"My Apartment Needs Padded Walls"
Since I had posted these cartoons I drew, I felt that I needed to also post a brief bio of myself. I can't tell you a story about how I lived in a van (In the deep south that's called a bachellor suite.) If you think of the origin of "Deep Fringe" as the moment when I put pencil to a piece of paper and drew a silly drawing and then evolved into what you see before you, then it all started on a cold day in Regina, Saskatchewan in February 1996 when I went to the mall and bought a little sketch pad. I didn¹t know exactly why I bought it, I just did. Later that night I picked up the note pad and a pencil and drew a guy tied to a lot of helium filled balloons and a mafia guy saying "Now you"ll sleep with the boids" and captioned the cartoon 'A really stupid mafia goon' I got a little chuckle from the cartoon that I had just drew. I guess I drew this to break the 'blue' feeling I had at the time over being unemplpoyed and living at my grandmother's house.
In the weeks and months that followed I drew more cartoons. By July I had used up the note pad. When I read through all the cartoons that I had drew I realized how strange some of the cartoons were. I could see how I was influenced by Gary Larson who used to draw "The Far Side". I decided to draw future cartoons at a size of six by six and a half inches and inked them up with a felt marker. While this was happening I got my first Internet account. I was cleaning out my dialing directory in terminal software when I had come across a Bulletin Board System (BBS) that I used to call up a long time ago. To see if it still worked I dialed up with my modem. To my surprise the number was that of what became my Internet service provider. To start out all I had was a shell account with just E-mail and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) I had to download the software from Internet because they couldn't provide the software for the Macintosh but at 10 dollars a month the price was right. Figuring out the Internet software and making it work took four months.
By December of 1996 I was starting to really feel the hard times still without a job and still finding the jobs that were advertised I was unqualified for and my bank account down to only a couple hundered dollars and only down to a few cents in my pocket I was still living with my grandmother. My Aunt came to visit for a few weeks just before Christmas and she saw that I needed help. She finally convinced me to go on welfare. I thought that going on welfare would lead to the loss of my diginity however I had been stripped of that a long time ago. After a few months of being able to surf he web I thought to myself,"Hey you could put your cartoons on a web site and have other people actually look at them" At this point only a couple of friends of mine and my sister had seen the cartoons that I've been drawing. The drawing had really improved- a lot. A while later I lost the Idea of putting my cartoons because I didn't know how to to it at the time. A few months later a friend mind and I put up a site devoted to a mutual hobby of ours, He showed me how to do some basic HTML. Once we got this site up and running we were surprised by the number of hits recorded (over 32,000 by now, when all we were expecting few hundred by the time).
A few months later I found out that my grandmother was planning on selling her house. The Idea that I would end up homeless scared me. My aunt came to visit and to get the house ready to be put on the market. I think she understood how scared I was she found me an apartment where the rent was very reasonable and got welfare to pay the rent. The apartment wouldn't be ready for a month and a half but my grandmother's house was ready to be put on the market. My parents allowed me to move in to their house until the apartment was ready. In the chaos of moving my grandmother found all the cartoons that I had drew and showed them to my aunt. My aunt then showed the cartoons to my parents. I had to explain some of the cartoons. While living with my parents I found that my creative inkwell ran dry. I couldn't think of any ideas for cartoons. Then on October 1st 1997 the apartment became availible for me to move in. Judging from my cartoons you are probably thinking that I should have moved in an apartment with padded walls. My apartment does have ugly shag carpet from the 1960's and I guess that's close enough.
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