This is my art, and it is dangerous! Do you think I want to die like this?!

Ok, something is weird out there. I positively flew to work this morning. There's more traffic at 3am on the way back from the Angelika than there was this morning. It was like Christmas morning on the road or maybe a half-step away from the opening of 28 Days Later. Ok, maybe not that bad. Seriously, I am aware that Oct 9 is Columbus Day, but wtf? Does Columbus day merit a 4-day weekend for everyone but me? I'm also a little worried about what that means here at work. Either we'll be intolerably slow (which is a little bad since I cranked out nearly everything yesterday...though I should mention I managed to smuggle in my own stuff to work on, shhh...ok, no one here cares) or hella busy and Mark is out of town and I will want to hurt people. I guess I usually want to hurt people anyway (the kind who come in here, at least), but his abscence merely exacerbates the problem.

Anyhoo. The other night we got to hit our local Spirit Halloween Store, which Mob knows D was dying to find, and brought home a wispy-shroud-clad skeleton creature we seem to keep calling "Tom." He lives in front of our house along with some bloody gooey hands on the glass. It's getting there. I'm eager for my lamp to come back from repair so I can light him, complete with a little thunder and flicker and fog. I do kinda wonder what Fiona and Sophia will make of the whole eerie entryway...oh well, they can come through the garage! That way's child-friendly.

Also nearly polished off the whole of the new Cinemaslave episode #63 this morning. Joe does seem to be having an impressively bad week. As one car-strut-impaired friend to another, I feel at least some of your pain! The whole insurance debacle seems to put even the car problems in a lesser light, though. That's hard to do! But it was a great episode (and great to get a mention, I've even been hankering for some MiSTie this week, as a matter of fact. Have Santa Claus Conquers the Martians on the brain, don't ask...)!

I did not paint the dork room again last night...instead I had to take one of my prints back to christing Hobby Lobby, where the dickheads had somehow managed to trap moisture between the print and the glass, ruining the print. I took it back to a different location, where we were helped by perhaps the scariest woman in customer service of all time. We stood there while she yelled at another customer who was saying one of the prints she was picking up wasn't hers (and the customer was by no means hostile or unhappy, merely explaining she wouldn't be taking it). "Oh yes it is, ma'am, but that's fine, if you don't want it you don't have to claim it. I'll sell it, that's fine!" With tone and volume like these words simply cannot convey. I just stood there, like you do when a co-worker gets reamed in front of you and all you can do is stand there. But on the flip side, she did seem to know what she was doing. AND she's going to replace the print herself and have the store reimburse her. I decided I'll take scary bitches who know what they're doing anyday over incompetent fuckwits. Still, any time longer than five minutes in Hobby Lobby makes me want to take a bath.

Then it was over to my friend's house while he was at work to leave him roses and a book by his porch. He's been so depressed lately he has trouble getting out of bed (yes, he is planning on a trip to the doctor). And since his woes are mostly female-centric, laced with the fact that he's not too big on being on his own (especially in his new house), the book was Jean-Paul Satre's No Exit, to remind him that "Hell is other people." But the roses are for cheer, so hopefully that's not one massive mixed signal. I mean, I guess Satre doesn't really go with roses (live ones, anyway), but he loves philosophy and has never read it (if memory serves), so there you go. They were really cool roses, too, yellow with red edges. And in case he missed the display on his drive into the garage in the early AM, we bought the tackiest fucking candy corn (with a goddamn smiling face on it) helium balloon and tied it to it.

So that was our evening. The remainder of it was brought to us by Domino's and Desperate Housewives. No actual work was spotted.

Ok, everyone, the day is crawling by. If the owner weren't so heavily medicated and sloth-like, I might seriously be afraid of a very Little Shop of Horrors moment in which he would become Mr. Mushnik, throw up his arms and yell, "Ok, that's it! Go home, don't bother coming in tomorrow, we're closing the shop for good!" And then I'd have to figure out if I were the Audrey or Seymour of that scenario (Seymour's got better songs, after all), and frankly that's way too much effort for the way the day's going.

And now I have "Welcome to the Jungle," in my head. For. No. Reason. At. All.