Take This Year And Shove It

Hey- you know what was great about 2018? Remember when I farted that one time?

That was pretty great, right?

I mean hey, sometimes your dignity has taken such a beating after begging for food and money on social media, you figure, why not just make some rude noises and see what happens? People are losing their homes, you know what I mean? Why not bring proper levity into the situation with some base humor?

What if the videos of rude noise become more popular than videos of you working? How would your precious dignity feel then? Huh, space monkey? DANCE, SPACE MONKEY! DANCE!

How would this affect your attitude towards your work? How would this knowledge affect your artistic productivity? How would your working routine be affected?

As I’ve repeatedly harped upon, 2018 is the 20th anniversary of the creation of the strip. It certainly feels like it. I have ideas for strips and articles, but they come much more slowly now. I have to avoid repeating myself. I often fail to avoid repeating myself.

Speaking of 2018, I wrote a little haiku about it:

Die, 2018
Die, you shitty lousy year
You deserve to die.

Even still, a 5th issue of Bands I Useta Like came out this year, ya know? I squeaked it out before the crushing despair set in that most people don’t give a flying fuck about comic books anymore, except as blunt instruments in social-media assassinations. Whoopee for this decade, for reals man. What a treat it’s been.

Haw- did I say that I was gonna try and bring out a 6th issue before the end of the year? Was I high, or what?

I mean, I got a few strips out, and a handful of decent site articles… what am I expecting anyway? Where does this endless nagging need to create content emanate from? It’s a 21st century thing, yeah? Have I written about it before? Have I ever seen you before?

My pet hamster Vern passed away on my 46th birthday. Look, I know they don’t live very long, but I always get attached to them anyway, alright? Vern was a terrific Podhamster; this has been officially and traditionally documented.

Remember when that “hate speech” thing happened on Facebook? No, not the racial hate crime that no one ever talks about; that time in early May when this button popped up on every Facebook post:

That was just six months ago. Have you visited Facebook lately? If you have, notice anything missing? Like, perhaps, your friends getting banned or silenced for unclear reasons?

Oh- that’s because the people who run Facebook, Google and Twitter are fascistic werehumans that are 100% not on your side. YouTube has gotten fruity with the bantz too, but what are we gonna do, stop using YouTube? Ha ha ha. YouTube is practically gearing up to surpass oxygen as a human necessity by this point. In five years you’ll be able to breathe it.

Did you know that the self-examined life can be suffocating?

Do you know the warning signs of terminal fancer?

Symptoms can include nausea and intense vomiting:

What difference does it make? Literally none of it matters.

That’s how you know for sure that you’re not racist.

Because that’s all that matters.

Boy, it all seems much more dark and nihilistic when you review the whole year of articles at once, doesn’t it? More blackpilled? Again, I kid; no one but me would ever waste their time doing such a stupid thing. I coded the archives drop-down menu in the sidebar of this site to display the number of articles posted per month, so I could better oversee the decline and feel the necessary shame.

In summer, I turned to poetry for solace.

I do my best not to be a toxic influence.

I gave you a Safe Space, dammit! Shouldn’t that be a social network brand name by now? “SafeSpace”? Can I claim that? I’m claiming it.

For a year until September, I lived on a road in Atlanta that was affectionately and euphemistically dubbed “Suicide Street”. I appropriated this title for the latest compendium of BIUL strips. Appropriately, it sold poorly.

It’s explicit, excruciatingly personal and inappropriate, and you not buying it is a rejection of the last two decades of my life. Thanks a lot dick.

Hey- HEY! I WASS KEDDING! I WASS ONLY KEDDING!!!

https://youtu.be/fxZFVApWwjA

In 1998, I created the Bands I Useta Like strip. In 2008, I finished production of my movie John’s Arm: Armageddon, which doesn’t have anything to do with Bands I Useta Like, but it was a big deal that overtook my life and wrapped in a year ending in 8, so I’m counting it here. Mike The Pod, my first strip, was first published in 1988. Now it’s 2018 and I don’t know what my point was.

For no reason, here’s Apu.

And… Isis!!! Could there be a connection?!? No.

I mean, other than I wrote both pieces in October.

Despite what you might surmise from the above comic strip, the also-political dental humor page, and the page where I say you can’t do anything about climate change, no, I’m not deliberately trying to alienate people. I think you’d agree it was a grim year. They don’t put that on no blimp.

The bad news is that I can barely afford to keep my two websites up. The good news is that I’m working on a solution to this, but the immediate solution is always money. My old GoFundMe is still up, though I haven’t updated it in a bit because holy fuck it’s mortifying to beg for money. It’s always so much more satisfying to earn it.