Sketchbook: Little Rascals

One thing I'd like to do more of with this blog is share little glimpses of my sketchbook with you from time to time. It gives me more motivation to sketch, and it offers you a nice little break from surfing for midget porn, spamming Twitter with ads for your "all otter-fisting, all the time" website, or whatever it is you do when you're hunched in your cubicles, pretending to work.

Living in the city has its ups and downs. Some of the downs include the high property tax, the garbage in the gutters and getting gang-stomped by 16 grade-schoolers while walking to the Rite Aid for a Snickers. One of the ups is that you occasionally see some fucknuts-crazy shit going on.

Sal and I were heading to the Home Depot a few months ago, and along the way we passed one of the local middle-schools. We must have gotten there just as school was letting out. All along the road there were rowdy packs of kids heading home. We slowed down so as not to mow down any of the precocious little fuckers darting out into the street when I saw it: today's aforementioned fucknuts-crazy shit.

It was a little old lady on one of those Rascal Scooters, the kind you see on TV and buried underneath morbidly obese people in Wal-Mart. I guess it was Grandma's turn to pick the kids up from school, because this is what we saw:


(You can click the picture if you'd like to see it bigger.)

I freakin' love this town.

One day you'll look back on this and laugh. On second thought, fuck "one day." Please laugh NOW.

Much like that time the guy who broke into your house and raped your dog got released from prison, I am dragging myself back into the public eye for a completely unwanted and unasked for comeback.

Well, "unasked for" isn't completely true. This return to blogging has actually been repeatedly asked for. In fact, it has been pleaded for, but only by Karla, who hardly counts as a decent representative of the blog-reading public. Karla hasn't actually been considered a "decent" anything since she spread a raging case of herpes throughout her third-grade class.

Why Karla is so desperate for me to come back to the blogging world is quite beyond me, considering that she spends about 65% of her blog real estate vociferously claiming to hate me the way that children hate the dentist, or the people of Texas hate... well... Karla.

All of this is rather moot anyway, as when I say I'm returning to the public eye, the "public eye" pretty much consists of Karla. You knew I was going to say that, didn't you? That's because if you're reading this, you are Karla.

I suppose it's possible that one or two unsuspecting internet denizens might have stumbled across this blog while sweatily googling "naked Asian chick fellating a donkey," (Well, now that'll show up in the Google searches...) and I imagine that I'm probably obligated to provide those people with some kind of actual content. So let me tell you about a valuable lesson I learned.

By the way, when I say I'm about to tell you a valuable lesson, that's code for "here comes a story you didn't want to hear and will get nothing out of."

A few months ago I attended a community meeting with the local police. It was one of those things where the cops gave everybody a run-down of crime in the area, people asked questions... On the whole a good experience. Not long into the evening however, I noticed a deaf woman sitting in the front row. I noticed she was deaf for two reasons. One, she had a sign-language interpreter sitting with her, translating everything that was said, and two, she was extremely pretty.

I don't mean to imply that her attractiveness somehow clued me in to her deafness. I mean to imply that her attractiveness was the only reason I cared she was deaf. If she had looked like most of the women in the room, which is to say like a lifetime supply of coffee and heroin had somehow grown arms and legs and thrown on a rubber crypt keeper mask, I would have been far too disinterested to notice the interpreter and put two and two together. But she didn't look like that at all. She looked like Jessica Alba had a four-hour make out session with a Porsche 911. Needless to say, when I first noticed her my thought process went something like this:

1) Hey, she's really pretty.
2) Hey, she's got a woman signing everything at her. She must be deaf.
3) Hey, she'd never hear me sneaking up behind her. I need to find out where she lives.

When the question and answer portion of the evening arrived, Hottie McDeafDeaf had her hand raised from the get go. She kept it raised while other concerned citizens asked about police patrol schedules, mugging statistics and night time safety. When, after 20 minutes, the Major in charge finally pointed to her, the entire room became supremely attentive in that way that you only do when the disabled speak, or try to walk, or limp. Whatever. Every person in that room was sending a clear message with their unwavering eye contact that said "We see you, deaf girl. We see you and love you because you are deaf and we would never think you are weird or mildly disturbing." When a deaf person speaks it is much the same as when the only over-40 black woman in an otherwise all-white movie speaks. You know she's going to bring some serious wisdom.

And so, of course, when she finally had the floor, Hottie McDeafDeaf spent 10 minutes bitching and whining about some $30 parking ticket she had gotten. Through her interpreter no less, which meant that not only was she wasting everybody's time, but she was forcing this poor interpreter to play the part of the miserable douche for her. As I sat there watching everyone's eyes roll back in their heads as we entered the 11th minute of Deafwhineapalooza it hit me:

The disabled are assholes.

Not the best moral to end on, I grant you, but I've been away for a while.