Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again

We've done it. Well, not completely, not even, not yet, but we're more here than we aren't.
What the fuck is he talking about?
Oh, we're moving. Gotta keep movin' doncha know....
We are moving our shop - Signs Of Life [In Roswell] from out of the ass end of the Roswell Space Center, which we, Sharon & myself, managed to make famous through the Associated Press news network this last summer, into a whole 'nother venue; another building about a hundred yards away from where we were, but now everything is going to be ever so much better thsn it ever dreamed of being before simply because we have way more space 7 It's all ours.

Happy Pagan Midwinter Holiday

We had a Welz family gathering in Kittery, Maine during parts of the holidays.
It was all my children & all my grandchildren. I'm the patriarch! That's something I never imagined imagining. It's all right. The kids are all right. None of them are screwups. I'm so proud. Jesse's in Santa Cruz with Sheyenne, who is 10 now. Selena's living in the Mission in San Francisco. The 3 of them took the same flight from SFO. Sharon & I flew out of ABQ at 11:30pm Christmas night.
We ate. We played games. We played Wii. We did karaoke. We had lobster & clam chowder. We went to the ocean. It was good.

I Was Really There

Behold! It is I - & I am It. I am there (well, I was there) & look! I'm on the other side of the monitor now! It's that guy, & he's at Burning Man™ out there on that playa thing with his silly bike. Silly bikes don't get stolen, according to my theory. That's a kid's BMX bike I bought for Zerek in Santa Rosa California when he was like 10 years old. It came to Roswell with us. Zerek rode it here once maybe twice, had a dramatic encounter with a strand of barbed wire & a lot of goatheads/puncture weeds near the mall. Then it sat out in our 5 acre yard northeast of town for 10 years or so, through rain, snow, dust, wind & high levels of ultraviolet radiation.
The extended seat post is a chromed clothes pole for a store, that happened to fit into the right orifices. It hasn't failed yet, but it will, it's already starting to go, I'm still in denial.
The seat is from an old 3-speed from Bakersfield in the 50s. Really. It was my brother's bike that ended up being mine. The seat is still here & functioning, a little frayed around the edges but unbelievably still retaining its basic structural integrity. Weird. I mean, it's not as if plastics were better back then. Or were they? I don't think so.
That's my brand new Tilley™ hemp hat; my Toon Glasses - my own creation (I got the idea from Greg Duncan years ago); my necklace made from the stubs of Dixon Ticonderoga™ Number 2 pencils that I killed drawing Cherry Comics; & my cop swat team boots that I got online from Galls™.
Notice the fresh gash in the leg from a rebar tent stake that I had just pounded in.
This was probably not too long after I had returned from the Summer Of Love Camp & decided to dismount while the bike was still rolling & did so quite gracelessly in an awkward pirouette that concluded with my going right over into the dust on my left side, scuffing up my elbows & knees some & doing something to something in my upper chest which I took to be a pulled muscle. A week later, after returning home I realized that it was actually a cracked rib. A few days after that I figured out that it was the rib that I had already cracked while trying unsuccessfully the 1st time to install that big Signs Of Life sign at this location.

This is where I ended up, in Stag Camp.

Here's some but not all of the Stag Camp campers.







This was my gift. Well, one of them, anyway. It's a cut vinyl sticker about an inch & a half or 2 inches across. It's the Green Man, I say. It's the Corporate Green Man. It's ironic, 'cause it's vinyl & vinyl ain't green. Everybody who received one or more liked it/them, or seemed to at any rate.

I'm going to Burning Man

I just robbed a grocery store. I'm going to Burning Man.
No, not really. I'm just paraphrasing the song by Dada, 'I'm going to Disneyland'.
But I really am going to Burning Man, by damn. I got my ticket an everything. The ticket's pretty.

Dude, you're gonna have a horrible time. Yer gonna die. It's an endurance run, yer too candy-assed an old for that kind of extreme shit.

I'm doin' it. Hey, I've been in weirder places before. I was in Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love. I ended up sleeping in a borrowed sleeping bag under a bush in Golden Gate Park with a car thief from Chicago (not in the same bag, okay?).

That was 40 years ago. Yer a fossil. You'll crumple up an die. Nobody'll like you, these kids hate old fucking hippies.

Hey, I was never a hippie. I was a Freak, & remain so to this day. Hippies were those kids that showed up on weekends & we'd try to sell them bags of oregano for $10, which is what an ounce of pot went for then.

You went through the whole Summer of Love an never got laid. When fall came, you were still a virgin. That's how lame you are.
But then I went up to Seattle with nothing but my guitar on my back, to be with my ladylove. Then I got laid! Then I went down to Venice to not be with her. I've got such stories! These kids today, they're smart. They're conscious of their culture & how it got there. Some of them are, anyway. They'll sense my wonderfulness & love me. My stories will be my gift. I'm gonna live forever!

Those aren't stories, they're anecdotes. Nobody cares. The occasion will never come up when any of them will have the time or the inclination to sit still long enough to listen to you ramble on about what a loser you are.
But I'm a world-famous 'underground' cartoonist! I'm already an Art Hero!

But yer stuff sucks. And what have you done lately that's even remotely cool?

Well, I did this great big mural on a wall in Roswell. Outer Space with lots of rocket ships & planets & asteroids.... It's right on Main Street!

Facing the other way!

Well, it's a zen thing that's what makes it extra cool, right?

Sure, but nobody cares.

People come from other parts of the world and they take pictures of it.

Yeah, that & three & a half bucks or so will get you a latté.

Hey, I still got it. I'll be okay.

No, you don't. No you won't. You're so not prepared. It's yer first time you don't even know what the fuck yer doin' & yer all by yerself. You got no one to depend on but you, & you suck! You have unrealistic expectations.

I know. Nothing ever turns out the way I think it's going to. So if I think the plane is going to crash, well, then it isn't, because... Anyway, I'm going to leave my expectations at the gate, just like they say to do.

But you have so many. You'll never be able to let go of...
Oh, shut up!

I don't have to.

For at least 5 years, probably much longer than that, I can't remember when or where I first heard about BM, I've been (not) experiencing it from this side of a 17" monitor. This year, now, soon, I'm going to climb through the looking glass and be on the other side. In it. Like the Grand Canyon: all the pictures you see of it, even a Circarama™ presentation in Disneyland™ are really nice, but don't give you anything of the feeling you get when you're standing on the edge of it, looking a mile down into the bottom of it & having it extending out from both sides of you farther than the eye can see, as the wind blows on you & all that. Not the same. I know that. I gotta do this. Even if it kills me. There are definitely worse ways to go. I'll bet.

Yer a jerk. Yer gonna hate it. They're just a bunch of rich assholes. Sticking their heads in the sand as the world goes to hell. Yer just gonna be perpetuating the idiocy.
Yeah, but there's all this really cool art that I just have to see!

Yer gonna hate it. It's gonna suck.
I know.

4th of July in Roswell

Now that Zerek has married Caryn & they have produced an offspring, we are part of a whole 'nother family.
Zerek completed his submarine school course in Groton, CN, so he got a break so he & Caryn & Elijah (Caryn's child from before, that's another story) & Cadence (Sharon's first biological grandchild) came to Roswell for the 4th of July.
So Cadence (They refer to her as Cadybug or Cady) was there with her mother, both of her grandmothers & 2 of her great-grandmothers.
I've never seen anything like that.
More photos here.

AP Roswell Story

Here's the piece AP did on the tchotchke trade in Roswell.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19637638/

It's Coming

Now it's actually summer which means the UFO Festival is almost upon us.
Gotta get ready. Gotta stock up. Get shirts printed. Make stickers. Get more done on the mural on the wall outside. That's what I'm doing right now at 2:00 in the morning. It's too hot during the day.
Anyway, here's the shirt art I did for Bob for the Roswell Runners club. It's my response to the art the '07 UFO Festival Committee is putting out as the main image for this year, meant to look like a pulp thriller paperback cover. I thought they were going for comic book cover which really pissed me off. So I did a real comic cover.