"Consessions on the Struggle Bus"
18 May 2026I'd like to be completely honest and up-to-date here. Life these past two weeks has been difficult.
Offline, I'm an overnight warehouse worker, and I've been working that job for about five years now. Before then, I worked other jobs that also took a physical toll on me, but the thing is, as we age, we weather those tolls a lot less gracefully. This is especially the case for people who, as kids, were very agile and did a lot of physical activity. I was a tree-climber, a roof-climber, a barn-climber, a headstand enthusiast, a dancer, a skater, and a self-styled contortionist (mainly because I didn't realise that flexibility was both a temporary blessing and a ticking time bomb).
So I have worsening degenerative chronic pain that effects how long I can work, stand, lift, push, pull, or even complete everyday household chores. This, as you can imagine, has been a constant frustration between my bosses and me. On the morning of May 8th, I found myself in so much pain I had to stop work. I'm not usually very forward or public with my emotions, but I was in so much pain that I cried.
After a confusing, distressing, and stunningly ablist back-and-forth, I left the building and went home. That night, I went back to work, but refused to go on the floor until I had words with leadership, specifcally HR. My department operations manager also asked if I'd be willing to share my concerns with him, which I did. In the end, HR decided to send me home, I used the last vacation hours I had to get at least some pay for the week, and I was told to not come back until I'd updated my disability accommodations paperwork.
If you're unaware, accommodations paperwork is something that sounds great in theory, but is frustrating, expensive and often unhelpful in practice. In my case, my doctor and I had to explain to the company why I, a disabled person, should be allowed to utilise the same short-term care facility that every other employee is allowed - even actively encouraged - to access. Strange, I know. That's corporate for you.
In the meantime, I was in a lot of pain, so I tried something I don't usually enjoy - a hot saltwater bath. Because I don't take them often enough to remember what not to do, and I haven't been swimming in years due to gender dysphoria and most pools being closed at night, I forgot that putting one's head underwater is a great way to get otitis externa... Swimmer's Ear.
So when I saw a doctor last Tuesday to speak about my accommodations paperwork, I also had to ask her about the stabbing pain in my right ear. She took a look, said, "Oh, yeah, that's pretty red," and sent me home with a five-day cycle of Azithromycin.
The following day, I was taking not only the Azithromycin, but also a metric fuckton of Advil, as well as applying warm compresses and even attempting a hydrogen peroxide ear flush, all to no avail. I was still in so much pain that I could feel it in my elbows and ankles. I called the doctor I'd seen the day before begging for help. She wrote me a prescription for Tramadol - an opiate. Of course, opiates are nothing to fuck around with, so I thought it might finally grant some relief, being a big bad scary awful restricted drug and all that. I just needed to be careful and follow the instructions to the letter.
This is where the first concession occurred. I knew already that driving in my state would be miserable, so I prepaid for the prescriptions and tried to find someone who could pick them up for me. My roommate is terrified of the intersection where my pharmacy is, so they weren't an option. Several other people were either at work, stuck home with children, or out of town... but two of them weren't. My good friends and neighbors, Adri and Owen, were immediately down to help get my medication to me. Thank goodness for community.
Thanks to them, I was able to start the new pain medication. I tried to believe so hard that it was working for the rest of the day, but around midnight, my mind turned to work and I broke. I went to the ER. After an oral steroid medication for the swelling and trying to pry my ear open long enough for medicatied drops to trickle into the canal, only for my ulnar nerve to get pinched and cause me to jump, startling the hell out of myself and the attending nurse, I was sent home with yet another two prescriptions - a combination antibiotic and steroid pill and some gentler but still effective ear drops that should grant me some actual relief.
I was also sent home with a doctor's note advising me to not return to work until Monday, meaning I'd miss another week of work. Even while trying my best, I couldn't heal up faster than the ER doctor predicted. My ear infection is finally under control now, but I still can't hear out of it. I'm sure it'll only get better with time.
Still, I could see that financial void on the horizon, and it was approaching fast, so I put all of my artwork and carvings up for sale. It's all I could think to do.
My oath-brother who art in College Station, hallowed be their pseudonym, Possum, swooped in to help out as the second concession. They get their pick of the lot, and the first one I'm setting aside for them is Strange Lady. The third concession was a dear elder in my local gaming and history nerd circle, Andie, who's getting both the bird and the two-toned dagger in the mail as soon as I can package them up.
I am so deeply grateful to all of my people mentioned in this post. Adri, Owen, Possum, and Andie, I love you all. We are all in precarious times here, living in a region that has actively and blatantly put a target on our backs, be it for our queerness, disability, classification or otherwise. When the rest of the country forgets about us weird little southern goblins, we remember and keep each other going. I am proud of the friendships we've built, and I thank you again for your willingness to step up and help me when I needed it. I hope you'll grant me the opportunity to return the favor someday. ♡
"Site Updates"
11 May 2026I finally decided how I want to display my handcrafts from my watercolors!
And before anyone wonders, yes, I am still working on the gallery page and category subpages. It's just been a hot minute since I had access to my laptop, and charging the battery on this old pal is still like attempting a heart transplant through an earthquake. This is especially the case when the cats decide they want to participate.
The basic plan for the category sorting is a bit convoluted, and I know for sure there's a better way to do it; I just have zero interest in figuring it out. I can't help it. I'm a cantankerous old man who's stuck in his ways, and while his ways may frustrate the wiser and younger and perhaps even drive them to despair, those ways are his ways, and he doesn't want to have to learn any other ways until he's damn good and ready. So I'll spare you the details! Just pretend it's 2000 again, and it'll all feel perfectly in character, I promise.
As for the handcrafts, I don't have the same quality photos for all of them, unfortunately. Two, the heart and the kriss knife, have already gone to other people and are therefore out of range for fresh pictures. I plan to use the same background when photographing future projects, though, so that should grant some nice consistency over time. Until then, just ignore those two little crappy transparent PNGs at the bottom of the page there, lol. You don't see shit. Look at the pretty stars.
I do plan to make many more pieces, but first, I need to restock my woodpile and get some of my newer watercolor paintings posted to the gallery. I promise I haven't stopped painting or drawing! I just needed to work on improving my carving for a bit, and that involved more than a few accidental slashes until I found a good pocket sharpener.
Look forward to more changes and improvements to this website, going live whenever I get around to publishing them! :)
OH! I've also been enjoying more audiobooks. I finally got around to listening to some of the more classic Stephen King books, my favorite so far being Misery — which I think is everyone's? I hate to be a basic bitch, but y'know, quality is quality.
I somehow managed to go my whole life avoiding spoilers for the genuinely interesting details of the book, and while I have nothing but respect for Kathy Bates' performance, I'm still not entirely sure I'm ready to see the movie after enjoying the book. Idk if you can really portray the same level of horror without, well... I wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone else, but I don't remember anyone telling me about the excellent gore effects in the adaptation. Sorry, Kathy, but breaking some ankles just ain't the same.
"Resurrection!"
9 May 2026I live!!!
After months of trying to find a solution to my laptop's power problem, I finally figured out just the right angle for the powercord. Now, with a fully charged battery (for now), I can finally get enough screen space to update these pages! I simply can't trust my smartphone screen for these things, especially since my cellphone has developed some issues too. The touchscreen will suddenly stop responding, and because of the way smartphones are designed, all I can do is shut down and restart it until the touchscreen finally wakes up again.
In other news, my favorite steampunk festival has been canceled this year! Genuinely devestating, tbh, and it's all down to real estate bullshit. It turns out that the land attendees were using as a parking lot was land the festival owner was renting from his neighbor, and the neighbor recently decided to sell the land. The new owner, for reasons I can't fathom, refuses to continue the rental agreement due to "having plans" for the field... which is gonna be awful strange for him, I can only imagine, having land literally less than a road's-width away from the beautiful, weathered two-story reception building of the festival he fridged.
I wonder what he thinks he can even do with that land, tbh. Or thinks he can do. There's gotta be a reason the original owner was happy to rent it as a parking lot, and not all plots of land are good for much.
I know this mainly because my mother's family, being farmers, had various plots of land when they died that needed to go somewhere. My grandmother in particular had a few plots that she'd been renting out as grazing areas to neighboring livestock owners until she died, because, well... there wasn't much else to be done with the place. IIRC, the ground was dry, getting running water there would be too expensive to bother, you couldn't build on it, and you couldn't farm on it —— something about the soil quality. Still, the taxes on the land had to be paid, making it a money sink rather than just a benign piece of land my family had rights to. While it would have been ideal to keep it in the family, in case we needed it, my mom sold it for a low price, just so she wouldn't be losing what little money my family had worked for to a piece of land she couldn't do anything with.
I wonder if this is at all a similar case to what's happened to this other land. If that's the case, perhaps the new owner will have realised by next year that he got duped into buying a rotten hot potato, and may either begin renting the field to the festival again, or perhaps just offer to sell it for dirt cheap so this problem doesn't get kicked down the road any further.
Either way, I will very much miss my November lighthouse. I've looked forward to that festival as a reason to get through every year for quite a while now, and while there are other festivals like it, I don't know... It just wouldn't be the same. My usual crew are talking about a camping roadtrip in November anyway, just to keep the routine alive. It might be a decent solution in the short run. Hell, at least with it just being a plain camping trip, we could go wherever we want and find the nicest, coldest, crispiest campsite in Texas, with plenty of tree cover and perhaps even a nearby lake so we can enjoy the sound of lapping water in the early morning.
Perhaps I'd run less of a risk of coming home sunburned this November. :D
"Anxiety Rampant"
29 Oct 2025As November rapidly approaches, my brain feels more and more like a wheelchair tipped over on its side, still spinning its wheels just trying to feel useful. There's so much to get done, so much to pack and unpack, so much to prepare for, so many precautions, planning, repairs, etc. And I keep forgetting to actually find the time to focus on getting my garb ready for the event.
Thankfully, I don't think much has changed about it since last year - Cloak, straw stetson, black shirt, frayed cheap vest, black denim jeans (which need replacing), and of course, the kit belt with the grenade pouches and spell supplies. I've also got some nice grey leather spats this year (given to me by a friend). It's all just a matter of finding everything, making sure it's all washed, repairing that damn lantern prop, and making sure everything's packed up in a smart and accessible way.
I also need to take inventory and locate the camping stove, tent, sleeping bags, camp hygiene supplies (waterless toothbrushes, body wipes, first aid basics, heat shakers) and cooking tools. I love camping and I love this festival tradition, I even love the excitement and strange calm of long-distance driving, but oh my godddddddddds I do not handle the preamble to any kind of major event with grace.
Hell, I've been known to snap and bring people I care about to tears with a single look or a few words when it's Go Day, regardless of whether they're even the source of frustration, just because my brain starts turning into a cornered, feral animal who has only two thoughts: Leave me the fuck alone and I will bite the next external object in this environment that so much as breathes in my direction before even seeing what it is. I know it's kind of old-hat by this point for queers to compare themselves to racoons, opossums and so on, but the way I handle stress on Go Day is very similar to the way a cornered rodent will hiss and snarl warnings at anything that moves before finally biting at the next thing that touches them, be it a child's finger, a blanket, or the head of a broom.
My goal for this year's festival adventure is to not cause any of my travel companions to get caught in the crossfire of that panic. We all deal with enough shit at home; I don't need to causing even slightly similar shit at the festival, regardless of whether or not it's ever been intentional.
That's how I view my part in such incidents. It doesn't matter if I meant to be hurtful, if that frustrated sigh or snarky tone was intended to be taken as a personal sting or not. I and every other person with mental health struggles that result in us lashing out instead of coping responsibly might say, truthfully, that lashing out was because of PTSD, anxiety, OCD, being overwhelmed or overstimulated, etc., but that's only half of what happens. We still have an opportunity before every lash-out to choose what we do. We can choose to stop and be silent, to take a few breaths and tell the people around us that we're overstressed and need a moment alone, or we can choose to let go of the reigns and leave our behavior up to whatever will give us temporary satisfaction. It's a choice to direct that steam at other people, as opposed to putting safety first so nobody gets burned.
And when we do burn someone, that is our fault. Intention doesn't matter if harm was still done. When such a thing happens, when our actions hurt others unintentionally, it's our responsibility both as friends and fellow human beings to take ownership of the flaw, hear the complaint, and debug.
I really hope I've successfully debugged and rewritten what needed rewriting, because I can already feel the stress building up, and I have no intention of repeating past behavior.
"Busy in a Not-Bad Way"
21 Oct 2025Long time no update! The Queen has a new battery, two new tires, and just needs two fresh air filters (cabin and engine) and a good, thorough de-junking, and she'll be ready to run! In that process, I'll be able to organise everything I need for Tibor this year and mend whatever needs mending.
Work has been kicking my ass lately, hence the lack of updates, but on the bright side, it's given me the opportunity to enjoy more 40K audiobooks. I've completed "Horus Rising", "False Gods", "Galaxy in Flames", and "Flight of the Eisenstein"; now I just need to find a good source for "Fulgrim" and continue from there. The books really are well written, and the audiobook performances are excellent (save for the voice given to Euphrate in FotE, but in fairness, not every male VA can voice a female character without making her sound more like an old crone than a young photographer-turned-saint).
I've also been enjoying some more-obscure-than-usual horror content. For example, the animated short film "Dear Beautiful", which I honestly might have to watch a few more times to fully dissect the themes and ideas inside it. There's definitely an aspect of domestic abuse and mental health, and I'd be lying if I didn't wonder at least for a few scenes if the story hadn't taken some inspiration from "The Yellow Wallpaper". Take a look for yourself and tell me what you think via my guestbook!
I haven't stopped drawing or painting, of course, so there are plenty of pieces to come in gallery updates! I've been leaning into my spookier side, fittingly enough, and cannot wait to share them all with you. One of them so far is nice and gory, and I plan on leaning a little more into that aspect for at least one more before the end of the month!
Say hello to your pets for me. :)
"Time Moves Fast"
29 Sep 2025So the car needs a new MAP sensor and a new battery. I've got the MAP sensor. Now all I have to do is coordinate with someone who drives a car (my roommate drives a bike) so they can jump my vehicle to life once I figure out where I'm going to get that battery replacement.
In other news, one of my favorite outdoor festivals is fast-approaching! It's something I look forward to every year, no matter what's going on in the world. I cannot wait to strap on my garb and carry my deity-trapping prop lantern around the event, performing and improvising as my time-traveling mercenary demonologist OC. With how hot it's been on this side of the territory, I cannot wait to be up there in the colder climate, sleeping on a picnic blanket in freezing weather with nothing overhead but the stars and juniper branches. The smell of pan-fried caramel apples cooked over a gas camping stove, my friends climbing groggy out of the tent like the dead digging themselves out of the dirt because sleep be damned, the feral farm kittens smelled breakfast and are just comfortable enough to start cuddling up to the quieter campers...
It's really moments like those that make the rest of the year worth surviving.
And that's not even all there is to look forward to! Last year, I met with a friend of mine from an old fund-raising group and discovered that their current operation, exclusive to this event, was struggling to get dependable volunteers for the cast. Since I already knew the basics of the job and had worked with them before, they asked if I wouldn't mind joining their crew for that day "for old times' sake". My group ended up staying a whole hour longer than we'd planned and had a blast helping out and supporting the fund-raising crew. Long story short, this old friend then invited me to join back up for this year!
So of course, my OC will absolutely be there, ready to help and perform as a bounty-chasing mercenary who has agreed to be on the side of local authority solely because the money's good and he's been in a bit of a financial dry spell lately. His name is Tibor Vavra, technically a villain but mostly the adaptive and self-serving kind. He would double-cross the gods themselves (and has, just ask him about that lantern) if he believed it would substantially benefit him.
But in order for Tibor to be there for the crew, his creator needs to get those new parts and make sure the skrunkle queen is good to go for at least ten hours of long-distance driving down all kinds of roads.
Hell, last year, the drive home took more like ten hours because we kept missing turns in the dark, my astigmatism wasn't diagnosed or treated, we were all exhausted, and of course it was dark and foggy out and the GPS sent us down empty tree-lined gravel roads winding through cow pastures in the middle of rural nowhere while I replayed the first season of Old Gods of Appalachia - a horror anthology podcast that might not be suitable for all audiences - in an attempt to spook myself awake. I truly believe that if it weren't for the small isolated gas station we found where I stocked up on energy drinks to swish around and absorb into my gums, I'd have fallen asleep at the wheel and we would have crashed somewhere in nowheresville and probably not died, but been really scratched up and almost definitely in need of emergency services.
So yeah, this year, we're going to add a cheap overnight stay at some off-brand motel to the budget so that we can travel home in the daytime after a hot shower, a change of clean clothes, and a proper, restorative Long Rest. :D
"Old Gray Horses"
23 Sep 2025Well, the water damage is still present, but it hasn't got any worse and it did stop dripping! There's some positive for ya.
Trouble is, now my car is acting up ;v; I gotta turn and hold the key for about three to five seconds to convince the old skrunkle queen to give living a chance. She drives okay, but obviously, I can only push my luck for so long. She's been put through hell since 2013, and only the past few years were on my watch, so who the hell knows what parts she had swapped out, replaced, damaged, etc. before I got her. She was a lemon too, bought as-is, so it's not like I was given any kind of history on her.
Gods, if there was ever any uncertainty my maleness wasn't carved into my bone marrow, that above paragraph alone should be all the evidence modern culture needs, lol. That car may look like a wreck, but I talk about her like she's an old gray horse I rescued from a pasture of similarly neglected animals, and that's precisely how I think about her most times too. What can I say? She's done nothing but her best for me since.
That being said, I've only got about 40USD to my name until Wednesday night, so there's no way I can even afford a diagnostic glance from a trusted mechanic, let alone the necessary parts and whatever the labor's worth. She's got a couple nails in her rear driver's-side tire as well, but thankfully, it's not losing air super-quickly and my father bought me a hand-held air compressor for Hannukah last year. It works great for what I'm pretty sure is a Temu product.
In other news, I've been working on some new art pieces, and I'll be getting my shop page set up here shortly. I just gotta figure out how I'm going to process transactions; I loath PayPal and don't have the money for something like Square, but CashApp only works in some regions and has a more personal vibe than most people are comfortable sharing with internet strangers. If you have any ideas or recommendations, dear visitor, HMU, I'm all ears.
"Shakespeare Clowns and Water Damage"
10 Sep 2025One of the things I typically do in my friendly Discord group chats is something we've referred to as "Lawrence Dream Journal Story Time", in which I start typing as soon as I wake up and tell everyone what I just dreamed. These dreams are usually either disturbing, hilarious, or just downright confusing. I prefer to keep the more distressing dreams to myself, so as to spare my friends from an unanticipated trauma dump, unless the PTSD is extra saucy and won't get off my back for anything. For the most part, my dreams are more of a chaotic stream of consciousness punctuated by some really interesting ideas and visuals, as well as some very incredibly dumb ones.
For instance: Sneaking a puppy into work, realising I can't keep him safely hidden from the managers, not wanting to get fired, swiping my badge to take the dog outside, realising my parents decided to drive off and leave me without transportation home, awkardly sitting on a bench in the dark parking lot, being approached by a very sweet and generous coworker who offers to buy me an Uber, only to tell me not only the driver's license plate, but that the driver that we'll know them when we see them because... shakespeare. clown. (?)
I'll spare you the details, as the whole story took multiple paragraphs to type out and multiple full-length character-limit messages to tell completely, but yeah. Also, the Genitorturers covering Cyndi Lauper for some reason.
I don't have a whole lot of time to explain all of it anyway, as my roommate and I have to bust ass and get our apartment spotless so we can report suspicious, dripping, gradually expanding water damage in the ceiling of my bedroom. I hope to the gods this doesn't turn into a massive issue where I can't sleep in my own bedroom until they cut into the building itself to fix the rusty old pipe that's sure to be at fault. We don't exactly have a lot of extra space in our apartment for day-sleeping, and I work exclusively nights, so...
Ah well. It is what it is. Habit finds a way!
"Heresy is For Days That End in Y"
7 Sep 2025It turns out that one of the dangers of editing HTML on your phone while stuck in a warehouse safety refresher course during night shift is that your fingers only need slip a tiny bit to delete some very important code you didn't intend to remove. And then you have to figure out a way to sort things out to "not super-broken looking" while still on your phone and just hope that it looks okay enough until you can find time to put things back the way they were.
Thank goodness it wasn't anything super crucial, just the blog index, without which this blog page looks mad funny, dude (trust me).
Now that that's fixed, I'm going to take a nap and figure out how to word that DM I plan to send to that festival owner. I feel like less might be more. Maybe something to the effect of, "Hey, I noticed that a couple of your new graphics on the social media account and official website are AI-generated. As someone who looks forward to this event every year and wants nothing but the best for it, I want to volunteer an alternative set of original hand-drawn graphics that still match the look you're going for. I already noted the dimensions of your current graphics and have the time and materials, and turn-around time could be one week or even less. Is this something you'd be willing to consider?"
Okay, that's not quite "less", but I think it covers all bases lol.
Fingers crossed...
In other news, I've been enjoying "Horus Rising" via audiobook at work, and I have two main takeaways.
First - Horus has no reason to be given such an insanely sexy voice by the narrator. This is a giant, genetically engineered, hypermasculine, bald and heavily-armored back-stabbing Judas of a supersoldier who has so far given zero indication that he has any interest in anything other than thinly-veiled fascism, brotherhood, and finding any scrap of evidence that his dad is actually proud of him. I should not want this abomination to hold me close and tell me nice things about myself until I drift off to sleep in his gigantic, freakishly muscular arms. And yet...
Second - After looking up the narrator's performance history, I cannot unimagine an alternate timeline in which the entire book is read in the voice of that dorky Neimoidian ambassador from the beginning of The Phantom Menace. We could have had it all, y'all.
Now that I've committed two heresies in a single blog post, I can thoroughly recommend that if you've ever been to a gaming store and wondered what was up with those funky little armor guys that cost an arm and a leg to purchase before they're even painted, you should check out the books. Horus Rising is a great entry into the Warhammer 40K universe, and even though I already know the cliffnotes of what happens in the story (the series is called The Horus Heresy ffs), there's no adequate substitute for the experience of actually immersing yourself into what I can only describe as what would happen if you explained the concept of bishounen to Willaim Shakespeare.
"Wrap It In Cheese I Guess"
4 Sep, 2025One of my favorite festivals, a small but longstanding steampunk event that has always struck the perfect balance of low-maintenance and excellence, has seriously let me down, as well as every hard-working artist who vends or attends year after year, and I feel very conflicted about it.
They used AI graphics on their website and promotive material.
I genuinely don't understand the logic behind it. As I mentioned before, this is a steampunk event. Steampunk as a fandom has always been a niche that celebrates human ingenuity and defiance of industry, with a spotlight kept on the beauty of an artist's labor. Using AI graphics is ick in general, but for an art-centric event like this one? Make it make sense...
That being said, I'm not going to mame and shame this festival, and im going to try to solve this problem in a constructive way. I don't want to give up on this festival, not just because it's sometimes the one thing that gets me through the year these days, but because I know enough about it to know that the people running it are not malicious or lazy. They've never operated the festival at a profit, striving to keep tickets as affordable as possible and even operating at a loss while raising money for local charities that often benefit the very people working and attending the festival.
The easiest solution that comes to mind is to contact the festival owner and offer to donate my time and skills to create an original graphics set to replace the AI-genersted ones. I've done it before on other sites, including this one, so doing it again, even for free, is a small price to pay for giving what i can to a festival that's meant so much to me for so long.
Now, being the blunt cunt that I typically am, the real challenge is going to be figuring out how to word that email without coming across as either judgemental, pandering, opportunistic, self-righteous, or unprofessional.
Wish me luck, I suppose.
