I would be remiss if I neglected to share any of the art I am working on. Drawing is fun, after all.
This is Hildy.
No, I don’t know where her other arm is either.
Drawsome!
This is Hildy.
All posts by Lucas
This is Hildy.
One hundred lies about myself
- My name is Oona.
- I am a married mother of two.
- I own seventeen cats.
- I breed them for combat.
- My friends tell me I look just like Alec Baldwin.
- I have a weave.
- I was a cast member on You Can’t Do That On Television.
- I have collagen injections in my lips.
- I received manual stimulation from a famous teenaged actress at theatre camp four years ago.
- My college major was biomechanical engineering.
- I am currently employed as a fencing instructor.
- For fun I tap dance for coins on subway platforms.
- I have twelve tattoos.
- One of them appears twice.
- This was the result of an oversight on my part.
- I collect gas masks.
- I own seven of them.
- I am famous for illustrating children’s books about poop.
- My body odor smells like chicken broth.
- I apply my freckles daily with a brown marker.
- I am Jewish.
- I am a rabbi.
- If I was a girl, my parents were going to name me “Katie-Baby”.
- I painted the walls of my apartment black.
- I did not recieve the landlord’s permission to do this.
- I have dyed my hair six different colors over the last three weeks.
- I am now bald.
- I have a pencil fetish.
- I have impregnated over seven thousand women.
- I am your long-lost twin brother.
- I lost my virginity in a ferris wheel…
- …one week ago today.
- I can’t stop eating olives.
- I make gin in my bathtub.
- It is chocolate-flavored.
- This is because I bathe in melted chocolate.
- I am an instrument of the Lord.
- Possibly a saxophone.
- I was Pat Buchanan’s running mate in the 2000 election.
- I had a torrid love affair with Saturday Night Live’s Melanie Hutsell.
- My grandfather never used an indoor bathroom once in his life.
- My fingernails are sensitive to laser beams.
- I have a birthmark shaped like Nixon on the back of my left thigh.
- I am allergic to peanuts.
- I am allergic to newsprint.
- I am allergic to pleather.
- I gave birth to a man just to watch him be born.
- I have been married one hundred thousand times.
- That was a rough week.
- I believe the children are our future.
- I believe when I fall in love with you it will be forever.
- Do I believe in miracles? Yes I do. You sexy thing.
- When no one’s looking I put a pink bow in my hair and call myself “Mary Susan”.
- My most embarrassing moment: trying to pee in the middle of class, and not being able to go. Too many onlookers!
- I am a United States Senator.
- I invented a new clown makeup which wards off evil.
- My friends call me “Killer”.
- I’ve only actually killed one or two people.
- In ‘Nam.
- I am a successful British comic book writer.
- I was married briefly to David Geffen.
- I have starred in three off-off-Broadway productions.
- I was on that show “Big Brother 2″ until they kicked me off for threatening another contestant with a knife.
- I play the french horn.
- I was in the Breeders.
- Kim Deal owes me fifty dollars.
- My feet are dry with the ashes of dead babies.
- There is a comet named after me.
- I am currently writing an unauthorized biography of Lorenzo Lamas.
- I have millions of dollars tied up in offshore funds.
- I drive a pink Corvette.
- When I was a teenager, my acne was notable for its consistent radial symmetry.
- I have a large scar that goes across both of my buttocks.
- My high school principal slashed my there with a scythe.
- It was part of a safety demonstration about scythes.
- I do voice-over work for Comedy Central.
- My best friend died a lonely man, in some Palm Springs a-hotel room.
- I got the call last Christmas Eve, and they told me the news.
- I am currently serving consecutive life sentences.
- They are not for anything in particular.
- I just woke up one day and felt like serving consecutive life sentences.
- I haven’t taken my garbage out since April 2000.
- I answer the phone with “Bite me!”.
- I was the seventh man on the moon.
- I keep the company of scarlet women.
- I am a black belt in jujitsu.
- I try not to wear shoes.
- My father is Bob from “Sesame Street”.
- I shave with a seashell.
- I am writing this on a Commodore 64.
- With a ballpoint pen.
- I had gay sex with Leonardo DiCaprio in a crowded movie theatre.
- I have thrown up fifty times in a single day.
- I once proposed to someone on the Jumbotron during a baseball game.
- That someone was noted Cincinnati Reds relief pitcher Rob Dibble.
- He said no.
- But he was extremely flattered.
- I have artificial eyes.
- I can’t see the forest for the trees.
- I have had breast reduction surgery.
Inspired by Mr. Matt Fraction on his forum.
Track marks, Chicago-style
My friend and noted train fetishist Jim Ellwanger recently brought to my attention the website http://www.chicago-l.org/, which is, as it says on the front page, Your Chicago Rapid Transit Internet Resource!
Within this site is an almost frighteningly complete and detailed history of Chicago’s rail transit system, known to some as the “el”, and to others who are clearly smarter as the “L”. I have been an avid “L” rider for the past few years, and I am sincerely interested in learning about this subject. Already I have spent many hours curiously combing through the site’s artifacts, looking at pictures of old cars that are no longer in service, reading about stations that have long since been abandoned and demolished, and looking at maps of the crazy twists and turns a railroad track can go through while wending its way from one end of the city to the other.
Why, did you know that the Yellow (Skokie Swift) Line, which is now an express train running between two stations only, used to have several stations along its route? Did you know that on the Purple (Evanston) Line, there was once a station called Calvary next to the large cemetery just north of Howard? And that that station was abandoned and left boarded up for the better part of a century before it was finally demolished just a little while ago? It’s all true!
Did you know the north branch of the Red Line used to be connected to the south branch of the Green Line, and that the west branch of the Green Line used to be affixed to the south branch of the Red Line? And they didn’t even change that until the early nineties! Of course, this was before they named the lines for colors, so they had no idea the trains were mismatched!
Why, with all this exciting transit history to learn, I can almost understand train fanaticism!
I said almost, Jim.
An unrare glimpse into the author’s psyche
My midlife crisis continues.
It is true that I have not really entered midlife at this stage, unless I plan to die at fifty or so, which I do not intend to do ? I plan to live a good century and a half longer, or at least until I pay off my credit card bills. At the same time, however, I figure that getting a midlife crisis out of the way early in life will clear up the schedule for a far more interesting midlife crisis down the road. Therefore, I am confronting my difficulties.
The first step in confronting one’s difficulties is to determine to some degree of accuracy what they are. The processes which are flawed or repetitive must be solidified, and not left as vague, abstract concepts. For instance: “I feel like my life is going nowhere.” Let’s toss this one into the garbage. First of all, “feeling” something doesn’t make it so. Second, “life” is too all-encompassing a term, and who says it is supposed to “go” anywhere? Why, just this morning, my life went to work. Clearly, that is not the meaning our wistful moaner wishes to ascribe to this statement, but if he could see through the gloomy gray clouds in his brain, he would see that his lamentation is overbroad.
“My career has stalled out.” You won’t catch me saying this ? I don’t have a “career”. I don’t know if I want one. In my purview, to define a career for oneself is to build a large brick wall around one’s world, to limit one’s options. For some people, this is probably a good thing, and I am not suggesting that I am superior to anyone for disagreeing; in fact, it may even bespeak a lack of maturity on my part. I am guessing that it is almost a universal truth that looking for a job is a tedious process, with little reward for the energy invested. However, on top of this I seem to be irrationally afraid of seeking employment. I am certain that if I put in the effort I could at least be considered for some position or other that would pay me a fair amount of money for my skills. But I neither have nor want a “career”, and so I drift aimlessly, thinking only about what I don’t want to do instead of what I want to do. Going back to school scares me also, but not quite as much, for some reason. Perhaps, then, grad school is on my horizon.
“I am getting old.” Everything is relative, of course. While I have left the demographic that MTV shoots for, I am still squarely in the range most advertisers are looking to sell to. But aging is a lot more than moving from one demographic to the next. Another part of it is seeing everything that you remember from childhood transformed. Tiny trees become giants. Giant trees die and get chopped down. Housing developments are built on top of all the dirt bike trails in the woods behind your backyard. Your ex-girlfriends from high school get married, have children. Your high school itself is for all intents and purposes torn down and rebuilt from scratch ? and then, after you graduate from college, suddenly you find that the landscape you became so used to has been altered as well. What of this nostalgia? Actually, I think I’ve come to terms with this one fairly well. Old memories are often worth revisiting, but to try to re-live the past will invariably result in disappointment. This may be why Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was received so poorly. (Or, possibly, it was a terrible movie. I didn’t think it was terrible, but then Natalie Portman makes me weak in the knees.)
Another important aspect of aging is the increasing attention one must pay to one’s body. For the last five years or so I have maintained the same basic diet and exercise, and only very recently have the effects of this regimen begun to visibly show ? in the form of, in my case, fatty fatty fat fat. The weak daily workout I have created for myself might keep the gut size in check for a little while, but certainly this bit of my life could stand a bit of revising. And illness ? I get sick a lot more often than I used to. It is actually a lucky morning for me if I don’t wake up feeling nauseated. It is unlikely that I am pregnant, but for now that is my only working theory.
I’m sure my sleep patterns are only exacerbating the problems. I go to bed between 2 AM and 3 AM most nights, and wake up at about 8 AM. It could be a lot worse, but I’m definitely dangling off the low end on the scale of recommended sleep ideals. I simply can’t get to bed any earlier, though, and I don’t really want to. I have so much trouble ending my day. As a result of this, though, I am basically tired all the time. Surely there is a better way to live one’s life?
But even after the identification of the problems comprising one’s midlife crisis, implementing solutions can prove extremely difficult. At the moment, I am nonplussed, and hoping everything sorts itself out. I am disappointed that I have not had any epiphanies or feelings of catharsis while writing this; but then again, if one lives one’s life in pursuit of catharsis, one is probably doomed to a lifetime of disappointment.
Damn it. I think I would like catharsis.
St Paddywagon
Kiss me, I’m Irish!
We ought to fish well and diligently, as our Lord exhorts. Hence, we spread our nets so that a great multitude and throng might be caught for God.
— St Patrick, an Englishman
Bless me, I’m Irish!
I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well, the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers, as with wells; a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there; and that often, when there is nothing in the world at the bottom, besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and a half underground, it shall pass, however, for wondrous deep, upon no wiser a reason than because it is wondrous dark.
— Jonathan Swift, an Irishman
Fight me, I’m Irish!
Happy St Patrick’s Day to all those Americans out there still bafflingly determined to claim Irish ethnicity. Why not make your day extra-authentic, by making fun shapes with semtex, arbitrarily hating people with marginally different religious beliefs, and banning abortion? All while listening to the soulful sounds of Westlife.
— Paul O’Brien, a Scot
Keep me out of the sun, I’m Irish!
Now anyone who’s felt the touch of heaven in their lives
Will know the way I’m feeling looking in my baby’s eyes
That’s why I can’t bear to be too far away
I know that God must love me cause he sent you to me on Angel’s Wings
— Westlife, an Irish boy band
I’m going to go drive the snakes from my pants!
Going for the record books
The prime number shitting bear has re-entered my life in a big way. I have decided I am going to try to beat the top score. The top score is determined by the highest prime number that one can prove one has seen. This in turn is largely determined by the length of time one’s browser has been running without crashing or reloading. As of this moment, the bear has been on my screen (sometimes in a minimized window, in the interest of full disclosure) shitting prime numbers for approximately forty-two hours and twenty minutes. Despite having run it this long, I am still far from the prize. The current top record is 167,901,421. That’s a pretty big number, and you know what?
It is only divisible by one and itself.
What a fat, lonely number.
I am just going to let the sucker run until my computer crashes, and to be honest I’m surprised it hasn’t crashed already, given my tendency to squeeze more and more data onto my hard drive until finally one can hear it squealing like a pig. But I am going to let it run, and damn the consequences. And if I don’t win, well, at least I will have had a good run, and also I won’t have actually wasted my time doing anything.
I am a fat, lonely person. And I love myself!
Beware the ides of March!
Holy shit! It’s the ides of March! I wasn’t paying attention! Suddenly, it’s the ides of March! What the hell am I going to do now?
I’ve got to go to the grocery store, get some canned goods! I’ve got to go to the hardware store and buy some crossbow bolts! And a crossbow! Fuck fuck fuck! I need to withdraw all my money from my bank account and bury it in a metal box in the backyard! Shit! I don’t have a metal box OR a backyard!
It’s too late anyway. I can’t go out now! The roads are clogged with traffic! And through my window I can hear the blood-curdled screams of a thousand people! I should not have waited so long! It’s too late now… it’s over… it’s over…
Damn you, ides of March!
Britney: urine trouble
This can’t possibly be true.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/020310/140/ctlq5.html
Pop queen Britney Spears fled for cover after having urine thrown at her as she filmed a TV ad. The star was bombed with buckets of urine by angry neighbours as she sang on location in the early hours of the morning, according to the News of the World.
Buckets? Of urine?
How many of these neighbors were working together? Even if I got everyone in my building together to pee into a bucket, the likelihood of that bucket being full would be small. The likelihood of a second bucket even being necessary would be slim to none. Granted, this took place in Los Angeles, and they certainly are fond of their mineral water over there. And I suppose it all depends on the size of the bucket.
Actually, now that I think about it, not only is this story completely plausible, it is almost exceedingly likely to be true. My amazement, I guess, is that the neighbors were able to set aside their potential differences and come together in a unified, urinating front.
In fact, I think I would like to live in such a neighborhood.
No sweat, preferably
Yesterday I finally came to terms with the fact that I am a great big tub of lard.
In the last few months, I have gained approximately twenty pounds. More importantly, however, every pair of jeans I own will no longer fit me if I do the top button on the fly. Well, technically they can fit me if I do the top button, but it is incredibly uncomfortable and also it creates an unsightly yet vaguely humorous spillage of belly flesh over the waist. Unpretty! And I can’t help but notice how *solid* my fattiness is. It is not at all as squishy and malleable as television and movies led me to believe it would be. It’s *heavy*. I guess that could be why heavy folks are heavy.
As I am far too cheap to simply accept myself the way I am and buy some new trousers, and because walking around with my jeans unbuttoned at the top seems undignified at best, I have decided that I am going to dedicate some of my free time to taking an inch or two off my abdominal region. In service of this I have gotten my “ab-slide” contraption out of mothballs and have begun intensive daily workouts. This work I do on the “ab-slide”, however, may be cancelled out by the fact that working out on it renders me unable to move for several days, leaving me stranded on the couch with a bag of chips and the remote control. I have also started doing a daily regimen of push-ups and sit-ups, which, again, leave me unable to move. The sit-ups are probably redundant anyway, as I think the “ab-slide” contraption is meant to replace them. Lord knows it’s easier on the back. Oh, if only someone would invent some sort of padded mat which will allow one to exercise unhandicapped by painfully solid hardwood floors!
Another step I have taken towards reducing my waist size is the complete elimination of food from my diet. I’m not quite there yet, however. Yesterday after work I went to the local chain supermarket with the full intention for buying food for me and for my household. However, I thought, “A-ha! I’m going on a diet! No more food for me!” So, instead of food, I bought liquor. No beer, though – certainly beer won’t make my waist any smaller. No, I bought a bottle of scotch and a bottle of sweet vermouth. For dinner I ended up making myself a double Manhattan. I can already feel the flab melting away. I feel *something* melting away, at any rate.
Finally, as a last resort, I have begun corset training. The gals at the workshop think that I can have a fifteen-inch waist by June if I keep at it!
The vanishing spies
Retraction of Bah!
Blogger is by no means an ass butt. Neither is it perfect, but nevertheless, I was somehow able to fix my problem via the tedious process of manually changing information. This may sound bad, but I actually have quite a high threshold for tedium, and so I was able to do it without going insane.
While I was fixing up the date/time problems with my earlier posts, I decided that, since I am now a subscriber to Blogger Pro™ and can perform such operations, I would go in and convert all my pre-Blogger Daily Heys to Blogger format, so that they could be accessed via the archives just like every other damn Daily Hey I’ve ever written. Not that I did much writing on the old ones. Back then, a Daily Hey consisted of a single picture with a snappy line of text underneath, and an additional snappy mouseover caption. But the result of adding these is that my archives now stretch back to February 2000, over two years ago, which seems unreal to me for some reason.
Of course, much of the material on my satellite pages – Drawing Is Fun, Scrivenings, The Juke-U-Bus, and OneMegPlus Theatre – is well over four or five years old by now, and has been on the web far longer than any Daily Hey material. It’s looking less and less likely that I’ll ever update the latter three of these, although I’ve always intended to.
I registered the domain lucubus.com back in 1998, and since then the page has had approximately five different incarnations, of which the present one is by far the most successful. I say approximately because the third design had a number of variations. But overall, the transformation of the site into what it is today has been fairly organic; that is to say, as things have become trendy on the web, I have seen them and said, “Ooh! I want to put that on my page!”, and stole ideas left and right. Stealing is organic, isn’t it?
Hey, there’s nothing classier than a webmaster talking about the history of his “domain”. But I never claimed to be better than anybody. Just prettier.
Bah!
Blogger is being an ass butt.
In order to make things a bit more efficient, I renamed all my image files and edited their links in all my previous posts to accomodate the new names. I appear to have been successful in this endeavor, but one result is that due to some unfortunate glitch in Blogger, many of my past articles have been moved several hours into the future from when they were first posted. For example, an article posted on 11/10/2000 at 10:34 PM now shows as having been posted on 11/11/2000 at 12:34 AM, which is, of course, a total lie.
In many cases, this change is not significant. However, occasionally it results in funny contradictions, such as me saying “it is the morning” and it being 4 PM, or saying “it is New Year’s Day” and it being January 2. This is exactly the type of tiny little inconsistency that drives me completely insane, and so I have been trying for hours to fix it, without success. I have a line in to the tech folks, and for now I am going to just let it be. However, if you are perusing my archives (and by all means you should – why, check out the links to each month of archives, now available on the main page, beneath my webcam image!), and you come across one of these inconsistencies, do your best to sorta kinda read around it.
Also, let me know via the email form at the bottom of the page if you spot any broken links, to images or otherwise. And check out my updated links page.
Thanks for reading!
Rambis? Ryder?
Recently I was informed that I resemble legendary basketball player and hothead Kurt Rambis.
Hmm… don’t really see it, myself.
Some time ago I was told that I bear an uncanny resemblance to Winona Ryder.
Now THAT’S more like it!
Er.
I am sick today
This morning, I coughed up three small children.
If anyone has any need of me today, I will be lying on the couch, trying to find the words that will properly poeticize the feeling of some unknown-but-high quantity of post-nasal sludge oozing slowly down the lining of my throat. In addition, I may be conducting some experiments concerning chewing gum vis-à¶is sneezing forcefully.
It’s a beautiful world; I’m just living in it.
A word of caution regarding leftovers
Microwave-reheated cheese fries smell alarmingly like vomit.