Mead & Dreams

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

Making up a test batch of mead to see if my yeast is dead or not as I had some problems getting the last batches to ferment.  I only have enough honey to make two other batches, so I need to decide if I want to buy more honey (& possibly more yeast) or just call it quits for now.

I’ve been spending the past couple of days trying to proof my dream diary collection.  It’s about 400 pages & I’m on page 130 right now.  I’m debating if each dream should be on its own page or keeping them together as long as multiple ones from the same date fit on the same page.  Also debating doing sketches for it.  Still trying to figure out a potential title.  It is interesting how many of my dreams are about the unstuck time traveling that fascinates me & how many of them are about being a touring musician.  I think my plan is to do some kind of ebook & print-on-demand thing & a Kickstarter for the book eventually.  We’ll see what happens.  I am thinking about doing a physical book of Suborrhea & 4 Hours Old again, though I have no real idea why.  But I guess there’s no more demand for my music than for stories I abandoned 20 years ago, so there’s that.

Last Night’s Dream:
I’m in the parking lot of a church.  I had the strength to get out of the car, but I feel too guilty to actually go into the building to pray.  I walk back to the car staring at the gravel parking lot.  I find a coin coated in the stone dust so I can’t tell for sure if it’s a penny or not.

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2 Responses to Mead & Dreams

  1. hi brian says:
    July 11, 2013 at 7:58 am

    juxtapost the touring dreams with stories of your touring reality.

  2. hi brian says:
    July 11, 2013 at 7:58 am

    yeah….juxtapost.

Finally Checking It Out: The Moon Maid (Edgar Rice Burroughs)

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

moon-maidAs a kid I never checked out Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Tarzan just really held no interest for me.  In 2007 my heavy metal co-worker Bruce gave me the John Carter of Mars books to read because he knew I was a fan of Robert E. Howard.  Sure the John Carter books are a little bit goofy sci-fi romance, but they are generally fun & good (I’m especially fond of A Fighting Man of Mars).  Bruce told me that he had tried to read some of the other Burroughs stuff & they generally weren’t as good, so I never really pursued anything else.

Anyway, I stumbled on The Moon Maid for a quarter at a thrift store & figured I’d give it a shot.  I can’t really explain why this book isn’t as good from a literary & word choice side from what I remember about the John Carter stuff & maybe that’s not even true.  It is essentially the same story of an earthman falling in love with an alien princess & fighting monsters & scientists, but it does have a major problem that it ends in the middle of a scene (the same thing happens in the last John Carter book actually).  The narrative starts with a guy telling a story on a train & then it ends with the train arriving & the guy not finishing the story.  I guess that gets you to buy the second book & third books & I am under the impression that this break point in the story was just for the paperback market.  I guess if I find the next one for a quarter, I’ll go ahead & grab it, but I’m not sure why as I’d probably be more satisfied re-reading A Princess of Mars.

Oh, it’s also worth mentioning that the cover art picture of the Va-ga (it’s Frazetta, but based on an older cover for the novel) doesn’t seem to fit the description of them in the book to me & that’s kind of a pet peeve of mine.

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Finally Checking It Out: Bloodshot #12 (Valiant Comics)

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

bloodshot12So in the late 1980s I had started abandoning reading mainstream comics & was generally thinning out checking out new books as the indies I was reading started to cease publication.  This is when Valiant hit & I always heard good things, but never really checked anything out from them.  Recently I did some bin diving for cheap comics & decided to give them a shot if I found any that were one-shot issues.  So I picked up Bloodshot #12.

So I don’t know anything about the character Bloodshot, but I’m under the impression he’s some sort of mercenary with some minor super powers.  This issue is called “Bloodshot’s Day Off” & the cover shows him watching TV in a bathrobe in a hotel room.  So yeah, this cover is semi-indicative of the issue.  It’s a comic that I would write, a mercenary goes on vacation & ends up needing to kill some no account low level crooks because they are interrupting his vacation.  Oh, & also he somehow gets a girl.  Not only do I feel this comic is worth more than the quarter I paid for it, it may well be worth the $2.25 cover price, thought I have no idea if it’s indicative of the series.

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RCB & ENB (short story)

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

I came back to take care of her.  To protect her.  To love her.  To be her man just like I have always been.  But when I appear in the living room, she simply says, “Get out of here.  You’re dead.”  I gave up the light in exchange for these two seconds.

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Buttons, Beaches, & Dreams

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

So I’m doing a Kickstarter project again.  This time out I am doing a series of buttons by some of my artist friends.  If it’s successful, I’ll do another series in the near future.  This time out the artists are Kimberlee Traub, Arabella Proffer, Joe Badon, Nick Marino, & Brian John Mitchell.  Spread the word about them if you can & if you dig them feel free to buy some.  I have no idea of the interest level on something like this, but I wanted to try it out as a way to help my friends spread the word about their work & get them some money instead of being to self-centered about things.  We’ll see what happens.  In other button news, I’m doing a workshop in Durham this Saturday (basically just making buttons & magnets that people bring in images for) & then next Thursday I’m appearing in Greensboro with my comics & buttons for an art fair.  Once again, we’ll see what happens.

So I went down to Myrtle Beach this weekend to sing for an Electric Bird Noise live show.  It was at an art gallery & the owner totally freaked out when the smoke machine filled the tiny room with smoke & after the show went around touching the paintings saying he hoped they weren’t damaged.  Newsflash… smoke machines use shit designed to not damage things & they get used in art galleries that have performance art pieces all the time.  It was kind of hilarious to me how pissed off the guy was & how all thirty people around told him there was nothing to worry about & that did essentially nothing to calm him down.

Last Night’s Dreams:
I go to the car dealership where Jamie Barnes works as a mechanic.  I ask him how I can tell if my car has too much oil in it & he tells me it should be noticed if I’m taking my car in for it’s scheduled weekly maintenance.  Weekly?  What a scam!  How can I afford that?

I’m at a bar & I smuggled in my own mead & poured it in a Miller Light pint glass, but it’s over room temperature from carrying it in my pocket & therefore tastes pretty bad.

The Cylons (1970s version) have invaded the earth & taken over the planet.  I’m a revolutionary killing the raiders with a rifle I stole from them in the first place, collecting more & more rifles as I keep downing more of them.  I go into a safe house allegedly full of revolutionaries, dragging in behind me a cache of rifles & half of a dead Cylon.  The other revolutionaries tell me what I’m doing is wrong.  That the alien robots are no worse masters than the human ones we’ve given ourselves for centuries — in fact, they may be better.  I kick the head off the Cylon & see that instead of being filled with electronics, it’s just empty.  I’m going to fight them alone until they kill me.

Posted in buttons, daily news, dreams | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

One Response to Buttons, Beaches, & Dreams

  1. Peter says:
    July 9, 2013 at 9:23 am

    I dreamed that I went to see U2 and it was boring.

Dreams

Posted on July 5, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m driving on a long trip & my seat is broken so that I’m leaning against the door & almost sitting on the floor & it’s throwing my balance off so that I’m having trouble staying in my lane & my ass is getting sore from it.

I’m working at some kind of advertising agency re-tooling Woodsy Owl’s “Give a hoot! Don’t pollute!” campaign for the 21st century.  I just want to use the old images from the 1970s.

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Podcast Bonanza

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

So to prove my absolute nerdishness, I appear on not one, but two podcasts in the past few days.

On Gutter Trash episode 236 we talked about the movie Miami Connection & just a bunch of random crap.

On Charlie Tonic Hour #80, Charlie & Ginny talk about the Derby City Con (where I appeared) & then I am in for a segment where they taste my homemade mead.

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Louisvillle, Dayton, & Dreams

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

Back in Dayton after spending a few days in Louisville with Arlo & Kelsey & Jamie Barnes as well as appearing at Derby City Comic Con hosted by Chuck Moore of Comic Related.  I’d had a vague hope for doing something musical with Jamie when I was up there, but it didn’t happen.  It’s really hard to make music happen without time really blocked out for it & things planned for it when there’s probably less than ten hours of downtime in a trip.  In the end a big chunk of that downtime was spent doing mexican candy reviews with Kelsey (will there be a future QRD or will they appear in the blog?  Hard to say…).  Going to the church service where Jamie plays & sings was really cool & I really wish I had the guts to make my music work in such a setting.  The convention was fun & an interesting mix of clearance priced comics, crafty steampunk stuff, prints, art suppliers, celebrity creators, & folks like me.  It was super cool to see it all under one roof.  Thanks to doing custom buttons with kids I made enough money to pay for my table.  I need to think about just getting a little kiosk at a mall or something making buttons like that all day.  We’ll see what happens in the future.

I’m back in Dayton now, last night I guest starred on an episode of the podcast Gutter Trash & it’ll go up in a couple days.

Recent Dreams:
I’m running for the first time in eight years.  I can feel my muscles working.  My body getting both tired & stronger.  I can’t tell if I am going to collapse or explode.  It feels good.  This should be part of who I am.

Jessica Bailiff is staying at my childhood home.  I get home after working third shift & she gets up to have breakfast with me.  She tells me her obsession with the table top game Car Wars has cost her almost all her friendships & relationships & I tell her we should play Thunder Road some time as it’s a much simpler version of the game.

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Comics & Dreams

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

I ended up doing an interview with Jason Young on the radio last night on WYSO.  I think there is supposed to be a way to listen to it online if you go over to their website, but I couldn’t find it today so I’ll post the link in a couple days.

I wrote a little Remora demo called “songs for a woman.”  Strangely not as twisted or condescending or angry as most of my love songs.

I got the layout done for XO & sent over to Melissa.  We’ll see how long it takes for the issue to come out.

I bought about 40 discount bin comics.  We’ll see when I actually find time to read them.

Last Night’s Dreams:
I let my hair grow out.  After three days it’s a thick black mess thicker than my hair was when I was young & the texture is different than it used to be.  I can’t tell if the hair is fake or I am.

I’m on a camping trip & there’s a storm blowing a friend’s tent over & she starts yelling out, “I confess!  I killed the cat!  It didn’t run away!  I accidentally shot it with a gun!”  Everyone stops trying to help her.

I’m standing on a pier with someone, I’m not even sure who, & I emit a loud monstrous noise that sounds like a whale call, easily heard over the crash of the ocean.

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2 Responses to Comics & Dreams

  1. Nick says:
    June 27, 2013 at 11:48 am

    good song

A Partial Understanding….

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

So I stumbled across this video.  It kinda helps me understand my problems with Silber these days.  That I’ve lost the feeling of mastery & purpose & being self-directed over the past few years.  That I used to feel like I was technically skilled & leveling up & that was super rewarding, versus lately I feel like I’m getting less skilled & less innovative & less useful.  Which sucks.

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2 Responses to A Partial Understanding….

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    June 25, 2013 at 9:58 am

    i wish this was an essay. it started off interesting to me but then as it went a long i felt like the general message was that people should do what they love and give it away for free and this will make the world a better place (says everybody but the financial industry who will profit and collect fees etc. take advantage of all the opportunities that creates prices that you must pay and the companies that take advantage of the free/lowcosts to profit). I feel like it was video sponsored by TechDirt. Would be great to read the studies i think and

  2. Brian John Mitchell says:
    June 26, 2013 at 11:11 am

    My favorite part is when the guy says, “why do people make music on the weekends? clearly it won’t get them money or help them find a mate.”