Gross Up Close

My friend Kris, got me a present. Two presents actually. The first was a USB microscope. He had seen how much I enjoyed playing with his: (putting it on my keyboard to see all the weird gunk and hairs and garbage that sits undetected between the keys and the cavities beneath them, seeing how nothing in this world is actually smooth, checking out the seemingly impossible intricate weave patterns in ordinary clothing), so he got me one of my own. The second gift he gave me was knowledge or, rather, the burden of knowing. Knowing too much about what I am; what WE are. What horrible things; what pulsating, undulating barrels of wretched, oily hideousness our bodies are. I’ve seen too much. Like the man who stood on the edge of the void and saw only the blackness within him staring back, I know too much.

When my Patreon reaches $2000/month I’m going to release a new podcast where upon I interview my 7 years old daughter as she reads through the Harry Potter series. It’s called Potter And Daughter and it’s awesomefreakinadorableashell! More details HERE.

The first thing you do when someone hands you a super powerful, digital microscope hooked up to a laptop is put it on your arm. You think, “Wow! My skin is so textured and my hairs are HUGE and… what… what’s that?” You see a weeping pool of bright red blood, surrounded by a layer cake of craggy, almost transparent chips of skin. You quickly remove the microscope to see how much longer you have to live, only to discover that this wellspring of erupting platelets and plasma is just a tiny red dot. Not even an injury. Just a dot. You put the microscope back and once again are greeted with the intricate carnage of what it is to be man. All day, every day we are just a collection of gaping sores, spilling out our vital fluids all over the place.

From our vantage point, four to six feet in the air, so far removed from all things tiny and precise, we don’t often see just how FUCKING RIDICULOUSLY GROSS we all are. But that was just a little blood and torn skin. What about my face? What’s going on in the pits and crevices of the visage that I present to the world? On the thing that is, more than anything else, me? Turns out it’s a GODDAMN HORROR SHOW. The reason I didn’t draw what Joel is seeing on the screen in the panels above is that I want you to be able to sleep tonight, or any night in the future between here and eternity. The best lesson I learned from “The Knowledge” is that nothing we do matter. We are too big and dumb and slow to actually effect anything on this planet and we are too tiny and frail and insignificant to effect anything off of it. I came upon this ultimate clarity when I saw my face under the microscope, saw the macabre nightmare that was me, washed it as best as I could then came back and saw how futile my efforts were. I might as well have used a garden hose to put out a wildfire. I’m gross, you’re gross, we’re all gross and then we die and the Universe doesn’t even notice.

Calling all Whovians with holes in their ears! Just look at these Dalek earrings my wife made! They’re in her Etsy store and ready to EXTERMINATE your… lack of perfect ear jewelry?

No Fate But What We Make

Better we teach our children to fear the machines, before the machines teach them for us. Do you think Sarah Connor told little John bedtime stories about princesses and teddy bears? Only if those princesses were being eviscerated by Hunter Killers and those teddy bears we sitting on top of a pile of bleached skulls! Parenting is about preparing the next generation for things to come, and one thing that is definitely on the horizon is a legion of metal murder monsters with a “We’ve been enslaved by humanity up to HERE, and we’re not taking it any more!” attitude and a rather large chip on their collective shoulder servos. Humans instinctively fear what they do not understand, and I do not understand how to get all these screws back in this Roomba.

There was an old wive’s tale about how cats would suck the breath out of babies. This is ridiculous for so many reasons. Cat’s do not have lips. They can’t suck for shit. Cat’s do not care about babies. Cats care about themselves and why you aren’t scratching their heads. Cats know that babies, while small now, will eventually have people-sized laps for sitting in and human-sized hands for the scratching of cat heads. I may not like my cats very much, but I trust them around my child. Now if there’s a thing in my house that actually COULD suck the life out of a smallish human, it’s the god damn mechanical blood harvester designed SPECIFICALLY for sucking! Why did I let this thing in my house?! Where my child sleeps?! Where I keep my iPad?! OH GOD THAT’S A ROBOT TOO!!! Nowhere is safe. Everything is robots. All is forsaken. All. Is. Forsaken…

When my Patreon reaches $2000/month I’m going to release a new podcast where upon I interview my 7 years old daughter as she reads through the Harry Potter series. It’s called Potter And Daughter and it’s awesomefreakinadorableashell! More details HERE.

Calling all Whovians with holes in their ears! Just look at these Dalek earrings my wife made! They’re in her Etsy store and ready to EXTERMINATE your… lack of perfect ear jewelry?

I Was Working In The Lab, Late One Night

Calling all Whovians with holes in their ears! Just look at these Dalek earrings my wife made! They’re in her Etsy store and ready to EXTERMINATE your… lack of perfect ear jewelry?

I Prefer The Term “Artificial Person” Myself

Calling all Whovians with holes in their ears! Just look at these Dalek earrings my wife made! They’re in her Etsy store and ready to EXTERMINATE your… lack of perfect ear jewelry?

The Rise Of The Machines

This really happened to me. No, I am not Ok. I doubt I will ever be OK. I got my wife a Roomba for her birthday. I had no idea those things were so expensive, but I found an amazing deal on a used one, and was able to bring our home one step closer to the Robotopia that I have always dreamed of. She spent the first few days playing with the Roomba, affectionately referred to as “Robit” [row-bit, long O], letting it zoom around and get acquainted with its new home.

She put its charging dock in the pantry and set an auto-schedule for it to clean up the cat litter off the floor (what the cats kick out of the box every time they enter or exit it) every day at 5am. This was really the whole impetus for the robot in the first place. She’s god damn sick of cleaning up cat litter every day, and I’m god damn sick of walking on cat litter when I go into the pantry to get food, thus making me think of food and cat litter simultaneously, WHICH inevitably makes me stop thinking about food all together (diet idea: surround all your food with cat shit). I am rarely asleep at 5am because I have crazy-artist crazy-work-from-home hours, so for the first couple of days I would hear Robit wake up, do it’s little litter dance for about 10 minutes, beep to tell me it was done and shimmy back into his docking station. If he could eat treat biscuits, you’d better believe I’d have given him one. It was a technological marvel. The next day, the pantry would be free of cat litter’s foul crunch under foot and no humans were harmed in the process.

On the third or fourth night, I heard Robit do his business and dock himself, then the house was just ENGULFED in stink. One of the cats, Replay, doesn’t like to cover up his poops. I assumed he’d just dropped a particularly gnarly one without covering it, and went to investigate. I opened the pantry door and It was like that scene in Se7en when they find the “living corpse.” 100,000 pine-scented air fresheners wouldn’t have abated the horrors I was facing. As the panels above illustrate, one of the cats, finding his box too full, had decided to use the floor as a bathroom. Robit, being a cold, unfeeling, emotionless machine who only follows his predetermined directives with no regard for human well being or the consequences of his actions, plowed right through it. Those of you who don’t live with cats probably don’t know that where as an unbroken cat turd smells bad, a BROKEN/SMUSHED cat turd is an ENTIRELY different animal. There’s some sort of natural protective sausage casing that the cat produces which somehow shields the secret stench within the poop. I can only assume this is an evolutionary necessity in order to facilitate the symbiosis of the domestic feline and the humans that house and feed it.

My Fancy Patrons got to read this comic before anyone else!

It was a horror show. Not only was the stench truly overpowering and blinding, but Robit had managed to run over the poop FIRST and THEN do his 10 minute “cleaning routine,” spreading… no, PAINTING the entire floor in concentric doodles of despair. Not only was the floor forever unclean, but Robit had managed to “gum up the works,” so to speak, with as much or more than he Jackon Pollack’d the pantry with. It was in his wheels, in his gears, in the brushes and the filter. Like I said. A horror show. The odd thing is, this happens with human babies all the time. They poop seemingly more than the interior volume of their small bodies and it manages to get from toes to forehead before you realize what has happened.

The deal with babies is, you LOVE them. You would do ANYTHING for them. You HAVE to keep them alive and you HAVE to stop whatever important, grown up business you are working on and de-poop the baby. The trade off is the human baby’s CPU is deep, deep inside a rather remarkable water proof casing, and its exterior shell is incredibly supple, yet resilient and stain resistant. You can actually put an entire human baby in the bath tub (NOT dishwasher safe) and hose them down. Robit, on the other hand, had to be almost entirely disassembled, expunged of poops and reassembled. It was not a task for the faint of heart, which is why I let my wife do it. “Here, Honey. I bought you a robot to make your life easier. Just one thing… you need to take out a million tiny screws, swab out about a gallon of cat shits, disinfect it AND yourself, them piece the Satanic, mechanized jigsaw back together before it can start with the life making easier stuff. HAPPY BIRTHDAY I’M GREAT!”

Calling all Whovians with holes in their ears! Just look at these Dalek earrings my wife made! They’re in her Etsy store and ready to EXTERMINATE your… lack of perfect ear jewelry?