so leave me alone. you outta be proud that i’m getting good marks.

If you haven’t seen this, you need to:

And then you need to go here and download Sad Kermit’s version of Needle in the Hay.

Little proud of this. Not gonna lie.

 

Thanks to Drawn & Quarterly for linking - also Top Shelf Comix, and Joe Matt himself.

For all you lovers out there…..

You know who you are:

we’re special. in other ways. ways our mothers appreciate.

I’ve been thinking that I need more pizazz. More ooomph! on the site. Pictures, video, god forbid a cartoon. So, instead of doing my job which I’m well paid for, I made this. Have a good pizza night everybody.

This argument is getting confused.

Nothing like writing at 1am, huh? So, I’m uncomfortable with the comedy piece because I think it could be done better, and the serious piece because it was probably done too well. For those keep score at home, no real idea what I’m doing here.

i’ll cover for you like a slipcover covers a chair

Dan Stafford, an institution unto himself, evoked much praise and criticism in his short career. Whether through his

off-off-off-off-on-off-Broadway plays as a playwrite, his powerful blog hungguy.blogspot.com, his work doing voiceovers for Aunt Jemima

Syrup commercials, or his culture breaking redefiniation of Kafka as humorist, Stafford illuminated the human condition, or at least the

corner of the room where grandma’s picture hangs on the wall.

Thankfully, in addition to his prolificness as a cultural icon, he left behind a body of personal correspondance which gives us insight into

the artist as a manchild. Random House is pleased to present, in conjuntion with PBS and Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Klassic Kettle

Korn, the ‘Letters of a Dirtbag’.

Subject: What’s up man?
Date: 9/28/1999
From: Dan (dano247@hotmail.com)
To: Seth (sethbagbalm@juno.com)

Hey man! How’s it going? Can’t believe you got email too - this is pretty rad. How’s yer sophomore year? Get laid yet? hahahaha gnyuck

gnyuck. Just kiddin’ ya man. Anyway, I gotta motor to calss, hit me back and let me know what yer up to.

-ddog

Subject: sucky
Date: 10/12/1999
From: Dan (dano247@hotmail.com)
To: Seth (sethbagbalm@juno.com)

Hey chief - sorry to hear that things aren’t so good for you right now. Don’t worry man. It’ll pick up. Or not, how the fuck should I know?

Things are pretty rockin’ here - you’ll never guess whose playing our ‘Fall Festival’! Fucking Pavement dude! I can’t believe it. I’m so

stoked. Maybe if college doesn’t work out for you, you could come here and roadie for ‘em! hehehehehehe.

ok pal, I gotsta run. give a shout back when you get the chance!

-dday

Subject: lonely
Date: 10/21/1999
From: Dan (dano247@hotmail.com)
To: Seth (sethbagbalm@juno.com)

Wow man, you sound BAD. Do they have like, the counselors at your school? We have ‘em here for people who go a little schizo.

Maybe you should go talk to one?

anyhoo - i’m thinking about you man, and if you ever need me man, i’m totally here!

-dstamp

Subject: RE: re: lonely
Date: 11/15/1999
From: Dan (dano247@hotmail.com)
To: Seth (sethbagbalm@juno.com)

Hey man - justed wanted to check in…….and tell you that Pavement was AWESOME — wish you could’ve been there.

So what’s up with you? You’re not still doing that cutting shit are you? The mime troupe thing sounds cool - you should hook up with

those guys. I joined a jousting group and met the coolest chick. Her name’s Gwendolyn, and she’s rad, you’d totally like her.

a’ight man, I’m off to the movies (the matrix - i’ve heard it’s AMAZING)

peace
-d

PS - Are you gonna be home at thanksgiving? we should totally hang…….

Subject: Holy shit man
Date: 1/5/2000
From: Dan (dano247@hotmail.com)
To: Seth (sethbagbalm@juno.com)

DUDE HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK???!?!?!?!?! Man, now I’m so sorry we didn’t hang over the holidays - it was just at the last

minute Gwen invited me to her parents in connecticut, but if I had known, man…….

So, what’s up? I would ask if you’re ok, but that seems silly…..let me know what’s going on!

-dplug

Subject: how long has it been?
Date: 3/24/2002
From: Dan (dano247@hotmail.com)
To: Seth (sethbagbalm@juno.com)

Hey brother - man it’s been a long time. What the hell? Where to start? Well, I’m not even sure if you use this email anymore……we’ll

see. Things didn’t really work out with Gwen - she got really weird, like wanted to drink blood together and shit. The funny thing is, she

broke up with me. Oh well. I’m seeing this girl now (jen) who’s pretty cool. She’s a grad student, so it’s neat to be dating an ‘older woman’.

What the hell’s up with you? Last I heard (yer mom told my mom) you went out to cali to kind of get your shit together. Sounds cool.

Well, it’s late man, and I got class tomorrow (just a couple more months and I’m done with this shit - I can’t wait). If you’re still out there,

send word………

-dbomb

Subject: bmoc
Date: 4/11/2002
From: Dan (dano247@hotmail.com)
To: Seth (sethmjones@vectorproducts.com)

I can’t believe you wrote back! I had no idea if that email would work or not. Glad to hear you’re working and living man - I was worried!

So no thoughts of going back to school, huh? That’s cool - I can understand that. Me, I can’t wait to get out of this fucking place. My final

project, if you can believe it is, ‘The Comedic Works of Franz Kafka’. I came up with it as a joke, but……

So you sound really good. Your roomate Bruce sounds really cool too - just hope yer not turnng gay on me! (just kidding). Are you

gonna be back this way in time for graduation? I could hook you up with tickets - Yo-Yo Ma is our speaker - let me know if you’re down.

ok — gotta run
dbag

Subject: Totally sorry…..
Date: 4/13/2002
From: Dan (dano247@hotmail.com)
To: Seth (sethmjones@vectorproducts.com)

Dude, I’m really sorry. I had no idea. Bruce really sounds like a great guy, and I hope you both are super happy with each other. One of

my professors is gay, so, you know, I’m cool.

Sorry you won’t be back for gradeation - it’s gonna rock. I’ll let you know if i’m ever out that way though!

Subject: Holy shit man
Date: 9/11/2006
From: Dan (danstaff@gmail.com)
To: Seth (sethmjones@vectorproducts.com)

Setg? you out there man? Things are all right here - I’m with a new girl now (beth) and eshe’d great, you’d like wher. sorry my tiping is

bad, i had a couple drinks with fome friends onight a nd got to thinkg abdout you. how’s bruce? i dunno i’m not sure love can last myself,

nut htat’s just me i guess! hahahahahah.

man who would’ve thought that our lives would end up hwer? you know? i mean jeeaz. have you hear d the new yo la tnego album? it’s

fucking amazing so fucking good their coming to town soon, and i can’t fucking wait to go it’s going to rule. i can’t wait!!!!

well man let em nkow what you’re up to where tyou’re at i can’t bleive it’s been likt four years man! crazy! ok i’m gon a go get some lsepp

man

miss you like fuck
-dan

Nothing exists of Dan and Seth’s correspondence beyond these e-mails, and two postcards from Fire Island, which we’re unable to print for legal and communistic reasons. Little is known of Seth and even less of Bruce, even less than that is known of Roger, a person I just made up this moment, admittedly of little consequence now.

The great historian, Giles Frankenheimensteiner has presupposed that perhaps ‘Seth’ is actually the manifestation of Dan’s fears, hopes, dreams, and superstitions about white lighters. Or, he could be Dan’s childhood friend Seth Johansson, a Sweedish giant Dan befriended in his seventh year.

Whatever the case may be, there are not enough words in the Danish dictionary to express humanity’s gratitude at Stafford’s genius. There are plenty in the Slovenian dictionary, but those were destroyed in the great fire/tsunami of ‘17.

i’ll be the phonograph that plays your favorite albums as you’re laying there drifting off to sleep

It’s Sunday evening and I’m supposed to go to a dinner party with my brother and his not-quite girlfriend. Instead, I’m laying on my floor with a wee case of the Sunday blues.  Back in the day, I’d get fairly sad on Sunday afternoons. The light fading across the wall of my room would always make me choke up a little bit. I think it was my weekly recognition that my life was in fact good, and it was sad to see each day go. It went away for a couple years, but has been slowly sneaking back into my subconscious lately.

I wrote the initial letter to Miranda July, asking her to do an interview. I need to figure out the gift for her. Also, Joe Matt linked to the site from his blog, which is nice. He’s really a good guy. I tried to write a ‘comic’ story tonight, but didn’t really like the structure of it, which was frustrating. I may work on it some more after dinner, but who knows.

I’ve also got this other story idea, but it’s horribly horribly sad, and while I’m in the head space to write a melancholy, it may be over the top. We’ll see.

Talent is luck. The most important thing in the world is courage.

This morning I got an email from my boss who asked if we were ’still going ahead with x project’. I wrote back that not only were we going ahead with it, but had in fact been working on it for eight weeks, and it was actually done. So given the intense scrutiny I’m feeling about my work, I thought fine to break the mold and post while at work on a sunny Friday morning.

Last night, in the middle of a nightmare - and not a location nightmare or boogyman nightmare, but a general feeling of unease nightmare - I woke up to crazy sounds and light flickering into my room. I got up and went to the window to see a crazy rain and lightening storm happening. Then,  I looked into my neighbors yard, and saw a blue and white striped umbrella being twirled around clockwise, and then counter clockwise - then, whomever was holding it ran off into the alley. That freaked me out a little bit.

Last night I watched ‘Factory Girl, which is the story of Edie Sedgwick, who I’ve always had a strange affinity for. I was pretty taken in by the sheer volume of work that Warhol did though. Prints, films, sculpture, photography, painting, drawing, bands, not to mention doing all in the whole Factory scene. Simultaneously, I’ve been reading the great biography of Woody Allen called, amazingly enough, ‘Woody Allen - A Biography’ by Eric Lax. And the thing that has struck me about Woody is that he too is a multi-medium artist. Write, director, actor, sure, but also stand up comic and musician.

So waking up this morning, I felt a little better about the fact that I like to write, make posters, play music, make people laugh, do comix and so on. Where I’ve often felt that I need to sort of pick one creative outlet and just go with it, it dawns on me that the various outlets actually play on each other, and help each other grow and develop, if that makes sense. Of course, I also was thinking how great it would be to start a factory like space here in Denver. We’ll see.

Wrap up by saying that all 79 Dirtbag strips are now up on the site, feel free to check them out. I thought about leaving out some of the darker ones, but thought better of self censorship. I still need to add in a bunch of stuff - but it’s getting there.

Oh, not wrap, two other quick things.

I’m going to attempt an interview with Woody Allen, predictable, I know. But gosh the idea is exciting. I’ll keep y’all posted on how that one goes. Secondly, I’ve become completely tired of and bored with most of the music I’ve been listening too, so have rekindled my interest in jazz. I’ve been listening to this great Miles Davis/John Coltrane record a lot, and discovered that the opening drum and bass line to ‘Little Melonae’ are pretty much the exact same as Modest Mouse’s ‘Fruit that Ate Itself’. I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but you never know. Also, have re-fallen in love with Django Reinhardt.

At the end of the day, when there are no friends, when there are no lovers, who are you going to call for?

As I was posting loads today, and setting up the new site, I remember, with an intense amount of shame, that I owe people here some fucking prints of Dirtbag comics. So, since my new office has a print place around the corner, I will attempt to do them tomorrow. I got sick yesterday, so may end up working from home again tomorrow, but if I’m able to make it in, and print of the shizzy I will. Terribly sorry about that.

The lyric above is from an album I listened to non-stop in math camp. For those keeping track at home, that was summer 1990, so it’s likely from the 80’s. I was crazy excited to go to math camp. It meant I could take BOTH AP english and AP calculus in my junior year of high school. Yah. Stoked!

Then on the way to the three week program at Skidmore College, my mom stopped at a rest stop like twenty miles from the camp and told me she was leaving my dad. So camp started out pretty badly. I was so nervous about going away to this camp, that I was just confused by my mom’s news and it’s terrible timing.

I don’t remember her dropping me off, but I do remember that right after registration I saw some kids playing Tetris, and totally rocking it, and feeling really lonely because everyone seemed to know what the game was but I had no idea. Thankfully, I met a kid named Don who was from Toronto. In addition to our similar names, he was born about 12 hours before me which I took as a good omen.

I don’t remember too much of the actual math classes. I remember being on a college campus, and that being really neat to me. Don and I somehow got to DJ on the Skidmore Radio station (91.1 - WSPN) for the weekends we were there. We played Dinosaur Jr. and the Dead Milkmen and a lot of R.E.M. and Velvet Underground, and it was really fun and impressed the girls in our program.

Back home, I found out that my girlfriend’s mother had died. She’d been fighting cancer for a long time, so while not shocking, it hurt like nothing else. She was sort of an old school beat painting teacher. She once bought a print from Matisse while studying in France in the ’50s. She and her husband got me interested in being an intelligent smart-ass. They turned me on to the New Yorker and goat cheese. Hibiscus tea and jazz. Matisse and Braque. They had lived in New York City, and gone to dinner parties there, and whenever I watch a Woody Allen movie, I swear I see them in the background.

They are the people who taught me to live a full life, and to live god damn it.

So math camp got more depressing. It took me a week to get through to my mom to tell her the news. I was petrified that I couldn’t get a hold of her though, because mom’s were dying, and that must’ve been the reason she didn’t answer the phone. I had wanted to go home for the funeral and to be supportive of my girlfriend and her dad and her brother, but wasn’t able to. When I got mom on the phone, she told me that Don, the 80-year old gentleman we had known for years, and who we had taken in for the last year, also died.

I went to the campus store, and bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream. I’d never had Ben & Jerry’s, so it was a pretty big purchase. I took my walkman, and a mix tape from my gf, and went up to the roof of the library (unexplainably unlocked) and ate my ice cream while listening to Guadalcanal Diary and Lou Reed and John Cale and Ella Fitzgerald and Meet Me in St. Louis. I thought about mom and dad, and about gf’s mom, and about Don. I thought about them for a long time, and expected some kind of epiphany, but none came. I just sat until the ice cream ran out.

Thinking I had missed something, I went into a dark classroom and listened to Robyn Hitchcock while laying in front of the blackboard with the lights off. Still no epiphany. I felt guilt for not crying so forced myself to shed a few tears and, like priming a pump, the water got flowing - a trick I have to use to this day when I feel I should be crying but am not.

Still no epiphany though. I got up, went to the bathroom to clean up my face and see about some dinner. I walked out into the fading summer sun and roamed towards the dining hall, happy to smell cheeseburgers in the air.

Trust in your calling, make sure your calling’s true