EADJ Surprising Hostility: Watercolor Painting

As painting techniques go, watercolor is the no-gear version that thinks it's hot shit. It prides itself not only on its infuriating difficulty but brags on and on about how delicate and spare its textures are. It even requires a special kind of paper to paint upon. Well, fuck that. Fuck watercolor up its difficult, delicate ass. You hear me?

Here's how it works: you dip your brush in water, then you dip it in some watercolor paint that's been diluted a little bit by more water, then you have to move the brush just the right way to create a form, because otherwise there are no do-overs and...SHIT! You messed it up! Try again! Grab another sheet of WATERCOLOR paper (only $14.99 for a pad of 12).


Oh, yeah. Forgot to mention: you have to let some of that paint dry before you begin another stroke, because when working in watercolor, sometimes a wet spot will be contaminated by an adjacent color, then you wind up with an unerasable mix of the two colors, and then you have to grab another sheet of WATERCOLOR paper (only $14.99 for a pad of 12).

When you've finally finished with one after wasting fourteen pads of watercolor paper, you can stand back and look at the colored stain that you've left. Because when it comes down to it, most watercolor paintings are little more than smears that happened to be kind of shaped like something, like a bridge or a fucking basket of strawberries. Hotels in beach towns seem to eat that shit up for some reason. Old people.


Parents seem to think that kids love all kinds of art projects, so they'll often buy them a watercolor set. Then their kid will dip their brush in some water, then dip it in the red circle, then back in the water to make it wetter, then back in the red circle, but some of that water got into the blue circle, so now it's a purple circle, and it's seeping into the red circle, and it got on the brush, so now you're painting a big purple blotch when all you wanted was red...FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! MOTHERFUCKING COCK! Time to grab another sheet of WATERCOLOR paper (only $14.99 for a pad of 12).


And I realize, yes, there are some truly talented artists out there who have mastered watercolor and have possibly made quite a living from selling their beautiful paintings which actually look like things. Well, bully for them, because I sure as shit am not "painting with water" ever again. If you want a semi-abstract picture of some goddamned cardinals, just take a blurry photo yourself. You're the lazy one, see?

The EADJ Pun Sheriff Is In Town.

(cue Ennio Morricone music)

Round these parts, there's no sense of right or wrong. People feel they can let their wordplays and turns of phrase run wild. And because of that, nobody wants to be the lawman. Well, that's where I come in. Here, you risk your skin catching punsters and the juries turn them loose so they can come back and make you groan again. If you're honest you're poor your whole life and in the end you wind up dying all alone on some dirty street. For what? For nothing. For a tin star. But that's the job. I'm the pun sheriff of Butt Gulch.


Now some Hollywood studio tried to put up a poster near the telegraph office with a terrible joke about credit and shopping. I aimed my six shooter at their hand to stop them but hit their ankle. Looked like it hurt real bad.


Now, some different Hollywood types were doing the same thing over by the blacksmith, 'cept it was a movie about dogs. And the pun was worse. I aimed for their wrist but shot them in the neck.


Some fleabag newspaper in New York had a pretty awful pun in its headline (someone told me "BK" is often short for Brooklyn). That itself wasn't the problem...


...it's just that they ran it TWICE in the same publication. I aimed for their feet to drive them out of Dodge, but I hit them in the belly. That's a terrible place to get shot.


Mabel over at the dry goods store called my attention to a catalog that someone had left out front. Pretty standard, terrible stuff in it. But when I looked closer, I read one of the worst puns of my career as a lawman:


I rounded up a posse real quick and we rode out to Favorites Catalog Ranch. There we burned down the house and barn, raped the livestock, and I shot the owner in the thigh, though I was aimin' for his heart that time. Maybe I should start drinking whiskey again to stop my hands from shakin' so much...