Bonjour from inside of the holiday echo chamber, from which I wanted to post a short notice with December updates. If you live in Northeastern Pennsylvania and want to hang out, get at me, I usually get extremely bored around 10pm. If you don’t live here but might want to email with me for a day or two, my email address is still tom//at//dogchirp//com.

Work Work = I will work for you anywhere in the United States or abroad, get in touch if you have a full time salaried job.

Fun Work = I painted/embroidered two big clothing patches this month but forgot to photograph one of them (the other is above). I started brainstorming a new video yesterday that I may or may not decide to start working on next week, if for no other reason than to goof around animating and playing with the new Flash, which I haven’t used on any personal projects yet. I am in the middle stage of putting together a critical mass of text that I am going to edit into whatever I wind up using for January 15 application deadlines; this work will likely wind up abridged across Test Patterns #3 or No Such Thing as News #3, unless someone else winds up wanting to deal with it. I have a giant pile of sketches that are going to get scanned and may or may not appear on this blog, as well as in those aforementioned print projects, and I have a design for a painting that I’m hoping to do the week after christmas.

Schedule = Planning on going to Philly this weekend, but not totally sure what the deal with that will be, then back home. Will likely be around New England for New Years, and then hopefully moving soon after that pending work options.

Last week I was in New York. I stayed with Christi some nights and Leah others. I got to hang out with Kathryn, Aaron, Julio and Jeff, and I ran into Sarah. I rode my bike all over. I did some work with Emily and Corey and I had a great lunch with Dan. I got lost in the rain while I rode to Max’s house, where I watched Futurama and ate a burger. I ate delicious sweet potato quasadillas, but I didn’t sleep too well.

Arson in the new development

Patrick and Scout

I’m not doing a great job of posting these on Sundays.

Last night me and Mike were in the middle of the usual records/beer/board games Gray House flop-out that horrendously replaced the ultra-productive December/early January videos/whiskey/drawing mode (what can I say other than that we apparently enjoy having many, many titanic godswars more than we enjoy having anything to show for our stupid days) when it started snowing and Mike decided to take the dog to the park.

Despite predictions and the observed weather that prompted the move out, There were no clouds in the sky. We stayed in the park for a frigid hour and watched the first eclipse I’ve seen in probably ten years. I remember standing in the spring night in my boy scout uniform watching Hale-Bopp and thinking, shouldn’t there be some sound or something for this? Shouldn’t there be some great clap that shatters windshields and sets off car alarms in order to draw everyone’s attention to the fact that the universe is indeed fucking gigantic, and check it out the moon is disappearing and then turning a weird red? I drank my beer and paced to keep my feet warm. Mike tried to get his dog to climb up onto the playground’s fort. Cops idled and watched us from the edge of the park – their tire tracks in the frozen mud shone in the red moonlight. The dog chewed a plastic water bottle and its crunch echoed loudly. We had a hard time setting up the board for game three when we went back inside because our hands had frozen.

Earlier, Amber bought me beer because I drove her around. This somehow seems relevant to my being able to linger in the park for an hour, play three games of godstorm and have what may or may not have been a killer Bavarian Kings-style band practice (to be decided). Even earlier, and this is only tangentially related, Davey joined us to drink 40s and plan a band tour (and play two games of godstorm).

Even earlier, Sunday, I was at my parents’ house. I riled up my baby cousins at my gramma’s, scared my brother John and played video games without thinking too hard about the big issues of the day. I beat my dad in chess twice (which feels weird, re: he used to constantly destroy me when I was 10 when we last played, and the game itself always felt like such a raw ego vs. ego Chronus/Zeus thing especially now re: our general disagreement on almost every matter in the world, not being used to having my weird family position validated by winning, feeling weird about getting older/my dad getting way older (he was only eight years older than I am now when I remember him at his youngest), etc.). I missed my brother, who is in Australia, and who I can’t call on the telephone. I watched many Hollywood movies and walked on the banks. I finished watching the Mighty Boosh and have, as ever, been drawing.

This week is almost over and I have no plans for the immediate future. Tonight I’m going to drop in on my old roommates at their show. I’m going to have band practice a couple times and work on finishing drinking the beer. I’m going to try to go to the park. And on.

In the morning I woke up with a triple dream, 1/3 in the ancient city, 1/3 in the underground complex, 1/3 fresh weird allegory/film digestion in a tar pit. Two of my favorite three things, I volunteered to an old classmate of mine, are “fresh garlic” and “Enya.” Full disclosure in the zine I’m putting together for the two shows on the 5th, art/sabbath thing at dgl, and apparently an ospreys show in Lancaster – reunion jammer with our buddies Wether + P Des that I thought wasn’t happening until a wake later. Whoops.

I had breakfast at my gramma’s at 1pm after writing all of this down. I ate fried chicken, green beans, sweet potatoes and perfect gnocchi. I had no dessert but drank black coffee from my grampa’s new coffee machine (replacing his ancient Mr. C that took like 55 minutes to brew a pot and made the most terrible/perfect sunday buzz sludge ever – new Cuisinart pot or whatever brand makes the same brew [the flavor is based on his coffee making style of filling the filter to the absolute max with grind regardless of the amount of brew he plans to make] but in 10 minutes instead) while soundly defeating a challenge from my brother to beat original Contra without the ++– code. I died three times against the belly dancer (boss of energy zone = one general sloppy style, one because I forgot you jump over him, one because I forgot you can’t blow up the spikes he throws at you) and once at the end boss (just sloppy). All of my cousins watched me do this and laughed as I recalled to them the Contra styles our neighbors once espoused (machine gun against the waterfall boss, laser against the snowfield boss, etc.) while ruining all with what I believe to be the perfect unbeatable style for this game, S + R.

I am thankful every day that I do not play video games anymore.

At my grandmother’s house I had a glass of port and a bite of a ham sandwich. I have always had the feeling that she makes sandwiches only once per year, and that time being when we come over. (Or, perhaps I am being unfair because I eat most of my meals between two slices of bread, and I have become especially particular when served in this way.) When we left her house we moved logs up the river bank and my hair came out of its bun. The thinking was that if we didn’t move them up, the river might rise and take them. It was 60 degrees out and I didn’t wear a coat and my hair blew in my face. My sleeves were wet with the water from the muddy ground’s melted snow. I rubbed a piece of ice in my hands to clean them when I finished, and wiped them off on my pants when I sat in the car and closed the door.

At home my dad asked me if I knew any of the comics in the best comics 2007 collection re: his reading the times, and one of Ben’s was one of the images associated with the article.

I ate four chicken wings for dinner and drank a glass of wine from a homemade bottle. It was sweet and very mild. I moved onto the beaujolais nouveau and tried unsuccessfully for two hours to get work done. I organized drawings but didn’t produce. I ate three cookies and then two more later. I played chess against my dad with a chess clock and the game lasted for slightly less than the length of the Sun Balance side of VCO “Sun Balance / Open Knot.” I checkmated him as white in a wild rush after sacrificing a knight to gain space and one move’s time, but really it was a dumb luck gambit in a red wine crazy game. I finished the wine and drifted in and out of sleep listening to “Versatile Arab Chord Chart.”

I watched “The Limey.” Last night I watched “300.” Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.

2008 = Whatever, Go Even Bigger

January = build tall couches, allen coming over on the 2nd, show on the fifth
March = band tour with stallions
June = MDBTR project is finished
July/August = camp
Late September/Early October = traveling with my mom

Click here to view the embedded video.