journal page 21

march 5, 2002 3:11am
don't believe
everything you read
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. please refer to exhibits A and B below, with a quarter included for reference. not sure if they are related to the gnats or are just good friends. monsters coming out of the walls. my apartment is the greatest. is there an entymologist in the house? these 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. fascinating. after these pictures were taken, a giant weevil emerged from my sink and took the quarter.

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 the couch after four (shared) bottles of wine. not in that order. 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.. somehow can't stop listening to that. sentences losing shape slowly, mine are

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. it's embarrassing and awful and the source material isn't even something you ever wanted flaunted to the world in the first place. bleaaah.

back to the weevils..
don

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.

almost every day i go downstairs to get the mail out of my box, the neighbor guy jokes that the post office keeps accidentally delivering him my mail. "hey i keep getting your mail," he'd say, "ha ha. but it's just bills, ha ha." and i'd say, "all righty then, well you just pay those for me, ha ha." and i'd be on my merry way and life continues. his door is right next to the mailboxes so he watches people coming and going and his little joke was pleasant and neighborly at first but he's been doing it every time i run into him for two years now and i've never talked to him about anything else and i don't even know his name. "hey there, when's the post office going to stop sending me your mail? ha ha. nothing important today." one might think he'd come up with a new joke or mix it up a little after two years, but often it's an exact same line, "hey i keep getting your mail, ha ha. credit card applications this time, i went ahead and filled them out, ha ha" 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 established... he made the joke once two years ago and now it's all he can associate with whenever he sees me... it could be a sort of social panic response, but it really seems as though he's enjoying the joke all over again every day. even if i'd see him in the parking lot, away from the usual mailbox area/catalyst of conversation, it's still "hey so maybe we should just switch the apartment numbers on our mail boxes for them, ha ha ha." sometimes i go get my mail in the middle of the night or at other odd hours when i'm working late and then he's just staring out from his little window. perhaps he's going to drop dead one day and they're going to discover this enormous mountain of my undelivered mail piled up in his room, which would at least give the story a nice twist

my apartment has gnats. i think they're after the plants. i had to be photographed today which really sucked because i'm not good at that and it's not like my face on the cover of a magazine is going to sell anything because who the hell knows what i look like anyway? there are few things i hate more than getting my picture taken. i am listening to this old charles trenet song and the little horn section has got to be one of the happiest things on earth. so anyways my apartment has gnats and i am killing them one at a time

don

february 12, 2002
10:50pm
waking life not getting the nomination for animated feature is a solid kick in the groin to all things animated. 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... oh my she wiggled her ankle a bit there, that's a mandatory two point deduction, her dreams are over, ha ha ha. on a related note, the speed skating would be a lot more interesting if the ice was patchy and thawing in spots.

speaking of trying to find meaning in one's life, animation is moving along like a turtle with a hernia, slower than i'd like, but steady and occasionally grating. really the most difficult process now isn't to do with the specific work within the scenes as it is remaining calm and preventing the stir-crazy now that i'm over a year deep in drawing and probably looking at another year to go. venturing into uncharted territory, never spent nearly this long animating something before. very much like writing a novel by etching it in stone one letter at a time with your fingernails, just have to take the baby steps and try not to completely lose it. so, difficult as usual to keep from being distracted by all the shiny other things life has to offer and stay focused. otherwise not much to report... watering the plants and plucking 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 apt courtyard, spreading a giant cloud of ash 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 but it really smelled bad and rob didn't really say anything, just sort of stood there shaking his head sadly feeling the pain that is living in my poo-ridden apt building. and then the guy 'shived him 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
"underneath this pile of stones
lies all that's left of sally jones
her name was lord, it was not jones
but jones was used to rhyme with stones."
have been kind of light-headed and woozy this week. probably dying. already you can tell the mood i'm in. well, the santa barbara don n' bill shows last weekend went very well and this weekend i'm off to LA to nominate the academy short films. feeling kind of ill and cranky at the moment though. also spent the better half of last weekend digging this unbelievably long ingrown hair out of my neck with tiny scissors; these are common but they usually don't go so long undetected, and this little monster had been curled up under several layers of skin like a very tightly wound spring for what must have been weeks. so it was a two day struggly process of cutting, digging and yanking and was quite bloody and i'm not sure why i'm sharing right now other than to illustrate my wonderful home surgery skills. because once i finally sliced/popped the damn thing out i swear it must have been an inch long of coarse, unhappy, woefully-going- the-wrong-way hair. i'm quite the little surgeon, i always yank my own stitches out when i have them and can handle just about any operation with my little scissors and also i have a hammer and pliers somewheres in the kitchen for the larger problems... MONGO MAKE HEALTHY... umm other than that, not much excitement.. the nights are long and the days are under layered blankets and it is frigging coooold here and my eyes are glaze-y and it's difficult to animate with numb fingers. rob says he's going to buy me a space heater. i read about this new pill, originally intended to help narcoleptics maintain consciousness, but now being further developed to entirely eliminate the need for anyone to ever have to sleep. amazing, no? it targets the hypothalamus and simply keeps you awake without any sleepy or passing out, 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 wakey 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, this was all far too cheerful

don

january 14, 2002
2:42am
animating continues in happy manic spurts and depressing lulls, getting over a little hill right now. my face feels greasy tonight. well, have been hearing troubling reports from the cartoon network, currently sitting on rejected's american television premiere because of new problems with the network censors standards and practices people. they were all ready to go and air it uncut and gutsy and throw caution to the wind to impress everyone with their new adult programming at first, but now they have problems with the fact that one of the characters says "sweet jesus". no problems with the blood and violence, but apparently "jesus" is a dirty word now, which i was not aware of. let's hope this silliness clears up soon and the film gets to air, because everyone knows we will yank it entirely before even thinking of editing anything. meanwhile have been hearing reports that some of you have already bootlegged the new DVD onto the internet. sweet jesus people, it's less than a month old. could you at least give us a grace period before entirely destroying our income? YOU ARE STARVING MY CHILDREN, ALL OF YOU. 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 ticks off of animals because all of their teeth have fallen out of their heads due to MENINGITIS because i cannot afford floss. it is a lot like a charles dickens novel. anyways
moving on to more fun news, i've just got into the academy and will be voting the oscars in march. ha ha ha.. let's see if i can't do some good. not sure if i made it in in time to nominate this year, but if so it's a sweep for jurassic park 3 if you ask me. yesiree. i am eating fruit out of a bowl. you know that thing where you sort of suddenly half throw up in your mouth? i think i just did that

don

december 30, 2001
take two
they're small
12:41am,
gaaaah i've already gained a solid seven and a half pounds since i arrived here a week ago. oh, the winter coat.. 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 humble 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