Razor Blade.

Alright, so bonus post for the day! I did this the other night for a friend of mine... In my mind it would be a great tattoo design...

Working on the most recent lesson for Main Title Design taught by Ash Thorp, the homework was to create a title sequence for a documentary about the Apollo missions. In the process, I came up with this title card. Not exactly the vibe I was going for, but it speaks to my glitchy, sci-fi, cyberpunk side.

Perhaps, if this were an Alien-esque horror movie, I could get away with it.

Escape Real Life

It’s that feeling you get far past the noon of night, when, as your day comes to a close, things begin, at last, to make sense.

It’s that urging that, if you could just grasp that feeling and hold its heart close in your hands, staying up through the dark and into the second day, you could achieve everything.

It’s that hastening of sleep which fights that urging, telling you that everything can be left for the morning.

It’s that pleading in the back of your mind; it begs you to push past the hastening, for in the morning, nothing will be as clear as it was in this moment.

  And yet, every night, you always give in, knowing that real life will not forgive your whims.

And every morning you await the end of the day; you await that clarity and the chance to try again, assuring yourself it will be different this time.

  Define insanity.

  Then… turn the music a little louder and put on a fresh pot of coffee.

Unending.

Duskblade. (Of a part with the earlier Moonblade.)

Appropriate for today, as Lewis Hamilton's number is 44... Not where the design originally came from, but an afterthought that made it all work wonderfully. Best of luck to him in the Mexican GP.

Experience Junkie

                I fell in love with an experience junkie.

You know the expression, “Those who burn twice as bright, burn half as long”?  Well, that was her.  She got off on always doing something a little better, a little crazier, a little more dangerous than what she did the day before.  Immediately, I knew I was in over my head; if I didn’t keep up the pace, she would get bored and move on to the next guy, hoping he could fulfill her insatiable thirst for experience.

And yet, I’m not the kind of guy who just throws in the towel when the going gets tough.  Especially not with a girl like her.  She might have been wild, but to me, that was a good thing.  There was something exceedingly special about her, an untamed quality that had long been extinct in the human race.  She intrigued me.

So keep up the pace I did.  For almost eight months I kept up the pace, working tirelessly to find something new and exciting for us to explore.  I never would have admitted aloud how worn down I was from keeping such a frantic, unpredictable lifestyle, but the fatigue was definitely beginning to creep in.  I was certain it would only be a matter of time before it all caught up with me… or before she noticed my inability to keep up any longer and drifted away.

Then, and only then, did I make the jump from normal thrill-seeking to something new—crime.

Doubtless, our actions had always skirted the edge of the law.  Driving much too fast, skipping through skylane levels like they were green-lighted intersections, polluting the regulated-atmosphere by smoking cannabis down in the bowels of the Dive, brightening up the dour metal walls with colorful, if not entirely appropriate, graffiti… we’d even gone so far as to get some unlicensed body modifications.

But never once had we actually committed a crime of force, an aggravated assault per se.

“You wanna rob a bank tonight?”

She rolled over lazily until she was on top of me, heart beating achingly against mine.  Her skin was warm, slightly sticky with sweat, just like the walls of the dingy flophouse room, and her movement was tired.  Despite the languid motion, however, I could see the fire that had suddenly sparked behind her eyes.  Taking the hand-rolled joint from between her lips, she let a thin streamer of blue smoke trail out of her lungs.

Silence, other than the slow whisper of her breath.  It was something we had come up with, something just between the two of us.  Silence was often the best answer, when you couldn’t trust words to express how you felt.  I suppose it also could have been the worst sort of answer, when anger or hatred was too strong to speak… but I knew that wasn’t the case here.

So, without a word, I knew she’d said yes.

Then, voice hazy with smoke and the thought of a smile, she raised the stakes a little higher.  “An oxygen bank.”

•Duality•

Dark Alleys. Bright Shadows.

Part Two.

Under the Grind