One of those weeks...

Eh you know...

Beware of the Loong rant!

First, on Friday, after rearranging some furniture in our rumpus room, I got attacked by a gang of dust-mites.
Being allergic to little fuckers, I've been scratching myself ever since and now I am covered in scabs and little bites and my skin itches like hell.
To make things better, on Saturday I had to go to pick up my son from his little casual job at local K-mart. It was raining, and as is a custom in fucking Brisbane, every time there's a few drops of rain, every man, his dog and his dog's fleas take their fucking car out for a ride.
Parking lot was full so I had to drive all the way up onto the third level rooftop car park.
On my way down to the shops, being busy with scratching myself like crazy and cursing my life, I stepped on a fucking escalator, rather clumsily, both of my feet slipped from underneath me, and I fell. Real bad!
I cracked my right elbow against the corner of the fucker, and as is my style totally lost sense of reality.
What the fuck!
I remained laying there holding my elbow, trying to figure out if my arm was broken, and in general, dealing with huge amount of pain by cursing loudly while at the same time trying to scratch my itchy neck.
I looked behind, and there was a couple standing on a conveyor a few meters behind me, pretending they do not see me.
I realized they did not see me fall, so from their perspective I was some crazy fuck who decided to take a nap on the fucking escalator for no particular reason whatsoever.
( At the time I was unshaven, covered in sores, wearing a cap, hoodie, old cargo pants and sandals with my socks on- a typical dumpster explorer look, so I understand how they did not want to get involved)
There was a bunch of Asian people in a restaurant at the bottom of the stairs who saw my fall, but they were too full of respect for my dignity to offer any help or concern whatsoever.
At that point, I remembered the words of Greg Giraldo: how you know you are old when you fall in a public place and no one laughs, everyone just looks concerned.
Well at that moment I felt fucking old.
It took me all the way to the bottom of the escalator to get up, my right arm the sea of pain with little fucking dust mites biting me all over my body like crazy fuckers they are.
As I thought that my arm was broken, I looked for the mall security, thinking I will have to get the ambulance happening. I found one of them guarding the entrance to some newly open Asian restaurant, manning the velvet rope, told him of my plight, and then he called some other dude with mustache who took my details.
By that time, I figured that my arm is not broken, only badly bruised and cut, and my son showed up, so I decided to let it be and piss off home.
Thing is, My niece's husband has been working at the mall as a security guard, so soon enough the whole fucking family knew of my shameful incompetency to preform a bipedal motion at a public place. And him and his buddies had a laugh in the afternoon looking at the footage.
I hope he gets it to me one day. And I hope it looked as good as it hurt.
Then I went home, told my wife about my misfortune, and she had a nice laugh too.
Badly bruising myself was a small price to pay to see her happy and cheery.
I licked my wounds and went and got myself a haircut from some Lebanese dude who cut my hair in a less than a minute and charged me 20 bucks for the pleasure. Then I went home and being itchy as i was, shaved my beard of many years, freaking the whole family with the end result, because I looked as if half of my face was missing.
It's funny how the beard becomes part of your personality after you have it for a loong time.
Anyhow, I spent the rest of the weekend scratching myself, crying from pain from my injured elbow, and trying to get some extra work done as we had to get some last minute presentation images done for the project I am working on at the company I am working for.
Monday I went to work, still sore and itchy, And tried to squeeze 2 days worth of work in one day, while at the same time fighting with fucking Cintiq drivers who kept on resetting my wacom pen and stuffing all of my work and tryng to scratch my back with my free hand.
At the end of day I did it, with a help from my new colleague Rob M (link on the right) and pissed off home.
And then today, still fighting off little mites who proved resilient to three showers a day, tube of Bactrin and half a tube of some fucking steroid cream, I went to work only to find out that the boss overlord over in the La La land, did not like any of the images I did, and decided to hide them from any possible focus group who might have to see them.
I sucked in the tear, bit on my arse once again and said I am ok with it.
Then a fellow employee who recently came from Canada and started working with us stopped by my desk, saw me looking at "cafe sale" site and proceeded to tell me how he knows all of the really cool concept artists- those Ubisoft Canada master painters: Barontieri, Lacoste, Sparth and the rest of the gang and how awesome they all are.
With all the shit that happened to me by that point, I felt retarded.
He was telling the truth, all these guys share the same job description as I do, they produce these awesome landscape, character and creature concepts in a blink of an eye, and here I was, itchy, sore and unable to do two pieces of art looking decent enough to be shown to anyone.
Also, the knowledge that I will never be as good as those guys did not help.
So I felt like shit.
I felt like quitting and going to do some lumberjacking for the rest of my life.
(originally I wanted to say driving a bus for the rest of my life, but I know I would fail that too so I opted for the lumberjacking- how hard could it be to swing an axe?)
Anyhow, that's my week so far.
Above images are some shitty sketches I did tonight trying to cheer myself up, but all they did is made me feel worse.
I hope this shitty week, this shitty mood, pain in my elbow and these fucking little fuckers who use my body as their fucking holiday destination finally go away, so I cheer up a bit and get myself out of the mental slum I am in at the moment.

Thanks to all three of you who still visit this shitty place,

Kind regards,

Milenko