my new book Dr. Devil Spring Jungle

Here's my new book. It's called Dr. Devil Spring Jungle. This book has been in the making for the last 6 months or so. We just moved to a new apartment, a better part of town. Some of that came through with the pieces in this book I think. A lot of anger living back where we lived before. Not happy about that, but these books serve me too, to help me remember always remember what things were like because time moves fast. So glad to be moving on from there though. Ok. Here goes. Dr. Devil Spring Jungle. It starts with this picture and goes on from there.

THE END. 

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my favorite hemingway

my dad wrote about hemingway the other day on his blog. This is my favorite hemingway. The last page of the epilogue to Death in the Afternoon.

the sound of the engine at 5:12

New painting (oil on paper with the sun shining through the back of it)

Went to the mall yesterday to get my hair cut and they had a white 2012 M3 sitting right there inside the mall. That car is so gorgeous. Here's an oil on paper picture I finished up yesterday. The under portion is a giant sun painted with oils. Over that is blue chalk shading for sky and green chalk shading for earth (though you can't those colors too clearly in the picture below). Normally if you had a picture of grass and sky, the sun would just be in the sky, in this case though, the sun is behind both. On paper, the oil from the oil paint makes the paper translucent. When you hang the paper on the window, as I did with this one as I shot it, you get the effect of the light coming through the back of it and illuminating it like stained glass almost, except that this way has more texture than glass can for the most part.
 

Here's a detail if you want to look closer:

back atcha nepal

It’s been hard in the last few years. I haven’t much wanted to travel anywhere. Even if money were no object, I couldn’t say there’s any place I’d like to go. Maybe just home to see family.

I sort of had enough with traveling. Not with seeing new places, but with the routine I made of it -- looking on the internet for a place to visit, finding somewhere to sleep, printing out the itinerary or directions and a map. That’s a boring ass way to travel.

That sort of changed a bit with Nepal. Going somewhere was exciting again. I didn't plan anything, which meant no expectations. The drive from the airport to the center of the Kathmandu hit me sort of hard. Look around. Wood shacks with corrugated plastic roofs. Smoking piles of garbage. Dirt roads crammed with compact cars and mopeds. No stop signs. No traffic lights.

I thought about Kathmandu the other day and wrote this in my notebook: “I would like to one day get back there and organize some dumpsters and some respirators and some workers for a little money (workers are cheap there) to clean up the river.”

I was talking about the very unriver-like Bagmati River in Kathmandu, which you can see part of here:

there are actually a couple of people towards the top of the picture if you look closely

The million or so Kathmandese either burn their garbage or toss it in the Bagmati. The Hindu population of the city cremates their dead publicly on its banks and sweeps the remains into the river. Kids swim in it. Cows drink from it.

I was thinking, wouldn’t it be good to try to make things a touch better there if at all possible? At least to remove some of the trash. Not on the next plane, but maybe I could help. Then I was like, no.

That river can be sad, but I can't see it that way. To see those real and shitty things -- the river, the wild dogs, the garbage, the traffic, the awful smell -- to think them through, to see past them to something that even they can't touch. That wild dog on the sidewalk has severe mange, and he’s sound asleep. That woman around that black-burning trash pit has her son and a daughter with her. At the cremation place, a little boy with a broom and a bucket of water is helping brush the ashes into the river. That people live there. That there is life there.

Related posts:
(unfortunately these will only open in a new window if you right-click and choose that way. oh well.)
Back from Nepal
A photo from Nepal and some killer Browning
Couple of drawings in Nepal

interesting historical tidbit about NY

The history of the name Brooklyn Dodgers thanks wikipedia:

 "By 1890, New Yorkers (Brooklyn was a separate city until it became a borough in 1898) routinely called anyone from Brooklyn a "trolley dodger", due to the vast network of street car lines criss-crossing the borough as people dodged trains to cross the streets. When the second Washington Park burned down early in the 1891 season, the team moved to nearby Eastern Park, which was bordered on two sides by street car tracks. That's when the team was first called the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers. That was soon shortened to Brooklyn Dodgers."

nas

The thing about writing is how can you make it sound like this. There's nothing like a hungry human voice. You get that in rap, you don't get that in all music. That's the thing I have against crafting something until it just becomes writing, and not whatever you said when you were hot. That's the thing about how most writing is, it's like journalism or something. Then you lose all the taste though, and you just get the feeling from it that the writer has thought a lot about what he's writing and chose all the words carefully, and went back and tightened it. Sure they do that in rap music too but the delivery is a huge part of it. So you can show emotion even if the lyrics are really crafted. How do you do that in writing though when there's no voice, just the words. That's something man. Like if you look at my post about Pavla's dad, that's way crafted. I don't know man. I want the writing to be straight and real, which to me means not stepped on. But I don't know. It's tough writing something in one moment full of whatever and then leave it alone. Even though it's true in some way and in that moment it was perfect, when you look back on it cold, it's not perfect anymore. Still it feels more real if you leave it alone. I dont know.

Picture I made

I wrote this last night and colored it today at work. ignore any grammar mistakes pls. it's not about that.

yeah loved doing this this morning

Put these down in the park today in chalk. I found a nice little corner up on Vitkov hill this morning. So Marsh and I sat there and a couple of these came to mind. The first one is just about money and thinking about that sort of thing. If you rollover the image you can see the text.

I like playing with abbreviations of things that aren't normal (like the ABR and the TCOP). This second one is just about changing opinions about things and also about saying I don't know. Notice that no one around me ever says they don't know anything, especially at work. It's like some sort of weakness or something. Drives me crazy. I think it's not healthy to be like that because other people see it as a weakness.

And my boy marsh being patient meanwhile...

Emily Dickinson's "Four Trees — upon a solitary Acre —"

I like this poem a lot. Emily Dickinson's Four Trees — upon a solitary Acre —:

Four Trees — upon a solitary Acre —
Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent Action —
Maintain —

The Sun — upon a Morning meets them —
The Wind —
No nearer Neighbor — have they —
But God —

The Acre gives them — Place —
They — Him — Attention of Passer by —
Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply —
Or Boy —

What Deed is Theirs unto the General Nature —
What Plan
They severally — retard — or further —
Unknown —

the flag

not being home these days, i get to reading different stuff about home. i don't understand why the flag has so many rules. Isn't it just a symbol? How can disrespecting a symbol hurt whatever it symbolizes? Aren't we just people? Isn't letting someone trash a symbol of freedom part of letting that person be free?

I was reading this travel piece about Brazil. In Brazil people do all kinds of funky things with the flag.

g

Marcus Aurelius

I saw a woman being incredibly rude to the bus driver today. I was like ich, gross. I don't know if y'all like Marcus Aurelius.

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own–not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.”

Oh and he was a badass emperor. If you like that, check out the whole book on amazon:

I mean, geez just look at how good the first page is...

hmmm...  

argh

@dad and mom, sorry about the vulgarity in this one, but I have to start speaking on this blog the way I really speak. Anyway I'm 32.

I work as a technical writer here in prague. today I got chewed out in a meeting at work for not being able to tell my boss what the software I write the user guide for does. There are a lot of reasons why I don't know. You could say it's because all of us writers here write about hundreds of different bits and pieces software, and it's hard to know what any of this shit does or why. But the BIG reason is I don't care. I've never given a shit about telecommunications in my whole life. I work here for the money and because there isn't much work. So I can write or do whatever. It's not that I don't work hard from time to time. When it's necessary I do. But it's rarely necessary. I probably could have bullshitted an answer today too. I've done it before to not look weak. But today I just said I don't know. My boss is actually my friend. He's a good guy. But there are rules and one of them is you can't call bullshit in a meeting. It never works. There's no ground swell of support. No one says peep. I'm tired of status reports. I'm tired of meetings. We all have email. Let's all just type to one another so I don't have to get out of my seat to go to another seat and talk about what I write about. I used to actually care though. Things have changed so drastically since I was hired four years ago it's not even the same job anymore. So many douchebags have come and gone. Seeing high up people come in, change shit up to show how proactive they are, and then move on is fucking exhausting. I disconnected myself a long time ago and told myself just to work on other stuff, write, put up a blog, post, make books, make pictures. Justify getting paid to sit here at a desk in front of a computer all day. I can imagine leaving this place but I can't imagine going for another interview somewhere. I'm so bummed by this stuff. People put their whole lives into this shit. It means nothing to me. Telecommunications mean nothing to me.

With Pavel in the barn

I’m standing with Pavel in the barn watching him clean the mousetraps under the rabbit cages and toss the dead mice into a pile by the door. Pavel is my girlfriend’s dad. Here in the Czech Republic you call people by their first name if you know them, so Pavel, not Mr. Veik as we might stateside.

The mice are smaller than I thought mice are. I thought mouse traps snapped further down the body. They actually snag just the head. I didn’t see any blood.

When you travel to North Bohemia where her parents live, you get the sense that it’s no-bullshit living. Pavel kills the mice so the mice don’t eat the rabbit food so we can eat the rabbits. Pavel shoots the birds in the cherry tree so we can eat the cherries. I wasn’t sure if it was actually even possible to kill a bird with an air rifle but birds rot like any other animal and one day I was walking in the garden and I followed the scent and came across a bird lying right there under the tree.

I have always had two feelings that I feel like are opposing. The one feeling that living things (animals, people, nature) are so beautiful and interesting. When I get in the right frame of mind like that (coffee helps), I feel like I’m seeing through things to how cool it is they’re even there at all. I get these intense overwhelming feelings of wonder. Then there’s the other feeling, the feeling that that’s shallow. That I might see beauty, but that I’m seeing just part of it. That there are things built into the nature of nature that aren’t beautiful at all. I’ve never killed a rabbit or any other animal for food, but I haven’t had to. It’s weird that there are two views of one thing. But maybe it’s about seeing both, or that it’s okay to some days see one, and other days the other. Or that maybe it’s okay to be confused about it. Maybe it’s supposed to be confusing. Maybe all that sounds obvious. Maybe it sounds nuts.

Anyway, the weekend was great. I wanna tell you more about Pavel and his wife Jana, my girlfriend’s parents, and how they came to be living here in Nová Ves v Horách. I’ll tell you later tho. This is long enough as it is. Stay tuned for more about them though. It involves Nazis.

Here are a couple other pictures I took up there:

pavla and her sister

pavla

the field behind their house