The gist of my sentiments here today is this: on the 27th of this month, I will be fifty years old. I don’t understand it any better than you do. I feel no older than 38. I don’t look at my face, hands, or body and see those of a fifty-year-old man. I can walk a mile in ninety-degree weather without issues. I don’t talk about it much because my age is a recurring reminder that my ability to empathize with other humans will only continue to dissipate.
I have now passed the half-way mark on my least productive year in a decade. Even when I was practically homeless and actually starving a ways back, I was producing more work than I have this year. I know what the problem is.
Pictured: The serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know who should go fuck themselves.
In case you missed it, Bands I Useta Like (the comic strip, not the site you are currently reading) is over. I am forced to accept that a printed periodical outlet for the strip I have drawn for the past twenty-three years no longer exists. This is the theme of the 2020’s; forced acceptance and submission. Historically, I do well with neither.
So, in the spirit of the current times, I am accepting my own flaws and shortcomings as personal advantages, and forcing them on the rest of society and the world. As a pipe-tooting sailor once said, I am what I am.
Where do I even start with Ren & Stimpy? How do I handle the Faustian tale of its fallen creator, John Kricfalusi, without getting overly personal and acrimonious?
Sometimes in life, we fashion an artistic animus that over time, becomes a cage that confines us. Sometimes we try different things to keep the animus from becoming stale, and redundant. Sometimes we overhear a song that makes us want to kill, kill, kill, until we are hip-deep in blood and viscera.
The mid-1980’s Twilight Zone was actually really good. It had an appropriately creepy vibe right from the start, aided greatly by the reinterpretation of the classic theme music, courtesy of Merl Saunders and the Grateful Dead.
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