It's taken me a while to get around to part three of this series, but I have good excuses.
So, drawings in hand, Laura back east, and despite everything I've been drawing about finally catching up with me, here it is, the third and final part of Amazing Tales of Ridiculousness. Much thanks to Alison Turner for her altreality/hallucination sketches (though the one below of Laura is mine). Apologies to A Softer World.
When we last left our hero, he had just been half-dumped...
The phone conversation between our hero and his homegirl Laura continues as we dive deeper into the ridiculousness...
Madi and Kevin finally broke up. Twice. My roommate Abra and I had her hang out at our place rather than sit in her apartment alone, and we kept her fed and boozed. Turns out, I was the first guy who'd ever made her breakfast.
"Seriously?" Laura asked.
One night, I took her to dinner, then drinks at Hazelwood, and walking back to my apartment, we were suddenly holding hands in the pocket of my plaid coat. We watched Wong Kar-Wai's In The Mood For Love, and after the movie, we kissed. She spent the night.
"Heh. Oh really?"
But,
But then it was done. Kevin had been told. I stayed up until that phone call was over, and she and I talked afterwards. My old boss from Microsoft, Ian - see, and that's how all this got started, because Madisyn had dated Kevin and Kevin replaced me at Microsoft when I left - Ian reassured us she and I were "of course" still welcome at the weekly get togethers he and his wife put together.
"But her ex goes to those? I mean," Laura laughs, "I broke up with a guy and then dated his roommate, so that's really not all that big a deal."
Madi and I figured if Kevin acted like a dick, that was his problem. We weren't going to stop hanging with our Microsoft friends just because he was uncomfortable. Madi felt he'd lost all right to be upset about any of it, as his douchebaggery and nonstop cheating were entirely responsible for his his being dumped.
Now that it was all out, we felt good about where we were.
Tune in next week as things get better, and worse!
Laura Dyszynski is definitely one of my closest friends, which is hilarious considering the circumstances under which we met (foreshadowing!), and the comically awkward period in which we dated. But she and I can count on one another to be around whenever we need someone to talk to, or to have some sense beaten into us (not necessarily figuratively when she's doing the sense-beating).
It may seem odd, though, that I'm choosing to introduce the following three part comic by introducing an old ex-girlfriend, but my inspiration came during a phone conversation between Laura and I which spanned hours and a car ride, dish doing, record organizing, and drink mixing.
Without further ado,
Laura and I had been playing phone tag for a the last few days, and I finally caught her on my way home from work. Apparently I also drink martinis in my car.
Single Matt had been put away, Relationship Matthew was basking in the sunshine, and Happy was suddenly, amazingly, a thing again. And yet, hints of little problems had begun to pop up like mushrooms, problems largely created by third parties, and I needed to talk it out with someone logical and unconnected.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
Tune in next week as things become ridiculous in part two of... Amazing! Tales! Of! Ridiculousness!
I've been working on a rather epic, most likely three part comic - I'm excited, at least - but it's not quite finished yet. In the meantime, enjoy one of the many scribbles I've made while avoiding work (in a non-napping manner):
Note that there are a few other comics that should have been posted in before this, which I'll eventually get around to sticking in (Twitter will of course inform you), but I've been... a little lazy with scanning and editing the increasingly daunting pile of drawings on my desk.
So until I get around to it, fast forward to an unexpected chapter in this little miniseries. The first person you know - for better or worse - but here I introduce you to someone you may not be familiar with:
I hope the transition won't be too much of a shock.
And so, as he'd agreed with himself to - after the preward of a trip around the world - our hero returns to school.
Now, back in the day, back when I was in school, I always had a date. Lately, not so much. Logic - or at least the convoluted sort of logic I use to feel better about myself - would dictate that school = meeting girls. Back in the day, though, I hadn't yet been introduced to Sweet Mistress Ethyl. Nowadays I've got other things on my mind in the morning.
Nevertheless, I eventually noticed that there was a girl on the other side of the room who was always looking over at me, who looked like a girl I knew years ago. I repeatedly intended to strike up a conversation with her after Human Genetics, but I kept being distracted.
Eventually, though, I managed to catch up with her just outside the building.
...is what I generally expect to happen when walking up to a girl on the street to start chatting her up, but we had a rather delightful conversation. The sort you have when you're crushing on someone as a teenager.
So we made our way to Bauhaus for a coffee date...
Having returned to the Emerald City, our hero set about looking for the basic necessities.
Unable to immediately secure a job...
...I went looking for an apartment. Once that was taken care of, I decided then to set about finding a girlfriend.
My prospects look grim.
Nevertheless, I have hope. It'll happen eventually; after all, I spend plenty of time out with my friends...
I'm not quite sure why I haven't met anyone yet. I guess I just need to be more proactive.
Update 3/3/09: Did I blog my "Everyone Just Needs To Chill Out" flow chart yet?
Earlier today an item came across the Slog which I thought was worth mentioning here as an aside. Someone wrote to I, Anonymous about hipsters in the Wild Rose, "sit[ting] around and talk[ing] about how much better Portland is than Seattle, how much [we] wish [we] could have babies with [our] fixed-gear..." etc., and how "we" should just stay out of "her" bar. I could go on about this - it's a beer for chrissakes, I'm not signing up for the Vagina Monologues - I just thought it was silly and worth sharing.
Thomas Hardy wrote, "If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst."
These last eight years, all the bloodshed and freedoms stripped, the torture and lies, the crippling cynicism and acceptance, all of this was not solely the fault of a government - evil and corrupt though they may have been. Yes, they took advantage of fear, human nature, and a tragic situation and ran with it - I believe someone allowed it to happen, many argue they caused it - and they did things almost no one could have imagined. But they alone were not to blame.
2002, September. My first semester of university. A much younger and less experienced version of myself takes the stairs to the fourth floor of Varner Hall, and sits down to US Foreign Policy. We were all bubbling with something - for some, still unformed - in the wake of 9/11. One of the first things I learned was the rally 'round the flag effect. I remember putting a star next to it in my notebook: "this is important".
It was happening. The twentyfour hour news cycles were still broadcasting fear, and we were being spoonfed terror by the administration on a daily basis. For the remainder of the administration, I don't think we as a people ever recovered from that first, early offensive.
A full look at the Worst. In these bright and shining days of New World Order, history demands that we do just that. All the evils of the last eight years were not an accident, some sort of karmic mistake or cosmic joke or divine accident. Every bullet spent and right suspended is the fault of every single American. We are all to blame. But I do not look for, I do not proclaim that we seek vengeance on one another, nor that some outside force seek it for us. There's a quote from An Unquiet Ghost, a Russian whose grandfather was a victim of Stalin's Great Purge said of casting blame on Russians, that in what happened during those years, everyone was complicit, "practically the whole country, one part denouncing, one part judging, a third shooting people, a fourth guarding the camps." I'm certainly not trying to compare the two; Bush's reign certainly smacked of Stalin's early years - consolidation of power, formation of a secret police, waning freedoms - but the situations are not comparable. I am merely attempting to illustrate that while we are all to blame, the time has come to move on. It can, however, not occur at the expense of denying the past.
While Cheney sat in a (now and forever) disclosed location, grimacing and faking an injury so he wouldn't have to stand for a black man, our new president spoke of putting away childish things. Of moving on, of visualizing that brighter tomorrow. I spent the last eight days of the Bush Administration tearing down our collective impotence where action was needed, blindness where we needed vision. It seems this sort of empty fingerpointing holds little place in this new era, and, certainly, our wounds won't heal if we persist in poking at them. Heading into this next American chapter, it's important for us to look forward, to what we can accomplish - indeed, psychologically we as a nation need it - but we cannot allow this to happen at the expense of ignoring our past, our missteps, to know them, what Obama called our "collective failure to make hard choices"; perhaps in this little bit of wetblanketism, we can, if only for a little while, avoid those same mistakes again.
President Bush, during a trip to Seattle in the late days of his presidency,
enjoys taking part in our local love for irony, both in being at a Prop 8 protest, and by employing the peaceful protest as a successful method of conflict resolution.
I was at a club on New Years Eve, and when 2008 rolled around, as my date - ignorant of how champagne bottles work - let fly a cork that ricocheted off the ceiling and hit a kid in the head, I heard a phrase uttered which was surely spoken simultaneously throughout the liberal bubbles of America: "Only one more year of Bush!"
And that was what it had come down to. It's all so big, and so far away, and I don't understand it, and, hey, we've only got, like, a year left. The stock market was dropping. We figured we could just let it all wind down. And, hey, there's a black guy and another Clinton running for president. I'd really like to be extra pessimistic and say that - like the Clinton sex scandals and free trade talks with China - the election allowed the Bush administration to commit some seriously heinous human rights offenses, but the wind had somehow gone out of his sails. Bush was meeting with historians and philosophers to try and figure out what his legacy - and that of a post 9/11 America - would be, and why, gosh darn it, nobody seemed to like him.
My liberal outrage fatigue had hit a steady rhythm, and I looked forward to my trip around the world as an excuse to not have time for the news for a while (except local safety-related updates on where I was headed, and of course the hilarious Times of India, of which only the first page is non-celebrity/fluff news).
And then, I was back in America and it was Election Day. I was homeless, camped out in a spare room at a friend's cat-filled house in White Center, and I took the 116 to West Seattle to cast my vote in what would probably be the most important election in American history. Everyone (again, I speak of my liberal brothers and sisters) was nervous - "What if?", they whispered darkly - but I had just ridden cross-country on a train and talked to a lot of people; everyone from fellow urbanites to people who looked like they might have gone out cross-burning a few years back were saying the same thing: America needs Obama. I was confident.
I was at an election party on the top floor of a tall Capitol Hill apartment when a collective scream rose up from the city below. Obama was now President-Elect. We switched to Fox, they were already pointing out he was "only half black". I left the party and walked into something no one here ever thought they would see:
We were... patriotic. A car pushed its way through the crowd of people waving a giant American flag, and I felt... I felt, pr- pride? Suddenly - yes, suddenly, it was... it was okay! I was an American, I was proud to be an American! Even now the words are hard to put out, some part of me so deeply entrenched into my psyche fights still against this new emotion, this thing that I had believed was only felt, let alone expressed openly, by the ignorant and the elderly. But as I turned to random people cheering, chanting, singing, and waving sparklers in the streets, we were all saying the same thing (and for perhaps this moment alone), We feel this way now, and it's alright!
The line outside the Shell station went around the block, and half the beer in QFC was gone. Several people had simply begun drinking in the aisle.
Fireworks, booze, climbing on lamp posts - cops watched it and didn't mind; indeed, they were smiling. The world over, this was happening, and talking with my mom on the phone the next morning, amazed, she said, "and nothing bad happened". With all those people, with all that energy, one would just assume that something would have happened somewhere. But it didn't.
I had set about writing this post with the intention to not write about the election, as I would inevitably have to discuss that hatemongering tundra bitch, and I'm not except to say, that we showed, definitively, who Real America was.
Years before, when everything was falling apart, when the truth couldn't be denied but we all sat, jaws agape, watching it all happen, and even in those comparatively naive days, sitting in Professor Trumbore's US Foreign Policy (and all his subsequent classes & Poli Sci Pub Nights), no matter how dark things became, no matter what was thrown at us, I always stood fast in my belief that everything gets better eventually, progressives always win. Slavery is mostly a thing of the past, voting rights - at least in the First World - extend beyond white male landowners. There may be steps backwards, there may be leaps backwards, but in the end, there are more, and prouder, steps toward equality and justice. This belief of mine was constantly met with criticism; and in the times in which I was espousing it I wasn't surprised. But as I stood on Broadway Ave in disbelief watching Seattle's Capitol Hill turn patriotic that night, my theory was proved right and I knew things were to get better.
Over the next months, I would talk with my friends abroad, about the changes to come and that hope of change; they welcomed America back to the world. Though I now look forward to this new era of American policy, and I bask in the knowledge that the soon-President Obama will do what he can to undo the destruction of the past eight years, I can't help but wonder if, in allowing it to all go on for so long, if we as a people, as a nation, have lost something along the way.
Heather Holloway and her mantourage. Left to right: George W. Bush, Nate Parkinson, Matthew James Runde
In 2007 I was the maid of honor at my friend Heather's wedding, and I had spent the better part of the year busy helping her plan.
Right. She was back in Michigan, so I spent a lot of time on the phone telling her and her bridesmaids how I wish I could be more useful, and paying for things like limos and strippers (for them, to clarify).
Anyway, between cleaning up after my new roommate Brad, drinking with my new Seadragon coworkers, and waking up in strange places as I trained for the marathon of drinking with people I hadn't seen in years that would be Heather's wedding, 2007 was pretty busy.
Three years before that, there were these red bumper stickers circulating. I lived in Michigan then - specifically, a small town named Oxford, and signs at the town's main intersection (the only downtown intersection with traffic lights) were perpetually littered with the aforementioned stickers. My little brother and sister were 10 and 9 then, and I would take them along with me as I peeled the stickers off the No Turn On Red signs at all four corners of the intersections. I did my rounds every few days, and every few days someone would replace them; this went on for months. The 700 Club was, of course, handing these hate stickers out for free (great use of funds, btw). Between being shouted at and the occasional harmless thrown object, I had my work cut out for me. The kids loved it, though, and still talk about it, especially being able to say they were called fags by a biker gang (though Vladi was entirely unaware to how potentially dangerous that could have been).
But now I was fully integrated into city life, and the rest of America - what next year would be called "real America" - seemed just a little far away. None of that hatemongering was happening where I could see it, it must have just, like, died down or something.
My liberal outrage fatigue had hit full swing, and since my fellow Seattleites were straddling the fence between a contemptuous indifference of flyover country (definition provided for friends and readers still in flyover country) and a presumption that everything was doing more or less alright, or at least that there was nothing much that could be done. Impeachment now seemed a little silly, 'cause, hey, Bill Maher had, like, a countdown clock on his show, so it must be getting pretty close to No More Bush anyway. Us Urbanites, we could just wait it out.
Indeed, looking at the shelves upon shelves of political books in my apartment and they seemed just a little... quaint. Remember, I said, remember when Bush was stripping us of our freedoms and stirring the ignorant into a frightened frenzy about terrorists? Remember those silly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Rememb... wait, what? That's all still going on, really? Are you sure? Because I haven't heard anything about it in the news lately. I mean, except The Onion. But they only report on fake news, right?
Somebody let George stay up all night reading those Narnia books, and the phrase of the year becomes "human-animal hybrids".
In 2006, the Democrats (read: moderate conservatives) took control of Congress, largely by nominating candidates who were opposed to such staples of modern society as gun control and reproductive rights*. Well, mostly:
[again: new apartment, I'm still stealing wifi; this video - thanks a ton NBC for not having a search function on SNL's video site - may have genuine compression artifact issues, or it may just be me]
Somehow, though, in the time between (and despite) Bush's reelection in 2004 and the 2006 midterm elections, things had cooled politically. Part of it was the beginnings of liberal outrage fatigue, which would increase steadily until (spoiler) the Obama election in two years' time, at which point our outrage would be replaced by misconception that Barack Obama is a magical country-fixing unicorn, and George Bush is somehow not still president and/or not still fucking things up. Part of it was the inevitable calming down that occurs in these situations. Eventually, people just learn to live with an $8000 curtain or warrantless wiretapping. This is exactly the sort of thing I've been complaining about the last few days, but on this point specifically, I'm really not blaming us. This is just what happens (my European friends will say this is just a way to make me/us feel better about my/ourselves, but we elected a black guy, and you're all still racists). The bills need to be paid, the lawn needs to be mowed, my prison cell doesn't have a window. Day to day stuff takes over the bigger picture.
But with the sudden slight shift in power from right to center, 2006 was going to shake things up again. We - the liberals - were (sort of) in charge! We could make things happen, we could - hell - we could reverse some of the damage Bush had done! Finally, just in the nick of time, we could make a change. Overnight, our ennui from doing nothing and being disappointed when nothing happened as a result (coming up with things worth complaining idly about is tiresome; take it from me: upper-middle class, white, male, and straight) was replaced by smug satisfaction. Finally, we of the educated left could relax a bit, folk singers could give their guitars a break, the blogosphere could take five minutes off. High fives all around. Have that latte on me, the owner of a coffeeshop in Port Townsend told me the morning after the elections. The Democrats controlled Congress, things were going to get better.
So, celebrating our new found power, we updated and secured the PATRIOT Act, let Bush veto the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act, and Cheney shot a dude in the face (my father likes to point out that Cheney was never fined for hunting without a license, clear evidence that when the President - or his men - does it, it's not illegal). Once again, way to take the ball and run with it.
* Democratic candidates in 2006 were also generally not big on molesting pages and gay airport bathroom sex.
President Bush avoids the press and Hurricane Katrina by dressing in drag and going to a Detroit goth club with Matthew James Runde, seen here dressed ironically in white.
2005 was busy. I was in a drunken tailspin after the end of a long relationship, I spent the summer in London and the ex-Yugo (namely Bosnia), and returned to Michigan only long enough to pack up and head to the West Coast, a place I knew nothing of, for reasons I'm still not entirely sure of.
My brief stay in London - my first steps outside North America - introduced me to the fact that even art students at Central Saint Martins majoring in Jewelry knew as much about international affairs as I did - a third-year political science student who considered himself to be pretty aware. Returning to Michigan was hard; while the state always votes blue, it's a socially conservative and politically indifferent (if not ignorant) land, and conversations with fellow Michiganders became increasingly laborious.
Thomas Ridge was replaced by Michael Chertoff, nobody noticed. Nobody cared. Do you even know who they are? We were starting to lose focus even on our empty complaints. But, then, we had something to be distracted by.
[note: for some reason, this won't play and it seems to be the only copy available online; please click through]
You can tell he cared, though; you can see it in the way he gets his face almost close enough to the glass to be able to see down to where all those minorities who didn't vote for him were watching their homes be destroyed, but it would be a long, long time before Bush would make any sort of real motion towards the destruction. And of course, later, too late, "they" would say that Bush never recovered from his failure with Katrina. But now it doesn't really matter. Nobody's still living in asbestos trailers, right?
By the end of the year, I would sell my car, making me entirely indifferent to the Iraq War's influence on rising gas prices. I was now a city person, and these things were unimportant to me. I had other things to worry about, like meeting hipster girls, finding cheap drinks, and getting rid of the cockroaches and rats in my new ghetto fabulous apartment off Yesler & 13th.
President Bush, during a trip to Seattle in the late days of his presidency,
view full-size
Heather Holloway and her mantourage.
President Bush avoids the press and Hurricane Katrina by dressing in drag and going
You can tell he cared, though; you can see it in the way he gets his face almost close enough to the glass to be able to see down to where all those minorities who didn't vote for him were watching their homes be destroyed, but it would be a long, long time before Bush would make any sort of real motion towards the destruction. And of course, later, too late, "they" would say that Bush never recovered from his failure with Katrina. But now it doesn't really matter. Nobody's still living in asbestos trailers, right?
