Sketches

Earlier today on Twitter, the hashtag #ialwayswantedtobea was trending. So, I tweeted: "#Ialwayswantedtobea cartoonist when I was a little kid. Used to really love drawing." And that's true, drawing was my first love, going all the way back to my elementary school days when my friends and I drew Pokemon all the time. I kept up drawing for quite a few years, planning to be a cartoonist when I grew up. But after my freshman year in high school, I started picking up other interests (music, theater, girls) and I put my drawing talents to the side.

Coincidentally, I found some old cartoons of mine while I was cleaning my room today. They were sketches of some characters I planned on making my first comic out of. There were no dates on any of them, but I remember coming up with them sometime in my 7th grade year at Arcadia Valley. Take a look!

They're very anime, that's what I was into at the time. There was a sixth character, a girl named Sami, but I can't seem to find her original sketch, which sucks because she was probably my favorite to draw (she had interesting clothes!). The comic was supposed to center around Terry's life as a high schooler, and his various escapades with his best friend Josh, his twin sister Sherri, and eventually Sami (she was a new kid at school and slowly befriends Terry's friends). Derrick was the class bully, who especially liked picking on Terry and Josh. Kenneth was an older kid who hung out with Derrick, but wasn't really the bullying type. He had more a laissez-faire personality.

Writing about these characters makes me miss them. Maybe I'll revive the comic this summer. Until then, I'll try to find some more of my old sketches of these characters. I think I still have the first strip somewhere...

Tattoo

The other day I was playing my guitar and singing some Golf Course Kamikaze songs (my local band started by my two younger brothers, my friend Henry, and I) when I had a revelation. One of our songs is called "King of Me," and as I was singing it, I realized that the title is eight letters long--just enough to be tattooed across my knuckles! That would make such a bad-ass tattoo! I thought. But as I looked down at the backs of my hands to visualize the tat, I also realized that it would look pretty weak on my scrawny little hands. So, I tossed the idea around and came up with this: placing it across the top of my back, just under my shoulders, and extending the phrase to You are not the king of me, completing a lyric from the song.

I haven't decided whether or not to actually get the tattoo. I'm an indecisive person, so getting something that permanent has never been too appealing to me. But now that I have an idea of something meaningful, something I'd actually want to stick with (King of Me is one of the first songs I ever wrote, a song I still love playing to this day, and I always want to remember the first band I was ever in), I'll consider getting the tattoo someday.

About this dream I had...

I had a sad dream last night. I wish it had been real. Well, not the part where I got a ticket for parking handicap, but the part that led me to Chase. I took my ticket (for some reason it was a small metal placard with my misdemeanor written on it) to the motor vehicle office in Ironton to get it processed, and while I was sitting at a table waiting for my turn (it was a small two-person table, and I vaguely remember a homeless-looking guy sitting across from me, but he didn't say or do much of anything) Chase happened to walk in. He came up to me with something in his hand. It was a piece of paper, a small comic he had made, and I can't remember exactly what the comic looked like, I do remember it being very funny and very amusing. But somehow it looked familiar to me. Then I realized it was based off a rough cartoon I drew in our Statistics class our senior year of high school, one I thought I threw away or something. Chase said he found my cartoon while digging through his old drawings and liked it so much he decided to draw his own rendition of it, adding more details and his own Chase Lindley cartoon flourish. I told him his version was really good, and tried to awkwardly cover for my cartoon's poor quality by saying I had to draw it quickly and discreetly so Mrs. Spitzmiller wouldn't catch me. But Chase was still cool, he said he knew what that was like, haha.

After we both laughed at that, we both fell silent. I was still sitting in my chair at the table while Chase was standing over it. Neither of us were looking at the other, avoiding eye contact like two kids who had fought each other over something stupid and realized they need to apologize to the other, but can't figure out how. Okay, so that's a very specific analogy, but that's exactly how the moment in my dream felt to me.

Chase broke the silence first. He said something about how our cartoons were really cool when we worked together, and how much fun he remembered having when we drew them. I told him I was thinking the same thing. That's when Chase asked if I wanted to draw some cartoons with him sometime. I said yeah. And we didn't have to draw the whole time, we could play video games, make a funny video, ride bikes, whatever. And I said I'd love to. I looked up at Chase and noticed he was carrying something else under the papers. I was shocked when I saw my favorite sock hat, the dark gray one with two black bands around it, a fat one and a thin one; I had lost it a long time ago and thought I'd never see it again. Chase told me he found it and thought I might be looking for it. I told him I was glad to have it back.

I remember Chase and I eventually leaving the motor vehicle office, but the rest of the dream gets kind of fuzzy after that. It didn't relate much to my encounter with Chase, anyway. When I woke up and realized the whole thing was a dream, I felt sorrow wash over me. I really wish that dream had been real, even the parking ticket part. I've known for a long time that I miss talking to Chase, and being close friends with him like were our senior year. After we graduated, our relationship somehow came to be defined by arguments on Twitter and Facebook. Reflecting on those arguments, I realized they mostly centered around our increasingly diverging ideologies--me, a growing atheist and Chase, a growing Christian--and they were mostly instigated by me. In retrospect, it's not hard for me to see that debates about the existence of God and the legitimacy of evolution were stupid and not worth the bad blood between us now.

I miss Chase. I miss the good times we had our senior year. To me, the dream I had last night is a representation of my longing for that friendship. I guess I could just text him or something. Kind of afraid of how awkward it might be. Sigh... whatever.