Got a job finally. I was hired at a Trader Joe’s in Cary as a sign maker. What a relief! I thought I was going to levitate in my car on the way home from the store. I was told after I got the job that I beat out two hundred and fifty other people. I think it is going to be a sweet job, too. I have NEVER gotten a job due to artistic reasons.  Whew. The mental torture is over.

Oddly enough, I haven’t felt too much like drawing anything for awhile now, which makes a lot of sense. For the bulk of this year I have felt like I had been drawing with a gun to my head, and at times it was pretty stressful. Now that I won’t be solely depending on freelancing (if you could call it that!) as my sole source of income, a lot of pressure is off. Things just were NOT working out on the level I had hoped. Plus the whole Lumberjack Mordam thing seriously fucked things up. As some of you might recall, they were the distro company that my friend and publisher Charles Cardello worked with for all of the things that his label BIFOCAL MEDIA had released, which included the three MANCHILD books that we have done. They suddenly a few months ago went bankrupt. Just like that. They owed BIFOCAL MEDIA a fairly large sum of money. Charles showed me the receipts for what they had sold so far in regards to MANCHILD 4 and it was five thousand dollars. Just for that book. There of course was plenty more. Some of the labels that these thieves worked with are owed fifty thousand dollars! So thanks to these guys life sucks pretty bad for a lot of people. They worked with almost one hundred record labels..at least this is what I was told.  Man, it still stings…as you can imagine.

I am proud that in the year and a half it has been since I had quit my last job, the fact that I had lasted as long as I did is pretty cool. I did things and pushed myself at times in a way that I never would have before. But the up and down mental roller coaster was too much. The starving artist trip is probably pretty cool when you are twenty years old and have no real responsibilities. It is less so when you add at least another twenty years to it and have a mortgage. Fuck all of that.

The other thing that I realized was in some way I know that I have reached a sort of dead end with what I have been doing. After four books of my own work I cannot imagine what there is left for me to say about punk rock or what surrounds it, either now or when I was growing up. I think I am done with all of that (with the exception of MANCHILD 5, which I will get to a little later). At least that is how it naturally feels like. So I have to think of something else to go from here. I want to do stuff that I haven’t done before but at this time I have no idea what that would be.  I want to do some stuff that has a bit more real heart to it and could be a bit more universal to understand.  Who knows what that could be but I am sure I will think of something on the horizon.

This doesn’t mean that if a client wants me to draw  a mohawked kid skanking into a longhaired metalhead for money that I wouldn’t do it! I will always be available to get a little bit of work. Count on that, folks.

Eventually, hopefully in the next year me and Charles will re-group (He has tapped another distro company called REDEYE to handle his distro affairs, and they are based almost practically down the street) and work on what will be MANCHILD 5, the oral history of Raleigh’s punk rock and underground music scene in the eighties. As a few of you remember, this is stuff that I have been working on off and on for at least six years now! And last night I stayed up re-tooling everything and I think it is going to be really cool. And even though there may not be a whole lot of international interest in one town’s story, the whole thing is universal and personal enough that I think it could still appeal to a lot of people. So that will happen.

And as far as the band that I drum in, DOUBLE NEGATIVE is set to self record that long awaited second album called DAYDREAM NATION in a month. All of the material is much stronger and a bit more varied then our first record and it is going to be great. We will get it done, against all odds..which includes ourselves sometimes and what little time the four of us can realistically put into it. It will be worth the wait, I promise.

The new Cheap Trick record called “The Latest” is another winner, by the way. I don’t know how they do it.

See ya.