As I write this I am sitting in Simon’s Tavern in Chicago’s fabulous and historical and Scandinavian Andersonville district. I am sitting on a recently reupholstered sofa and sipping on a Pabst Blue Ribbon while keeping an eye out for friends who may or may not show. In fact, it is quite likely that I have missed them, as I arrived somewhat late and many of my friends lately have been giving in to their damn fool impulses to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Maybe they call it maturity. Maybe they’re dopes.

Oh, I’m probably just jealous of their self-control.

Anyhow, a brother and sister pair have sat down on the couch across from me and said hello — Mark and Lauren, I believe their names are. They are telling me about their moneymaking ideas, most notably toilet paper with the news printed on it. I point out to them that it would be difficult to keep the toilet paper rolls timely, as a daily or even perhaps a weekly delivery would result in far too much news for the average ass-wiper to keep up with. Plus, people’s asses are generally dirty enough without worrying about newsprint and the like.

I have finished my beer, and now I am getting up to leave and wishing Mark and Lauren farewell. I have told them that I am here regularly on Mondays, and even though it’s true more in theory than it is in practice, they seem to be impressed that I actually have a night during the week specifically set aside for drinking in a bar. So perhaps I will see them again in the future. Or perhaps not. Even now, as I walk to the train station, I have already largely forgotten what they look like.

Warm weather really brings out the beggars in my neighborhood. I’ve been asked for all sorts of things. A little while back a young kid asked me if I could give him a ride from my neighborhood out to some far west suburb. As I was on my way to work, I could not. I’m not sure I would have anyway, but at least I had an excuse other than “I don’t do favors for strangers”. He wasn’t around when I came back, so presumably he found his way out.

Tonight, I’m approached by three different middle-aged black men asking me for change. Well, only one of them actually approaches me. The other two just call out to me as I walk past. I’m never certain what to do in these situations. I suppose it really depends on the presentation. Sometimes I hustle past, doing my best to ignore them. Other times I apologize for not being able to help them, and other times still I actually dig in and pull out some cash. I’m very inconsistent.

Tonight, however, I have no change to give even if I wanted to. Nor do I have smokes to lend, nor matches to light said smokes. I do, however, have a portable computer in my pocket. I nod hello to the folks on the street and walk quickly and quietly home.

I have made arrangements to travel out to the Left Coast for a few days at the beginning of August. I am unsure of the wisdom of this endeavor, but it will be nice to visit somewhere that is not Chicago nor Dayton nor the strip of land between Chicago and Dayton.

Last weekend, a very unfortunate thing occurred. I cleaned needlessly.

I won’t get into why I felt I had to clean, or what made it needless. Such subjects shall be relegated to so much grist for the rumor mill. And, even so, needless cleaning is not a giant tragedy in and of itself. After all, even when one cleans needlessly, one is left with a clean apartment, correct?

The answer: Sort of.

While I was either sleeping or out of the house sometime last weekend, the shelf in my bedroom closet — piled high with boxes overzealously stacked to finally get them off my bedroom floor, where they had been since I moved in back in the fall of 2000 — collapsed, taking with it the wooden hanging rod and all of my clothes, including one relatively expensive suit, and very nearly taking out the sliding doors, which are primarily composed of full length mirrors.

I am unsure how much time elapsed between the shelf collapsing and my noticing it. Expeditions into my closet in the summertime have traditionally been limited at best, as I keep most of the clothes that I actually wear in a dresser outside the closet. No, the only reason I noticed the shelf had collapsed was that one of the mirrored sliding doors was bulging outwards in the middle. And the only reason I noticed that was that I, too, was bulging outwards in the middle.

Perhaps you’ve never had a full length mirror in your bedroom and think me peculiar, but sure enough, one day this past week, before or after a shower, I stood naked in my bedroom, admiring myself in the mirror. “Yes,” I thought. “I am a god.”

I turned to the side and noticed that my belly was sticking out about a foot further than normal. Moreover, I seemed to be looking slightly downwards at my reflection, and I looked shorter than usual. Sure enough, that’s when I saw that the closet door was bulging outwards. A tiny peek through the closet door revealed evidence of a shelf collapse.

I honestly did not think I put anything particularly heavy on that shelf. It was mostly empty boxes. The only items of notable weight were a tub of Legos and a box of old notebooks from college. But, as I discovered, the shelf was no more than thin particle board which was poorly supported, and was destined to snap in the event that significant weight were placed upon it.

For a few more days I chose to ignore the bulging closet, leaving the contained clutter to fester as I considered various ways to remedy the situation. Today, however, I finally succumbed to my irrational fear of the mirrored closet doors shattering and scattering glass fragments everywhere, including all over my cat and my eyes. I pried open the doors and began to shovel the contents out onto my only recently-uncluttered bedroom floor, soon realizing I would end up with a bigger mess than what I started with.

I then headed to my local Home Depot, intending to purchase a wooden rod and shelf, spending a negligible amount of money in the process. I would have needed a specially cut shelf, as the back of my closet has irregular dimensions. However, I never even made it to the lumber. Instead, I bought this ridiculous modular closet/shelving unit that will probably not fit in my closet at all, let alone allow me to more efficiently organize my belongings. And as I am reluctant to learn that I am right about such matters, surprise! The shelving unit remains unassembled, and the contents of my closet remain scattered on my bedroom floor.

And my belly remains sticking out a foot further than normal.

From the files, circa 1999. What began as a freeform writing exercise ended up as a pretty blatant rip-off of The Onion, if anything so blatant can even be termed a rip-off, as opposed to a misguided homage or pastiche or whathaveyou.

Eco-Librarian At B-School Is My Confidante, Says Disgraced Oil Executive

“Comfort Zone” Celebrates Grand Opening
New Adult Themestaurant Promises To Keep At Least 10 Feet Of Distance Between All Occupants

Mallady, My Lady Opens Off Broadway, On Crapway
New Street To Serve As Haven For Cliched Fluff Of Musical Theater

Stethoscope Probes Pope
Pope: “There’s nothing wrong down there.”

Halibut Lodge Formal Complaint Against Jokester’s Cheap Puns
Comic Tom Fullery: “Why Do I Crack Wise About These Fish All The Time? Just For The Halibut!”

Bottle Opener In Second Drawer To Right Of Sink
No Wait, First Drawer To Right Of Sink. How About Under Sink. In Cabinet Above Sink? On Top Of Fridge?

AUTOS: All-Latin Jukebox Built In To El Camino

EDUCATION: “Bagel” Popular With Math Teacher, Dorks
“Smear The Queer” Popular With Special Ed Teacher, Retards

MEDICINE: First-Ever Case Of Lapdanceriasis Identified, Diagnosed, Treated In Poorly-Lit Back Room

COMMUNITY: “All-Day Event” At Area Racetrack Draws Crowd, Annoys Local Man
“Blatant Attempt To Raise Money For Spousal Boob Job”

HOME ECONOMICS: Lotion Deficit Brought On By Frequent Visits To “Pants Bar”

CULTURE: Unprovoked Hitchcockianism Wrecks Perfectly Good Slasher Pic

SPORTS: Georgia Superstars, King George III, Sweep Nebraska Nipples 86-69

This should really come as a surprise to no one: the world is running out of stuff. We’re running out of fossil fuels, of wildlife, of trees, of fresh water, of eligible bachelors who don’t turn out to be gay, you name it. We’re running out of everything. Except babies. We have lots and lots of babies.

This article, originally published in the Observer of London, tells of a report which suggests the Earth’s supply of natural resources will be stripped by the year 2050, and that by then we will have been forced to colonize at least two other Earth-sized planets to adequately provide for this continued growth.

In 2050 I will be seventy-five years old, and I plan to not only still be alive but also be a distinguished elder statesman, an important thinker, a noted man of books, oft-quoted in term papers for college history and philosophy courses and in original oratories in high school speech and debate tournaments. In this capacity I will fight tooth and nail any law that would require the execution of anyone over the age of sixty-five in an effort to reduce population growth. Surely, the only viable and just option is space exploration with an eye towards exploiting the resources of other worlds, and never mind that a comic book I am writing deals with this very subject.

As Edwin Hubble discovered almost a century ago, the universe is expanding. The two simplest cosmological models thought of today show that either the universe will eventually collapse back upon itself, destroying everything in a cataclysmic implosion, or the universe will keep on expanding forever, until finally everything is spread so far apart that the temperature of the universe will grow much colder and stars and galaxies will flicker and die, leaving large-scale matter as nothing but invisible hunks of rock floating through the empty blackness of space.

So the universe really has a sunny future either way you look at it. Of course, humans will be long gone by then – or at least, we will be, if we don’t watch ourselves. In his book The Universe in a Nutshell, Stephen Hawking wonders if science/technology and population will ever reach a final steady state. If not, he points out:

By the year 2600 the world’s population would be standing shoulder to shoulder, and the electricity consumption would make the Earth glow red-hot.

So life as a human would be pretty intolerable under those circumstances. Of course, over time, as the growth continued, being human would gradually take on a different meaning. What would the philosophy of such an overcrowded civilization be? Would life be worth less than it is now, a return to the nineteenth century and vigilante justice? Or would it be worth more, with humans not allowed to die under any circumstances, even natural causes? Either way, strife is the only possible outcome.

And strife has been the Earths raison d’ê´²e for the better part of its lifetime, so this will just be business as usual.

The bottom line is that Earth as a planetary mass will probably be around until the sun dies, millions of years from now. Humanity may not be so lucky. So let’s settle Mars. Let’s go set up camps on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

‘Cause dammit, I’ll be an old man and I won’t want you kids running around on my lawn.

And so another Wizard World-brand comic convention has come and gone, and I think this might have been my last one, unless something changes.

I go to shop, but I have run out of things to buy; I go to meet creators, but I am too shy to talk to them; I go to see panels, but I oversleep and miss the good ones; I go to spend time with girls from the internet and they get drunk and run around and raise hell and are generally terribly difficult to keep up with.

This year, I spent far less money than I have in the past, and that probably would have been the case even if I had not spent all of Saturday chasing the girls around. Am I getting tired of comics? I don’t think so. It’s simply gotten to the point where I more or less own all the older stuff I’d been looking for in years past. Am I getting tired of comics fans? Hell yes. And being that I am one, it puts me in quite a pickle, doesn’t it?

I walked through row after row of artists and retailers peddling their wares, which, based on display alone, were by and large composed of richly detailed paintings of fantasy warrior women, with stickers over any exposed nipplage in the paintings so that small children walking by would not be subjected to a visual onslaught of nipples that their young minds were too weak to prepare them for. I looked at the fat, balding artists selling these, and the fat, balding men buying them, and could not help but think of my own future. I would like to be an artist. I like drawing women. Will I become this artist? Or will I give up on my art and become the man who buys this stuff? Do I really have to become either? Can’t I put a gun in my mouth instead?

Oh, hi there.

I suppose I should have been helping out with the First Seminannual Daily Hey Catch-up Freakout Event, but I’ve been sort of dry on content. Lucas deserves a break, though, so here I go.

Here’s a poem I wrote for a girl one time. I sent it to her and I think she liked it, but things never really went anywhere. Maybe just as well, we weren’t really into singin’ the same kinds of Christmas songs anyway.

Some of you will no doubt see right through this riddle and devine who the recipient, indeed, was. Well, good for you.

Chicago likes to have its July 4 festivities on the evening of July 3. I suspect that this is so we do not have to compete with nearby cities in Indiana, where the more outrageous fireworks are curiously legal and thus draw (and also put out) many a curious eye. Either that or Chicago just wants to party the night before so it can get drunk and not have to worry about work the next day. Either way, it is clear that Chicago is one burg that knows what’s what.

I decided to reprise my July 3 evening activity from last year, since I enjoyed myself immensely, so I pulled on my shoes and socks and pants and strolled a couple blocks over to Lake Michigan, where I stood on the beach and watched the fireworks down in the city.

However, this year was different. First of all, the beach was far more crowded. I chalked it up to the thousands of people who read my write-up of the experience last year and wanted to try it for themselves. And they’d tell two friends, and they’d tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on. Also notable was the presence of little children who were organizing chants the entire time. They went through several rounds each of “USA! USA! USA!” and “God Bless America! God Bless America! God Bless America!” The most interesting one was “Peace on Earth! Peace on Earth! Peace on Earth!” which isn’t really what Independence Day is all about, and to hear it chanted by a bunch of ten-year-old boys who were probably just going to go home and play Grand Theft Auto 3 was mildly ironic, but in general the ignorance of the prepubescent set is not without its charm, and this was no exception.

The fireworks themselves were unremarkable, hindered by a cloudy sky, and by the fact that they seemed to be lower to the ground than usual. From my vantage point, the fireworks were going off behind two very tall buildings off in the distance, which produced a visual image that was not dissimilar from, say, two towers exploding in a ball of flame.

Eventually, that show ended and another one started several miles up to the north, slightly closer, more audible and unobscured by buildings, but also unremarkable. I slowly came to the realization that I was bored to tears and wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there and go home and play with my new graphics tablet. For some reason, however, I felt bad about feeling this way, and so I decided to walk up the beach until the fireworks stopped.

Forty minutes later, the fireworks were still popping, and I had walked a few miles on sand in the darkness. “The hell with this,” I said, as the rockets red glare and bombs bursting in air continued glaring and bursting, respectively. “Good night, America.”

Don’t mess with Lego Warren Ellis!

He’s got French cuffs and a purple vest!

He’s got a spaceship and a robot sidekick!

Don’t make him call you SHITEYES!