It’s going to rain on me as I walk home. I will be laden with groceries and my shoes will squish as I walk.

So many things I “should” be doing this morning. So many things I’ll have to do before I can head off to work. I’ve got lunches to make (cucumber and celery and leftovers for Nizzibet, pasta and sauce for me – sauce is done, pasta needs to be cooked) and home accounting to enter, not to mention 3 different art projects I could work on and there’s that shirt that needs buttons reattached to it. And I just want to bundle up on the porch and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. Maybe put some tequila in that coffee.

All of which would probably just make me dizzy, if not down right ill. And I don’t have either the cigarettes or the tequila in the house.

Just that kind of morning I guess.

Started reading The Stand yesterday. I read the first version back when 1985 was still The Future. This version, the expanded, mostly-what-Stephen-King-would-have-had-published-in-the-first-place, had the dates updated to 1990 plus. (This second version was published in 1990.) It’s a nice little time capsule reading it now in 2003.The world he wrote of had no internet, no cell phones and no cable. Certainly there were cell phones and cable TV but their impact on society was so slim that they aren’t mentioned in the book. There are three television networks, easily co-opted by the powers that be.

I read Year Zero by Jeff Long a few months ago. Published in 2002, that was another doomsday plague novel and it shows the difference between the world of the eighties and the world of today. In Year Zero the survivors watch the world fall apart on cable and the internet. Those involved in trying to find a cure watch the heat signatures of human civilization fade out by hooking into the satellite networks. They know where on earth there are survivors by finding their campfires at night from orbit.

I call Mom in a few minutes. I’ll get some laundry started before then. Have some breakfast after. Finish up a few more panels of Wild Nights in Oz. (The way I’m doing has turned each page into memory hogs on the computer so I’ve broken each page into sections. I’ll reassemble it all at the end.) Then do some illustrations for the Kung Fu Dictionary for Mandate of Heaven. Guardians of Order approved the proposal on Thursday so we’ve got until the end of May to get the thing finished. It’s our deadline not theirs but we’d rather get it together sooner than later.

End of Means

The foolishness of it is – the ends cannot justify the means because there are no ends. There are only means. There is only the journey. Perhaps death counts as an end but if we accept the religious view (any religious view) that there is an afterlife then death is simply the means by which we transfer there. If there is an armageddon that’s only the means to establish eternal paradise.

When I was an atheist I decided that the only way to behave was to be good to people. To watch out for them and take care of them (and the rest of the world) as if each moment was the only chance I’d ever have. Certainly that was my faith at the time. I’ll make no claim that I succeeded in behaving that way. Day to day existence trumps ideals 99 times out of 100.

And today, though I’m not certain of any spiritual concepts (though I have faith in a few), I keep that ideal in front of me.

If planet Earth’s life cycle is as scientific theory indicates, then, way down the line, the sun will expand and take this world into itself. Whatever evidence that humanity leaves of its existence a few billion years from now will be wiped clean.

All empires fall. The continents move. Does what we do matter? Does how we do it matter? We decide that, minute to minute, day to day. We will fail to live up to our ideals because ideals don’t have dishes to do and cats to feed and children who insist on using white walls as Sharpie sketchpads.

This little rant only seems to end with the edit after this paragraph. It continues in my mind every day.

I’m up early for a Saturday. Saturday is Sleep In Day.

I start the day with coffee. Check the TV guide. There’s the new Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles on Fox so I turn on the TV. As often seems to be the case with the TV guide listings for children’s shows the TV guide was wrong. I don’t know what I’m looking at but the character design is unattractive so I change to A&E and watch the last few minutes of a David Bowie biography. He’s put out 35 albums? I don’t think I own one at the moment.

That’s done so I get online. No one has posted at with my Lifeforms Unlimited chatgroup. I check friend’s blogs. Long-S-S-Pier has some eloquent to say as usual and FSCKD is short and pithy. I read Lovesettlement’s thoughts soon after he posted them originally and he’s not added to them. Sarah Byam has a new essay up at Tuppenceworth. Read that yesterday. I check briefly with Salon. Yup, the ghostmaking continues.

Soon I’ll wake Nizzibet and we’ll work on writing. The story is set in the 1870s somewhere on the Kansas prairie. Bad things happen. Heroes fight monsters.

It is all about oil.

Oil is the remains of billions of ancient creatures transformed by the pressures under the earth. We’ve disturbed the dead. We tear them apart again and burn what’s left. Our air filled with ghosts millions of years old. Ghosts of creatures whose species are long extinct. Ghosts with only instinct and survival drive.

They howl and rage and we go crazy and dig up more. Once they’ve all been disturbed, once they’ve all been pulled up and set loose maybe they’ll go away. Maybe they’ll leave us in peace.

One of the biggest advantages to living alone is that you can wake up in a sensible manner. You get up, put on great music and dance like a crazed gerbil until your brain is shaken up enough for thoughts to bubble out.

I don’t live alone.

So I drink coffee.

Low Budget Movies

The writing partnership with PresiD and ScarletBlue never managed to come together again after Christmas. Which isn’t a problem. The amount of time that they put into their business coupled with their church and family obligations meant that they were usually stressed out. Are usually stressed out. They have a good sense of humor about it. Writing was just one more thing on their plate. Since it was something without an immediate return it was the most obvious thing for them to drop.

Nizzibet and I continue writing. Of course we’re scattered and have half a dozen different projects that we’re working on. My friend, Gianni, was once advised to stick to one project if he ever wanted to get anything done. It’s good advice that I doubt I’ll be following anytime soon. I’d like to. I need a sustained period of solitude on a regular basis to concentrate on one project. Without that I have to grab concentration when I can and apply it to whatever project fits it in the moment.

Sometimes that’s illustration. Sometimes that’s cartooning. Sometimes it’s writing. Nizzibet and I have Saturday’s set aside for Couple Time. We try to use that as writing time as often as possible. We got to know each other originally because we were working on a graphic novel; her as writer, me as artist.

We’ve been doing some weird collaboration this last week. PresiD and ScarletBlue are working with some folks who want to do low budget horror movies and asked us to come up with some film treatments for them. Not hard. I’ve always got ideas. I outlined a couple of plots earlier this week. Nizzibet has spent the afternoons fleshing out one of the plots, deepening characters and working on the rhythm. She does most of that work in longhand on 3×5 cards that will then come back to me for typing and further fleshing out.

If there’s no interest in either idea as a film we can always turn them into novels. I think it’s funny that opportunities for film writing keep wandering our way. I gave up the idea of making movies when I was a kid. I figured out that I could tell the same stories I was imagining as movies as comics instead. I could do if for a fraction of the budget. I wouldn’t have to worry about actors or directors or editors or producers turning it into something I didn’t like.

Have I actually turned any of those movie ideas into comics yet?

Um.

What was I talking about again?

Systems

The Boss is having me read The E Myth and see how we can apply the business systems theory of that book to CreativeTechs. We’ve been batting ideas back and forth and he’s having me read other business theory books to see what can be used to complement, expand on and improve the ideas in The E Myth. It gives me something to think about during the day while I’m waiting for the next customer call.

CreativeTechs provides services that require too much knowledge and education for us to be able to completely Turnkey the operation. Turnkeying a business is designing your business in such a way that you can hire employees with little actual skill and have them still manage to turn out a product that’s identical to the product produced by longtime employees. Michael Gerber, the author, has a huge admiration for McDonalds and uses them as the prime example of his business theory. McDonalds is his example of how to take a small business and break down all it’s processes into reproducable systems thereby making it possible to reproduce (franchise) that business all over the world.

On April 15th we’ll be starting the Quick Start Mastery program. Between now and then we’re studying our customer base and our costs and the way we do things. So far I’m noticing that the place where we’re most likely to be able to systemize things is in my own job and in how the technicians record their information. If The Boss is willing to put into practice the systems I want it’s going to require a lot more paperwork than he and the rest of the technicians currently fill out. I’d prefer most of the paperwork to be electronic (and therefore accessible to techs in the field). Even so I’m not expecting any of the guys to get excited about this. It’s hard enough to get them to fill out all their reports on a weekly basis.

One thing I’ve noticed from this process so far is how much I systemize my activities as a matter of course. When I cook I break down the different activities into steps. When I get up in the morning I have a variety of habits that I run through. When I draw I start with a specific graphite weight and progress from there. I think in a very “this then this” fashion. In fact, I’m not sure that I’d really call it thinking. If I automatically start applying system breakdowns to my activities am I really thinking?

That’s not a question I’m looking at deeply. Plenty of other folks have devoted their lives and many words to that sort of philosophical rumination. I find it entertaining to watch my self function automatically in the same way I’m entertained by Paliki going through her motions. Once in a while I see her think.

Something disrupts her pattern. She stops. Then she acts in a new way. It’s obvious to me that her brain has weigh options and is acting out a new plan. And everytime I watch her think I wonder about the humans who insist that only human animals think, that other animals only act on instinct. Am I deluded? Are they stupid?

Of course I usually decide that they are stupid and deluded.

Off topic much?

No lawn mower action today. It rained this morning. The sun is out now but after a brief evaluation I decided that the grass hadn’t grown enough for me to feel obligated to drag out the mower and beat it back. Since I find myself using the term obligated I’d guess I’m also feeling lazy. On top of sore from the hefting and hauling of furnitures.

Saturday is the normally the day that Nizzibet and I have set aside for Date Day, Couple Time, Hanging Out With the Spouse.We didn’t manage much togetherness this Saturday. Helping DoubleM redistribute her ex’s possessions took care of that. No drama involved in the process at least. I do not like to be around bitter ex-couples. They’re not cute or sexy when they’re spewing bile at each other. Fortunately M’s previous is just moving to East Coast and wanted to get rid of a bunch of stuff to make the move easier. We (between Nizzibet and Jaydogg and I) are richer now by two chairs, a bookcase, an entertainment center and an espresso maker. Nizzibet stayed at home. She had a bout of sickness of her own on Thursday and Friday. When that happens it’s safer to stay away from heavy work and exercise. Cuts down on the likelihood that she’ll overdo it trying to keep up with healthy folks and drop something heavy on something fragile. Like her foot. She has skinny fragile feet.

Once the moving was complete we ended up watching DoubleM’s daughter LittleM while M and Jaydogg took care of returning the U-Haul and tracking down the dolly that someone had forgotten to return to the truck. M is four. Normally she’s a barely contained hurricane. Last night she had a stomach ache damping her enthusiasm for world domination. After a day of dragging about furniture I appreciated her relative quiet.

The two chairs have already been cat tested by Paliki. They are porch chairs with washable cushions. Paliki had hunkered down on one of them within a half hour of it’s placement on the porch yesterday and I found her splayed out on the other one when I went out to get the paper this morning.

Jaydogg claims he’s going to put the bookshelf into his office. Exactly how he’ll do that I have a hard time imagining. Especially after he was saying how much he hated moving yesterday. Nothing the size of that bookcase is going in his office without some serious moving of other things.