journal page 21

march 5, 2002 3:11am
there appear to be miniature insects drilling holes into my kitchen. the holes are not larger than pinpoints, yet i have been finding rather large piles of sawdust underneath them in the mornings. i'm not sure if they are related to all these gnats or are just good friends. they seem to be too small for termites because i thought those were like the size of beetles or something. these seem more like ants with tiny black and decker tools. i've taken some pictures for reference, with a quarter included for scale. afterwards, a giant weevil emerged from my sink and took the quarter.

i was in LA doing semi-responsible things all weekend and back for more next. played lots of pool and listened to public enemy very loud and passed out on a couch after four (shared) bottles of wine. not in that order. i bought a couple of three-dollar shirts at the supermarket tonight but one of them doesn't fit and smells like produce and the other sort of fits but just doesn't seem like a good idea anymore. going to clean this desk off tomorrow. tonight it's inking. also lots of the "a.i." soundtrack. i somehow can't stop listening to it while i work.

doing more interviews but going to have to stop soon because they're taking too much time and asking way too many of the same questions and i'm tired of getting horrible pictures taken and being wildly misquoted/fictionalised/blatantly lied about for their benefit. it's a lot like helplessly listening to someone you've never met try and impersonate the sound of your voice on your answering machine. actually it's exactly like that. it's awful and the source material isn't even something you ever wanted sent to the world in the first place.

february 23, 2002
4:31am
chuck jones has died.. i heard the news while animating, appropriately i guess. we met once sitting in the telluride airport in 1996 waiting for a delayed flight, me with no doubt badly colored hair and he with his floppy hat and cane. we chatted a while but for some reason what i remember clearest is when i was leaving he asked if i knew where he might find a sandwich. i said it looked like there was a little deli around back in the nook of the terminal. he gave me his card and invited me to the warner lot and the card had a picture of "what's opera doc?" on it.

february 21, 2002
4:09am

thank goodness for people like jake and jsn, who send us
homemade toys of rejected characters mid-bleed.

the big strange neighbor's apartment is right next to all of the mailboxes downstairs and he is always sort of sitting in there with his big strange head in the window. so i was getting my mail once when he says, "hey i got some of your mail, ha ha. but it's just mostly bills." and i was sort of puzzled and said, oh. ok. i'm on my way out but i guess i'll get those from you later. so later comes around and i knock on his door. and he goes oh yeah your mail ha ha let me get that for you. and he sort of fumbles around behind the door and wanders down the hall and comes back and looks around and then finally says, "i don't actually got any of your mail, man." and i then i realize that he had been attempting to tell a joke at first, a joke that sort of only made sense to him and then he was stuck improvising. so i sort of thanked him and left. and now whenever he spots me from his window, getting my mail, he'll say, "hey i keep getting your mail, ha ha. but it's just bills, though, ha ha." and i'd say, "ha, well ok then you just keep those for me." and this has been going on for about two years now, to the extent that when we happen to pass in the parking lot i'll say hi and he'll sort of stumble and blurt out, "hey i got some of your mail the other day!" and this happened once when he saw me by chance in the grocery store, "hey i got some of your mail the other day!" and it's clearly the only way he knows how to exchange pleasantries with me given that it's the only line of communication ever really established. he made some sort of half-joke two years ago and now it's all he can associate with whenever he sees me. it seems like a sort of panic response, but it also really seems as though he's enjoying the joke all over again every time.

i wonder if he drops dead one day and they clean out his apartment and find this massive mountain of mail in his place that he was never able to successfully communicate to me that he had.

my apartment has gnats. i think they're after the plants. i had to be photographed today which was terriblebecause i'm not good at it and it's not like my face on the cover of a magazine is going to sell anything because who careswhat i look like anyway? my apartment has gnats and i am killing them one at a time

don

february 12, 2002
10:50pm
have been enjoying the olympics and the people flopping in the snow trying to force meaning and purpose in their lives by the measures of stopwatches and anonymous international experts. she wiggled her ankle a bit there, that's a mandatory two point deduction, her dreams are over. though i guess i'm not really one to talk, spending years grinding out thousands of pieces of paper in sadsuccessive motion for reasons only known to me, and then only sort of. everything is still moving much slower than i'd like, occasionally grating. really the most difficult process now is just remaining calm and preventing going stir-crazy now that i'm over a year deep in drawing and probably looking at another year to go. this is venturing into uncharted territory, i've never spent nearly this long animating something before. this is very much like writing a novel by etching it in stone one letter at a time with your fingernails. just have to take every little step and try not to completely lose it. as usual not much to report... watering the plants and plucking strange hairballs out of the carpets. the woman behind me at the post office today had way too much perfume on

don

february 6, 2002
2:07am
the bunny sponge
helps mop up
all of the spilled bunny

Filling in for Don again is Robert May, from his little Los Angeles cube..

damn Tuesday always hits like a freight train. Everyone is sick. I can feel it growing around me. Only a matter of time till I buckle under the pressure. I could use a day off. "Moles and Trolls, Moles and Trolls, work, work, work. We never see the light of day and all they want to do is study..."
Hi folks. Thought I'd take an opportunity to pop in and say howdy while we ice up the captain and get him ready for another fierce month of drawin'. For those of you that made it out to the recent SB Don and Bill Show a hearty thank you. We had a great audience for both shows. God bless the elderly woman who stayed long after you all left, pointing her cane in my general direction and calling me Ronald. Hey, she could have called me Dobert. None the less I want to thank her for her kind words and the monstrous bout of diarrhea her brownies brought me after the show. Good times.
Any whoo. Work carries on. Don has been locked away a little more than usual. A scary mullet haired neighbor has been burning his prison documents in the building B-B-QUE at the foot of the stairs. This has been blocking Don's escape from the building. Perhaps time to move.
(don's note): this is actually true. the big scary guy living downstairs asked me if i had a paper shredder and i said no. five minutes later i find him burning an enormous stack of papers - plastic covers and all - in his BBQ grill in the middle of the apartment courtyard, burning ash flying everywhere. he told me it was his paperwork from san quentin and then said, "ha. ha. ha." and i couldn't really tell if he was kidding or not. and then he stabbed me with a little knife carved out of soap.

Thought for a change we could move away from production info to fill you all in on my exciting casting news down here in L.A. I had a heart stopping call back for an animated French commercial yesterday. I don't know if any of you have heard of "Fritz" but they sell Hot Dogs in France and I guess they're a huge chain. The ad is a hot dog, BUN AND ALL, making love to a large sixteen ounce glass of soda. Now the hot dog has very little to say in these ads but there is an occasional bit of French gibberish and lots of moaning and panting. To make a long story short.... I did pretty well. My moaning easily won over the casting folks. The only thing that's got me on pins and needles was my disastrous French accent. Not good. I tried to explain to the gentleman that they should try making the hot dog American. Leave the fries and drink French but the hot dog could be this surly young son-of-a-bitch. We'll see. according to the journal of medicine Rats and Horses cant vomit. Talk to you all soon.

r.

february 1, 2002
""
have been kind of light-headed and woozy this week. probably dying. already you can tell the mood i'm in. the nights are long and the days are under layered blankets and it is terribly cold here and it's difficult to animate with numb fingers.i read about this new pill, originally intended to help narcoleptics maintain consciousness, but now being further developed to possibly eliminate the need for anyone to ever have to sleep. it targets the hypothalamus with so far no known side effects. the military is very interested as are anyone else who'd like to work 60 hour shifts without getting tired. sign me up. could use some of those magic pills right about now but alas i have to go to bed early tonight (read: 5am) because i have to practice waking up like a normal person on saturday. i will meanwhile try and come up with something less inspirational to write for next time

don

january 14, 2002
2:42am
animating continues in manic depressive spurts and lulls, getting over a little hill right now.i've been hearing troubling reports from the cartoon network, currently sitting on "rejected"samerican television premiere because of new problems with the network censors standards and practices people. they were ready to go and air it uncut and throw caution to the wind and impress everyone with their new adult programming, but now they have problems with the fact one of the characters says "sweet jesus." the word "jesus" cannot appear on a turner network, which is somehow considered more offensive than all of the strange blood and gore and violence in the cartoon. meanwhile it seems the new dvd has already been bootlegged to the internet. it has only been out for a few weeks. YOU ARE STARVING MY CHILDREN. they are very knobby with dribbling eyes and they ask for fresh mush BUT I HAVE NONE TO GIVE and they crawl around in their oily rags sucking the ticks off of animals because all of their teeth have fallen out of their heads due to MENINGITIS because i cannot afford floss.

don

december 30, 2001
take two, they're small
12:41am,
i've already gained a solid seven and a half pounds since i arrived here a week ago. POUR THE FAT INTO MY MOUTFF ..well, what a wild and crazy year this has been for us. just poking thru some of these entries from the past 12 months reads like it's been 10 years (and not just because they were written so piss poorly).. and hopefully the next 12 will give us further opportunities to entertain and engage you all with our newest little dance numbers and monkey tricks and also hopefully there will be less people in the world killing other people in the world because i think we've all just about had enough of that.

once work on the new project kicks back into high gear next month, the gallery in this place will be seeing a new (albeit wishful) goal of weekly production pics and updates. also i think we'll be sprucing up this site in lots of elsewhere places as well and by god we may just yet complete our quest of installing a live chat room where i can insult you all personally. just you wait. i had to cancel my january sundance trip because of the current production attention-needs so with luck i'll be able to get settled and focused and refreshed anew with it (yes, it's already been over a year and a half in the making). and with more luck, the shiny new digit soon to replace the tail of the year-counter will refresh some of the world news as well

happy new year,
be good,
don