Transcript:
KEVIN “You broke my stylus? How could you??”
JARED “Do you even read my blog? How didn’t you see this coming?”

I guess it’s back to good ol’ fashioned dry media for the time being.

Actually, does Sharpie count as dry media?

It’s been a few days, my loyal handful! Take comfort in two things: First, Spartacus started his revolution with but a handful. Second, Spartacus would mysteriously disappear in his tent for…what has it been? A week?

Trouble was, I broke Kevin’s tablet pen. You remember Kevin’s tablet pen? Well, I broke it. The tip mysteriously stopped working. The eraser side works, but I that doesn’t do me much good in Photoshop.

Oh, and if you’re Kevin, I broke your tablet pen. Sorry about that. But really, what did you expect?

I couldn’t draw any cartoons on my computer. I tried to draw a few on paper, but I thought about scanning them in and then I got distracted and forgot what I was doing.

Unfortunately in the last week I think I lost 100% of my fan base, which was 10. Brave souls, all. Actually, maybe I didn’t. Let me check on Google Analytics…

Yep.

Shut up, Sparty, you’re drunk.

Actually, I got something pretty good with just words, but I wont say it now so that a new visitor won’t have to slog through all this stuff.

I saw X-Men: First Class yesterday. It was one of those movies that I wouldn’t have seen unless the reviews were real good. I didn’t see Wolverine, like other super hero franchises, X-Men universe began at science fiction and has been slowly moving toward straight-up magic.

Genetic mutation, space radiation, and green serum will go a long way with me. They’ll get me to an eight-armed, nuclear powered octopus cyborg. They’ll get me to a man who can control fish with his brain.

But a woman made of solid diamond? I mean…how does she move?

I can give it a good injection of suspended disbelief as long as they have a reason for making her out of diamond. But there wasn’t one.

Say no more, I understand. The writers had no choice but to have her be pure carbon.

Sure, Mystique is cool, but why go to the trouble to bring her back 40 years if her only function is to be a walking identity crisis? Couldn’t another mutant have taken care of that? How about the red devil dude? Now he’s creepay!

But whatever, she’s blue and its neat. Defending the science of these things takes more rhetorical gymnastics than defending the quality of the Star Wars prequels.

(I’ve heard people do it. It fills me with pity.)

It’s the themes that matter, and my real trouble comes when I try to sympathize with tortured characters whose main source of agony is that they have friking superpowers.

And movies set in the Cold War are always an educational experience.

In pedicabery, there are two important things about Saturdays.

First, one Saturday hour is worth something like 2.5 ordinary hours.

Second, because I work whenever I want, I have this feeling that any moment not on the cab means a direct loss in profit. You could see pedicabing as having no set shift, or you could see it as having a shift that goes on all the time. So when this happens…

It usually plays out like this…



Therefore, I must work Saturday until every soul has gone from Downtown. I had a sore throat, I was dehydrated, and a street burrito threatened to give an encore, but I couldn’t quit. It would be like lighting $50 bills on fire.

And nobody wants that.

But I still had Church at 9am. And what kind of a person would I be were I to sleep through Church because I was up helping drunken philistines to their debaucherous ends?

Unfortunately, when I need to get up for something specific, my brain does something strange. It takes a harmless suggestion, like, maybe I’ll get up to go to Church, but with nothing else to do, turns this small idea over and over all night long…

It was incepted.

By 8:30am, I was no longer a man, but some kind of Church-going automaton.

In fact, I shouldn’t have gone at all, for I developed some kind of sickness in the night. With the virus, low sleep, and a night of pushing my body to its drunk-hauling threshold, I really should have stayed in bed.

But I didn’t understand this. I didn’t understand anything. My powers of reason were no more. An avid sleepwalker, I honestly think I may have been sleeping when I got out of bed.

I achieved semi-awareness in the bathroom, but the light was bright, so I closed my eyes…

…and then dozed off for about three minutes.



I awoke in a lingering delirium. But of course, I had to fulfill the purpose that my mind had spent all night incepting. It was a consciousness composed of a single idea: go to Church. So I shambled to the car, though I really shouldn’t have been driving.

I found the classical station especially profound.

.

And the jazz station was no help.




.

Certain things were very upsetting…



…and led to some troubling revelations.




.

Of course, I had no conception of a route, and just wandered in circles that sort of drifted outward in an easterly direction.





.

Turned out the service actually started at nine thirty. At least they had a coffee machine.

Now I’m gonna sleep.

Facebook wall post from Tessa.

“No blog today, eh? Isn’t “Jared’s Daily Green” a bit deceptive then?”

And then

“Oh, sorry, it’s not Jared’s Daily Green, it’s “Jareds Daily Green.” You don’t even know how to possess something properly. I guess I can’t blame you for the failure’s of that blog then, though, seeing as it doesn’t really belong to you…eh?”

Well you know what? The day isn’t over. The day’s only over when you go to sleep or see the sun.

So go suck a lemon, Tessa.

Almost made me want to become a member.

Almost.

Apparently some of you have misunderstood the last image. That was probably due to the poor quality of Birddog’s photo. Here’s a higher resolution version.

I have a regular now! After seeing this blog, this person actually returned without being prompted by Facebook or anything else. She just came. Ain’t that a trip? Her name is Tessa and she looks like this:

She knows Shakespeare. In fact, she once got on all fours and performed the witch scene from Act IV of Macbeth in the parking lot of the Lolicup Teazone because she lost a game of Egyptian Ratscrew. Four studs in military fatigues came up to watch, and it took her 39 seconds to notice them standing there. She fell over and had one of the little seizures that she is prone to having.

It was real funny.

I’ve been roaming downtown Denver for years. I ran catering for a BBQ place on the 16th Street Mall when I was 14. I worked for Greenpeace one summer and covered the Mall, Lodo, Sobo, Lohi, Bilbo, and anywhere else. One of my favorite things to do is just get on my bike and just roam around the city.

But I never drive it, and for biking and walking, one-way streets, sidewalks, intersections, parking lots, alleyways, and parks all fall into a kind of wilderness in which the trails aren’t always marked and cars become nothing more than Frogger-style obstacles. I know it by feel and instinct, and never bothered to learn, like, streets. You wouldn’t expect a deer to know the different branches of Appalachian Trail.

That’s right, I’m a deer.

This map show’s how I have seen downtown Denver (at least, my main pedicab area) for the past decade.

1: Streets that start with “C”
2: Streets that start with “W” (except Welton)
3: Some hotels are up here
4: Unknown wasteland
5: There’s a McDonalds in here somewhere
6: Watch movies here!
7: Jerri’s Tobacco and Wine
8: Tewksbury Tobacco and Wine
9: Enter here on bike
10: To library
SB: Starbucks

But with pedicabing, people expect you to know downtown better than a Google Map. When they say,

“Where’s a good place for 30-somethings, lively, but not crazy?”

I’m supposed to say,

“Oh, you may try The Firepot at 18th and Curtis, they have Latin jazz with mild 50’s-era undertones, but blues every Tuesday and Thursday. You can also check out Forest Room 5, tonight they’re featuring blah blah blah blah blah”

And so on ad infinitum.

Unfortunately, the places that people most like to go, bars and hotels, are places I know the least, me being a native and my idea of a good time being Egyptian Rat Slap with people who go to college in New England. It usually pans out like this:

Why don’t people play more Egyptian Rat Slap? It’s a quality game.