Hi! It's me your friendly blog host. It's nice to see you again face to face. It's been awhile. I've got a new computer and I'm still trying to make stuff work. I've just spent two hours messing with the spell check feature on FurFaux, and well, it won't spell check in real text, and that's what I use here. Oh well, it's a cut and paste jones. The things we gotta put up with on the weeb.

So, being from Cleveland, and watching the Pittsburgh Penguins 2-1 in the Stanley Cup Finals, up 2-0 in the second period of game 4, I sit and try to create more goodness. When I was a kid, Ziggy stood for goodness. Ziggy's creator was a guy that worked for American Greetings. They are the greeting card company with Holly Hobby and Strawberry Shortcake and many other characters. Yeah, they were no Hallmark, but they were one of Cleveland's biggest companies. None of that was important to me when I was an up and coming hack artist. I drew many things and I guess my mom didn't like me talking so much on car trips so she bought me this for Christmas. A Ziggy Portadesk. Man, this $20 gift got a million dollars of broken dreams of use. I mean, I was using this desk until a few years ago when I got the foam bead filled nightmare desk with the LED Light that didn't work. Yes, I still have this desk sitting beside the new one. I can't get rid of Ziggy. He wants me to "Hang In There".

When I was yonger, I had a "publishing" career, or "pubbing" as I called it. I actually drew "newspapers" and my "Mad magazine like" monthly cartoon book as well as other projects. Since I was going places with my family including to see my brother at Bowling Green college, this was perfect for me. My step father's music of choice on the radio was "easy listening". (Elevator music.) We had a tape player in one of our cars, but if it wasn't the factory tape that came with the player, it was one of the four (yes FOUR!) easy listening stations. When we went out of range from local, they'd look for another station. I didn't really care because I wasn't much of a music fan, but I do remember when I discovered music a few years later, how many of those cheesy easy listening songs were actual major hit rock songs!

This little desk had all I needed. Pockets for pads or magazines or both. Plus it had the pen slot in the center which just fit my Parker Big Red pen. Did I mention I used the same damn refillable Parker pen for years and years? I stopped using those when the refills started "blopping" ink all over the page. That was a deal breaker and I never looked back.

I believe the smaller pocket could fit the latest Mad paperback that I wanted to read. Al Jaffee's Mad Inventions was one I read a lot or Don Martin books over and over and over. The bigger pocket fit some of my "magazines". They were done on notebook paper, folded in half, and stapled in the center and I would fold over the staples. Yeah, I was a kid. I keep saying that. I couldn't afford one of them there "bigger" staplers.  It was "DIY". Kept me busy on long trips while "Montovani and His Orchestra" played "Stairway" with a nifty string arrangement.  Huzzah!  You can see the fabric is a bit stretched where the pen would go.

Here's the big business end. The really worn desktop. I made the black marker lines in an attempt to keep some of the white writing surface, but no dice. (DUH). I have the Ziggy sticker barely "Hanging In There" with loads of transparent tape. At one point, I had written my name in pen on the paint at the top. It caused the paint to wear off in the pattern of my name. I can't stress how much use I got out of this desk. When I realized my writing was better than my cartoons, I started writing. I wrote 4 "novels" for kids with this very desk. I transcribed a few when I got access to a Apple Mac word processor and then my own Smith Corona word processor. When I read them today, they are as good as my cartoons. I still wrote on this very desk whenever I was sitting in bed. I never found that writing with a computer was very good for my thought process, but that's silly because this blog proves I can write at a 10th grade level and be somewhat amusing. Somewhat.

...and this was hidden in one of the pockets. I used to draw "cars" for my "car company" called "Toxx". This was the "Microtruck" inspired by the Subaru "Brat" cars with two rear facing jump seats mounted in the back or Dodge's chopped 80's Omni based "Rampage". Automotive poo poo. Kinda neat to find this in the pocket, who knows when I put it there. One other footnote, on the "Do Not Remove" tag extending from this desk, I'd written the address of a good friend and collaborator on a series of comic books where I wrote and he drew the cartoons.

He moved away, and a family with a son that was a year younger than me moved in. I may have met/passed him by in school but I don't remember. 15 years later, I met someone living in Toledo where I was employed in radio. He was a computer geek going to the University Of Toledo and I'd just purchased a computer. We met through on-line means (he was featured in an on line TV Guide article) and similar interests. (We both lived in the same city and went to the same school for instance....)  A few months later we were at a convention in Cleveland and he took me to his childhood home. Yep. Same. I even showed him some of the pulley systems that my old friend and I had rigged when we built tree forts in his back yard. They hadn't rusted away.  Bee-Zar. Junk Blog.