Carbunkletown. Population 789. Home to Mrs. Catsballs the contortionist, Father Pricklenuts the limp wrist, Frauline Gertude the snowglobe collector, Peter Sniffles the throat slasher.

789 residents: all different colors, some with herpes, some with stinkeye, all incapable of embracing emotion.

But down in the hollows of Carbunkleton, past Herman’s Booze Hut and a few stone throws from Porno Delight, lived a boy named Sigmund, and Sigmund loved music. He loved it more than the other 788 townsfolk, who turned the radio to the local Top 40 station only to block out barking dogs and dumpster-rummaging flaneurs. But they never listened to music to FEEL.

As he tacked up posters of his favorite bands, Sigmund would silently thank them for singing the words that swam in his heart, for screaming the cries that rattled inside his mind. He’d throw on records he found in neighbor’s garbage cans — discarded after they realized they might need to put effort into listening to it, that it wouldn’t go down nice and smooth like a swig of Pepto Bismol — and lay back in his bed, watching the hair on his arms stand up as the singer’s voice pierced through his heart with molted emotion.

Sigmund would excitedly run through the town square when he found a new band that made his heart quake. He’d try to implore the Widow Crotchbiter to listen, he’d tug on Jake the Smut Peddlar’s sleeve, tap Susie Chibbles on the back.

"Please, you have to listen to this band! They’re so good and full of emotion and they’re from Smugglesville and there’s this one song and and–"

"You’re so dumb, Sigmund," they’d laugh.

"Grow up, Sigmund," his co-workers would say.

"But, this record saved my life, seriously!" Sigmund would cry in defense.

"Music is for drowning out crying babies," his boss Patty Rumproast sighed when he asked for a night off to go see the Anal Probes play at a neighboring town. "And sometimes dancing to when you get drunk at weddings. Why would you want to actually FEEL something? That’s so stupid. YOU’RE stupid."

Slowly but surely, Sigmund put up his walls and stopped trying to express himself and stopped trying to share his love of music with his friends. He stayed inside his hut, listening to post-hardcore records with his headphones on, so he wouldn’t receive a citation from the out-pouring of emotion from his windows.

After time, his right eye swelled from the stress of bottling his feelings. Turned out his giant right eye really like synthpop, though.

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Original painting on a thick 8×8 wrapped canvas. Sigmund is loaded with texture and would make a great gift for your favorite misunderstood music-lover.

Making my desk prettier, with a side of bacon and eggs. Too bad my address is so blurry, was hoping to get new stalkers. Oh well. Maybe for Xmasz0rz.

EDIT: Oh Jesus Christ. Hang in there, Craigery. Fuck.

Urgent. Will die without reading.

• 09:41 I really hope I don’t die from a stabbing. I keep daydreaming about it though.
• 09:54 In the car, chooch & I flipped out at the same time over a passing playground; a good indication of my mental age.
• 20:19 It doesn’t feel like summer to me unless there’s swimming in the afternoon and horror movies at night.
  

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• 11:50 Today, chooch is really into storing things down my shirt. A bit uncomfortable.
• 11:53 Eric Nies and his fucking jumprope DVD can go anally probe themselves. My calves have welts from aerobic flaggellation.
• 11:55 Just bought 2 Lost Boys figurines for myself. I mean, for Chooch. He unforch doesn’t yet understand e-shopping & wants them NOW.
• 12:07  I don’t approve of any of the ppl looking at the vacant side of my duplex. Time to pull out the Viking metal & Satanist propaganda.
• 16:41 One of my co-workers is encouraging me to contact Corey Haim so he can see he’s in love w/ me. God I work with a bunch of enablers.
• 18:02 I asked Henry if he still thought I was pretty. His answer was "when your face is on my penis." Now that’s love.
• 20:48 Henry won’t get involved in bento box lunches because "those are so gay looking". Yeah but – so is he.
• 22:10 Kim had me blowing up balloons for some broad’s bday tomorrow, because she knows I blow hard. Now my fingers stink of balloon rubber.

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* Quite possibly one of the worst Internet services EVER. Mostly I end up doing these  manually because I’m too fucking OCD to say fuck it and drink a fucking Jack and Coke instead and OMG I’m clenching.

He seriously reminds me of Drop Dead Fred in the first picture, I don’t know why. No! More specifically, Rik Mayall’s character in The Young Ones. Now I feel better.

Was just outside on break, having Tina lecture me about how someday I’ll have to grow up (gasp) and that my thirtieth birthday is really going to hit me hard. I stamped my foot and was all, "Whatev! I want to wear Volcom hoodies and Draven shoes and cut out my heart to screamo music forev and ev."

Kim, on the other hand, prefers to perpetuate my immaturity and had me teaching her various Internet-spawned slang to give her vocab that added obnoxious touch. Basically, I just recounted all the things Christina and I say that started out satirically but now I think we say them in srs-ness; things that make Henry turn up the volume on the TV when she’s visiting.

We went through the regs: OMG, WTF, BTW. Sounding out LOL instead of saying L-O-L.  Adding z0rz to words to give a veritable face-punch of immaturity. Owellz0rz!

Tina kept grinding her teeth and groaning, "Oh Jesus Christ," proving the validity to my lesson. "Who talks like that?" she demanded in disgust, her weener likely growing more flaccid by the second. She’s probably hunkered down over her desk as I type this, ripping open more of her "bug bites" in Erin-induced agitation.

"Erin does," Kim said cheerfully, flipping her hair in mockery. "Now I know why she’s so quiet in our meetings — no one would know what the fuck she’s saying."

Walking back inside, I said, "You can also add -sies to the end of things for that extra ridic boost of cuteness. Lolsies!" They started ignoring me after that. It’s just as well — anything beyond that would likely be too advanced for them. Whatevelyn.

My parents were in the process of having a back porch built onto our house. This was a big deal for my brother Ryan and me, because stalking one of the workers became the sole reason we got out of bed each day. I mean really, who wants to swim and lay out in the sun when you can be violating someone’s privacy?

There was no real reason why we felt so intrinsically drawn to the sweaty laborer. He wasn’t good-looking, he didn’t sport a peg-leg, he wasn’t albino. He was just your average forty-something year old porch-builder with tinted eyeglasses, a farmer’s tan and a bushy moustache. I don’t even think he ever spoke to us. I mean, would you?

We would run from window to window, snapping pictures of him. Pictures from the kitchen, pictures from our parent’s bedroom, pictures bent around tree trunks. One day, Ryan even chased his truck up the street as he departed for home after a long grueling day of hammering nails and chugging Schlitz under the shade of a maple. I often wondered if our porch-builder had a good broad with a nice plump behind to nail, maybe cook him up a nice thick stew.

I’ll never forget the day we discovered his name was Gary. We ran into the house, erupting into shrieks and giggles. Our mom’s reaction was something akin to “Yeah, so?” accompanied by an eye brow raise. She always raised the eyebrow that bore a scar from when she was a baby and rolled off her bed, banging her face off the corner of the nightstand. I still can’t believe she never made up a better story, like how she was nicked by a gypsy’s butterfly knife the time she tried to steal cantaloupes off their wagon. When I was fourteen and viciously mauled by our psycho rabbit, you better believe I went back to school with a yarn about getting stabbed during gang initiation.

After a week of wasting film on this fine craftsman, we decided these clandestine snaps weren’t providing enough of a sociopathic rush. We needed more thrill, something that provided more of an instant gratification. When you’re young, you want souvenirs for everything you do: pocketed sugar packets from a truck stop diner, pebbles from the parking lot of the first sex shack your dad made you wait outside of, bloodied gauze from your first tooth extraction.

So the next obvious step clearly was to collect Gary’s cigarette butts and beer cans.

We waited until he’d go to his truck, then sprint out in the backyard like scavengers, picking through the grass in search of a butt or two. Once we accumulated enough to satiate our pursuant appetite, we brought our treasures in the house and stowed it underneath the couch in the family room. Like chipmunks storing acorns, crack heads hording rocks.

Stalking Gary consumed so much of our summer. So much that it infiltrated the summer of my friends, as well. My best friend Christy was out of town for some sort of academic camp. I wrote her a letter and enclosed one of Gary’s cigarettes butts for her to cherish as well. I just wanted her summer to be as rich as ours had become, thanks to Gary. I wrote letters to every one of my pen pals, detailing Gary’s every action and movement. Everyone clung to the Summer of Gary with bated breath.

Unfortunately, the fun and games ended when my dad unearthed our stash of purloined memorabilia under the couch. Now, any other dad would have rightfully accused us of smoking and drinking. Luckily for us, my dad recognized the extent of our weirdness long before this incident, so he believed our tale and we escaped punishment. The downside was that he forbade us to continue our game and pitched our pirated keepsake, muttering something about how we were embarrassing him or something.

I often wonder what Gary is doing these days, and if he knew he was being stalked. Was he flattered? I asked my mom: she said probably not.

At Lowe’s on the current. Henry wanted Chooch and me to stay in the car so he could just run in and buy a padlock for work. First Chooch started crying so Henry reluctantly unstrapped him and took him out of the car. Then I was like, "Me too" and boy was Henry ever frustrated.

In the lock aisle, I suggested Henry purchase a delightful lime green lock with an alpha passcode, which he would then naturally choose "tuna" as the secret word and then proceed to scream real loud.

But instead he chose to ignore me and spent several painful minutes pursing his moustachioed lips while perusing the selection with constipating seriousness. I made some comment coated with teenaged attitude about all locks being the same, to which Henry angrily responded with a boring lesson on the varying sizes of padlocks and what it all means.

Meanwhile, Chooch was running off with thieved merchandise from shelves and I was bitching about how boring it is at Lowe’s. "This is why I wanted both of you to stay in the car!" Henry barked.

Then some dude with a limp, a protruding lip, and the general demeanor of a kid who spent his childhood making bombs and having no friends, came over and attempted to make two keys for Henry’s golden padlock of choice, but failed because he was too busy staring at my boobs and plotting the demise of our Nation to find the key code on the package. Not sure if there’s any correlation there.

On our way out, an elderly Lowe’s employee with icy blue eyes said "thank you" but I thought she said "Bury a deer."

Urgent. Will die without reading.

• 09:56 and hey, the walls are going back up. #
• 18:52 I like how GayT&T waits until AFTER I pay my balance to suspend my service. And by AFTER I mean THREE HOURS AFTER. #
• 19:37 A good way to kill yourself might be choking on a handful of wasabi peas. Oh, nevermind; I thought you were asking. #
• 20:25 I hate when I mistake my bangs for a nimble assassin, creepin’ on ah come up. #
• 21:37 SaucAY. #
• 21:29 A thought: Perhaps if I stop sitting at my desk like a five-year-old, I might stop falling out of my seat so much. #
• 22:24 I’m pratfalling all OVER this bitch tonight. I feel like I should travel with a laugh track.#

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• 08:42 Deer urine is available for purchase???? I learn A LOT from Henry. #
• 09:11 Chooch is afraid of ice cream scoopers for some reason. Probably not bc I said I was going to scoop his eyes out with it though.#
• 09:43 Lewis acquired a new friend today. His name is Jonny. I predict some fabulous double dutch in the fyootcha. #
• 12:43 I never knew TicTacs could sound so nerve-raping until one wound up in Chooch’s mouth. #

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I wanted to go to an amusement park, but all Henry gave me was a shitty playground.

Urgent. Will die without reading.

• 16:36 If cheese curds ever had to go on trial, I’d make the best defense attorney. If you ignore the fact that I have no degree. #
• 18:35 I guess I’m never comfortable. #
• 19:00 Somehow, someway, Tina and I are arguing about the actor Robert Conrad being hot or not. #
• 19:02 Apparently, I never should have mentioned Battle of the Network Stars. #
• 20:48 Plants make me sick. Get your own fucking water.#

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• 09:00 Chooch hurt his head on building block. We spent the next 15 min doing what any reasonable ppl would: sodomizng it, calling it bastard. #
• 15:50 Ten years since the best summer of my life. Still basically the same girl, except now I wear a bra. Every day. #
• 16:10 If I had a city, it would definately be built on cash & swagger. #
• 18:17 Its been a long time since I’ve yodeled. #
• 18:19 I just noticed that somewhere along the way, I lost several yards of the flesh drapes that hung from my chin. #
• 18:39 Tonight I learned that Tina is a pediatric authority. Need baby advice? GO ASK TINA. #
• 21:05 I’m not doing anything right now, but i can tell you with utmost honesty that on August 23 i will BE DYING. IN THE BEST WAY.#

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Darnell and Yolanda’s love had been on the fritz for the past 17 months, starting back when Darnell fathered a love child with the neighbor’s milkmaid and started stealing Yolanda’s pearls to meet his child support payments.

When Yolanda found out, she cared less about the pearls and more about the fact that Darnell had used Mountain Dew as an excuse for his inability to impregnant her. "Baby, my sperm count is drastically lowered from doin’ so much Dew." Turns out he was secretly using condoms because he was afraid that any offspring they might produce would inherit Yolanda’s lazy eyes, eczema, and blizzarding dandruff.

One balmy afternoon, after months of terse salutations and a frustrating sexy time hiatus, they finally decided to quit ignoring the skeletons in the closet;  and so, they dove right in to a wet, sticky and vulgar imbroglio.

They screamed things like: "You’re a good for nothin’ triflin’ HOBAG!" and "Oh my BAD, I thought that was your baby mama callin’ you but it’s just a STRAY CAT!"

At the end of the seventh hour, they stood in the kitchen, chests heaving with a polarizing combination of adrenaline and exhaustion. Yolanda did it first: using a butter knife, she made a calculated incision between two ribs and scooped out her heart with her palm like it was a chunk of melon for a fruit salad.

Darnell followed suit and the war of the roses ended with two abused, trampled hearts, discarded and stewing in a pool of coagulating blood on the linoleum.
 

Little does Darnell know, Yolanda has been moonlighting at the burlesque club, patiently saving money to pay for the hit she plans to put out on his stank cheatin’ ass.
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PLEASE NOTE: My scanner was acting like a crabapple, so I had to take actual photographs of this. It doesn’t do it justice, I promise. The areas where it looks like the paint is thin, that’s just glare from that stupid sun.

Original painting on a 5×12* piece of gallery-wrapped canvas. Sides are unstapled and painting so it’s ready to be hung as is!

Can be found HERE with all my other fine (haha) wares.

(* I measured this myself so God only knows what the measurements really are.)

Ice cream does that to me sometimes, too, Chooch. Maybe closer to all the time, if we’re playing truthsies.

Urgent. Will die without reading.

• 13:23 About to book a flight to LA to make Corey Haim my man. Henry doesn’t seem concerned enough to stop me. IM COMING, COREY!!! #
• 15:01 I love my jump rope so much, I named him. Say hello to everyone, Lewis. SAY HELLO. #
• 17:17 Omg it must be arthritis. So much for my handjob career, motherfuck. #
• 17:32 Tina got another one of those hot Rambo haircuts. #
• 17:33 Or maybe she was just wearing a helmet all day? #
• 22:13 Henry’s always right. Gonna post a MySpace bulletin about him being an Oracle, see if it catches on. "Yeah, just talk to the ween, yo." #
• 12:18 Trying to talk Henry into getting cooler shoes so he’ll look like less of a geezer at Warped. I’ll make him over yet. #
• 12:31 Chooch on the current: perusing the Victorias Secret catalogue while punching his head & laffing hysterically. Puke is on horizon. #

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“My back feels a lot better today,” I said in lieu of ‘hello’ when Henry came home from work. “Probably because I put ice on it today, and stretched a lot.”

“Yeah, probably. It couldn’t be because I RUBBED IT FOR AN HOUR AND A HALF last night,” Henry said, pushing past me.

And with that, I went back to plotting my scheme to win Corey Haim’s heart, while Henry robotically prepared my dinner for work tonight. What? I swear Henry and I are in love! He just bought me sparkly Converse, even.

Urgent. Will die without reading.

• 17:54 At my brothers grad party and wished aloud to still be 18. Henry said "You pretty much are." #
• 09:40 I took an immediate liking to one of Coreys friends yesterday. Of course it would be the guy who’s in and out of rehab. #
  

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• 14:33 My nerve is tired of being pinched. #
• 14:52 Doctor Henry has been having me apply heat to back since last week. Today I learned from medical sources: heat is beat, ice is nice. #
• 15:42 Oh god, doctor Henry is trying to drug me now. #
• 16:23 Henry gave me a pill, said it was acetamiblahblah, waited until I swallowed and said "or it could have been stool softener." FUCKER. #
• 17:25 Brutal desire to stick a fucking needle into where it hurts on my back. #
• 21:37 Positive my kid just called me Erin. Thank god he doesn’t know that most people just call me ho. #
• 23:41 Let the Rocky DeSade nightmares commence. #

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