page after page of ashtrays

Ants! Oh lord, the ants! They’re everywhere! They came for the cat food and stayed for the dishwasher, and now we’ve got thousands of the fellers running around this ol’ place, doing unmentionable ant things like walking in lines and finding food and eating food and… uhh… making and feeding and raising baby ants somewheres under the floorboards and stuff.

Last night we changed their diet, from food to poison, so everything should be wrapped up in a nice little package before too long. My landlady set out little cardboard squares with delicious puddles of poison, but those quickly ran out. I cut up an old box of Girl Scout cookies, carefully cutting out the girls’ faces so the ants will see them as they feed and be paralyzed with terror.

Besides that, not much new to report. Crystal Mountain has gotten four feet of snow in the last week, it’s been raining here since last Friday, Brian and Miriam are now on their way to the Olympic Peninsula, Storyhill is playing in Portland this Friday, and for the last couple weeks I’ve been subsisting on little more than sugar and caffeine.

I’ve also found an outlet for my rage and anger, and that outlet is sketching. Do you know how difficult it is to draw human characters in natural-looking poses? It’s difficult enough to make a man sketch an ashtray. Maybe the ashtray is overflowing by now, out of frustration with trying to draw characters. One might even say it’s a mighty fine ashtray, but at the end of the day it’s still an ashtray.

What of tomorrow? Certainly not more ashtrays? I mean, how many ashtrays could you possibly need? Well. Perhaps you need as many as it takes to master poses and character drawing.

Something is now tugging at the outside door to my room. This door opens up to the roof. I hope it is the wind or a jabberwocky.