This photo was taken a couple weeks ago. I was practicing guitar when Owen grabbed his own ax and crawled on the arm of the chair to jam along with me. We rocked.

I'm starting to upload stuff to my Flickr account. If you added me as a contact sometime in the last couple years and I didn't respond in kind, well - I just did. I forgot that you have to "friend" your friends. Der. But, see, now that there's a freakin' widget to put on my new blog linking to my flickr photos, I feel more compelled to upload.

Cross-posted from Wordpress.

I read Dennis Lahane's Mystic River a few years ago, but only tonight have I seen the Clint Eastwood adaptation, a video copy Jenn brought home from work. As I recall, Sean Penn won the best actor Oscar, but he just barely squeeked by Tim Robbins, whose Dave is just a beautiful, scary mess. Penn's cold rage complements Robbin's numb warmth, while Marcia Gay Harden's Celeste was a brilliantly rendered train wreck. Moral of the story: Don't jump to conclusions - or in the back of strangers' cars.

In other news, I have found that when there is no school work piled up in front of me, I draw more cartoons. Monday's Sheldon installment is already inked and scanned, simply awaiting a fresh coat of RGB. I have the rest of the story line written and the following story in the works. I brought my sketchbook out of mothballs.

And I play more guitar. Callouses on my finger tips. I have played enough so that the basic fingerpicking pattern (thumb - ring - index - middle) is automatic, a feat that had eluded me in the twenty-plus previous years of guitar dabbling. Switching from D to Bm is still tricky. Ties my fingers in knots. And I finally figured out the intro to "Sweet Home Alabama," a ridiculously simple D-C-G pattern (duh.) My main repertoire is full of Lou Reed, Richard Thompson, Radiohead, and, of course, a dead Liverpudlian or two.

Back to Sheldon. Today an average of 1,416 people viewed webcomics at Modern Tales; 49 went to Sheldon. I think I need to bring my stats up. And, really, they are up, thanks to some minor promotion in other venues, like Comixpedia. But I need to be more aggressive. Any tips?

And I read more books. I am revisiting T.H. White's The Once and Future King a year or so after returning it unfinished to the library, thanks to a heavy course load. I would get five pages and fall asleep. Now I can read during the day, guilt free! Wart's visit to the ant colony still creeps me out: "Everything Not Forbidden Is Compulsory."

And I want to do a comic strip or book or something called "Valley of the Uncanny."

So, as I noted earlier this week, I ain't a-gonna draw Sheldon this month. Not until this here school work is done, dead and buried. And I'll stand over the grave to make sure that it's dead.

But all work and no play makes Shelley Duvall nervous, so I gotta do something in between reading about multiple literacies, reviewing YA novels, steeping my brain in youth development literature, and keeping my children from suffering total parental neglect (at least on my end.)

I brung out the git. That is, I have been playing guitar again. This time in earnest. Well, more earnest than in any of the previous 23 years since I first picked it up and banged out an Elvis tune. This time I actually practice. I fingerpick. I download songs from the Mind Hive and learn chords to tunes that I have always wanted to play, but never took the time. I experiment more with bar chords and minor chords, flat chords and combining chords outside typical combinations (like G-A-D, or G-C-D - venerable, time-tested structures that undergird our best classics, but new designs suggest new possibilities, at least for my untutored mind), and the whole family of B chords. I know so few B chords.

Here's a list of songs I am practicing:

• Bungalow Bill
• Midnight Special
• House of the Rising Sun
• The Thing that Only Eats Hippies
• Statesboro Blues (Blind Willie McTell version, not the Allman Bros.)
• Mother's Little Helper
• I Shall Be Released
• What Goes On?
Blue Moon of Kentucky</li>
• Sweet Jane

I keep telling myself that I should really learn Puff, The Magic Dragon for the kids, but something blocks me, some vague nausea, a holdover rebellion against all things Peter, Paul and Mary, damn them. Damn them to hell.

Owen has already written his own song. It's called "Pinky." Here's how you play it: As Daddy holds down the G chord, you strum violently with, of course, your pinky. Here are lyrics and chord:

G
Pinky, pinky!
Follow me!
Pinky, pinky!
Follow me!
(repeat until bored, then run to the trampolene and jump your brains out.)