Panels 1 through 5 were inspired by Ryan’s childhood trick of hiding whenever his mother came home with groceries. He’s always been more of a grocery-eater, not a grocery-putter-away-er. Panel 6 was based on a curious childhood ritual of Dave’s: his mother would often walk into his room to find him in the midst of a self-abusing frenzy. Startled, he’d quickly grab a towel, wrap it around his sweaty body and pause A Perfect Circle’s “Judith,” his jerking off anthem.

“What were you doing, David?”

“Oh, just finishing up in the sauna.”

“What sauna?”

“The disappearing sauna.”

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What’s that you’re wearing, friend, in this harsh weather brought on by the changing of summer to winter? Is that the same thin outer coat made of glossy synthetic material that you wore in the spring? I noticed it incorporates an elastic waistband and zipper, how novel. What do you call this seasonal garment?

What’s that you say? A windbreaker? Such flagrant use of a genericized trademark should be frowned upon. Are you using that windbreaker to go to the Xerox machine? Or to shelter you from the ills of disease so you can save your bucks rather than buy some Kleenex?

How about this: does it make you fart? Are you wearing some sort of Cloak of Flatulence, because that’s what it sounds like, buddy. You are wearing a hoodless creation that has been named as if it was an organism that was seconds away from defecating, if it could just clear the path of all that gas.

Huh, are you wearing a fart? Huh, fart boy?

Do not be afraid, you – like the majority of the population – have become entangled in American colloquialisms. What you describe as a windbreaker is simply a article of clothing that has been given a title based on its assumed primary use. Really, the term “windbreaker” can and should be used to describe anything that separates the air around it as it moves in any of the cardinal directions (and some non-cardinal directions such as up and down).

And most importantly, “breaking wind” has more in common with aerodynamics than your flatulence. If we don’t disseminate this particular slang phrase, we run the danger of turning everyday chilly consumers into a race of walking gas factories. As of today, when you are forced to air out your insides via the exhaust of the anus, you are no longer “breaking wind.”

It’s almost impossible to trace this cutesy term back to its origins, since it gained popularity in times when it was rude to reference flatulence, nonetheless come up with an accurate term for it. It has become so ingrained into society that the definition falls under the idiom section under the word “break” right below “breaking the ice” and “breaking the bank” – two equally useless terms.

So it’s going to be difficult to purge this phrase without providing some sort of alternative. Naturally, it will have to be capable of use in formal situations, since that’s the primary use of the offending term in the first place:

Plutocrat: I say, Agnes, do you smell that putrid odor?

Aristocratic Agnes: At first, I was unable to detect the offending aroma, but after a prolonged wiff, I now believe that someone (not possibly myself, for I am a lady of the highest class) has broke wind.

Plutocrat: One of the Negros has been sneaking tastes of the goat cheese, no doubt.

Aristocratic Agnes: No doubt.

With all the various terms given to gas, it’s difficult to find one that fits in all social situations, so in the true spirit of Newspeak, I will condense all intestinal gas into one simple word that will hopefully breach the barriers of the lexicon.

The furthest I can trace back some sort of root that will allow for the blossoming of this new term is the Indo-European “perd-“ which is used dually for fart and partridge – ironically, an actual windbreaker. It is also the acronym used for the federal Program of Energy Research and Development, which is funny to me since methane is being researched and –most probably – accidentally developed by the team. Perd seems to predate the Old English “feortan” and the Germanic “fartōn,” and will serve as the basis for our solidified term.

Also to be considered is that this term must be verb if it is to replace “breaking wind.” Therefore, we might find some help in the Latin word “cernere” which roughly means “to separate or set apart,” and is the root of “recrement,” another great word to describe waste matter (including your fart and the shits that follow it).

Now, let’s mash these terms together. Perdcernere. That sounds ugly, and cannot be used in proper conversations, so let’s mash it up a little by taking out the offensive letter. Perdcernere becomes Perdsernere (fukk the sees) and with a twist of the gracious becomes Perdserene making your farts tranquil and elegant.

Let’s see how our friends make use of this new term.

Plutocrat: My, my. That a superior meal, dear. Who knew quail eggs went so sublimely with the boiled flesh of peasant children?

Aristocratic Agnes:I was certainly surprised, although the rich flavors might send my navy chest into some turmoil.

Plutocrat: Are you telling me that slight scent is a product your perdserene?

Aristocratic Agnes: Quite.

Plutocrat: Quite.

Now, I’m not as dense as to think you’ll now refer to squeezing out a toot as “manufacturing a perdserene.” So, I’ve made an acronym, P.S. That’s right, P.S. is now farting. How’s that for concise?

Let’s review what we’ve established today: You are wearing a thin jacket, which does break the wind, but is not correctly called a windbreaker. When you fart, you are actually perdserening or making a P.S.

And that plane flying above you is really the only thing breaking wind.

Post Script: In conjunction with the above statements, I hereby decree that post scripts be stricken from all letters. Say what you want to say in the body of your text or just write a new goddamn letter, you lazy bastard. If you end up using the P.S. abbreviation, all enlightened readers with think you’re just farting out some sort of pathetic afterthought.

Post Post Script: Logically, a P.P.S is now your actual feces, since that’s the only logical thing that would happen post P.S.

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This morning, 11:35 a.m., home—Guts feelin’ rotten. Seems like a gnome or faerie of some sort broke into our apartment (which can be easily broken into) and filled my gullet with no less than three pounds of pudding while I slept. I go to the John and push out a mess that, if I had the resources or the ambition to capture and transport it to a state fair that awards prizes to gorgeous poos, would’ve won a blue ribbon.

I didn’t take a photo, but if you’re interested in what it looked like, I’ll leave you with Franz Kline’s Orange Outline.

1:10 p.m., home—Lounging around in robe, watching a Cronenberg special on my new passion, ReelzChannel, considering my options: get brunch, go to Yo La Tengo in the park, do both, do neither. As the segment on The Fly ends, my bowels decide for me. Seems like the 11:35 poo was only half of the pudding. I sit down and squeeze out a set of spongy triplets. They’re ugly compared to the 11:35, but sizable and somewhat impressive considering that I haven’t eaten anything all day. It’s a curious anatomical situation, one that could possibly be a scene in a Cronenberg movie circa 1983, that is, if an attractive artist/academic-type lady came over and raped me with a television antenna, which subsequently broadcast video of the rape around the world.

Visual? Yams.

2:00 p.m., Driggs Ave.—I walk over to Driggs’ galleries, only to see “Closed ’til September” signs. Since I’m over there, I hit up Peter’s on Bedford and order a skillet of spinach, feta, three eggs over easy and sausages; a good-enough salad comes with. And even though less than an hour earlier I’d shat more than a normal person would in four days, I begin to feel gassy and ready to poo upon finishing the food. I decide to spare Peter’s’ customers the horror, but the trek back to my home court throne would be unbearable, so I walk down into the subway station. Wait five or so minutes for a train. Fart like a banshee in the subway car. Execute a perfect clenched-sphincter waddle back to the apartment and, somehow, going against all I know about anatomy, I push out another giant poo. The entire brunch skillet could not be bothered with supplying my body with nutrients. It needed to bail immediately. Like when a reasonable person enters Arrow Bar on Avenue A. But this mess was no beauty queen. Nor was it a reasonably-sized set o’ nuggets like the 1:10. Imagine this: a poor Argentinean boy works 12 hours a day scraping clay from the side of a cliff and then sells the clay to potters and artisans in his village. One day, while carting his wares through the streets, his wheelbarrow hits a pothole and $5 worth of clay falls off the ‘barrow and lands in a puddle. That’s what the 2:50 looked like in the toilet bowl.

The visual is rather weak, but I’m sick of Googling “clay,” “clay water,” “clay poop,” and “clay puddle,” so that’s what I’m going with.

I’m not a religious man, but after today’s three miraculous poos, I feel as if God may be trying to tell me something: “Stop eating lo mein after midnight, especially if it’s a lumberjack’s portion for only $3.75.”

Want more words? This isn’t the first time late night lo mein got me in trouble.

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Dave’s working on the site this week, but get ready for Season 5, Nazi Snakes, this Wednesday the 22nd.

If you haven’t been around since the beginning, you can start from Ep. 1 HERE, or browse the individual seasons by click on their banners in the right hand column.

Use the “tag page” button on the comics browser to set a cookie, so you can return to the same strip you left off on!

Because this site is awesome like that.

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This strip is a sloppy mess that was likely written during one of our creativity-smothering food phases. There was the bacon phase, the pie phase, the opium phase…. That’s about it.

We apologize for the disappointment. To make up for it, we’d like to share with you some production stills from David’s new movie, I Gag You Cuz It’s All I Know About Love. Click here to buy a gag.

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I’ve recently been tied up in legal troubles concerning the rights to my image, which I had little to no idea were profitable and/or desirable.

I’ll try to sum up the total experience as succinctly as possible, but Lord knows how much I love to digress in the middle of blog posts.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted my own action figure. I probably could have settled for a collectible bust (if I could have stomached the detail), but there is something to be said for taking yourself out of the collectible packaging and making yourself hump Barbies.

Sure, she’s already slutted out to He-Man and the Ninja Turtles (was Dave raised in the 80s? Yes he was.), but if I didn’t want sloppy mutant-seconds, I should have bought another Barbie, and having one secret Barbie is hard enough.

Imagine my surprise when I was contacted by Graphitti Designs, the makers of the ultra-cool and under-appreciated Clerks Inaction Figures, and asked to be part of their Up-And-Coming Bloggers series. Seriously, imagine my surprise. Because, I’m, like, not up-and-coming and a series of action figures based on bloggers has even more inaction than most collectibles. Like: Here’s Dave sitting shirtless on his futon, coffee in one hand and laptop on his lap.

That would actually make an interesting bust, but “action” it is not.

But, since this has been a dream of mine, I told them to e-mail the PDFs of whatever paperwork I had to sign and sent them some full-body shots of myself in some sort of “signature” outfit.

Have you ever tried to come up with a “signature outfit?” It’s fucking hard. None of the clothes I wear are anything beyond utilitarian, and most of the t-shirts I wear either have logos or promote something ridiculous, like being gay (Drake Rainbow Union: 10% is not enough!) or eating disorders (huge blue shirt that says: I Beat Anorexia).

I sent them pictures of me wearing my “Good Bush, Bad Bush” t-shirt, since I’ve had it since the early 00ts, but Graphitti was unable to clear the graphic, let alone find whomever originally manufactured the t-shirt.

I received the lengthy legal documents in my e-mail, paired with a request for another outfit. So, I put on my nice black Mavi jeans, a black button down and my vanity glasses (they look like glasses, but lack prescription) and took another photo. Then, I sat down to read through the agreement, which – surprisingly – I did.

This is a limited image rights contract, or that’s how I would describe it in normal-speak. Basically, they own whatever my “signature outfit” is, as well as my likeness (in action form) for 5 years, then they get to option me again at the end of that period, should they so choose.

That big action-adventure-comedy I shot with Louis Anderson a few summers ago? The one that is stuck in post-production hell with Lionsgate? Hopefully that movie doesn’t do too well, because if it does, legally, the action figure has to look nothing like me.

But, I digress, because I never ended up signing.

The discussion actually came down to how generic my action figure could be. Specifically, I have a key-chain that is shaped like a scrotum. It is black, and I refer to them as my “black balls,” especially when I put them in my mouth for comic effect. They hang with my keys on a carabineer I keep on whatever pair of pants I happen to be wearing at the time.

GD said there was no way they were sculpting testicles on my hip. I told them that was my “flair.” That and the glasses. Though they – and everyone else – recognized the Office Space reference, they said that they didn’t want to sculpt the glasses either.

Whatever style they have planned out for their Up-and-Coming Blogger Line (which they kept referring to, which makes me thing there are other Blogger Lines, probably populated with Harry Knowles and Perez Hilton action figures – maybe called Fat Bloggers Line), it was not glasses-friendly. They said they would have to sculpt the glasses as a separate piece, then meld them to the head, which would not only cost more, but anyone who has actually played with figures made this way realizes that the glasses are the first thing to break and go missing (First generation Simpsons’ Flanders figure: I’m looking at you and your glasses-less face!).

So now my figure was in a generic black shirt, didn’t have any cool-looking glasses to distract from my Mexican-Neanderthal face and was literally ball-less.

Then I asked about accessories, and they said they were giving me an iPhone.

I was like, “Cool! Are you going to pay for the plan?”

And they were like, “Your figure gets an iPhone and MacBook accessory.”

And I was like: “But I don’t have an iPhone, I have a MacBook Pro and a Dell I network together. Couldn’t I have a coffee mug and a pack of Camel Lights?”

[This is all paraphrased from a long chain of one-line e-mails exchanged in the wee hours of a Thursday morning.]

And they were like: “Dumbass: iPhones, Laptops = rectangular plastic pieces with decals that rake us in Apple money. Cigarettes, coffee mugs = detailed sculpting + anti-tobacco hate-mail.”

At this point, I saw the corporate scheme. I saw Steve Jobs throwing money to GD to get a series of blogger action figures so he could make them hump his Barbies, sell his products and – this is what I would do – run away from him screaming “Gojira! Run!,” before he stomps on all of us.

That’s when I had to respectfully decline the generic-looking Dave Gonzales B&U Action Figure.

Someday, I’ll live my dream. Just not now, and not because of blogging.

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Wait, I’m Dave.

I am so awesome.

Though Ryan Grim has done an admirable job keeping up the site by himself through the month of July and halfway into August, he’s just an editor for a ultra-mega-super-site, he is not the programmer.

And now who’s on vay-cay? Ryan is. With his girlfriend, whom I’ve slept with.

Long story short, Season 4 has been restored, the missing strips replaced and the numbers corrected. We’re going to do a stutter step day (Season 5 on 08/27!) to put up a Season 5 teaser banner that includes the snake that is not Evan or I in this rough scan:

Then, I should be able to add the Season 4 listing to the sidebar and maybe…

…just maybe…

I’ll give Ryan that Wordpress Upgrade he asked for.

For Dave is a kind God…

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At the time this strip was made, Ryan and I were trying to get a cool looking Dos Factotum ad going. I’m unsure about the details, since most of my life was spent playing online poker with Ryan’s parent’s credit card (and what’s online poker without copious amounts of memory-wiping Jamison?), but I think it involved Ryan sitting in the foreground holding up a cigarette while I humped an attractive woman with her panties around her knees holding a condom (still in its wrapper - thus representing our character) towards the camera in my outstretched Mexi-hand.

The problem was that we were never able to find a woman willing to pose for the photograph, even if I assured her that her face would be blurred. Then we lowered our expectations and said we only needed everything below the waist. She could bend over out of the frame and I’d put a sock around my junk so as to not accidentally impregnate her. She could even be wearing a skirt and a thong, since we could have an ad filled with beaver anyway.

For some reason, no one went for it.

If we had the above bear as a friend, I’m pretty sure we could have forced it into the ad. Because bears are weak willed.

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Mr. Lovitz is a true professional. He showed up on time to the photo shoot and was totally cool with the nude scene. He didn’t even complain when the photographer’s assistant spilled her iced mocha on his shoes. “All part of the gig,” he said. Though he begged to be a reoccurring character, we declined, saying that we decided to take the strip in a different direction. The real reason? We couldn’t afford his rider, which includes a dark chocolate fondue fountain, 20 cans of National Bohemian beer, exactly 17 mango slices, a live llama and all the tools one would need to slaughter and roast a llama.

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Instead of starting a Twitter and shooting friends and family an email like, “Hey, pussywarts. Come check out my Twitter. Follow my twits and shit. Read about what I did at 11:22 a.m. and then check back to find out what I thought about my cheese Danish at 11:43 a.m.,” I’ve decided to save up my twats and publish them here in no particular order without date or time labels.

*In Maryland for family vacation. So far, approximately 220 crabs have been eaten by Grims and people related to Grims with different surnames.

*Dancing at a Latina dance club in SoWillBurg (which is what most people I know call South Williamsburg) while drinking Caipirinhas and Mojitos.

*Started calling Mojitos “‘jitos.”

*Pooping with laptop in bathroom.

*Saving $20 copay by removing stitches from bump on leg with scissors and nail clippers.

*Eating a steak torta, slowly at first, then very quickly.

*Currently sleep walking. Now I’m peeing in the media room of our apartment. I’m still asleep, mind you.

*Eating a hot dog with a pickle in it…on a roof in SoWillBurg!

*Temporarily living in lovely Cobble Hill for a few nights.

*Coming around on asparagus.

*Loving Westside Market’s salad artisans.

*Hating the lady at H&R Block who made me wait today.

*Loving the other lady at H&R Block (the one with the limp) who helped me sort out my IRS-related unpleasantries.

*Learning fun wartime acronyms from Generation Kill.

*Practicing my a cappella version of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” in case I want to try out for the East Williamsburg opera.

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