Nate Beaty's Brainfag

Stay Upright, Honkeymeat

posted in Home Jabber on March 21, 2006

I keep writing myself as the "The Guilty Cheapass" and "The Angry Little Man" in my new comic, but last week I actually dropped off my bike for $80 of repairs. That's right, I actually let someone else do something for me, and didn't freak out over how I could buy a few tools and dive into a DIY 2-day bike repair session of scrapes, cussing and bruises to accomplish the same thing. Fuckit. I gotta draw comics. And I don't really need to have my fingers on everything I own.

Speaking of comics, I actually got a page drawn before 10:30 this morning. That felt good. I'm about 42 pages into the issue, and wanted to have 60 pages done, but I think I'm gonna settle for 52. I still have to design the cover for BF10, and design a new cover for BF6, and hopefully do a tshirt too.

Last weekend I went to Pasco with my mom to see my brother and fam race in the ABA nationals. I didn't really get any good photographs, only one of the swarm of BMX bandits lining up to eat dirt. It was a total blast and I couldn't peel my eyes off watching the races.. I totally want to race. But I'm old and weak and acclimated to a tenspeed. Even when I rode BMX as a kid, I could never get the cajones to really go all out and fly around corners and over jumps. I've had my fair share of crashes (on bikes and motorcyles and cars) and they've made me cautious. There's nothing cautious about a 30-second, 25-mph, adrenalin-pumped spin around a dirt track, elbow-to-elbow with bloodthirsty overly-competitive punks.

Soon Bok and I have unfortunately gotten hooked watching downloaded episodes of Lost (thanks a lot Jeremy!). The first season was actually pretty cool, but the second season is definitely weaker and quickly losing our interest. I realized a lot of people are watching this show, as it airs, when I asked my family about it. ABC's spending a ton of money on it, and it's mostly well-written, but it's getting worse with each episode. Bah, TV.. So rarely good, and even when it is, it can't last for some reason. Guess it's hard to keep it rolling with such a regular schedule. Shit, who am I fooling? I'm amazed people can write these sorts of things AT ALL with solid character development, suspenseful hooks and an overarching storyline. I can only write about myself!

Still on the frighteningly-Atkins-like diet, and feeling a strong need to get some exercise after eating all these eggs and sausages. I'm getting soft. Somebody's gonna roll me, I can feel it. Yesterday some asshole on the bus said "that from your KUNICHIWA friend?" to Soon Bok regarding an envelope with Korean writing on it. She didn't say anything. Then he blurts out, "Man, I hate asians." She responded with "Yeah, well I hate ASSHOLES, so piss off you ignorant fuck." Sheeit! I guess growing up dealing with this type of harassment constantly has put an edge on my girlfriend. I stared at the guy, but he was all homie-G'd out, and talking up a shitstorm of egotistical garbage the whole busride, and all I could think was "If I say anything, this will be a fight quickly ended with me being a pummeled pile of honkeymeat." I decided against it, then felt bad that I didn't stick up for my girlfriend.

While at the gigantic BMX track for two days, I got to thinking how humans can "move in" to temporary spaces. Like, the upper right corner of a stand of bleachers was Beaty HQ for nearly three days. We stash our food there, our water, our material goods (with someone to keep watch), our weapons and keys and gadgets. Our territory marked with an old blanket, we had a comfortable 16 square feet of metal all to ourselves. Those around us were similarly clumped into makeshift bleacher camps, and all had their own cameras pointed at the track. Each camp would scream at the appropriate time -- either when the announcer called out their state ("let's hear it for IDAHO!" "wooooo!"), or when one of their members is piloting a bike around the track. Everybody moans when there's a crash. And after a particularly long recovery from a crash, everyone timidly claps to salute the bravery of the fallen BMXer. Really weird when you step back and look at it. Humans have no boundaries to their weirdness.

What I find most bizarre, however, is how you build a sense of ownership or attachment to the space. It could be that I just don't go to these sort of 3-day events enough; that once you're a hardened BMX fam you just run through the motions without this side-effect. The first thing I thought about when reflecting on that space was how some OTHER group of people are camped out there, and how that kind of bugged me.

And the next weekend, when the BMX track is flattened to return to a rodea arena, more bleacher camps will unfold, cameras will be raised, and another equally strange human ritual begins.