We're back. Rejoice.

IT'S THE 200th EPISODE! YAY!

In commemoration of this historic event, Mr. Happy Puppet Head and I will be going out of town for a week to volunteer our time as camp counselors. We'll say things like, "Brush your teeth, "Get in that canoe," and "Dance like you mean it, kid, otherwise don't dance at all."

So look forward to next week's episode, which will be a lots-of-fun re-cap of our week at camp. So be sure to come back. Because we'll be here. And we're pretty great sometimes.

I will go back in time and teach the Beatles how to play punk rock. I will convince them that it is the wave of the future and I will slap their knuckles with a meter stick whenever they start to play that pretty crap they always want to play.

"Holiday in Cambodia," "Code Blue," and "Linolium" will be the three hit singles off of "Meet the Beatles." So stay tuned.

I like it when friends have beautiful babies. Especially when the friends are young and could easily waste their youths on ugly children.

I like it when bulldozers wake me up at five in the morning, and I think, "Oh, no, they're going to be bulldozing all day and I won't get any sleep." But people are just coming over to take the bulldozer away, and soon it is quiet again and I can sleep.

I like quesadillas made with real Mexican melting cheese for breakfast. And burritos for almost every other meal of the day.

And I like it when everything turns out okay.

Laundry time. In gathering all my clothes to bring down to the laundry room, I find a white undershirt. I always wear a white undershirt, so this isn't so strange, but the state it is in causes me to stop and wonder. First of all, the shirt has dark dirt and grass stains all over the front. Secondly, the back of the left sleeve has a rip in it.

And I don't remember why. Telling by how deep in the pile this shirt was, the damage was done about a week-and-a-half ago. What the hell did I do?

I say to Mr. Happy Puppet Head, I say, "Hey, what did I do about a week-and-a-half ago that would make my shirt look like this?" And he says "I don't know."

Mr. Happy Puppet Head does all of our laundry. He gets upset at the way I mix colors with whites and says I use too much soap. And apparently I can't fold. So he takes the shirt along with the rest of the stuff and begins the process of laundry.

So what did I do to make my shirt all dirty and torn? Yard work? I seem to remember catching the sleeve on something and it ripping and I didn't really care at the time. It's just an undershirt. But all I remember is the feeling of not caring that it was ripped. All context has mysteriously faded from memory.

So is this the very begining of my memory slowly wiping clean? One of my main positive attributes soon to morph into one of my flaws? Old people warn me, but I don't believe them. They say, "The memory is the first to go," but not me. I may die, I may get fat, and I may one day have to perform dental surgery on myself while stranded on a deserted island, but my mind is mine. Leave off it, Life! Hear me?

Oh. It was from when that tree feel in the front yard and I had to chop it up and drag it down to the front lawn. I borrowed an electric chainsaw from the neighbors. Donovan was his name.

Nevermind.

This is the kind of bird that knows exactly what you want for your birthday. He makes a point of telling you that he will purchase this thing that you want. He will hand you a wrapped present on your birthday, and you will naturally assume it is the thing that you wanted. But you will be wrong. Instead, inside the box are a lot of illegal substances, like nuclear waste in old mayonaise jars and seisure medication stolen from an important diplomat. You thank the bird, and you go your separate ways. There will be one more awkward phone call several months from your birthday, just for you two to check on how the other is doing. After this, you will never speak again.

It's a period piece. I'm wearing a tuxedo with a top hat and a cane (the tuxedo has coattails), and Mr. Happy Puppet Head is wearing a hoop skirt and a frilly bonnet.

"I dare say," I say in a terrible mock-English accent. "I dare say 'tis quite a beautiful day. As are yourself."

"Ooooh!" says Mr. Happy Puppet Head in a high-pitched girl voice. He flutters his long eye lashes. "You're so dashing. Kill my husband. He called me strumpet and I need you to redeem my honor that has been so rudely besmirched."

"I will do this request."

A cool dude rides up on a silver Vespa and parks next to us. He has a really cool mustache and tight clothes and a bowler hat.

"Sir," I say to him. "I dare say 'tis my duty to slay your head."

"What's that?"

"I'll slay your head."

"Whatever, man." He takes off his bowler hat and walks off stage.

"Oh, thank you so much, kind sir!" cries Mr. Happy Puppet Head. "Now we will have lots of children to clean the coal stoves and work in the textile mill!"

Bermuda and Steve, the two-headed naked blue monster are in the middle of the lake during a torrential downpour.

“No, you have to row harder than that,” says Bermuda. “Don’t let your oar go so far into the water like that.” They’ve been spinning around in circles for several hours now. It had been beautiful and sunny, but all of a sudden the clouds rolled in and opened up.

“I’m trying,” says Steve. He puts his oar in like Bermuda says and pulls real hard, but he just ends up splashing water everywhere. “I’m cold. And I think I hear thunder.”

“Yeah, that’s thunder, all right.” Bermuda rows his oar properly, but it just spins the little boat around in circles. “You are such a keen observer. You deserve a medal or a gift certificate to a pancake restaurant or something.”

“You don’t always have to be sarcastic,” says Steve. “Oh, look!” he drops the oar and points up at the sky to a bolt of lightning that was there a moment ago.

“Wow, I’ve never seen lightning before.” Bermuda rows even faster, the boat spinning and spinning the rain.

They sit in silence for a while. Steve tries rowing again, but he just splashes a lot and doesn’t accomplish much of anything. Then Steve sees something, another boat. He watches as it slowly approaches them.

Bermuda rows faster and faster, and Steve starts to feel sick from all the spinning, but refuses to say anything about it. The other boat comes closer and closer until it is right next to them.

“Hello, there!” calls a woman’s voice. She is wearing a bright yellow rain slick and all they can see of her face is a big smile. “I have some sandwiches, if you want some.” She holds out two ziplock baggies full of sandwich.

Bermuda and Steve reach out and take the offered food. They haven’t eaten in a while, not since being chased out of that barn earlier, then having to convice the mailwoman that they weren’t really trying to dump mud in her mailbag in a continued effort to sabatoge the US Postal Service, and then the whole plot to steal the rowboat and carry on with their assasination attempt, which by now they had completely given up on. They hadn’t explicitly stated that they were giving it up, but they both knew. They were cold and wet, and in no mood to do much of anything other than go home and watch TV.

“Man, wet pimento cheese sandwiches are crap,” says Bermuda. “You got anything edible in that boat of yours?”

“I like it,” Steve says as he takes Bermuda’s sandwich and finishes it off in two bites.

“We are all united in the sandwich.” Says the smiling woman. And she rows away.

“See,” points out Bermuda. “See how her oars are only halfway in the water, and see how she pulls back like that? Do it like she’s doing it.”

But it seems that Steve is simply incapable of rowing a boat.

I find this website of mine to be a perfect place to vent my frustrations, insecurities, and general life problems. Like the fact that I have no idea how I just fell completely out of my chair while writing that last sentence. How did that just happen? It's a pretty solid chair, yet I managed to let gravity win.

So I've been working on the same script for months now, writing and re-writing it. It's just one of the Big Scary Monster cartoons, but for some reason every version just kind of sucks. I know it'd be so bad ass if I could just make it, you know, but I just can't seem to get a draft I like. shit.

so here's a cartoon about my frustrations, insecurities, and general life problems.

***********************************

Howie the little girl is talking a nice walk in the sunshine. Unlike other people, she doesn't feel like she should be stuck inside on beautiful days in front of computer screen writing and re-writing drafts of a script that means very little in the grand scheme of everything. Nope. Instead she's enjoying the day in the company of her best friend, Mr. Happy Severed Head. Head for short.

"What a great day this is," Howie says. "Boy, I sure like days where there's nothing to do but go on walks with your best friend."

They walk on down the street, rotted severed head under her arm, big smile on her cute chubby face.

There is a ditch, and Howie and Head walk past. They hear a moaning from inside this ditch. Howie approaches and looks down into the dark ravine. A dirty man in his early thrities is lying face down in the dirt.

"Hello?" says Howie. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," says the thin man. "I'm fine. I'm just covered in sludge. And a failure. I'm fine, but I'm a big failure. And I'm going bald." He sits up. "And I don't have a home because I can't get a job because I'm not good at anything."

"What about mopping floors?" asks Howie. "I thought everyone could mop a floor."

"Sure I can mop floors." says the man, wiping some sludge off his eyelids. "But I'm not good at dealing with indignity. I make movies. I dont mop floors."

"Even when you have to sleep in ditches?"

"I chalk it up as life-experience. It'll make me a better writer. Maybe one day I'll be sort of good, if I sleep in enough ditches and talk to enough little girls carrying around severed human body parts."

Howie sighs. "I have no time for self-pity, not in myself or in those around me. Life is good and I don't want to hear otherwise. Go clean yourself up, buddy."

And Howie walks off, not worried about anything at all.

So it's interesting the way things turned out. The end of this long drawn out balloon story. Yes. I like the sound of that.

So the Charles Children led me to this new house. It's real big and gothic. Far too big for just me and Mr. Happy Puppet Head, but they gave us the key and the deed and even furnished it with lawn furniture. Lots and lots of lawn furniture. it's hard to walk around with all these plastic chairs and tables and umbrellas everywhere.

I ask why we get to have this big victorian house now after I sold the other one and don't have any money anymore. They just repeat the name Charles over and over again.

"No," I say, "Why do we get to live here now? I don't get it."

they just start yelling Charles over and over again really loud and angrily. I appologize and thank them for such a nice place. I note how centrally located it is, and within an easy walk to the gas station in case I want a candy bar or something. Mr. Happy Puppet Head has been discussing taking up smoking, but the gas stations were always so far away.

the kids leave and now we're in this big house. Mr. Happy Puppet Head says "Damn. This place is creepy." And I say, "Yeah, but it's our creepy house now."

I look out the window into the back yard. It's a large expanse of far overgrown lawn with a kidie pool sitting in the center.

Tall cielings and intricate molding, peeling wall paper and no dishwasher, bathtubs with feet, rough hardwood floors, a grand staircase, a funny mold smell, and bedrooms with red carpeting. It looks and feels haunted. Except for all the lawn furniture. Lawn furniture has a way of calming disturbed spirits and making them think, "If Heaven is even a little like sitting in clean molded plastic, I'm there." So they should be out of here soon, I guess.

And now we're not street people and there isn't a balloon anymore and maybe we'll never see that funny balloon man again, though we probably will because he was interesting, and i'm not crazy anymore and now i have to pay attention to making the show really good again. With new performance art pieces and EducatiFUN videos and high school garage metal bands rocking it hard.


i'm excited.