On a good drawing jag I can pencil a week of Schlock Mercenary in under 2 hours. Inking that same week takes about 20 minutes per row, or another 3 hours. But that’s when I’m in the zone. I haven’t been in the zone since the shoulder injury.

So… today, I’m pretty pleased with myself. I really HAD to get 6 rows inked, which is 2 hours of solid work when I’m able to crank. I budgeted 6 hours for it, and figured that during that time I’d need breaks to loosen up my neck (my shoulder and neck tighten up while I draw), and at least one nap.

Well, I’m almost done with the fifth row, and I’ve still got two hours left. Yeah, my neck and shoulder ache, but this is by far the most drawing I’ve been able to get done in one day since the injury. I may not be back on my ‘A’ game, but for the first time in two weeks it’s been really clear to me that I WILL get through this, and I can see exactly how.

–Howard

The last Lortab I took was a single pill (7.5mg Hydrocodone, 500mg Acetaminophen) on Wednesday at around 2:00 pm. I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully, as the buffer-fu thread here may indicate) to manage the pain with plain-jane ibuprofen, magnesium salicylate, and Excedrin PM (500mg Acetaminophen, and I forget how much antihistamine).

Upshot — there’s less pain than a week ago, but that’s ’cause I’m getting better.

Upshot #2 — today I’ve alternately felt excited, angry, depressed, angry, sleepy, suicidal, depressed, bewildered, angry, and like I’ve got a cold coming on.

Is this narcotics withdrawal, or am I just having a bad hair day? I mean, now that I HAVE HAIR I suppose I’m vulnerable to that.

–Howard
p.s. No, I’m not going to commit suicide. That mood passed.
p.p.s. I’m putting off “cleaning my firearms” for a different weekend, just in case.

If I were to make a list of the DVDs I’ve rented that I wish I hadn’t, it would be as long as my arm, and I’d get depressed. After all, not only do these cost me money, but they cost me time.

So I’ll just read off the two most recent: Triple-X: State of the Union, and The Shield: Season 1, Volume 1.

I’ll start with The Shield. I picked this up on the strength of Michael Chiklis’ performance as Ben Grimm/The Thing in The Fantastic Four. And make no mistake, his performance in this series is strong. All the actors, in fact, are putting forth strong performances. It’s a great drama. It’s also depressing. I didn’t want a story of a severely flawed hero who (I assume — I haven’t seen more than the first two episodes, but I know Chiklis appears in at least two seasons of this show) gets away with murdering a fellow officer. So… while it’s a good program, it wasn’t what I wanted to be entertained by. It didn’t “bring the happy” (Sandra’s expression for programs that we enjoy watching together.)

And now, Triple X: State of the Union. Simply put, here is a film that never should have been made. The premise of the first “Triple-X” film was pretty good, and it looked like it could have been the heir to the James Bond franchise. Vin Diesel was great. I would cheerfully have paid to see another Diesel/TripleX film in the theaters.

This film, however, was flawed from the get-go, in that they didn’t have Diesel to work with, so they wrote him out of the story (he dies off-screen), and the NSA chapter for which he was working decides to keep his code-name and slap it on somebody else. Oh, and there’s a huge plot for a coup of the U.S. presidency on the part of the Secretary of Defense, and it gets foiled with the help of the Boyz ‘n the Hood.

I’m not sure who the target audience was supposed to be, and I’m not sure the filmmakers knew that, either. Regardless, it did not include me, in spite of the fact that it had car chases, helicopter chases, boat chases, train chases, explosions, shootings, martial arts, black ops, heaving bosoms, and intrigue. The ability of the director to assemble these elements in such a fashion as to alienate me (and, I’m projecting now, most of the rest of the action-film demographic) is masterful. It’s like he took chocolate syrup, chocolate shavings, chocolate cake, ice cream, cream-cheese frosting, oreo cookies, and whipped cream, and managed to create a lima bean and brussel-sprout salad.

I want CSI Season Five, and I want it NOW.

–Howard

As you may or may not know, spamming is a crime in my fictional universe. This hardly qualifies as predictive or prophetic when juxtaposed with the recent brutal murder of a spammer in Russia. I mean, it was bound to happen sooner or later, right.

I’m fascinated at how people are reacting to this. It reads like one of those “offbeat news” items, or maybe a “Darwin Award,” and those articles are things we’re supposed to be able to laugh at. Lots of us are upset enough at spammers, though, that we’re openly praising the thugs who committed an inarguably horrible crime upon someone whose only crime was that he found legal ways to make money by annoying millions of people.

So rather than just feeling what I’m gonna feel and then moving on, I’ve been THINKING about how I feel about this murder. I’ve been analyzing my reaction to the crime. And the more I think about it, the more I hope that it wasn’t the spamming that got this guy on the wrong side of his killers.

I hope it was something more mundane, like stiffing a pimp, or not paying off a gambling debt on time, or otherwise inappropriately interacting with the seedy, violent side of his society.

See, it does my heart good to think that his spamming gave him a sense of invulnerability that crept into other aspects of his life, and that he then went and did something more routinely fatal.

I’m not sure why I feel this way. Maybe it makes me less likely to identify with the victim, enabling me to more easily de-humanize him so that I can enjoy the news of his death without feeling guilty about it.

–Howard