I'll Be Selling All My BL Art

Breaking the fourth wall a moment here.

Some of my friends (and Lummerland's Show & Tell regulars) are aware that I have had a bit of an ordeal this year. My computer went down 2 weeks out of warranty, my refrigerator & AC died after 12 years, and I caught pneumonia from someone during a commute. As if these weren't bad enough, a neighbor on the other end of our floor hid from everybody that she had bedbugs for almost half a year. This would have no impact on residents on our end - in theory. Except at some point in May she walked over to our side of the floor with infested bedding in hand and placed it in the floor's refuse closet. She was caught and forced to bring it back to her apartment and ordered to take out her own garbage to the curb until her place was clear.

I'll give you one guess who shares a common wall with our floor's refuse closet...

So began a packrat's nightmare of hiring help to clear things out and prep the apartment for treatment. Since I owned a captain's bed from Gothic Cabinet Crafts, the set had to be tossed (yes, those & platform beds are hopeless cases). The fee for having these carted away were double because of the bedbugs. Once ready, I stayed for 6 weeks with my father during two waves of treatment. Dad and I don't get along well.


Bedbugs are interesting when you're not their victim. They're not parasites as some info sources say; they don't live on hosts. They travel to feed, then go back into hiding. Their bite is not distinct, and it took a visual encounter following dermatologist and primary physician visits before I was certain. I did not have a fullblown infestation (no rashes like some images I've seen; looked more like an occasional mosquito bite), but their elusive nature and resilience (they cannot be taken out by conventional extermination methods, but rather a strong poison applied directly) makes any number of them a problem. In truth, even towards the end I would look at my clean bed at night and know that as soon as they detected my body heat and carbon dioxide output changed, something would make its move.  The real nightmare of this ordeal was that in order to prevent them from spreading anywhere else in the apartment or to neighbors above and below me, I had to keep sleeping there. Close inspections, sealing clothes in bags, hot showers and hot laundry and dryers regardless of the fabric kept me from bringing them to others.


The thing that's sad is the woman isn't liable. Unless we could prove that a bug was seen entering my front door or a common wall from the refuse closet, there was no case.


That leaves me where I am now: on the edge of a 3 month debt plus late fees to the building's management and no means to afford more than one month at a time. All the rainy day money went into these expenses this year. I'm already resigned to sleep in the living room well into 2010.  Not to mention two weeks of vacation time wasted for prepping.

Therefore, any and all art that I produce for textures used in my Burning Life campsite will be for sale. Most of them will be hand-drawn with minimal digital treatment.  If you are interested, think carefully when you see the images and make note of them. After the event I'll put them up either on eBay or Craigs List (people say the latter is more popular? I've never used them).


It's sad to have to come to this under such circumstances, but these are truly desperate times.