Artist Renditions

I've discovered something that I am ashamed of.
I... am not good at realistic drawing.

I also have discovered something else. I can just call whatever I doodle "abstract" and it is still considered artistic! I don't care if you can't tell what I intended it to be, it still is an art form that takes talent and years of training!

Its a gawdam butterfly!

Although being a professional abstract artist is great and stuff, I still long to have the artistic talent to draw a dog without it being mistaken for a horse. In my efforts I have just spent time practicing in Paint! The subject of my drawings? Songs.

Along the way, I discovered that when you attempt to draw songs, they make a lot less sense. That doesn't matter. Welcome to the Abstract Art of Jack!

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps

World Hold On - Bob Sinclair

RENT - Light My Candle

The Beatles - I am the Walrus

Prodigy - Smack My B*tch Up

*NSYNC - Pop

Third Eye Blind - Non Dairy Creamer

Ludo - Part I: Broken Bride

RENT - Sante Fe

Scott McKenzie - San Francisco

Raffi - Banana Phone

Now, there may have been a few things that you have noticed about my songs.

First of all, yes I have 2 songs from RENT on there. I listen to RENT. Stfu.

Second, you may have seen the NSYNC song on there. I don't know why people hate NSYNC so much. Their tunes are still catchy!

Third, you may notice that there is a song with a pterodactyl. Its part of the Broken Bride series of songs that Ludo made. Trust me, it makes much more sense once you listen to all of their songs.

Finally, you may have noticed that gnawing pain in the back of your head. That is to be expected. You see, the occipital lobe (part of the brain in the back of your head) interprets vision and what you just saw may be very upsetting to it. Don't worry, it will adjust as you continue reading my blog.

Recycling!

My family has a habit of recycling. No, not tin cans and stuff, but whenever we can save by reusing old stuff, we do.

I'M BRILLIANT!

We even save bags and wrapping paper from holidays just so we can reuse them later. I've had Santa Claus on my birthday gifts since I was 4 years old. My birthday is in July. As you can guess, this lead to some confusion in my young mind.

The largest difference it made is at the REAL Christmas. It became a problem when my parents started using old boxes for new gifts. Usually it wound up that we would get gifts that we totally did not expect.

IT'S A TARP!

SHE R DISAPPOINT!

It then became sort of a game for my parents to play on us. They would start switching it up every so often. Like once, my father bought a monitor and kept it in the box then gave it to me. When I looked at the box, I became sad because I thought that I was NOT going to get this monitor. It was kinda like this when I opened the box:

I swear I heard angels singing.

The next 3 weeks were like this:

There were so many new colors in high resolution...

It appeared as if my parents had discovered a new way to hide their gifts while at the same time saving money! It was cruel, unusual, and there was no counter to this move. It was like mashing buttons while playing Soul Caliber.

And so we live through are holidays without knowing what is inside each gift. We have a saying for it now. "Don't trust the box!"

It lures you into a false sense of security

P.S. My brother received a birthday gift from my mom yesterday. It was in a bag that said "It's a Baby!" and was obviously stolen from my sister's baby shower. The contents of the bag? A backpack that doubles as a giant water bottle.

Zombie Babies!

My sister is pregnant right now. In fact, she is going to give birth within the next week and I will have a brand new niece. Being pregnant and all, she feels the need to be obsessed with caring for the new child and stuff. I don't know why... it's not like they are going to remember if you kept it in the basement and fed it dog food for the first year or two.

Anyways, she has a habit of watching shows that have anything to with giving birth. I mean, she even is on animal planet to watch donkeys give birth!

I don't see the attraction

Usually when I am over at my mother's house I am suckered into watching the shows with her. Horses and pandas are not horrible to watch give birth, but I had never seen a birth given by a human before.

Now, I already knew that newborns were ugly. I mean, they looked like old men scaled down. I decided that they just aren't that cute until they are 1 year old.

Nobody explained to me what a brand new baby looks like, fresh from the womb looks like. I always saw them a couple of days afterwards. The show that we were watching was kind enough to share the process of birth with it's viewers. Now, this is what I expected to see:

Not pretty, but kinda fun to laugh at.

Instead, I was greeted with this:

HOLY SH*T WTF IS THAT!

Babies are NOT pretty. They actually scare me. They are purple and brown with blood covered all over them. In fact, there is only was one place that I have seen anything close to the monstrosity that I was introduced to. It is a movie called "Dawn of the Dead". You know that scene in the movie where the pregnant chick turns into a zombie and then has a zombie baby? The one that the father would refuse to kill even though it was totally planning to eat his face off? Let me show you.

That is what I saw on the TV yesterday!

Now, quiet frankly, I am obsessed with zombie movies. Anybody that has known me can probably tell you that. But OMG WTF THEY AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE REAL!

The moment I saw the baby, I looked over at my sister. My eyes moved from her face, to her tummy, to her face, and then back to her tummy.

Carrier of cute babies or secret vessel to deliver zombie children!?

I don't know about you guys, but I think I'm going to to start hording non-perishable food, guns, and ammunition.

Jack: The Crash Test Dummy

Let us continue into my past once more. As none of you know, I lived in Alaska for about 2.5 years of my life. I was a very outdoorsy child back in those years. It was probably because Alaska had much more entertaining activities than Las Vegas.

Alaska

In Alaska, I could make snowmen, go ice skating, swim, climb trees, snowboard down a hill, and all that cool stuff.

Las Vegas

In Las Vegas, we can play "Kick the Cactus", run around through a desert while avoiding snakes and scorpions, and even try taking needles off of cacti. (I ended up with a giant needle going an inch deep into my foot when I tried that. We needed pliers to get them out.)

As you can guess, it was much more fun to be outside in Alaska than it was to be outside in the 110 degree weather of Las Vegas.

The sun down here is like "IMMA F*CK YOU UP CUZ IMMA SUN AND I AM NOT TRYING TO BE SASSY." 

Forget about my stories about the cruel sun, for that is not what the blog is about.

Back while my family was in Alaska, we did a lot of stuff out in the insane wilderness. We lived by a lake and our front yard had a forest in it. Most of the time, my sister and brother would come up with the awesome ideas. Now, a synonym for "awesome" should be "dangerous". Let me explain to you one of their ideas in the best way possible. (A cooking recipe of course!)

Ingredients:

1 Tree house that is 20 feet high

1 Trampoline

1 Window in the tree house large enough to climb out of.

1 Small child

Step 1:

Align the trampoline at the base of the tree house.

Step 2:

Preheat the oven Climb up a tree and get into the the tree house.

Step 3:

Climb out of the window and on to a ledge that is approximately 1 inch wide.

Step 4:

Jump from the tree house (that is level with the roof of your 2 story house) and on to the trampoline.

Now, the product of the recipe wasn't quite figured out yet, but we were pretty sure that it was going to be the best thing ever. Now what we needed was a person to actually preform the actions. My brother and sister both said "NOT IT" and I was trapped. How could I break the rules of not it? Its legally binding!

So they chose their 5 year old younger brother to jump out of the tree house first.

Being 5 years old, I did not quite understand the concept of death yet. If fact, I didn't really understand the concept of extreme pain. So it went a little something like this:

I lived through the next 3 times that my brother and sister made me jump out. Finally, they decided to do it as well.

We had a blast for the next four hours doing this same jump over and over again. It became our favorite thing to do until our mother got really really mad at us. She was furious and she looked similar to that half orc chick that I have previously mentioned.

Us three children got into a routine from that point on. Whenever there was something dangerous to do, they made me do it three times. If I was not dead or seriously injured, they would try it out as well.

This compromise worked very well for us until I realized "Hey, I could die from this!" and stopped.

Ahh... loving childhood memories... 

The Half Orc

What fascinates me about myself is this: I, for no apparent reason, remember the smallest things that don't even matter.

I've spent years trying to remember my mother's birthday, but so far I only have remembered the fact that it is in November (I think). I've tried hard to memorize my phone number, which took me about a year for me to finally memorize. Yet the smallest details of my childhood I remember.

Take my first memory for example. You know that Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland? The one with the weird stretchy portraits and stuff? I remember sitting in the egg chair part and seeing the mirrors. You know, the mirrors that have the ghost sitting right beside you in the reflection. Sadly for me, I was seated like this:

So when the mirror part came along, I saw this:

At this point, I did what came naturally to kids that are 3 years old and have a scary green monster ghost sitting right on f*cking top of them. That is, of course, I contemplated the symbolic meaning of it. I remember thinking about it and saying "Is that who I really am on the inside? Is that truly the physical representation of my soul?" (You may or may not realize this, but I may have used simpler words at the time. You know, 3 year olds don't usually have a great vocabulary.)

Aside from the monster ghost story, there is one thing that has really stuck out in my head for the past decade. I was in the fifth grade and completely awesome.

I liked Pokemon, Yu-gi-oh, and best of all...

Ya, snitches! I loved me some D&D. Now, upon being explained the rules by another 5th grader, I decided that we needed to play exorbitant amounts of the role playing game. I always played a sorcerer because I liked shooting fireballs out of my hands and it was the least complicated class to do so. When I opened the book for the first time to look at the cool drawings of monsters and crap, I came across something that stunned me. This is one thing that my mind refuses to forget. My browsing went a little something like this.

These guys are so cool! Also, I can be 3 different types of midget! I love D&D!

Oh! Chicks! Look, there is a hippie, a body building midget, a lesb.... WAIT!

WTF IS THAT!?

Upon further investigation, I discovered that that thing was, in fact a woman. I had asked the person sitting next to me and they were like "WTF! THAT IS A CHICK!" and then I also asked the 11 year old dungeon master and he was like "Yup. That thing has ovaries."

I didn't know what to do. My world had been turned upside down. Things that were left were now right. Things that were up were now down. Things that had insane amounts of muscle, a furry chest, and a massive jawline were now chicks! What the hell was she doing? What is that look on her face? Is she actually checking me out?

If you look closely, you may notice that her finger is to her mouth playfully. It disturbed me. I just kind of wished that it was orcish sign language for "IMMA F*CK YOU UP CUZ IMMA ORC AND I AM NOT TRYING TO LOOK SASSY!" but I couldn't shake that stare from my mind. From time to time, I see her in my dreams.She stares at me longingly with her mysterious eyes... and it scares me.














P.S.