Heeeelllllpppp mmmeeeeeee….
This is all I’ve got right now. Normally, I’m person who really requires 8 hours of sleep a night. Last night I got 0, with maybe a 2 hour nap in the mid-afternoon. It hurts to word. Eyeball my comic. Pencil erasers don’t really work in Tucson. Something about the dryness of the air, maybe. Like, upvote, whatever.
That’s so cool! I was actually thinking about getting into smashing the patriarchy myself. Is there, like, some kind of newsletter I could subscribe to?
I’m getting excited about writing again. As a few people know, I have written 10 novels. Two of them are bouncing around the Internet, 2 of them have been nudged and prodded by a couple agents and a publisher before whimpering off with their tails between their legs, and most of them just sort of exist. They have plans, but no executions. After completing my last novel, I massive undertaking, I sort of walked away from 25 years of constant novel writing to think about visual art; you can go back to page 1 of this blog and read it in order to get the entire story. It takes a while to tell it.
But I did send the ms for this last novel, an 800 page behemoth, out to the Desert Rats: Rabbit, Fox, and Owl. And I’m just starting to get some feedback on it, and the feedback seems good. The revision actually seems possible. I’m rereading it myself–it’s been about 2 years, I guess–and liking what I have, seeing where it could be tightened, noticing problems that didn’t get fixed in my last pass.
Plus, I’ve been working on a short story in comic form. Short stories are not my forte. I’ve only ever written a couple I was completely happy with. I can do novel, and I can do flash, but short stories elude me. But working in comic form might be liberating. I know the entire story, suddenly. It started out as a 16 panel gag, a short of blunt, deadpan, New Yorker style punchline at the end, but it took 20 panels to get to the end, and by the time I got to the joke it was more poignant than funny I was too invested in the characters to let their troubles be a joke and immediately I started to see the solutions to their problems. Now it’s 56 storyboarded panels, and if I can get out the rest of the dialog and thumbnails and actually find a style and draw the entire thing, I will feel much more confident about my graphic novel project, which is only one chapter from being completely scripted (although I stopped storyboarding before that, when I realize my thumbnails were completely useless and that you can’t put 12 panels on every comic book page if you want the images to actually express something.
As for this photo comic, it’s, as The Man has taught me to think of it, Kaufmanesque, in that I know it’s bizarre and I really couldn’t care less whether or not you think it’s funny. I think it’s funny.
Listen, you don’t know my parents like I do. My parents are better than those other parents and they deserve special treatment.
If you, like me, have 150 Facebook friends with school age children, you’ve probably seen a bunch of photographs in the last couple weeks featuring kids in new clothing and various attitudes of excitement or embarrassment holding signs proclaiming “First Day of Kindergarten,” or some similar sentiment. Well, my cousin posted a picture of herself hugging her 5-year-old with a caption explaining that she was probably the worst mother in the world because she wasn’t going to make him hold an adorable sign before he went off to school, and that the child would probably be scarred for life because of this moral failure.
So that’s where this comes from. But it comes from other things, too, like the Boy once again losing his Kindle privileges because he was watching YouTube when he was supposed to be doing homework. I’ve been thinking along similar themes, how we hold our kids to higher standards than we hold ourselves, and most of us would find ourselves without smartphones if some higher power took them away when we used them to screw around on the Internet instead of work.
My feelings on helicopter parents are well-documented. OK, there are worse things you could do to your kids, but when we’re talking about good intentions gone wrong, wrapping your kids in bubble wrap and protecting them from every possible bump the universe might have to offer while arguing with teachers, coaches, and other experts on particular aspects of childhood why your kid is better than other kids and deserves to be treated differently is a terrific way to raise a completely helpless and ineffective human being. How long do you plan on doing this, I wonder? When I taught at the college level I heard of parents trying to advocate for their kids, and a couple kids told me their parents were going to call me, but my standard response was that I wasn’t going to talk to their mommies and daddies because they were grownups and responsible for their own behavior. Legally, I wasn’t supposed to discuss their grades with their parents either.
Still, my supervisor assured us that parents would call anyway. From the kids, I heard firsthand that their overbearing parents didn’t prepare them for life after high school. They didn’t know when to go to bed without being told; they didn’t know when to get up. All their lives they’d been told they were the best, and suddenly it turned out that they were just like everyone else. And, having never been allowed to fail, they didn’t know how to succeed on a level playing field.
Seriously, moms and dads, back off! Your kid should be given more responsibility every year so that they have actual adult experience when they are 18. They should be allowed to fail, over and over, so that they learn about consequences and how to make better decisions. They should be taught not to throw a fit when they don’t get everything they believe they deserve. Otherwise, they are going to be mightily disappointed when college spits them out into the real world and they don’t get every job and raise and promotion they think the world owes them.
However, if any children would like to argue that I deserve something more than I’ve achieved in life, I would welcome the effort.
Be gentle. You have no idea about the weight of other people’s burdens.
I’ve never applied for any type of disability, but The Man has 3 pins in his knee, which resulted in a medical discharge from the Air Force, and he did have a hang tag for many years. We only used it when we were absolutely out of spoons, but even so some vigilante once left a note on the windshield accusing us of not being handicapped enough. It’s not a contest, people. You don’t want what we have. Also, the picture on the sign is just a symbol: there are disabilities other than being a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair.
This was the hardest comic I’ve ever scripted. Fibromyalgia is a subject I don’t care to discuss much (see panel 2). Adolescence taught me to never expose any weakness. Whenever the subject came up, doctors dismissed it and no one sympathized, or cared, or, I suspect, believed me. Most people don’t know that I have a chronic pain disorder; I try not to let it dictate my life, and when it does, I try to make sure that it doesn’t dictate other people’s lives. But the reality of my life is that I do have a chronic pain disorder. Invisible diseases exist, and you can’t judge someone’s level of disability. Clearly, I’m better off than many, because I’m still generally able to hide the problem, but that doesn’t give anyone a right to question its existence.
If I bring it up in person, you better believe there’s a reason that information is being shared: I have limits. I only mention it here because of consumer demand for a continuing series of comics cataloging all the excruciating reasons I’ve failed to summit the heights of my potential. It’s all about telling the most horrible parts with brutal honesty. I’m not complaining and I’m not looking for sympathy. I just need you to understand that this is the truth.
The Bard does not approve. Then again, the Bard never went to college.
This gag is actually an old joke of the Rabbit’s. We used to laugh so hard. What’s the worst thing that could happen if you default on your student debt? You can’t, as the expression goes, get blood from a stone. You can, however, get it from a head wound. But despite the central premise of The Merchant of Venice, there’s really no meaningful gain to taking a financial obligation out of a human body.
This comic is for the many, many people I’ve watched claw their way out (or not) of the rough burlap sack of the lowest levels of academia. The ivory tower is a sink or swim proposition. At this point, I don’t know that many people who are still adjuncting–most of them have gotten tenure track jobs or gone into some other lines of work–but I do know a few, and at one point I knew dozens. It’s basically thankless, low paying work that people do in the hopes that it will lead to more prestigious work with better pay and also job security, but it only works out that way for a select few.
Aside from The Man’s largesse and faith in me, one of the reasons I am able to do what I do is that I never had any student loans, since I am essentially 1 1/2 steps away from being a trust fund hippie. I mean, I don’t have the cash, but I do have the safety net. But I have friends who have been making well over their minimum payment for over a decade. I have friends who have been paying the same undergraduate education off for almost 2 decades. It’s crippling. You could get a mortgage in some parts of the country for what some people pay every month for the privilege of education.
In some places, it’s considered a right.
You can run. You can hide. But you can’t escape Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac. Or Dr. Biff and the Brain Repo Man.
We’ll also be examining the efficacy of pepper spray as a therapeutic option.
Hey! I drew a comic about going to therapy. Can I be in the New Yorker now? Or is my wit not dry enough? I tried to draw the therapist’s smile kind of forced and tight-lipped, but she still looks kind of happy, so maybe the art isn’t there. Yet. The Man believes it’s getting there.
The therapist comic seems like such a staple. So, whenever I have an idea for a comic, there’s always this voice asking if I’ve really had an idea for a comic, or if I’m just remembering something that someone else did years ago, that I read and forgot about, but which has been hanging around in my subconscious for all this time. How do you know? It’s not like there’s a big database of comic ideas and you can type in keywords and see whether or not someone’s already thought of the same gag. In face, I’ve seen different artists do essentially the same joke lots of time, and they’re probably not stealing, intentionally or otherwise.
If a musical genius like George Harrison can commit “subconscious plagiarism,” what hope is there for anyone? Am I funny, or am I just repeating someone else’s joke?
That’s the one-panel gags, obviously. The big comics about my bizarre life are mine alone, of course. And maybe if I get a Patreon and/or a Kickstarter and start making money off of comics I could do long ones every day. Still, the one-panel form is an important one.
I guess the secret is to make everything absolutely as personal as possible. No one else has my life experience. Not even remotely.
Probably, no one’s done quite this comic. Originally I wondered if the man and the woman shouldn’t be the banged up ones, but implications of domestic violence seemed like they would detract from the joke. They’re not trying to hurt each other. Things just got out of hand and the therapist got in the way by mistake.
Special thanks to The Man for his suggestion that the glass on the diploma be shattered.
You’re not the only one. No one’s *ever* the only one.
Even though my first passion was always fiction, and my training is entirely in fiction, my professional success has almost always been in nonfiction. I don’t know if I’m substantially better at nonfiction than fiction, but people seem much more willing to pay me to tell the truth than to make things up. Since I started workshopping with the Owl and the Rabbit, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about creative nonfiction, specifically, how memoirs work. People want to tell their stories,and they seem to want me to help them do it.
So: that’s it. Whatever is the worst, the most horrible thing that you feel sort of uncomfortable discussing with even your closest friends, the thing that you would never want the world to know, that’s the stuff you have to mine up from the depths of your brain and polish into a princess-cut gem if you want to write a biography that works.
Why?
People ask that question sometimes, too, and the answer is because you lived through it, and if you did, someone else did too, and your story will validate them, or else someone else is wondering if they can live through it, and your story will give them hope, or else someone else can’t possibly imagine what you’ve been through, and your story will enlighten them. Surviving difficult, confusing, and/or embarrassing circumstances often provides you with the wisdom of experience, which you may then feel compelled to share for the edification of others. This is why we have literature.
All the stories in this comic are true. The one in panel 2 is, of course, the famous “No Wire Hangars” scene from Mommy Dearest, but the others are all details that other people have told me about their own lives, or their parents’ lives, with maybe a couple of my own stories mixed in. I didn’t draw any of the people the way they actually look, though, because while some of these are things that people might not want connected with their identities. (Except for the dog; that’s really what the dog that saved a woman’s life looks like, because come on, that dog is clearly awesome.) I did write earlier in the week that I was planning “one of those brutal personal comics about the most painful things that have ever happened to me” but I couldn’t settle on which brutal, personal episode of my life to wrench up from the darkness, so I chose an assortment of other people’s problems.
I had also planned for this one to have the most awesome artwork yet. I had it all storyboarded out and did the lettering in the early afternoon, but then I forgot about Parent’s Night at the Boy’s school, after which The Man talked me into started the director’s cut of Yentl at 9 pm, so I didn’t get back to work until after 11:30, so I just jammed through drawing all those people. Next week I’ll get more brutal.
Popsicles? I don’t eat ’em myself. Could go for a cup of hot coffee, though.
Last week the Girl and I were running some errands and, while driving about 4 miles from one store to another, we saw 5 people dressed all in black, with long sleeves and long pants. It was about 105 degrees. Today I saw a dude in a black hoodie and he was wearing the hood part. Walking down the road. In 105 degrees. I like the heat and all, but, damn. People are crazy. It’s sick hot here. Most people wear tank tops and shorts, and plenty of people carry umbrellas or parasols. It’s not at all weird to see some big tough guy carrying a pink parasol. The sun is that brutal. And then there are the people dressed like they’re going to a funeral in North Dakota, not even carrying a bottle of water.
Don’t even get me started on the people out exercising at lunchtime.
Here’s to you, people dressed for the winter while walking around one of the hottest parts of the country during what will most likely be remembered as the hottest summer on record (until next summer, probably).
Fortunately, ice cream and quiescently frozen treats are easy to come by around here.
I’m actually really good at math for a liberal arts major.
This letter really did come in the mail today. That’s crazy to me. I don’t get as many credit card solicitations per week as I used to when I had a job, or even when I didn’t have a job but the economy was great, but I still get a lot. Random companies just offering me a one time loan at 38% APR is a new one for me. These terms seem not good, but I guess they’re so favorable to the lender that they can afford to send out 1000s of these letters on the chance that 1 person with credit that’s not good enough for a credit card but still good enough for these people will consider this a good way to get some fast cash.
The other thing I get in the mail a lot, besides people offering to loan me money I don’t want to borrow, is people asking me to give to charitable causes. I do donate money to charity, but some of these places, while highly rated for spending responsibly, seem to waste a lot of resources asking me for *more* money. But I’m gonna give when I’m gonna give, and your dead tree missives have no effect on that. I don’t need 3 pleas a week; save that money and use it in lieu of a donation.
On the plus side, that means my name is on the list for a lot of poorly managed charities, by which I mean organizations to which I have never and will never send money, but who nonetheless send me free “gifts,” primarily saccharine greeting cards and flashy address labels.
I should do a post displaying my collection of free address labels. It’s pretty extensive at this point. I’ve never bought address labels. I actually don’t think it really takes that much effort to write my name and address. But, hey, everyone want to give them to me for free.
What a weird world. It seems like there’s more than enough for everyone, and yet we have really pervasive distribution issues.
Other super fun activities in which you could participate over spring break might include lobbying your local legislature to enact environmental legislation and turning your stupid baseball cap around.
The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 is a federal law that provides for the cleanup of some of the most contaminated sites in the United States. It is most commonly referred to as the “Superfund,” which is actually the money set aside to help the EPA and other agencies complete this task, although sometimes the parties responsible for the pollution are also required to pay. There are hundreds of these sites across the country. Most likely, one of them sits pretty close to your backyard. For example, I was surprised to learn that the Tucson International Airport is on the list.
Most of these sites don’t look like ugly pits of mine runoff. Many of them have been allowed to grow over with wildflowers and support abundant wildlife. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the ground is full of mercury, or mustard gas, or some terrible byproduct of industry that will cause your entire family to die of cancer.
There are approximate 1300 sites on the list, with over 100 more whose addition has been proposed. These are only the ones we know about. Undoubtedly, there are many places that would qualify for the list but lack the activists necessary to get that attention.
Fewer than 400 Superfund sites have been successfully decontaminated in the last 35 years.
Check out this handy list to find your nearest pile of toxic waste.
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