PolkOut.com dedicates this one to you, our fallen brothers!

Michael and Billy, your light shines brightest from the heavens.

Page Update:  See that right below?  That's a donate button.  I know I said I'd never ask you readers for any money, but I've been thinking that if I really want people to read this stuff, I've got to advertise, and I've got to advertise up there in the big leagues.  There are webcomics that get upwards of 800,000 hits per day, but they charge upwards of $40 per day per ad.  Now StumbleUpon chargles $0.10 per impression, that's 400 impressions per $40; if 0.1% of one of those other comics' readership clicks my link, that's 800 impressions.  So it's already more cost effective.  It becomes even more cost effective the more attractive my ads become, so I was also wondering if there was anyone out there who could help me make some awesome ads.  To be honest, I feel like a piece of shit asking for donations when you could be giving your money to hungry orphans or organizations that plant trees in urban wastelands, so don't donate anything unless you're really hemorrhaging cash out of every hole.

Forum Update: The forum looks awesome now!  Big thanks to my friend Alex!  Post in the new forum: www.PolkOut.com/forum.  It's hosted on my server, and if that starts getting laggy in the future I can just pay for more bandwidth.  Any artistic contribution to the forum would be terrific.  You can still check out the old forum, and older pages will still link to it for now, so... uh... do whatever with that intel.

Quick shit for newcomers: Forum (deviant bullshit), Feedback (fan art, comments, critiques), About (check it out and contribute).  Do you have a website of your own you want me to give a shout out to?  Want to do a crazy guest strip?  You can reach me through that email or on the forums. 

Some fan art from forum user dodoman1:

Hey, do me a favor and click this link.  It’ll count as a vote for this comic and, according to forum user Stickfodder, I’m liable to get additional traffic if I make it up on the list. 

After last week’s rant, my step brother suggested I make some kind of legitimate blog.  Dr. Xoxo, our newest forum member, similarly pointed out, well, fuck it I’ll just use his words:

“[I] think that maybe you should try splitting the comic and the rants to some degree so that they don't compete for space and maybe you could put special effort into the writing. One way that this could benefit you is that the many (rather most) people who don't bother with news posts on comics would instead be redirected to another part of the site for your writing (or something like that). Also if someone discovered your work though you writing they might start reading the comic secondarily.”

If any of you have any suggestions for where or how I should make a blog (what service or network or whatever), I’ll take ‘em.

I saw the new Transformers movie, but I’m not emotionally invested enough in it to rant about what I loved and what I hated.  In fact, I just don’t really feel like hating anything at the moment.  So instead, I’m just going to tell you about my Saturday.

After I’d gotten back from the gym—which is essentially all I’ve been doing this summer (well, that and writing)—I met up with my friend Eric so we could head over to Brooklyn together.  We were going to Prospect Park to see a free show featuring three bands I’d never heard of: These United States, Phosphorescent, and Dr. Dog. 

I don’t talk about music much because I’m not really a music kind of guy.  At least I don’t consider myself one; Kevin’s disagreed, Eric has too, and they’re right in a way… I really love some music, but I can’t invest myself in so much of what I hear.  For me to say I like a band means I’ve listened to them over and over, memorizing their lyrics, backing them up with a simultaneous echo in my own head (I suppose a simultaneous echo isn’t really an echo, but who gives a fuck?).  Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, CCR… these were the sorts of bands I loved as a teenager.  Mark Knopfler is a fucking magician with a guitar, and Roger Waters, well I was obsessed with his solo stuff for quite a while… their writing, their bluesy melodies, their sardonic styles of narration, really plucked the right heartstrings for me back then.  I say I’m not a music person because I don’t know shit about chords and tabs and notes and whatever the hell else goes into making that kind of art, I approach this stuff in the language that I know: bumbley, awkward, literary terms.

And just the same, Led Zeppelin seems to be the band of my twenties (or at least early twenties).  Jimmy Paige’s desperate wailing, both with his voice and his guitar (which pours out sound like a wine bottle tilted into a glass, or more appropriately, some wino's rotten maw), simply resonates with me (I could do without his dumbass commentary on the live stuff though).  Bands like Angels of Light, Six Organs of Admittance, and Amps for Christ (I’ve got to thank Kevin for contributing so much to my musical education), are where where I am right now, and I'd never heard of them six months ago.  It always seems like such a battle to let a new group onto my playlist.  It’s like adopting another child and having that awkward phase where you get to know them, trying your damndest to convince them everything can be okay if we just open up to one another. 

So what I’m saying is, I went to this show expecting it to be like any other; I’m there, but not really, and I don’t even give a fuck who’s on stage because I haven’t had the necessary prep time (weeks of listening and relistening and obsessing) to give a shit.  But what seemed different this time was that… well, it was okay.

Beautiful day is a phrase that's tossed around pretty liberally.  You open the blinds, the sun is shining on everything, burning like God’s own angry eye, staring down at all us sinners, bleaching every color, every pigment, scorching through your flesh (giving lots of people lots of cancer), and you exclaim, “What a beautiful day!”  When we got to Prospect Park, it was raining.  But it wasn’t bad rain, like big globules of bird shit smacking down on your head, running through your clothes and shoes, making your socks uncomfortably wet.  There were little clouds and they drifted and between them the sun still shone.  My folks would call it mushroom rain, the sort of weather that lets those fuckers grow and grow and grow.  We walked down a road that ran along the perimeter of the park, the rain above our heads, but people, less than a hundred feet away, were playing soccer in the sun.  It was pleasant in an irritating way.  Like grains of sand digging into your elbows at the beach, sticking to your sweaty back.  Or like spitting up lake water through your nose.  Or damp dirt leaving spots on your jeans.  And then it passed, and the sun sank behind the stage, but the yellow and orange that it leaked stayed in the sky for a little while.  Our friend Alton appreciate it, even though he’d seen such things a million times before.

Alton was what we named the tree we sat under.  We named him while we were still sober, feeling all sorts of great just because.  The venue was essentially a stage, some seats, and a field, where people sat around, threw Frisbees, played with their dogs and kids, and bullshat.  There wasn’t that overwhelming ego among the bands, that look at us and only us that you tend to see lots of other places.  If it was too loud (and I hate loud music), I could walk back a few feet.  I could kick my feet out under a tree, zone out, and just listen to the sound.  What grabbed me grabbed me, what didn’t just sank under the low hum of human static.  I liked all the bands about the same, maybe Presidents a bit more because they seemed the most dynamic, though I was probably paying more attention to them since they were the first ones on.

We walked around, pissed in the woods, dug holes in the earth with sticks, and thought about Alton.  How someone must’ve planted him there all those years ago, how he grew, the people who sat under him, all that he’s seen, will see—like a montage, you know like when you see sped up footage of New York and Tokyo and the sun rises and sets and rises and sets and thousands of people stream in all directions within seconds.  It was a beautiful day.  The music didn't ask much of me and I appreciated it.

Transformers was an okay movie.  The script could’ve used another draft.

--End Transmission--

PolkOut Sells Out

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