I was telling a story to a friend of mine earlier today–one of those that seem like they should be straightforward at the time you start telling them, but get progressively more and more surreal as you try to explain all the contributing factors,* and I had gotten up to the point where I was sitting on a horse on a sheet of black ice in the company of an ex-jockey with Tourette’s–my mother was dating his brother at the time, and we had bonded over the fact that we both disliked his brother–he was an ex-jockey because he’d gained too much weight, plus possibly the Tourette’s didn’t help, so he was a very short, very angry man–who was lecturing me on the advantages of American vs. Japanese horseshoes, punctuated with occasional bouts of profanity, for nearly half an hour while the horse attempted to pick its way across the ice–

Otter stopped me here, and said "Your life…is so…I mean, did you look at this sort of thing at the time, and think "Perhaps this is an omen of things to come?"

"…not…really…"

She kinda had a point, though, and I offer this by way of explanation for how I wound up painting stuff like this. It was my life, man. It drove me to it.

Holstein Phalloi
Non-DA link

*This seems to occur with the majority of my stories. I start by trying to explain where I learned to use a blowgun, and then I wind up having to explain getting stoned with my stepfather and taking pot shots at the tree trunk holding up the kitchen, and then I have to explain both my stepfather and why there was a tree trunk in the kitchen and then I usually end up at how there was a meth lab across the street from that house and my mother calling me up to narrate the SWAT team raiding the meth lab–"Oooh, they’ve got a battering ram!" and how the guy rolled out on his roof, naked, attempting to escape, and apparently the tip off was the smell because the plumbing hadn’t worked for like six months, and they’d been using the first floor as a toilet, and seriously, WHO DOES THAT?! I mean, if my plumbing stops working, even if I had a meth lab and couldn’t get a plumber in as a result, I’d put in a porta-potty or get frickin’ buckets or something, I wouldn’t just decide "Well, I don’t need BOTH stories!" and anyway, my point is that I do kinda know how to use a blowgun, although only if the darts are made out of nails and shredded cigarette filters, and at this point, generally my companions are staring at me with much the same expression that Otter had. And, um, don’t do meth, kids.

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