Dust Bunny Jihad

GUYS I WOULD TOTALLY DATE

Disturbingly cute comix rogue's gallery of guys that artist/writer Mashanda would date. You will recognize the types, if not some past encounters with lonely boys.

$1.00

Contact:
love bunni press
or
mashanda

Labels: comix love bunni press, zines

Come and get Jason Gonzales' new drug-fueled story of a young girl's haunting obsession with horrific Kool Aide Men and body modification! Also there is something about Jesus' Return on the night before a lame hipster is scheduled to enter rehab. Night Nurses plan on fingering your internals!!

All for a $1.20.

Get it now over at www.lovebunnipress.com

Labels: drugs, love bunni press, night nurses, zines

Somewhere in my second try at Fourth Grade, this time at a brand new school, I began self-terrorizing myself with an invented fear of Kevin Hall.

Kevin Hall was a tough little Sixth Grader. He was infamous at lunchroom gossip conferences and at idle playground huddled tauntings for being a teacher-punching, ponytail-ripping, kid-beating hard ass.

Kevin Hall’s family was from a lower income tax bracket than the rest of the upper middle class kids in the school. He was a short, stocky kid with yellowish gray veins rippling along his prematurely defined forearms. His facial features reflected an unfortunate hint of alcohol-fetal, his close set eyes were always painfully squinting, his pencil lips clenched in a mockery of a smirk, and his black hair, littered with dandruff flakes, sat on his head in a mess of wavy spikes.

Everyday he arrived at school wearing the same grease-paper pin striped shirt, slightly un-tucked out of his navy blue pants - worn to threads at the knee and pocket. But his most distinctive marking, the one that flashed stalking danger to the herd of recess children milling around in tight circles, was his faded jean jacket. No other kid in the school wore one, so when we saw it approaching, we were sent scattering.

While Kevin was never actually seen beating on or teasing another student, I imagined he persecuted a deadly personal vendetta against me. I self-styled such a stomach dropping terror which demanded an ever vigilant attention to his location on the parking lot, lunch room, or hallway drinking fountain.

The persecution in my fevered imagination became an obsession, a consuming fear. I had plunged myself into a quivering abyss of nightly terrors and constant Kevin Hall nonsequitors, that my mother became extremely concerned. Ultimately, she wrote a blinking note asking that I be allowed to remain in the second floor classroom during all recesses and lunch hours.

From the safe distance of a full story, I enjoyed a bird’s nest view of the entire recess population. Sitting on the metal radiator cover, twisted, so my face pressed against the window, I kept watchful eye on the slow migration of Kevin Hall and his gang of future-fluky- stoner-metalhead-hippies. My surveillance was compulsively necessary. I worried to distraction during spelling exercises, anticipating the fear of seeing this terrifying bully again.

I felt a disgusted safety as I looked out at Kevin, action figure size, standing on the far side of the parking lot. And I jumped with a surprised panic when he stood against the wall under my classroom perch, skidding back across the neat rows of desk in horror.

After a few week of deflecting my classmates’ prodding questions about why I stayed inside during recess, I became overly secure in my empty classroom. The isolation, though, transformed my fears into untouchable cockiness.

My incessant persecution fantasies, slowly, grew into empowered revenge dramas. In these day dreams, I stood up to the terror-bully and humiliated him. I released the school of his monstrous grip! Typical Fourth grade, superhero over-simplification.

After a few days spent thinking of nothing else, running through all the possible scenarios and chewing over the possible outcomes, I decided upon a plan of action. The scheme was devastating. I would write an anonymous note insulting Kevin, then, when he was within range, I would drop the note down on his head. It would drift down covering him like World War II Allied Propaganda.

When he figured out it what it said about him, his caveman perplexity would turn to abject mortification. Once confronted with the truth, his puffed up arrogance would deflate, thus rendering him just another kid on the playground. Or at least that is how I imagined it would happen. But the day I chose to muster my courage to enact “Operation Note Drop,” events played out a bit differently than I imagined.

First, I waited all morning recess for Kevin to scoot over into the drop zone, but he stayed a safe distance away. Frustrated, I watched as he pushed on his friends in some mountianless king of the mountain struggle. The rest of the morning I was so agitated and distracted that I lost the ability to understand the English language.

The next frustration came as I attempted to compose the note, itself. As I toggled though the wealth of swear words I had expertly collected, I was brought short by the hard reality that I was a notoriously bad speller. In order to manage the full effect of the note, I would have to assure that the insult was spelled correctly, this cut out half of my bad word repertoire.

Once I settled on the language of the note, I took to the task of disguising my handwriting. Using my shaky left hand, I scribbled out the note several times. After a futile, unintelligible first tries, I was, by lunchtime, totally prepared. After wolfing down my peanut butter and jelly bag lunch, I was well-positioned on my radiator ledge.

I waited.
And waited.

As I waited, my stomach grew tighter and tighter. The nervous cramp became the debilitating holding-in -the-poop-explosions burning shivers. I squirmed back and forth, uncomfortably jockeying between hopping from foot to foot, dancing side to side, and sliding along the smooth brown metal of the radiator cover.

Then it happened. Kevin Hall materialized, like a beamed down Captain Kirk, underneath my window. He leaned against the rough brick wall, hands punched into his pockets, enjoying the shade the building cast. The moment had arrived!

My quivering hands left sweat prints on the window handle as it bent down to open the pane inward. On my knees, I stretched my arm out into the air and, with closed eyes, let go of the folded little note. Blinded by the excitement of my triumph, I did not watch as the note caught in the updraft, before plummeting to the asphalt. I spent the rest of the lunch hour huddled at my desk, pretending to draw a dinosaur on scrap paper.

As my classmates filed back in from lunch, two girls scurried up to our teacher. They held the note, my note, up as they breathlessly tattled on me. The next day I had to go out to recess like all the other kids in my class.

Labels: Humiliating Shame Rituals fourth grade, note drop

The first two months of any new school year are always physically uncomfortable. Aside from the scratch of new school clothes - the cardboard-stiff collars of brand-new oxford blouses, the whip-sharp catholic school uniforms, or razor-creased husky-sized slacks; there was the clunkiness of those new, not-yet-broken-in dress shoes that made a clippity clop noise when one tried to dash down the hallway.

Besides the wardrobe, there were those fits of false starting enthusiasm and the furtive oaths made in the school supply aisle, tiny hands pressed on the crisp, pristine notebook, that this will be an academic watermark, where procrastinations are finally eradicated. Oaths that would fail within the first month as homework assignments lost out to re-runs of sit coms you did not even find funny.

There are also the unforgiving heat waves and the blistering sun that crept along the length of the classroom, its punishment inescapable.

Uncomfortable, too, because, invariably, your summertime friends and last year’s alliances are shifted out across the arbitrary classroom assignments, the pains of having to resize the socio-academic hierarchy, (which included the selection of “small group partners,” that would determine so much of your in-class success or failure).

Finally, those first few months were made all the more uncomfortable because the rumor mill still levied dangerous sway over the molding of the raw materials that came to shape one’s fears, expectations, and perceptions that would come to dominate your entire school year. The gossip cycle was powered by the fuel of an older sibling's teasing or neighborhood rivalries. It spun previously benign unknowns into the black bile stain of nightmarish apprehensions and a bullying meanness. Nervous stomach cramps spread like a virus.

It was among these prickling thorns that Sister Mary Patrice, a bitter midget Bride of Christ, became the dreaded Sergeant Mary Police. She was renowned as a hardened kid-tossing disciplinarian, whose classrooms were more torture chambers than nurturing environments of supportive curiosity. The old-school-beat-the-lesson-in-through-your-ruler-cracked-knuckles was her greatest pedagogical method. Not above bouncing unfinished homework assignments against the foreheads of the lazy student, exposing the humiliation of the unstudied surrender of the slacking child. Nor was she one to shy away from ruling over a fearful kingdom kept in check by the ironfist grasp of the pop quiz.

So it happened one afternoon, just after lunch, that I was sitting at my desk in the back of the classroom. I had been impatiently distracted all through lunch by the book I could not wait to get back to reading. The thought of reading during lunch never even occurred to my tiny fourth grade sense of the possible.

The book I was devouring was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, which had just been made into a movie starring Han Solo. Blade Runner was splashed across the imagination for several reasons - the first being the fact that Harrison Ford was in it and he was so amazingly cool; the second were those movie stills that featured Harrison Ford pointing a terrible hand cannon, drenched in the noir rain; and finally, the almost nonstop hype that Starlog Magazine poured across its slick full color glossy pages, pure fanboy gasps, ooohs and aaahs.

I had dug the sleek black paperback out from inside my metal tub lift top desk and thumbed to where my Garfield bookmark stuck out. Not far into the novel at all, I was only at the scene where Deckard is riding up the elevator with the other cop bringing him back in to talk to the chief. The two are discussing whether screwing an android is technically cheating, as those artificial humans are just a clockwork of animated parts.

I am not sure if my easily flushing cheeks had lit up like a Christmas Tree ornament or whether that little four foot nun’s Notre Dame Morality Radar blew up like a mob hit car bomb; but before I knew what was happening, a small mannish claw shot out of the ether over my shoulder to snatch the book out of my hands. I sat in awe, staring at the empty space where the book had just been then I heard the slice of the cut, that clipped voice,

- Just what do you think you are reading?

I felt the burning hot rush of blood splotching my face with the rosy display of embarrassed guilt. The immediate and indiscriminate blaze that colored my starched dough complexion relegated my inclination to a life of smart-alecky bad boy mischief to happenstance and accident.

I was mortified, embarrassed and alive with a prickling rage. I could feel the stomach cramp and stress sweat beginning as the full effect of the obviousness of the singled-out example I was about to become settled in with the quiet of the hushed classroom. My classmates' faces turned back in shock and sneer.

The Sergeant growled through clenched teeth,
- Tell me what is going in this book!

I looked up at her frowning accusation. All I could muster was a meek stammer of
– i dunno.

- Do you not understand my question, young man?

- um…i…

- Then maybe you do not understand what it is you are reading!

At that point the conversation had become a pivotal scene in the larger childhood-crushing, imagination-decimating morality play that passed as pedagogy in the frigid halls of any and all catholic schools.

She continued in the coy and well-rehearsed authority of a well-practiced stage whisper,

- These men, if you want to call them that, are discussing a woman. Do you understand what they are discussing doing to her?

- She’s not really a woman…er, she’s…

- OH, I see, she isn’t--the snap of the curt interruption blistered the room. A frown curled downward, sternly punctuating the sharpness of the judgment lines burrowed into the sides of her mouth.

- This is totally inappropriate for you to be reading. You may not have this filth back until your mother comes to retrieve it.

She briskly turned on her heel and then walked back to her desk, dramatically dropped the book into a bottom drawer before disgustedly slamming it shut.

By the end of the week my mother had been called in to discuss the matter while I waited in the sterile linoleum of the hallway. Nothing was discussed about the mind-rotting pornography that was Philip K. Dick’s novel until my father came into my bedroom that night. He handed the book back to me and said

– You are allowed to read whatever you want at home. But please don’t take books to school unless you are assigned them, okay.

I nodded in amazement.

Labels: Blade Runner, Humiliating Shame Rituals

I was in the second grade and it had been a rough year. I had looked forward to Easter break since Christmas. The vacation was only a few hours old. I had spent most of the day inside playing figures, battling Stormtroopers with flying Wookies. With a half an hour before dinner would be ready, I went into the damp spring evening to kick at puddles and stab sticks into the mud. Consciously, I tried not to sink my sneakers into the slop, but was unable to resist the sole-soaking fun of mud holes’ slurping. I was bored, but enjoying myself.

Phil Stitt lived next door. A few years younger than me and always dressed like an extra neighborhood kid from the Brady Bunch. Phil thought that he was an Indian. He truly believed that his humorless father and ill tempered mother discovered him in the rotted out hollow the nearly dead stump in his backyard. He truly believed that he had been left in a swaddle of blanket by some Squaw, unable to raise her newly born son.

Part of this personal mythological origin was an invented religious cosmology that deified logs, large sticks, and other broken branches. Each piece of dead wood either protected him or bestowed upon him magical Indian powers. Whenever he was playing outside, whether it be a pick-up kickball game or a disorganized game of guns, he always hugged to his chest some awkward chunk of timber.

That night he came staggering down his driveway, his white cloth shorts a size too small, pinched his pale legs, making them resemble fat little bockwurst. His arms held up a thick branch. He cradled it against his tight fitted, faded yellow day camp hand-me-down t-shirt. He was singing an imaginary Indian War Chant imploring the Bark Gods to protect his troop movements and bless his evening war path, when he stopped in mid-step to look at me.

I had been standing holding a pointy stick of my own, punched into the mud next to a puddle polled at a sunken slab of sidewalk. I called out to him, raising my hand so he would see me.

Instead of calling back, he uttered a low pitched EEK! And let the branch roll from his arms as his fingers pitched it up. It smacked the lawn with a splashing thump. He pivoted on his heel, then bolted back up the driveway. Seconds later, he returned with a new lump of wood, this one water-logged and squirming with slugs. He lifted it above his head as he shouted out some nonsensical intruder alert in his made-up Indian vernacular, then as if dropping off a heavy barbell, he pushed the log to the ground. Then he squatted down to pick up some of the gravel on his broken asphalt drive way, aimed and lobbed it at me.

With two front lawns and at least one huge spring-budding tree between us, I was in little peril. While the rocks fell in a wide mud-slapping radius around me, I took to returning the volley. Phil was shouting his war cry as he weaved back and forth, ducking and dodging rocks that landed feet away from him.

Out of the bed of Day Lilies my mom had just planted, I found a rock almost the size of my own fist. Without particular force and with absolutely no care for aim, I send this rock flying in a high pitched arc. Caught in the slow motion thrall, Phil and I, both, watched the awful, branch shattering trajectory of this unstoppable rock. It peaked flawlessly and came straight down on Phil Stitt’ nose, hitting his face with a grotesque flesh-breaking whack.

Shocked by the unexpected direct hit, I tore up the front steps and bolted into my house to hide. I could hear behind me, Phil’s panic turn into a death wail of tears and hyperventilation.

My mother was in the kitchen stirring a big vat of boiling spaghetti. The kitchen windows were sweating steam under the lace doily curtains. She looked up as I ran past, anything moving that fast always signaled trouble. Just as my mom called after me, the phone BRAAAAANG’d, angrily.

Sitting on the landing halfway between floors, I could hear Phil’s mom screaming obscenities, both through the walls of our home and through the ear-muffled receiver pressed to my mom’s ear.

Seconds later my mom called me down to hear my side of the story. While she understood it was probably an accident, she was not at all happy that we were throwing rocks at each other in the first place. "How is that fun," she wondered. She continuously failed to understand that it was always more fun when we were filthy dirty and in the middle of trying to kill one another. She wanted me to march right over the Phil’s house and apologize for what I had done.

After some whiney indignation, I stepped over the pricker bushes between our yards and climbed up on the concrete slab of the Stitt’s front porch. I knocked softly. The door swung open and Phil stood there behind the screen door. His nostrils caked with blood boogers, his chin smeared by rough towel swipes, his faded yellow shirt tie-dyed in dark gore, and his white cloth shorts splattered with errant drips. His mother leaned over him, her claw digging into his shoulder.

“DO YOU SEE…” she growled through clenched teeth, tossing Phil forward, so that his hands bounced against the screen door with almost enough force to poke through its mesh screen.

As she continued, she yanked Phil back and forth as if he were a rag doll prop she used to punctuate her seething anger, “LOOK! Look at what you’ve done! Are you fucking proud of yourself, you little shit?”

I looked down at my sneakers. Phil’s mom screeched, jerking him back with a new ferocity, “Look at him! You see this?!!” She waved the blood sopped bath towel, brandishing it like a battle flag, “This towel is RUINED because of YOU! Are you going to pay for it, you worthless little bully!?!”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry? You think a sorry is going to make one bit of difference?! Goddamn motherfucker!” her face was purple from the lack of oxygen.

“It was an accident,” I pleaded.

“SHUT UP!” She spit as she flung Phil behind her almost sending him to the floor.

“Get off of my property!”

The door slammed in my face.
I turned and went home.

Labels: bloody noses, Humiliating Shame Rituals, stone throwing

The Hammer Head action figure fit perfectly in your mouth. The curve of his neck bulging out into the eye sockets, formed a sort of action figure Sherlock Holmes pipe. Its body stiffly bobbing with each breath, dropping out with every massive explosion (a curious aside...the louder the action got, the more devastating and complete the fire fight, the softer the actual sound effect became; our toys screamed in whispers).

Hammer Head was throw away background color, occupying mere flashing seconds during our introduction to the Mos Eisley Cantina. A figure grandma bought you on a Saturday trip to the Gold Circle (itself being a wretched hive of scum and villainy) on the edge of the mall. The Star Wars display was completely picked over and understocked, which meant that all the big name characters had already been sold to luckier kids who's parents shopped on weekday evenings. The cooler action figures had been purchased by parents who had accompanied their child to the movies; who knew who Luke and Han and Chewie were; not by generous, well-meaning grandmas. Those out-of-touch grandmas, who wanted nothing more than to spoil their grandchild by buying them one of these new action dolls that all the news programs were saying was the hottest toys in the history of playthings.

Grandma would not look at that spinning metal tree display stand with the clothes lined array of dangling action figures, trapped in their dark black spacescape cardboard tombs, and see the pathetic leftovers, toys that were mass produced within a best selling product line, yet were miscalculations, near misses, or nonessential characters. Neither would you at the tender age of eight or nine, feel the hobbyist's compulsion for completion to a collection. No, grandma somewhat impatiently saw the price tag or frowned over the monsters they made for her grandchild to play with these days.

By the time you stood there, timidly pushing the display around, those butterflies that first anxiously fluttered in your stomach when grandma told you, during the Merv Giffin Show the previous evening, that if you were "a very good boy while mommy and grandma shopped tomorrow, grandma would buy you a new Star Wars action figure." Those impatient butterflies would have concocted expansive fantasy lists of potential new figures, ones that were not even listed in the pages of the Sears Catalog.

No. Hammer Head, while readily recalled from the grotesqueries of Mos Eisley Space Port, just looked like a textile merchant or uninteresting shopkeeper, somewhat misplaced among the dangerous toothed pirates and other reptilian-skinned intergalactic outlaws. No, Hammer Head had just popped in for a quick after-work-cocktail before heading home to his wife and kid and the dinner waiting in front of the nightly news. No, Hammer Head was just a civilian during wartime.

Is this reward enough for standing quietly near the bins of multicolored yarn, amusing yourself by pretending those tight bundles of wide soft fabric, wrapped in dark sticker paper, were actually sticks of TNT waiting for the quickly burning fuse to buckle the yarn pile in the middle, before rocketing it skyward with ripples of pyrotechnic brilliance? Was this Hammer Head reward enough for being a good boy while grandma and mommy tried on shoes while you sat on the metal stool/seat with the rubber ribbed foot mat, pretending that the shoe horn was a sleek space ship exploring the dead volcanoes of a black planet, only to take on heavy laser fire from secret underground bases, only to careen and return hostilities with a planet ripping authority? The sense of disappointment, that guilty feeling that bottled, then pinned, those anxiously excited butterflies to the display matting of childhood compliance, of agreeing to abide by their adult rules and manage your hot boredom with anticipation.

Only to be met with the adults' own unbridled impatience that forced into your small hands the most convenient solution to your childish indecision. That sense of let-down, after tearing into the package to discover that even Hammer Head's skinny weapon appeared hopelessly ineffectual and Princess Leia level dorky, was quickly overshadowed by the sheer thrill of possession. The figure added one more fantastic creature to the Star Wars galaxy of amazing adventure and hours of chewing excitement, because, I think every kid who has ever been disappointed at receiving Hammer Head as a good behavior bribe or Hanukkah present knows - Hammer Head fit perfectly in your mouth as a sort of Star Wars action figure pacifier.

Labels: critical response, Hammerhead, Star Wars

In Praise of DANGERMOUSE

My first Dangermouse cartoon was seen completely by accident at Harvey Leo's house. My little sister and Harvey's little sister were friends and liked to play Glamor Gals or whatever they played away from us. Harvey's little brother was pretty much addicted to cable television, especially Nickelodeon, which Harvey and I were more than happy to allow him to plop down and veg-out to his greedy little tv-deprived heart's content, as long as it meant we could play Ghostbusters and other silly Commodore 64 video games without him bugging us.

Anyway, because Harvey's parent's were home and cooking dinner, Harvey was not allowed to play video games. So we sat on the floor in the living room and watched Nickelodeon. You Can't Do That On Television had not started yet, instead there was this strange, barely animated cartoon on. It involved some one-eyed mouse jumping around dodging very dodgily drawn explosions as a bespectacled hamster kept almost getting blown to hamster chunks. I was completely intrigued. I think, maybe, because at that point everything on cable, which my parent's still had not hooked up at our house, was rare and precious to me. The next day, I kept asking Harvey what the name of that cartoon was because for some reason I could not remember the show's title.


A year or two later, I am house bound, recovering from a nasty fourteen vertebrae spinal fusion. I sat in a large red and white floral print chair, covered in a cooling sheet, with fans pointed directly at me. I sat there, unmoving, for eight to twelve hours a day. I sat there waiting for the drugs to kick in and for the pain of the long wounds, torn down the length of my back and under my right arm, to close into gross-ridged scars. I sat there with the self-conscious uprightedness of one of those robotic g-man from the black-and-white science fiction-Martian invasion pictures, trying with all my 15 year-old-might not to lose my shit.

The minutes of each day were dreadful stretches between pills. Every human need was a trial of stamina, I could not muster. Where the oncoming tick of the next minute brought a depressed panic, sapped of every hope. Meals were uneatable. My toilet, a sham. All I was capable of doing was sitting, staring, and occasionally weeping. And that is to forget to mention the unholy heat wave that even made the metal of the back brace I wore sweat desperate bullets, in the middle of the afternoon.

The only bright spot in all this life crushing misery came when I discovered that Nickelodeon was broadcasting Dangermouse three times a day (early morning, lunch time, and then at dinnertime). The show and I were on the same schedule. It became the signal around which I based my day. I suddenly had something exterior to look forward to, unassociated with pain and the pills that accompanied it. Dangermouse's heroism bounded off the screen, conquering the greatest foe I faced, boredom! That sinister foe, Boredom, who promised that all I had left to look forward to was the routine of scheduled medication.



It sounds overwrought and dramatic, but it is entirely true - Dangermouse saved my life that summer. Everything about the show was perfectly adapted to my zonked out physical recovery. Those cheery adventures, riddled with puns and groaning allusions to popular culture, enthralled me. The stories were silly, without pandering. The action gleefully slow moving and often recycled (sometimes even within the same scene as cels were simply flipped - the old Spiderman swings left the right animation cost cutter). The characters interaction lively, fun and consistent. The sheer inventiveness of the series, too, should be applauded - for it took the snide half smirk of the spy, adventure, and sketch comedy with a seriousness that underpinned the deep joy the show emminated. Dangermouse worked so well at cheering me up, giving me something to look forward to, and providing the only genuine morphine-laced laugther, at a time when I knew there was far little to laugh about.

To this day, I have a love of the show that is unrivaled by any other cultural artifact. Neither Star Wars or Godzilla come close to glancing at the soles of Dangermouse's well-sprung feet. When I say "He's the greatest, he's fantastic, wherever there is danger, he'll be there," its deep and its real.