New Art! (Updated {Again})

Dear As I Run,  Just wanted to show off some new adventure game backgrounds I've been working on in my spare time.  It took me like 3 hours to finish the shading on the Easter Island head's upper lip.

Updated some more!

Choices=Freedom=America=A Quiet Revolution=The As I Run and Run Way

So I know you have been going about living your humdrum lives today just wishing someone would come along and show you a video with random sailors, a variety of salads, a grizzled boat captain with some children, watermelon with speed in it, and a little girl who experiences a wide range of emotions while playing baseball. Here is what you have been looking for.



But wait! This could be our own quiet revolution for this very blog! So I'm thinking this might be a whole new opportunity for new branding for our website and offering lots of exciting choices of platters. I know that all of our loyal readers out there want choices and quality in the personal lives and business lives and we provide all of that with a new kind of courteous, friendly font and images. That is why I am suggesting that we re-brand ourselves: As I Run and Run - A blog within a blog - the choice for America!!!

The choice is yours to make on the internet and you love choices and I know you will make the right one and go to the best internet website in the World Wide Web: As I Run and Run, Happiness Comes Closer.

Walmart Antics

http://www.vice.com/read/i-tried-to-spend-24-hours-in-24-hour-walmart-242?utm_source=vicefbus

Here's an awesome article Tommy showed me about Walmart.  Below are some excerpts:

6:20 AM I notice a bottle of tartar sauce on top of the belts in menswear. I think to myself that this is weird because the store only just opened. The tartar sauce must have been there all night.

2:36 PM I see an unsupervised child who seems to be attempting to open a register. I watch and silently hope that he succeeds. But unfortunately, someone moves him along.

3:59 PM I come to the conclusion that, despite almost overwhelming boredom and an increasingly miserable hangover, I am not able to nap in full view of everyone in a Walmart. I start walking again.

7:30 PM I notice that the store sells sympathy cards in packs of 12. Who experiences death regularly enough that they have to buy their sympathy cards in bulk?

7:38 PM I realize that everyone experiences death that regularly once they hit a certain age. Oh God.

7:44 PM I am going to die one day.

7:50 PM Everyone I know and have ever met is going to die one day.

7:55 PM With this in mind, is spending an entire day and most of a night in a Walmart the best use of my time?

Farts in The Pantry

I am very much in love with the Bruce Springsteen, blue collar, working man ideal.  Indeed a line I frequently use in job interviews is “If you’re going to do something all day you may as well do it right.”  There is something more real about building something all day versus sitting at a screen all day.  After all Jesus was a carpenter and not a data entry clerk.  But something is lost when you get the job and actually put in practice all the platitudes you used.  You quickly go from “I’ll do it” to “that looks like a lot of work.  I won’t do it and hope nobody notices.”

Take the food service industry.  Dish washing, or “Back of house” positions are entry level.  You have to work hard to move up.  As far as I’m concerned, any minimum wage job where you could get high on the roof at 2 AM the night before and then come to work and poison a bunch of people shouldn’t be paying minimum wage.  I spent a glorious 2 months with Corporate Caterers, hoping the health inspector wouldn’t show up.  Like its name, Corporate Caterers’ food was equally as generic and off-putting.  I was put to work washing dishes, washing surfaces, and ruining Mountain Dew cakes.  Nothing about white trash champagne screams “delicious baked goods.”  Basically I had to mix it with Lemon Jello, Duncan Hines, and eggs and bake. 4 times out of 5 I’d remember to spray the pan so the finished cake wouldn’t stick but that 1 time I’d have to do it over.  This would be no big deal if I weren’t making 10 cakes a day.

Dishes! Fuck! They never stop.  It’s a never ending battle. The chef would always say things like “once you’re caught up come up front and help me wrap 50 sandwiches.”  I never did catch up though.  Still haven’t.  There’s a wrong way to do the dishes.  You’re supposed to use a wash cloth and not a scrubber.  Scrubbers harbor germs.  People could get sick.  You’re not supposed to put the dishes in the sanitizer without rinsing the soap first.  People could get sick.  You need to use bleach on cutting boards.  People could get sick.  You should have a more positive disposition towards the clientele that always blames the dishwasher.  People could get sick.

Then there was Johnson.  Johnson was super African.  Kenyan.  He thought my name was Jolee. I corrected him on it once and then he kept calling me Jolee so I didn’t say anything again.  What did it matter really?  Him getting my name right wasn’t going make me rinse the chip salt out of the bins any faster.   Don’t get me wrong.  Johnson was easily my best friend at that place and in the top 10 people I’ve ever known.  He just was in the wrong industry.  He constantly bemoaned the management throwing away any food.

“People are starving in Africa and here this food is going to waste,” he'd say.

I suppose I should wrap this up by saying that holding in farts is detrimental to your health.  I was always finding creative places to fart.  Dragging garbage to the dumpster, in the pantry, sometimes at my sinks when I thought no one else was there.  Inevitably somebody always shows up to smell though.  The odor of methane and a million what-ifs.