the business, we call this "junk and garbage") from 2007. Above, you'll see the original artboard at the precise moment of its abandonment.

0061 — Shadow Puppets

(As is now custom, visit the In-Universe Tier or Author's Tier for the rejected panels—and the original 2007 inspiration artwork—from this strip! Posting at noon Pacific Time.)

In order for this strip to validate, it is time for me to declare that Philippe is a river otter, and not a sea otter. Sea otters have a mitten for a hand (sans thumb), while river otters have articulate little fingers that help them call their mothers and experience uncomfortable conversations where the persistent reference context of familial awareness — and thereby motherly love — is broken for the first time. At this point a river otter's little heart goes into both a tailspin and a panic, and he will not allow himself to think hard upon it for a while. When he does, it will typically be expressed along with other things which have been troubling the little fellow, such as all the nuclear brinksmanship he sees on the news, and the terrifying headlines about technology which threatens to eradicate us. Once this pattern is complete, his simple, playful nature once again emerges, and the little rascal sets about entertaining his friends. His complex inner life is no match for the joy of fond company.

Please read the preceding paragraph in the voice of Sir David Attenborough, while he still has his memories.   

Ray's Failed Cocktail Lab

This is a heavily-updated and newly-illustrated version of a piece that originally ran in the Assetbar on September 4, 2009. It features minor appearances by aquavit, egg whites, and Emeril LeGoinegasque.

The House Where Achewood Began, College Pics, The Doubt

Last weekend I flew down to Stanford for the annual reunion of the Chaparral, the campus satire magazine where I first cut my teeth as an aspiring intellectual miscreant. The Internet as we know it did not exist in the year of my matriculation, 1993; my dream was to spend the rest of my life in a smoke-filled room full of Conan O'Brien's opening monologue writers, growing bald (everywhere except my cortisol-hardened paunch) and miserable.

If I could do it all over again, would I forsake the long afternoons spent painting myself silver and harassing the dining halls? If I had spent a little less time dripping warm Goldschläger into my eyeballs, and a little more time learning C++ computer code, maybe by now I'd have that house on the hill. What if I'd taken anything as seriously as I took laughing my ass off?

A return to these mythic headwaters always foments an insecurity in the validity of whatever it is I have done in the days since I flipped the tassel. After I ask my ride to drop me at the Oval, and I embark upon my unscripted yet predictable pilgrimage across the Quad and White Plaza, I am washed over by the same sense of unbelonging that they included with my freshman registration packet. (It was a powder that you mixed into warm water.) What was an undecorated kid from the rural Sierra Nevadas doing among Andover and Exeter's best-looking Olympians and most hat-melting chess masters?

This time was a little better. Returning to the Achewood universe last May — nearly a year ago! — was, without question, the right move. (Most critical to this internal diatribe is that I have finally granted myself supreme authority to declare what the right moves for myself are.) My relationship with Lauren is fun every day, and stabilizing. Learning how to restore old homes built an unexpected reserve of confidence.

(A quick aside: The Achewood universe...I'm frustrated that dealing with the old and the new houses, both so decrepit, has kept me from completely losing my days with Ray and Beef, writing new adventures big and small, but those plates are largely clearing next month, when I will finally sell the old house. E.g., I spent today building a new gate there, figuring out which touch-up paints stay or go, and mowing a lawn absolutely lousy with dandelions, their fat wet heads splatting against the blade like zombies marching into a helicopter's blade.)

Back to the topic. I spent these recent days on campus trying out this new perspective, and it took me a while to realize this, but I don't think Stanford and I need each other any more. Of course, it definitely never needed me, but I'm learning not to look there for validation on any scale. Allowing this realization is part of letting go of the idea that I can ever go back there and start over, an idea which must have metastasized along the back of my medulla at some early point, like a sticky rind of brie against a dark portion of large intestine. I wasn't even aware it was there, but, like deep-space astronomy, sometimes we can only tell that things exist by observing that other things are not behaving as they should. Perhaps this condition is a common companion of regrets.

This does not go for the Chaparral, the place in which I formed large pieces of myself out of Weinhard's and Sharpies. As I reflected with Lauren upon returning home, the weekend proved that I had made the right friends there — the sort you flop down next to and pick up again as though great barrels of a completely separate life hadn't been topped and shipped in the meanwhile. Among the doctors, diplomats, tech legends — and even a scoundrel or two — I felt the ease and welcome of family.

0060 — Unused panels from Music Theory People

These panels were posted to the tune "Now That I Know," by Ted Lucas. If you look it up and listen to it, you will have heard the perfect song for cookin' chili to.

0060 - Music Theory People

Oops! Posted this one a day early! My bad. Leaving it up.

(The blooper panels will still post Friday in the In-Universe and Author's Tiers, to still have something on that day, for everyone who likes a Friday treat.)

Music Theory People, even though ye here be lambasted (I always think music theory people consider themselves born in the wrong century, and really wish their underwear had lots of buttons up the sides), feel free to plug the song that Pat is listening to into your composition software, silence all the alarms and auto-corrects, and see how it sounds. If my calculations are right, it will sound like a room full of dentists, waiting to get their teeth cleaned (this will ultimately be deemed unnecessary) by a dentist. A perfect day, with perfect music. Or, it'll just be Lenore by Chick Corea, which is also great dentist-waitin' music.

Okay, okay. Look, I know that whether or not we get music theory, it's like physics – it makes sense as a way of operating within a particular space. And, like physics, it's kind of hard to get into, because schools teach us all the wrong things. Imagine if your neighbor kept bothering you by leaving his trash cans at the curb all week, but you both knew how to jam out on the bassoon, so you could just go into your yard and start tooting some bassoon notes that were accurate to your intentions, and pretty soon he'd come out with his bassoon, and you'd start jamming, and this would be an entrée to peaceful conflict resolution. School could have given us all this, if only they'd valued music theory over, say, the Boer Wars.

0059 — Unused panels from Cinnamon Buns

As promised, at the appointed hour.

0059 - Cinnamon Buns

(As is becoming custom, watch the In-Universe and Author's Tier for the rejected panels from this strip! Posting at noon Pacific Time.)

ALT TEXT: Each of us has a public life, a private life, and a secret life. The secret life is where we wrestle with our base, unvarnished, and uncorrected animal impulses, hot from the factory. We typically do not share the secret life with anyone — not even our friends, spouses, or therapists.

There is a quote that goes something like, “Love is when someone sees the ugliest side of you, and still stays.” Here, we see Beef’s secret life. He won’t let his spouse see it, so he can’t know if she can truly love him, because he won’t give her the chance. Their relationship exists in an incomplete state. From that, they can only reap incomplete rewards.  

Paradoxically, completely sharing our secret life would obliterate the trust of our partner, and that is why it is a secret. In the recovery world it is common wisdom that secrets kill, but there must be a way to manage our secrets in order to stay healthily bonded. From the discord of hosting these multiple selves we must derive whatever it is we are, although who we are may just depend on who is tasked with experiencing us.

This will be a fun topic for you and your partner to discuss over dinner in a quiet, expensive restaurant this evening.

Our Boro Ouroboros

They say to lead with a feature image of a person, but they also say to make it a good image of an appealing person, so I was torn. Here you go, it's me sorting through a massive pile of remaindered denim.

What is boro? Read on.

Last year Ben (sukajan guy and frequent creative collaborator) drove me around LA and we popped into his favorite Little Tokyo bookstores, edge-case fashion houses, and gamified sushi-belt joints. An oft-thumbed treasure from that trip is a book he gifted me about boro, a Japanese textile genre in which worn-out denim and other indigo-dyed clothing are quilted together. Like an old telephone pole barnacled with rusted staples, screws, nails, and the rain-melted shoulders of playbills long fallen, these assemblies offer rich evidence of life — and pleasantly flummox the mind by looking like treasure though made of trash.

Hayden and I went to the Goodwill Bins a few weeks later, and picked a cart full of old denim clothing out of the grubby trolleys. (If you aren't familiar, the Bins are to human material culture what the fertilizer factory was to Jurgis Rudkus.)

The denim sat in a big blue IKEA bag in the garage at the fixer-upper all winter, which means it got soaked by the rain that flowed in slow sheets across the floor, and started fermenting. I might compare its ultimate fragrance to chicken manure.

Last week, a team of twenty mules pulled it through a long, hot laundry day, however, and so it was Saved.

Last night I spent a few hours trimming the landfill-bound Dickies and dungarees into usable panels, preserving with special care the bits bearing holey evidence of life. Next I will see if my 1979 Singer "Zig-Zag" can power its way through multiple layers of the dense material, reanimating it as a quilt, or perhaps an ugly large thing I keep in a cabinet. When this comes to something, you'll see it here.

The Hummus Technique That Saved America (five words)

INGREDIENTS (see photo)

15.5oz can chickpeas, drained

2 tbsp lemon juice

1/4c tahini

1 clove garlic, smashed

1/4c olive oil

1 tbsp toasted sesame oil

1 tsp ground cumin

1/2 tsp salt

- - - 
TECHNIQUE

Food processor, high, two minutes. 

- - - 

(THIS PART IS NOT RECIPE) The difference between fresh homemade hummus and refrigerated store-bought is so vast that I defy you to give two squats about the texture and flavor difference between this hummus, and a hummus where dried chickpeas were soaked overnight, boiled with baking soda, painstakingly hand-skinned for ten minutes, and blended in precious stages. Plus, this method has more fiber, and Americans are in a fiber crisis, so you need the hummus immediately, not one metric fusspot from now. 

Gunkin' Man Vs. Nature, Plus Photo Dump, April 1, 2023

Last Sunday eve, as I was stretching out an Achilles that threatened to go berserk after a spate of rain-sodden, increased-distance runs, I remembered that I'd completely blanked on the abdominal portion of my last gym visit. Always mindful of impressing Coop, and believing that in certain narrow angles of light I was seeing a bit of progress, I laid on my back to perform the Maniac Ladybugs and God-Facing Swans of penitence.

Only, the energy wasn't there. I'd had a brief sore throat in the morning, and the back of the house immediately mapped these aberrant blips to one another. I typically feel a bias toward attacking the physical tasks ahead — there are so very many of them piling up and intertwining at all times that immediate action, rather than deferral, is actually the laziest, most calorie-saving strategy — so this icky twist of the helix gave me leave to consider a day or two of convalescence.

What an awful idea, I thought. How would I get the old house on the market, the new house ready for the wedding (we're hosting the wedding at our fixer-upper in September), and rejoice in frolicking through the unfurling bolts of high-octane, early Spring sunlight that were now toppling and bounding down from the blue? Beetles, ravens, and osteopaths were outside my window, rutting and plunging and spurting with resplendent fecundity, yet there I would lay, head-to-toe in gray sweats, propped against a pillow and snoozing the latest round of intellectually disappointing Facebook friends. What a worm.

After five days of cautious engagement with the universe, during which I finished two comics, re-floored the landing at the old house, and moved a few carloads of forgotten junk to the darkest corners of the new basement, I'd had enough with this namby-pamby collapse into self-pity. It was time to remove the stand of pampas grass in the front yard, literally speaking.

Pampas grass — one of which sprouted in each glowing footstep of the Tyrannosaurus Rex — looks like a Hungarian Sheepdog crossbred with a hydrothermal vent. Our two specimens were six feet tall, with roots reaching nearly eleven feet into the earth, and tens of thousands of blades of fire emanating from every angle. These are the sort of plant Southern men chain to their trailer hitches, moments before angrily filing a claim with their automotive insurance provider.

With mattock, spade, and pail, I would sweat the virus out of me.

The poor soil around the first stand crumbled easily beneath the tools, and, after much welcome toil, a trench four feet deep surrounded my quarry. I sat on the rim, gave it a hearty shove with my legs, and...nothing. If you have ever, at the end of a long evening, laid on your back and tried to snap a telephone pole off with your heels, you will be familiar with the sensation.

Fortified by peanuts and fruit-punch-flavored sparkling water, I inhumed myself anew in the cavern that grew beneath the root ball. I beat it with a ten-pound sledge. I worried it with a serrated trowel. Inch by inch I severed the roots, which ranged from gnocchi to capellini in thickness.

Butting it squarely with my chest and anchoring my feet against the trench wall, I pushed again, with all the forehead-popping fury of a football man going at the tire sled. I visualized steel and jockstraps. I monitored the air for the scent of burnt toast.

To my considerable surprise, it gave. An inch at first, but that was all that I, the man-water between its nature-bricks, needed. A few more shoving matches yielded the snapping of its own thousands of Achilles tendons, and soon it lay on its side. Three cinematic sessions with the axe then had its three-hundred pound mass in manageable, wheelbarrow-size loins and barons.

The job done, I went to the basement, stripped to my skivvy, and threw my mud-crusted duds into the wash for a lengthy soak. After an unusually productive shower, during which rusted bottlecaps and small branches ran in dark runnels across the tile, I dressed, stood before the couch, and realized, not a moment too soon, that I was about to topple over from exhaustion.

As I lay there on the couch, the beneficent afterglow of exertion washed over me. I could not be bothered to participate in my usual pastime of snoozing morally offensive Facebook friends. When Lauren announced she was going to buy cat food, I could think of no finer excursion, and begged to join her. I coughed and spat the entire way, but was happy as a Lab out a window — a particularly apt metaphor, considering I'd been asked to hold my head out the window.

Today I'm not much worse for it, but have decided to spend the day writing and choosing the evening soup. The closest I got to a workout was when an electrician came by to estimate the cost of undoing the things the previous electrician had done, but with some careful breathing, and visualization exercises involving the previous electrician weeping before God in a crown of sparking copper, my heart rate maintained a healthy level.

0058 — Unused Panels from "A Fuck You Friday at Scobler's"

As promised.

0058 — A Fuck You Friday at Scobler's

I think I had five versions of every panel of this one. Watch the In-Universe tier for those "director's cut / bloopers & outtakes" panels later today!

If you have deep knowledge of Roast Beef and Molly, let's guess together, below, what dishes they had ordered at Scobler's Family Dining that day. I will chime in and say what I think the best guess is, but if the guesses are not going well, I will eventually tell the truth about their dishes that they ordered.