Music: Leechwife; by Rasputina

Okay, Ryan wanted to know where the story was going, so here’s a synopsis of what the rest of Hard Underbelly would have looked like.

In the next chapter we would have learned who the man who tried to shoot Saul in chapter 3 was. His name is Dee Smith, and he’s a former SAS man. In the mid 90’s he was involved in covert action in South America, where the rest of his team was wiped out by vampires. Saul was there killing the vamps, but Dee mistakenly thought he was there with the other vamps. With the help of Franklin Crisp, CEO of Zaibatsu, Smith was trying to kill Saul, whom Crisp was slowly feeding him information on.

After this, Saul and Casey were to travel to the realm of fae with the help of Luna to track down the only faerie to ever kill another faeire, Acherontia, and return her to her iron prison. Saul was asked to do this by the king and queen of fae, as he is sort of a hero of the realm for having destroyed Athanasius.

This would’ve segued into a flashback to the mid twelfth century, when the faeries where in the process of abandoning the everyday world and hiding in magical islands, underground citadels, and the like. It starts with an unknown faerie being attacked and captured by a pair of brigands, and Saul coming to her rescue. The faerie is Cobweb, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Luna’s sister. In the attack her wings were torn off, and in her weakened state, Saul protects her while trying to return her to the faerie realms. During their travels, they fall in love, though it doesn’t work out well, since this is before Athanasius was killed, and Cobweb is banished by the other faeries for consorting with a vamp. Rather than stay and try to make a life with Saul, she chooses to spend her thousand-year banishment in hibernation. Saul is broken about this, and it is in that fury that he attacks Athanasius, shoving a stake through his heart and hurling him off a cliff, though never actually seeing him turn to powder. However, by the time he returns to fae and is dubbed a hero, Cobweb has already left to begin her hibernation.

After this flashback, We see the lake in the New World where Cobweb went to hid and hibernate, and that a giant chemical plant has been built there in the interveening centuries. The chemicals being dumped into it’s waters wake Cobweb up, and in her weakened state she calls out to her sister Luna for aid. Luna contacts Saul, and together they find Cobweb. After she regains her strength, they take her to fae, but discover that all the secret paths and portals into the realm have been sealed, and Luna and Cobweb are trapped on the outside. They return to the city and Saul sets them up in a nice abandoned arboretum that Lenny No-Arms got for them. Saul and Cobweb are not really able to reconcile their feelings for one another, as Cobweb still blames him for her banishment, and Saul resents her choice to hibernate rather than stay with him.

In the next section Saul and Casey are traveling to Europe to try and see if they can get into the Citadel in the Black Forest in Germany to find out why Fae is shut, but they find the citadel abandoned. While inside they are attacked by Mei Li, again, and then by a group of trolls that have escaped from the prisons the elves put them in until the surface was safe for faeire kind again. Sort of an underground Ark, dig? Anyway, Mei Li is forced to fight with Saul and Casey to survive, doing which Casey is talking to Saul and mentions how cute he thinks Mei Li is, and is embarressed when Mei Li tells him that she can speak english. They escape from the Citadel, caving in the entrance and trapping the trolls inside, then pasrt ways.

When they return home, Casey and Saul go vamp hunting, and run into Lucy while she’s on duty, and meet Lucy’s partner, Henry Ekholm. Saul is attacked by Dee again, but he manages to convince him, with Casey’s help, that he isn’t evil. Dee storms the Zaibatsu tower on his own, and violently tenders his resignation to a miffed Franklin Crisp. After Dee leaves, Crisp flies out of the city in a helicopter and lands on a private island. Sneaking through a series of tunnels, he finally comes to the underground realm of Athanasius, his lord and master. Athanasius is, to say the least, pissed off at Crisp. He thinks that Crisp is tipping his hand, and is annoyed at Crisp’s unathorized attempts on Saul’s life. When Crisp asks him why he doesn’t want his greatest enemy killed, Athanasius tells him that it wouldn’t be slow enough, and that he wants Saul to suffer.

In the next chapter, Saul, Casey, and Dee are attacked by the last Wendigo, Red Xyster, which Saul had thought he killed in an avalanche in the 1600’s. If you don’t know what a Wendigo is, rent the excellent movie ‘Ravenous’. It’s sort of a Native American Cannibal/Vampire thing, except they don’t really have any weaknesses like sunlight or garlic. The only real way to kill one is to cut off it’s food supply, so they eventually dismember the thing and bury it in seperate boxes. Dee promises to help Saul and Casey to make up for his past attempts on Saul’s life and working for Crisp.

Moving on, Mei Li would soon attack Saul again, coinciding with an attack from some of Crisp’s men. Saul can smell Athanasius on them, and so he goes to confront Crisp. While he’s heading to the Zaibatsu building, Mei Li is being held captive by Dee and Casey with the help of Hunter. Casey talks with Mei Li, and asks her how she appeared in his dream, and how it was she was in a dream of his he had years and years ago, the dream from his childhood he was reading in his journal in chapter four. Mei Li tells him that she is a dreamwalker, and uses it to home in on her prey. He asks her why she is trying to kill Saul, and she tells him that years ago he killed her family in cold blood. Hunter and Casey argue with her, and urge her to use her dreamwalking abilities to find the truth. She then walks into both Casey’s and Hunter’s minds, seeing that Saul is good, and, most importantly that he was with Hunter and Angela in the German Citadel at the time her family was killed. Saul confronts Crisp and tells him to Athanasius that he doesn’t know how he’s alive, but that he’ll kill him again anyway. When he returns to Hunter’s, he let’s Mei Li dreamwalk into him and discover the truth about her family. In the 1800’s, Saul was in China studying martial arts with a shaolin master. The Dark Light Temple to the north of the shaolin temple was run by an evil demon and his disciples. Late one night they snuck into the temple and killed the shaolin master. Saul swore he would have revenge for his sifu’s murder, and so he travelled to the dark light temple and killed the master demon. His disciples, which were all chape-changers, waited until the day when a special child would be born that could hold their vengeance. Thus, almost two hundred years later, when Mei Li was a small girl, they assumed the shape of Saul, killed her family, and then poured the hate, power, and lust for vengeance into her, and unleashed her at Saul. After learning this, Mei Li leaves, and returns to China where she opens up a can of whoop ass on the Dark Light demons.

Crisp receives a phone call here, and it is Athanasius. Athanasius tells him how dissppointed he is in him, since now Saul knows he’s alive. He also says he won’t be needing Crisp’s services anymore, at which point his cell phone explodes, nicely killing Crisp in the blast. Athanasius makes one more call to an unknown person, to whom he says, “Kill all of his friends. Make him alone again.”

At the end of what would have been a giantly long chapter, Casey is heading to Lucy’s who is cooking dinner for everyone. When he arrives he sees that she has killed Dee and just shot Ekholm, and is in the employ of Athanasius. There is a brief, intense struggle, and in the end, Lucy is dead. Ekholm, severely bleeding and near death, urges Casey to go, and tells him that there’s no way he can be here when the cops arrive. Casey, emotionally distraught at the betrayel and loss of his grielfrienc, doesn’t want to go, but Saul arrives just then and pulls him away.

In the next chapter, Casey is seriously depressed. Ekholm is doing okay at the hospital, and as far as the authorities are concerned, Lucy was in the pay of some criminal organization, as the huge stacks of money they found in her house indicate. They don’t know why she would choose to kill a former SAS soldier and attempt to kill her partner, or who was employing her, but Ekholm is coming out looking like a hero. As far as anyone is concerned, he fought her off even after having been shot in the gut. Casey feels like a fool for not having seen that she was evil, and is launching into a deep research of vampirism and Athanasius to try and be better prepared. In his research, he discovers that you can’t be involuntarily turned into a vampire. He confronts Saul about this, telling him that he’d always thought he was turned involuntarily. Saul and Casey argue, an argument which finally ends with Saul telling Casey that he was willing to damn his soul for revenge, and that he’s the one who’s got to live with it, not Casey, so Casey should just butt out. Casey is kind of hurt by this.

In the next chapter, Saul, Hunter, Angela, Cobweb and Luna go globetrotting, trying to find anyone who can get them into Fae. However, the chapter is not about this, it’s really about a series of grisly murders. People have been showing up dead with two holes in their necks, but not exanguinated. The third body found has the message “Hi Casey” scrawled next to it, so Ekholm, who is the detective working the case, brings Casey in to talk. He knows he didn’t do it, and knowing that this sort of stuff is right up Casey’s alley, he has Casey consult on it. They work through what look like a series of fake vampire killings. Casey starts receiving phone calls from a rough voice asking him about vampires, and it takes a while before he starts to recognize the voice. Casey ends up visiting a mental institution that he voluntarily went to some years back when he thought he was crazy. He never actually was institutionalized though, so it’s not on any kind of record. But while he was there talking to a doctor years ago, an inmate, or whatever you call people in the booby hatch, overheard him talking about vampires, and now that he’s out, he’s been using it as the inspiration for some brutal killings. That night Casey goes home and the nutter attacks him. He knocks Casey out and ties him to a chair in his attic. As he’s coming up the stairs with an ice pick to make Casey into his next victim, Casey regains his senses and hurls himself down the stairs. The chair is splintered, freeing him, and the killer is incapacitated. Casey, feeling responsible for giving the man an excuse to kill, attack him in a white-hot fury, killing him. When Saul returns, Casey, now burdened with the knowledge of the evil that’s in him as well, apologizes to him for judging his choices of the past. Saul brings the news that faerun has been closed off by the faeries to hide from Athanasius, and will not be reopened until he is dead.

The final chapter would have been a biggy. Lots of stuff would have to happen. One, Mei Li returns. There’s an awkward kind of attraction between her and Casey. Awkward because she hasn’t related to anyone on a personal level since she was a child, and because Casey is feeling kinda out of sorts since having killed a man. Angela is getting much, much worse, and Hunter has made no headway on a cure for her lycanthropy. They all sit down and have a round table discussion, trying to figure out how Athanasius survived being staked. Hunter and Saul would push the theory that it’s because he’s so old. Since a vampire’s power only grows with age, they firgured that he’d somehow developed an immunity to the stake. Angela has a different theory though, a more mundane one. She is a nursing student, and supposes that Athanasius may have heterotaxy syndrome, a real life condition wherein the organs are reversed, left to right. They decide to go with this theory, as the alternative is that they’re boned.

Athanasius has now taken over Zaibatsu, and is entrenched with a buttload of demons guarding him at the Zaibatsu tower. Casey is wandering through the city in all his mopiness when he’s attacked by a bunch of Athanasius’ vamps. There is a drawn out battle which Casey survives, making it the first time he’s ever fought off a pank of vamps single-handed. This accomplishment snaps him out of his funk, and he gos to find Saul and the others. Just after he arrives at Saul’s, where the other’s are still in conference. They are attacked by a bunch of demons who kill Luna with an iron sword and carry off her body. Saul and Cobweb are distraught, to say the least. Angela, seeing that something needs to be done to get them into the tower, goes to Hunter’s workshop and takes a concentrated dose of werewolfism. She takes it to Zaibatsu, stands in the lobby as the demons surround her, and downs the potion, going giant and feral. The others arrive just in time to see her being overrun, and Hunter runs in, rescue or vengeance on his mind. Cobweb and Mei Li do their best to fight, but Cobweb has never been a real fighter, and Mei Li’s powers are diminished since she killed her demon masters. Saul and Casey get seperated as they search the tower. Saul is attacked by Athanasius, and through a losing battle learns why Athanasius allowed him to think he was dead: Athanasius could never win when everyone knew he was out there trying to take over the world, so he let them all think he as a goner, building his army in secret, recruitting the other demons while everyone else got complacent. Athanasius now sees killing Saul as the last thing to do before launching a full, global takeover. Casey, meanwhile, has been attacked by... Lucy. Athanasius used the healing properties of Luna’s fae blood to bring her back to a semblence of life. Lucy starts smacking Casey around. Saul isn’t having much luck against Ath, but he does have a slight advantage in that Athanasius never really bothered to train. However, he’s still pretty screwed since Ath is much older, and much, much more powerful. This would be a knock-down, drag-out kinda battle. I had a plan for them to punch and pummel each other through several floors, finally falling through into a subway. Also, Casey is getting his ass handed to him, but he eventually manages to get ahold of a gun and shoot Lucy in the chest. Unfortunately, as a zombie-thing, chestwounds aren’t really hurting her to much, and she gets the gun and shoots Casey in the stomach. She turn away from him, and Casey, coughing up a lot of blood, shoots her in the back of the head. Like any good zombie, Lucy dies with the destruction of brain matter. Casey collapses. Ath is wailing on Saul, and it’s not looking good. Casey coughs again and begins to stand, and finally stumbles down a corridor, leaving a trail of blood behind him.

Ath is holding Saul in the air by his throat, the fight has left him. The room is shattered from the rampage. Sonic booms still echo from their slipping in and out of vampire speed so much.

“How,” Athanasius asks, “Did you expect to beat me?”

Saul smiles a little. Blood is trickling out of his mouth. It’s slipping out from scalp, covering and stinging his eyes. “I didn’t. I just wanted to tire you out.”

Casey is standing behind Athanasius, and now shoots him in the right side of his back, hitting his reversed heart with a silver vamp-killing bullet. Saul slumps down, and Casey collapses. Athanasius becomes dust.

Mei Li and Cobweb find them. Cobweb uses her faerie abilities to heal Casey, and Mei Li finds some blood for Saul.

That’s pretty much how it would have ended. You know, I’ve got a few sketches of key scenes I did a while back. I think I’ll upload those,a nd a few new ones of other pivotal parts in the next few weeks, and end the whole thing with a giant good-bye sketch when I’ve purged all the good parts from my system, okay?

This is not spellchecked, because I haven’t got the energy. Looking at the length of this, I don;t even know how I thought it would be possible for me to finish this off in just a year and a half.

Ending Music: Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?; by the Beatles

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  posted by Tristan @ 1:19 AM

 
Mood: Introspective
Music: Heart Cooks Brain; by Modest Mouse

Well, here’s the haps: Hard Underbelly is over. This is something that’s been building since last year, when I took the comic to five days a week. It continued when I started doing partial color midway through chapter 6. These things were done for one specific reason: Hard Underbelly had become work. I started updating it more so I could move it along and get it done sooner. I changed the artistic style to try and keep my interest in it. But it’s all been in vain. The fact of the matter is, Hard Underbelly drains my energy like a gaping hole in the warp core’s dilithium matrix. It keeps me from being able to work on the projects that actually generate cash flow (Not All There, which I’ve been phoning in for far too long) and projects that I give me some modicum of personal satisfaction (The Wrong Band, which I would really like to devote more time to). The truth kinda hit home for me this week. I knew that I’d been trying to get HU over with, but looking at it, I realized it would take at least another year and a half to sew up all the plots I’d planted, and that’s even with all the streamlining and corners I’d been planning to cut. And I realized, as I was preparing to try and get some advertising for The Wrong Band, and looking for the papers that are printing Not All There and The Wrong Band, I just don’t have another year and a half of HU in me.

Another part of the problem is the content. Hard Underbelly is a story I started writing in High School, oh five or six years ago. I actually started doing the online comic almost two years ago. The problem is, even then, this was not a story that really interested me. Not to rag on people who like my comic, but writing on an ongoing series about vampires seems kinda stupid to me now. It just doesn’t hold my interest. To be perfectly honest, I’m embarrassed to tell people about it. And that’s not good, because if I really had faith in the project, I would shout it’s name from the rooftops, like Opera Batman.

I want to thank all the people who read my comic regularly and supported me in one way or another, the few I can remember off the top of my head are Ryan, Sarah, Stark, Jon, Flinch, Crescent, and Shadow Stalker. The Wrong Band will probably not ever have a tagboard, as the pop-ups and frame issues it presented were always debilitating HU’s index, and I don’t really want to infect the Wrong Band with that. Maybe someday I’ll have a forum, and I hope you all show up for that.

Hard Underbelly’s index and archives will be available for as long as it takes Keenspace to realize that I have stopped updating and decide to remove it. Sometime mid next week there will be a big farewell drawing with as much of the cast as I can squeeze in. The Wrong Band will continue, and will get the effort it deserves. This blog will also end, and when I get around to it, I’ll launch a new news space for the Wrong Band, maybe even one in the index page, if I can figure out the way to get that feed set up.

It seems kind silly to stop the comic just a few installments short of 300, but the writing is on the wall, and since this chapter has wrapped up, now’s as good a time as any. Again, thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to follow my other projects.

Ending Music: Stay With Me; by Spiritualized

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  posted by Tristan @ 1:29 PM

 
WEEKEND UPDATE

Mood: Good
Music: Watch Her Disappear; by Tom Waits

A couple weeks back I talked about the dumbass who robbed us at work but left his ID with us for some reason. To finish the story, the cop that responded to the call came by tonight. I talked with her, and the dude, Mr. Christopher Isaac Stevens, will not be facing charges. Why not? Because he's dead. He OD'd a couple of nights ago on heroin, and by strange coincidence, the same officer that helped us was the officer on the scene there. Otherwise, we probably never would have heard about it.

I know it's awful, but this is funny to me. I mean, it's kinda hard to mourn the loss of someone who sorta threatened to shoot me.

Ending Music: God Put A Smile Upon Your Face; by Coldplay

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  posted by Tristan @ 2:06 AM

 
DRINKS AND GETS MEAN

Mood: Good
Music: Cowboy Dan; by Modest Mouse

Just a few things. Last week on CSI:NY, which I never make any effort to watch, but had on in the background, they used AIR's "Alpha Beta Gaga" in one scene. I was pleased.

They got rid of what's her face on Law and Order that same night, and it ended with her getting fired. She asked, "Is it because I'm a lesbian?" and what's his face saying "Of course not." Now I'll admit I don't really follow Law and Order that closely, but have they ever mentioned her being a lesbian before? Or does Dick Wolf just like rubbing his audiences faces in the fact you basically know nothing about the main characters of his show? Whatever.

I've been constantly worried about the Fantastic Four movie since I heard it was getting made. For starters, I'm not even a huge fan of FF comics, I read them in the store, but they never seem worth plopping down any cash for. I read about the casting, seeing that they put Jessica Alba, who is pretty, but in my opinion not exactly the best actress in the world, as Sue. Michael Chiklis is great to be Ben Grimm. Inspired there. Anyway, I've just been kinda worried about the movie, it seemed like something that would be really easy to screw up, and they hired that director who made Babershop of all things to do it. So, lots of fear and apprehension, since I'm just waiting for someone else ot come along and make a movie that'll kill off this comic book renaissance we've got in the cinema these days. But tonight I got my hands on the trailer, which is available in QT at Apple.com, and was much impressed. The first half is setting up the accident, and I'm glad to see they embraced the space aspect of the comics. Then it gets kick ass, with some rockin' music in the background as it shows Doctor Doom just generally being big and evil. It shows Ben crumpling the hell out of a semi, Johnny lighting up, Reed stretchin' out, and some stuff with Sue and force fields. It looks like it'll have those knock-down, drag-out superhero battles with vehicles and scenery being thrown about that we've all been waiting to get from a superhero movie.

Lost just keeps getting better and better.

Read The Wrong Band.

That is all for now.

Ending Music: Distortions; by Clinic

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  posted by Tristan @ 1:16 AM

 
WHAT IS: LUCK?

Mood: Good
Music: I Just Don't Think I'll Ever Get Over You; by Colin Hay
Drinking: Coke

I have a good luck charm. Two, actually. They are a pair of red dice. Red is a lucky color to the gypsy people, and although I am not a gypsy, they were given to me by an old gypsy woman. This is completely true in that she is of Romany heritage, and is advanced in age. Not a crone, just old. Older than me at least. At any rate, I have these two dice. I roll them every morning, and put the higher rolling one in my pocket. If they roll doubles three times in a row, I put them both in my pocket. This is a small example of a very strange habit of mine that is so OCD it belongs in a Steve Martin novella.

This chapter of Hard Underbelly is based on my life in that tiny respect. Shadow Stalker posited that the dice (die? I seriously do not know if dice is both plural and singular or what) is not very lucky, which prompted me to post this. It's a few random thoughts on luck that popped into my head earlier this week.

I would say that my dice have not lost their lucky powers. True, bad things have certainly happened to me while I was carrying them. I was hit by a car while riding my bike, but all I suffered, despite flying a few feet to land on cold pavement, was a bloody nose and some scrapped appendages. I was robbed at work recently, but then, I also wasn't shot. I like to think of them as more preventing the worst of the bad things that inevitably happen to us all. I am truly of the school that any day you can walk away from is a good day. After all, if I still have a roof over my head and food to eat at the end of the day, it couldn't have been that bad.

In other news, I recently finished reading the Hyperion Cantos again. The Hyperion Cantos is an excellent series of sci-fi novels by Dan Simmons, consisting of Hyperion, The Fall Of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise Of Endymion. It is probably the greatest science fiction series I've ever read. The only other contender for the title in my mind is the Majipoor series by Robert Silverberg, but it's beaten because I have consider it a fantasy series anyway, and some of his more recent entires in the series kinda fall into what I think of the Silverberg Trap, which is, no matter how much I love his writing and enjoy his books, after reading his novels I'm sometimes left with a feeling of, yeah... so what. Like maybe I missed what exactly the point of the story was in the text of it. Anyway, Hyperion Cantos = good. Also, I grabbed the new Billy Chaka novel, Kinki Lullaby by Isaac Adamson, and, as usual, I recommend it. I think my favorite of the series is probably Dreaming Pachinko, largely because of the wistful and awkward relationship between Billy and the female protagonist, who's name escapes me at present. I'm planning on reading the Princess Bride again next.

Ending Music: The Only Living Boy In New York; by Simon & Garfunkel

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  posted by Tristan @ 4:47 PM

 
STUPID CRIMINALS

Mood: Amused
Music: Bury Me With It; by Modest Mouse

Okay, you know those stories about criminals being really dumb that Leno loves so much? I got a little of that tonight.

I was working in the photo lab, as always, when I looked up to see a guy trying to remove on of the portable cd players that we keep under a lock bar. I'm used to people not knowing that that's a theft prevention device, so I went over and unlocked it for him, explaining that the bar is a theft prevention device. He then asked me where the batteries were, and I pointed them out. He grabbed the cd player and the batteries. At this point we're standing at the photo register. He looked me in the eyes and said, "I'm stealing this."

At first I thought he was kidding, but then he started kinda raving a little, and I realized he was serious. Now, Walgreens is very clear that if we're being robbed, don't fight with the person, let them go, they don't want us to get hurt. However, at this point, I decided that this guy clearly didn't know what he was doing. The way shoplifting works is, you grab the item, and then you run. Since this guy had stopped to talk to me, told me that he was going to steal the discman, I felt he clearly didn't get it, so, against Walkgreens corporate policy, which is there for the safety of employees such as myself, I snagged the discman back out of his hand with lightning quick speed. At this point the guy started yelling at me. I was talking very fast, and was kinda hard to understand, but what I did catch was some stuff like "I'm not fucking kidding here, I'm serious" and "Call the manager". So I did. My manager came over, and quickly appraised the situation. He was yelling, and at this point said that his girlfriend was in the Ivar's parking lot (there is an abandoned Ivar's parking lot behind us, and I can see it out the photo windows), but it was dark, and I did not see anybody in the lot. The important thing is that he said his girlfriend had a pistol. I was mighty confused at this point, since I figured an important part of any armed robbery was bringing the gun in with you. I mean, you don't get people walking into a bank and saying, "I have a gun at home, give me all the money in the safe."

He also claimed to have a friend in the store, and he occasionally called out "Patches! Where are you?" I think I heard someone respond, but no one ever saw this mythical other friend. At this point, what with the threat of a gun somewhere nearby, no one argued when he took back the cd player. The weird thing is, he hung around after that. He wanted us to page his friend for him. He wanted to "know what it would take" for him to leave. I think he didn't understand that, as the robber, leaving was really his responsibility, and something he could do at anytime. He also urged us to call the police.

My manager had me call the police, and so, in full view of the guy robbing us, I called the police. He did not seem bothered by this.

"I'll leave my bag, or my wallet." He threw his wallet on the counter at this point. My manager and I were, to say the least, confused by this. As I started talking to 911, the robber took his drivers license out of his wallet and gave it to my manager, and then left. He did a u-turn once out the door, and came back in, asking us to page his friend for him. We declined, and my manager was inspired when she said, "If you're robbing us, I really need you to leave." 'Cause really, if he doesn't leave, he's just loitering and threatening us, y' know? So he left.

I spoke with the police for a while, giving them all of the information off of the guy's driver's license. And this really was his license. It was not a fake. His picture, his name (Christopher Isaac Stevens of Des Moines WA, brown hair, brown eyes, 5' 8", 150 pounds), all of it. The police came in as I was finishing up wioth the dispatcher on the phone. They couldn't believe it. They looked at the totally valid license listing the guys birthdate (April 16, 1976) and home address. It was bizarre. I related the story to them, and learned from them that he'd apparently been stopped by police earlier in the day for wandering around Seattle while high, which I did not find hard to believe. The weird thing is, about 20 minutes after the police left, I looked out the window, and saw him walking past, now heading east on 50th. I called the police and updated them, and that's the last I heard of it.

I've been trying to rationalize this in my head. The only reason I was at all frightened was that he left his license with us. This implied that he felt he would be able to come and pick it up at a later date. Since a gun had been mentioned, I thought, "maybe he's going to come and take it by force". The thing is, most of what he said was lost in the sheer speed with which he said it. I know he said something about his girlfriend, the abandoned parking lot, and a gun. The only way I can rationalize his action is that perhaps someone was holding a gun to his girlfriend, and had told him to rob the Walgreens. Of course, if that were the case, I'm sure they would have told him to get cash instead of a $40 cd player and a pack of AA's, which pretty much rules this out as a possibility. Of course, if he was robbing the store, why didn't he bring in the gun and get cash like a sane criminal?

Anyway, it's really only a matter of time before the police catch this criminal mastermind, but that's my story.

Ending Music: Wet Blanket; by Metric

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  posted by Tristan @ 1:06 AM

 
IN MEMORIUM

Mood: Saddened
Music: Marching Band; by Sufjan Stevens

I just heard that Will Eisner died Monday due to complications from surgery. This makes me very sad. I've been a big fan of his work, the Spirit in particular, since I was just a little kid. That's all.

FYI, I'm planning to spend a good part of Wednesday tweaking both Hard Underbelly and The Wrong Band's website's a bit.

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  posted by Tristan @ 1:24 AM