Dreams: Intermission*

Just a reminder: for the next month I will be sharing with you a story I wrote more than a decade ago, but am just now trying to illustrate. Please yell at me about it in the comments! This part is un-illustrated on purpose.

Intermission

The dream came back to Karen in vivid black and white while she sat at the breakfast table pouring milk on her Cap’n Crunch. She promptly dropped the carton, spilling its contents across the bright white tablecloth left from Christmas. Karen had never had a dream before, not in twenty-three years of a silently bored existence. Every night she had gone to bed, and every morning she had woken up no more interesting, imaginative or exciting than the day before. Now suddenly this living man and his baby-cooking lifestyle was running around inside her sparse, if not unintelligent, mind.

Karen went to work that day. She poured her cup of coffee, sat in her cubicle’s twisting chair, slid off her shoes and went to work. She entered data for four hours, then went to lunch at the small café on the office building’s second floor (egg salad sandwich on white bread, Lay’s potato chips and a Pepsi), then returned to work. After work she went home, microwaved a frozen dinner, opened a can of beer and watched television until 9 p.m. At 9 p.m., Karen went to bed.

Dreams Part 1: SweetMan

Just a reminder: for the next month I will be sharing with you a story I wrote more than a decade ago, but am just now trying to illustrate. Please yell at me about it in the comments!

Part 1: SweetMan

Once there was fat, white ice cream salesman who grew tired of bomb pops and began to eat babies.

The old man had been peddling icy treats to kids for 40 years, driving around in his square white truck, listening to the ten second jingle on infinite repeat. Day after day he had bent his face toward them to take the sticky nickels and dimes, and day after day he’d handed them ice cream and a pat on the head. Their joyful grins or spoiled pouts were the same each year, a source of comfort to the childless old man.

Then one day he reached mandatory retirement age and was asked to turn in his pressed white jumpsuit and the keys to his cherished SweetMobile. Roger (the ancient ice cream man) now sat in his little white house with the short, white picket fence and ate Blue Bunny vanilla ice cream from the carton with plastic spoons. He no longer bothered getting dressed in the morning; every day he wore the same sweaty underwear and soiled “SweetMan” hat that he had refused to turn in with the rest of his uniform.

Finally Roger snapped out of his waking coma, dressed in his bathrobe and bunny slippers, and walked to the nearest thrift shop.

With the last of his retirement fund, he bought a dark brown polyester suit, khaki shirt, white suede shoes and a lawn angel. Roger straightened up his apartment and hung out a hand-painted sign that read “SweetMan Ice Cream Man’s Day Care Center.”

Men and women who had bought creamsicles and popsicles from him in their childhood recognized his house and the name, and they sent their children to be cared for by his ice-reddened hands and round rosy cheeks. They left their toddlers to his olive shag carpeting, their preschoolers to his cardboard box jungle gym, and their first graders to his library of 30-year-old Reader’s Digest Magazines.

The babies however… the babies were left to the dark shed behind the garage and his ever-expanding kitchen. Somehow, the mothers and fathers did not notice their missing babies. They scooped up the toddlers, preschoolers and first graders and blithely went home to their pot roast or meat loaf dinners, never wondering why the family seemed that much smaller or there was an extra crib in little Johnny’s room.

So for several years Roger lived on the frozen corpses of stolen infants and the little money he got from the Day Care Center. Soon, however, other ice cream men nearing retirement began to come to him for advice on dealing with the change, and, after careful consideration, he let them in on his secret. The men then flocked from all parts of the country; retiring, near retirement, or simply quitting the sweet-pushing business, they came to him, and in three months the Center had expanded to three buildings with a state-of-the-art play center and two computers equipped with Teaching Tools for Young Children. And for those three months, Roger slept as soundly as a baby.

Daily Animal Doodles for July

The Daily Animals Doodle challenge started by Paper Sparrow continues in July, and I'm going to try to throw a few in there when I can. I'll mostly be focusing on "Dreams," so I hope no one is offended if I kind of half-ass it here and there.

To start off, I'm catching up by combining some animals. Here are days 1 and 2: Aaardvark and Badger.

Zinnia is an aardvark and she is only 6 days old, but she has already made a new friend: William the badger. William is only 4 days old, so Zinnia tells him all the time how things will be when he grows up. For one thing, he will have to start eating ants, because that's what the big people eat. Zinnia hasn't actually eaten any ants yet, but she assures him they will be delicious, nutritious, and make them grow big and strong.

And here are days 3 and 4: Chameleon and Deer

Growing up in Minnesota, I've seen my share of whitetail deer, but since I'm not a hunter or an animal whisperer, I've never gotten really close to one. Who knew they had so many colors going on? Maybe that's why Gertrude, the chameleon, likes Frank here so much. Gertrude is a world traveler, and she has seen 23 countries so far. She's a fan of the U.S. because there are so many different kinds of animals and terrain and things to imitate. However, despite Frank's indisputable beauty she does not like Minnesota, because it is too cold and most of the beaches don't have sand. Frank wouldn't mind if Gertrude moved along either because, first of all, she's kind of clingy and it makes his antlers hurt, and second of all he doesn't like people hanging around his home town talking about how it sucks.

A little about the story you will soon read

Starting Tuesday I'll be sharing with you (hopefully) a story I wrote when I was in college called "Dreams." This may be the only story that I ever felt like I finished writing, and to punish myself I have been trying to illustrate it now for twelve years and failing.

When I first wrote it in a creative writing class in about 1999, the Internets were still the Wild Wild West and also I was 20 years old and didn't think about things like "copyrights" and "long term plans" and whatnot, so for my final project I took a mix of my own drawings, pictures I took and photos I downloaded from the few web pages that were not dedicated to porn back then and cut them up and literally pasted them onto pages. I then took these collages to Kinkos and paid $1 a color copy to make it into a book. I kept forgetting about putting them front to back and what order they should go in, but they also didn't have the copier cards back then, they just let you make your copies and then carry them up to the register to pay, so I probably made about $100 worth of copies but only paid about $35. Still, that was a lot of money for a college junior. I have since lost that copy. Has anyone seen it? Doesn't matter, it's completely unpublishable anyway.

I'm not a very good drawer, but when I focus I can do all right, and I figured out that Paint now lets you sort of cut and paste in a way that's like a collage, so I'm trying that out and not investing in any more glue sticks this time. I also have a scanner now, so hopefully I can do this without destroying any originals.

Another important thing about this story is that it's really too long to be a "short story" (about 13 pages without illustrations, maybe 3o pages with them), so you'll be getting it in sections. Also, that gives me a chance to actually draw them, since I only have about 10% finished right now. Here's hoping I stick with this, and if you like it or hate it or just are concerned for my sanity, please leave comments because I have a feeling my commitment will wane if you don't.

Okay, see you Tuesday!

Daily Animal Doodles Review

Here they all are! I can't believe I made it to the end!