Banal Hemorrhage

You may hate this post, but it is entirely accurate and based on peer-reviewed data (drunken conversations with my friends). Individuality; what a slippery slope that is. Too little, and you are prone to manipulations and targeted ads.  Too much, and they may name a disease after you.  Symbols have been so interesting in the United States lately. The untrod snek used to mean a rebellious person in love with their inalienable rights, but now you see it next to pleas for abortion prohibitions. You may see a love sticker to Jesus, next to a beloved cartoon peeing on your feelings. Confederate flags in cars with license plates that didn't lose the Civil War.  However, in general, you can always tell the type of people behind the wheel with more accuracy than your typical Buzzfeed quiz. If you disagree, sound off in the comments!

I think the moral of the story here is, uhm, not to subcontract your proposal. It was easier to avoid doing that before. Nowadays, it seems you have to have a photographer, a scriptwriter and a social media intern, just to get hitched. Back in the old days (2015) you just arm-wrestled the lady’s dad and ran a few fetch quests for the mom. But, no, things have to be so complicated and showy these days. You can’t just like find out what sex your child will be, you gotta invite a few people and risk first-degree burns. You have to film the whole thing and have a commentary track, explaining exactly how much C4 you used on the giant paper mache uterus.  None of the young people these days get to be engaged spontaneously with a 30-cent ring, drunk off your asses and each other in a foreign shore, and it shows. Honestly I feel bad for my fellow introverts, this new world seems to have a higher and higher cost for just living and being present. You have to be there with intensity, with video

I love stonks! I'm a boring stock owner though, no options, no meme stocks, no timing the market. I buy companies that I believe will have growth over 10 years and I hold them.  It's literally the watching-glaciers-melt of the stock world, but it's served me well. During the height of our last bull market I got a bit carried away and tested out some new things, like options, meme stocks and a few alt coins. I won some and lost some more last year, but it felt a lot more like gambling than investing.  I met tons of peeps like my version of Cocaine Bear during that time. They all gave me the whole stock-broker-on-copious-amounts-of-blow vibe. Because what could go wrong when you combine financial decisions with a drug that makes you feel unbeatable and overfilled with confidence? I can't wait for the movie Cocaine Bear, but I think my version would be fly AF too.  

  To be completely honest, I didn't read Flowers in The Attic. Somehow a school friend read it or saw the movie and then told me the plot. Just this second hand retelling was enough to traumatize my young head. Incest, death and starvation will do that to you. It's crazy how trauma works, I dont remember what I had for dinner yesterday (Sorry Noom!), but I remember clearly the retelling of this story or the section in IT with the crawling eye or Luke losing his hand. Extra Panel: For some reason, my dad showed me Carrie when I was but a young lad. The image of the pig blood running down her face is burned in my hippocampus even more permanently than looking both ways to cross the street. Crazy stuff, trauma!  Notes: Our friend Tommy constantly tells me I should do one panels. I owe him one so, this is my attempt at that!

Deep, deep inside, I am an optimist. I don't let that side of me come out that often, because I think death, dystopia and destruction are way funnier and more entertaining.  I question my own use of a city as an example of humanity in disarray, but visually, it's the best way I could come up to display all of the stuff we are capable of doing in one panel. Personally my dystopia is a farmhouse upstate with neighborhood patrols and heavily armed "good guys" making sure there's no undesirables. A place where you need to use a car for everything you do and where solitude and a diet of everclear and deer makes you wonder if that Trump guy had some valid points. The kind of place in which you can yell at the wind and wonder when the open border policy you learned about in your loud cable news show will show up at your door. That’s hell on earth for me! Extra panel: 

One of the biggest ironies of the world is that to keep safe the things we love we have to hide their beauty from the world. Ferraris live under tarps, fine jewelry in old wooden boxes and our phones on cases or with nasty screen protectors. I'm sure that's why my wife buys me hideous shirts, to keep me safe from predators. Just kidding, I'm just checking up t see if she still reads my blog. Growing up in Venezuela I learned at an early age to hide any wealth. "They'll kill you for your shoes!", I often heard. And they sure did sometimes. My interest in shiny things has never been vast, even after I emigrated. It's telling that I have the ugliest car and shoes in the team of 27 I work with, and I'm the manager! The only time I see the special edition colors of my phones are 30 minutes after I buy them and 1 week before I trade them. Extra Panel: Padme with a Case  

My wife came up with this one and I manically drew it over the weekend. It made me remember why I married my wife. For some men, the keys to their heart is in their stomach. I don't get that. Does that mean I'm in a long term relationship with Grubhub? Because outside of making my tummy happy, Grubhub is not my type at all.  By about our third date, Roxanne was the funniest woman I had ever met. The first two dates she accomplished by being gorgeous, smart and interesting. The rest she got by making me laugh or by joining me in laughter. Sometimes my deadpan humor misses the mark for her. I'm sure when I actually have really sad news for her she'll laugh thinking it's a joke. Strangely enough, I think I'd like that.  Drawing and making these stupid cartoons was mostly her doing. As I started doing them she was lavish with praise, in a way I've never been able to elicit through my cooking, homemaking and love making skills. So I knew I had to bank on it! (Thi

  I thought I was being fancy. Whenever you see a rich bachelor in a movie, they consistently have satin sheets. I've been trained to associate satin with luxury. Because I felt like a fancy person, I bought satin sheets last week. Boy are these things smooth! What they don't tell you is that they may be TOO smooth. I feel like a bar of soap in a crisco disco. It's a veritable sleep and slide in our bed now, with dogs, cats, pillows and humans just sliding all night every night. We're getting used to it but it's been feeling a bit rough, which is an ironic feeling for satin sheets.  Luxury items are funny.  Congratulations on that fancy Italian car for which you will need to hunt for repair parts the rest of your life! Good job on acquiring Downton Abbey, and I hope you can find a good footman in this job market. I know two people who have pool maintenance businesses and the only thing they have in common is that they don't own pools.  Sometimes what you covet w

I undulate between having faith in people and being ashamed of being people. It’s a constant back and forth. Hey, look at this person that is giving her meager savings to help others! Oh crap look at what a cesspool of abuse the Boy Scout organization turned out to be! It’s back and forth all day, every day.  You wouldn’t think I had any faith in humanity if you've been reading my comics, but I’m a closeted optimist. Every time I see or read about an evil group, I learn of a good individual. In general it’s always throngs of people who allow evil, but individuals who exemplify humanity at it’s best. I’ll take a tree over the forest when it comes to humanity.  These times, all we hear about are the indefensible things that groups do: High level collusion between the government and the idiot parade that stormed the Capitol, Purdue suppressing and inventing clinical data, Facebook knowingly contributing to the crassification of everything. We forget that there are individuals showing

  I've recently had a First Day. It's pretty wild how these things can go. I definitely learn best when when I'm thrown in a pool with sharks, but sometimes these experiences can be veritable nightmares. Thinking back on all the "Karen" and "Wild Anti-Masker" videos that stream through social media, I keep thinking that it's very likely that some of those happened in someone's first day in the job. It's traumatizing! It's the people in charge who have to make this a smooth on-ramp. And as a recently minted person in charge, I am aware of the hardships. In healthcare, everything changes by the hour, so standard training is relevant for maybe a day after it's made. Training and onboarding has to be seen as a process and we are often behind.  In my family, I have one particular member who is sort of a male Karen. Let's call him Karlos. Karlos complains about fork tines not being symmetrical, regardless of the situation he's in. I

Many people in the right (at least, the United State's right) abhor college education. Many of them HAVE college degrees, but still huff and puff about colleges. They tell their constituents that colleges are a highway to communism; that the instant you enroll in any class, you're obligated to read Marx and call your parents capitalist pigs. I definitely missed that part during my college education, part of which was in the US. What they DO teach you in college is to apply reasoning skills. You have to compare and contrast in many classes and avoid logical fallacies. You learn about false dichotomies. Simple messages (both from the left and the right) tend to do this:  "You're either with us or not."  "You can't be a Republican and racially aware." "You can't be a Democrat and like cops." It's easy to get sucked in. I lost friends and contacts because of Trump. My argument went: "If you liked Trump after he cancelled DACA, you

Are awful families a thing of modern times? I know the answer is no before I asked. History is full of families who for instance, revered Mussolini, Hitler or Hugo Chavez! That one family that fostered rats during the Black Plague. The Trumps. I’m sure there were families who idolized Genghis Khan as his forces tore through everything around them. Humans have the free will to love the worst things for them and their neighbors, and they exercise that free will often. So, I present to you some nice gift ideas, some stocking stuffers and such for that family in your neighborhood. That way, you can feel like a good person while bringing a little misery to miserable people. Because, at the end of the day, it’s the season to show people what you think of them.* * On behalf of Banal Hemorrhage and its subsidiaries, don’t do any of this. We are not responsible for any of this. It’s just a bit of fun. Just ignore the bad people.  

Dear readers, this is not a joke. For at least a decade, I enjoyed the fruits of my immigration status. Every awkward, weird, strange, outlandish and cringeworthy thing I did was blamed by yours truly on the fact that I was from another country.  'In my home country we used salt instead of sugar,' I'd say after messing up a recipe. 'In my home country it's normal to be barefoot outside.' 'In my home country, it's customary to get blackout drunk on Mondays.' ' In my country we say grace AFTER eating the turkey. ' Do I feel bad about it? In my home country we don't feel bad about things. But, honestly, it was great. After a lifetime of being weird and an outcast in my own country, I got to flip the script a bit and make it exotic in a new one. It didn't last long. People caught on at around year 3. And then, in year 7 I became a citizen of the United States of America. I entered a period of diminishing results. And now, I'm back to

This comic started when I saw the reviews to a fancy tapas restaurant in Miami. They were what you would expect. "This item had the most pleasant flavor I've put inside my mouth since I was a child in Kentucky trying chicken fried chicken for the first time, but the portion size was so small! 1/5 stars." People sometimes conflate value with money and size, and it's clear that in the United States, that is absolutely true for dining out. Buffet culture is crazy up in here. It's like a competition! And of course, I as a traveler have tried to adopt the culture of the place I'm in. But honestly, I've never been to a buffet I didn't regret.  Portion sizes in the US will have to change. The downsides are too much: Obesity, supply chain constraints and a constant glorification of the big and cheap. How do we make this change? Do we make McDonalds 1/4 pounder (the gold standard in food prices) a 1/5 pounder? Do we make it more expensive? I don't trust hum

I’ve written and talked about impostor syndrome at length. Here is one early sample , and another . I’m still plagued by these feelings every once in a while, that I’m just acting like I know things instead of actually knowing things. I’ve heard a few of my coworkers express that feeling as well. I think in part it is because I work in healthcare, but I’m not in the front lines. The front line is where the magic happens (you can’t fake setting up an IV), we are all there just for support, and it is often hard to find the value we provide from the sidelines. All I can do some days is cheer like a paraplegic behind the marathon finish line. And then, there are those that should be feeling a bit like impostors but have no sign of self awareness. Do they wake up in cold sweats in the middle of the night and wonder… perhaps I should come clean to my West Virginia constituents and tell them that I’m actually a Republican in disguise? But seriously, the syndrome is real and it is very common

This comic is made all the better when you learn that HP Lovecraft, the father of the Cthulhu mythos, was a raving racist. Here's a blog from an author awakening to this reality . And here's a quiz to determine if an excerpt was written by him or Hitler. So, making a woke Cthulhu is very cathartic to me!

When I thought of this comic, I thought this song was created and performed by a Michael Bolton type. In a petty predictable turn of events, the original creator and composer was an African American.  And his version is perfect from the get go. 

When I was doing research on lizard-men, this picture of a human performance artist always came up. He lives in Austin. In one of those late night deep dives I went to his webpage and discovered two things. One, he’s a Philosophy graduate. Two, if I would’ve had to guess what his major was, I would have guessed Philosophy.  Thelizardman.com At one point in my life, I would have scoffed at this guy. ‘What a waste of a life’ I would’ve said, while sitting in my recliner watching superhero movies and being super basic. As I’ve grown, him and others like him are what makes life interesting. You think you’ve met all possible combinations of bipedal, primate prancers, and then this guy slinks by; making you change the size and shape of all your conceptual containers.  It’s a wonderful life if you’re willing to let it be.  He seems like a cool guy but I decided to go with a less earthly version. A combination of aliens and dinosaurs was my final design note, hastily written on an iPhone note

One of these languishing months I set myself down in bed fully awake. Anxious and worried about everything, my mind was in quick despair.  Doomscrolling was part of this process. In between these hazardous thoughts, the idea for this comic series was sprung.  So, enjoy the fruits of my warped brain, and let me know in the comments if you like this! I have character arcs and many episodes lined up already from that one feverish night.  

Bathrooms are the Water Temple of social anxiety. That’s a Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (1998) reference and trust me it’s very, very funny. On point though, public bathrooms, locker rooms, and other  loci of excreta have always been challenging locations when my social anxiety is at its highest. I don’t want to learn about others in these quarters, I feel no need to reach out to anything but my self. One time, as a new employee, I went to the bathroom adjacent to where I was being onboarded. The CEO came bounding in, loudly announcing himself and patting other urinators on the back. He then proceeded to let go of his liquid waste hands-free while holding a power pose and whistling. It dawned on me that that’s probably why he was the CEO. He had conquered the bathroom. Surely the people who hired him could tell this is a person who can pee while loudly talking about the weather! “He’s going places”, they must've said to themselves!  Extra panel:  Listen, I know it’s a shitt