1. Northern Vacations

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This is it. The first comic in ProCreate, the tool I used from then on. In all it's glory. Look at the circle hands, the broken lines, the unnatural proportions. Gosh, I miss the beauty in absolute mediocrity.

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169. Jackpot

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I'm not spiking my morning coffee if that's what you're wondering. I am, however, definitely drinking more now than the before times. We used to go out a lot, and I got most of my drink-on out there. It has not been the same without a place to gargle my griefs with grog. My fridge and bar are stocked with a lot more happy juice these days.  I've been asking around. I'm not alone. This is what we originally called the second wave, a stealthy mental health undertow that could suck us up. If you are reading this, you are likely shook up. And this time you can't blame it on the mediocrity of my comics.  The good thing is this: People ARE sharing their levels of anxiety. We are all there. Do we vary in our response? Yes. I make bad drawings of bad situations mocking my own issues. Some people crochet and stuff. Everyone, including your Facebook perfect friends seem to be experiencing a connected restlessness. Yes, them. That family that is always together, smiling, p
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164. Flame Buoyant

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I remember the ‘92 LA riots. If you don’t, there’s a brilliant documentary in Netflix about it (LA 92). At the time, the loss of property and all the literal flames made me question if the response was balanced to the cause (Rodney King’s beating.)  Now, I don't even pose the question. I can never know what it is like to be culled and focused on so adamantly. Sure, other minorities get some crap. But there’s something about the image of a black individual in society at large that scares white people. An angry white man doesn’t generate the same fear and reprisal that an angry black man does. An armed white man? Well that’s just Walmart on a Friday night! An armed black man is a death sentence.  I’ve only experienced racism a few times, and it only happens when they hear my accent. Instead of cops, the institution that treated me like dirt was Homeland Security in airports. They mocked my accent, they questioned my motives, and they generally made me feel powerless. However, I never
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173. Empathy

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Empathy towards strangers is learnable. So why are some of us so uneducated?   I'm not always empathetic towards strangers. During the Paris terrorist attack I wondered why Muslims weren’t decrying this heinous attack. Spoiler alert: They WERE decrying it (I was just too angry to see it) and they didn’t have to. You don’t expect Christians to apologize for every insane Christian. They'd spend every Sunday apologizing half the time.  My mind changed after a single act: meeting Muslim people. We helped a family from Syria as they were welcomed in our community. The “them” became “us.” Their amazing cooking skills and easy laughter will always stay with me. How do we get this to happen to people? There's value in learning that we are all extremely similar. We all worry about COVID, we all want to protect our own, we all occasionally leave skid marks in our underwear and never really talk about it. I’m the most introverted person I know, and I still have been able to meet Jewis
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186. Urine Trouble

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Bathrooms are the Water Temple of social anxiety. That’s a Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (1998) reference and trust me it’s very, very funny. On point though, public bathrooms, locker rooms, and other  loci of excreta have always been challenging locations when my social anxiety is at its highest. I don’t want to learn about others in these quarters, I feel no need to reach out to anything but my self. One time, as a new employee, I went to the bathroom adjacent to where I was being onboarded. The CEO came bounding in, loudly announcing himself and patting other urinators on the back. He then proceeded to let go of his liquid waste hands-free while holding a power pose and whistling. It dawned on me that that’s probably why he was the CEO. He had conquered the bathroom. Surely the people who hired him could tell this is a person who can pee while loudly talking about the weather! “He’s going places”, they must've said to themselves!  Extra panel:  Listen, I know it’s a shitt
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166. The Karening of the Dead

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We got horror movies so wrong. These past few months have taught us that we will have a significant amount of people whose ignorance will be worse than any threat. We will be riddled by people that believe that zombies are a Bill Gates ploy to get us to buy Windows products, people who think that George Soros is behind alien attacks and people who think that god and prayer will guard them against werewolves. These people are everywhere. They’re the real infestation of our times and I have no idea where they came from!  Somebody needs to make a horror movie with what we know now. How the biggest monster will be ignorance, stubbornness and privilege.  Extra panel: Worst case scenario
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182. Revenge

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Time is a flat circle. It's dizzying how things come back at you, like that nasty rash in your nether-regions. Speaking of rashes, let's speak about mothers. My mother and I can irritate each other every once in awhile. I say this with full candor, but armed with the certainty that this happens to all relationships. Specially to the earliest relationship you've ever had. For example, I get irritated at her continuous concern for my wellbeing; she gets irritated at my manic driving down the wrong lane while swerving to the music. It's maddening. And yet, I am a huge momma’s boy. In another dimension that may be an insult, but if you ever met my mom, you’d probably understand. She is intelligence, humor, courage, humility all rolled into one. I’ve spoken at length about it .  I know not everyone had a role model of a mother, and I understand that. For those people I hope that they find someone who loves them unconditionally. We all deserve that, an ardent, blistering, con
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174. Grandiloquence

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The inescapable irony of this is that I do the same thing. I make many of you read through my oodles of disparate, manic, poorly construed sentences to get to the mostly anticlimactic event of the “extra panel”. I’m well aware of this human tendency to bloviate once they get handed a microphone. If life was fair, you’d be hearing the Oscar music right now prompting me to shut up.  I was depressed last week. (This is the quality humor content you get when you subscribe to my blog!). I’m okay as of the writing of this post.  I just came from a heavenly vacation with my wife and I feel much better. I-drank-a-bottle-of-champagne-floating-in-a-lake levels of better. The thing that triggered this latest depression is heavy, noisy and grotesque. I’m talking, of course, of Trump. If you're a supporter, please skip ahead, I know you have a knack for selective blindness. I was affected by his post-GOP-convention bump and how his supporters seem to not understand why I am distraught by Trump.
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158. Transparency

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There’s no words to describe how crappy our toilet paper is. But I’m going to try. The toilet paper we found is malnourished. This toilet paper is like sliding spider web on your butt ravine. It’s like scraping waste with the Emperor’s New Clothes. It’s like using Casper The Friendly Ghost’s face to clean the evil remains. It’s the LaCroix of toilet paper. It’s like using graphene to dig up gold nuggets. And we have enough of it to survive two apocalyptic events. Yay. Extra Panel: Look out Halloween!
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170. Games

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I have never been able to mainline reality. For me it always has to be cut with absurdity and humor. Whether that is a flaw of reality or of myself, it’s the way it has always been. If you’re able to ingest the stuff with no additives or enhancers, kudos to you.  It always fascinates me how inseparable depression and humor are. The great podcast  “The Hilarious World of Depression” laid that bare for me. Why is it that these go together so frequently? The causal path is probably that depression causes humor, as a way to escape or provide layers between yourself and reality. This is only conjecture on my part, don’t make the mistake many people have done and take me too seriously. As COVID rages on in this year of our lord twentytwenty, I can only hope that you are doing ok. Our mindscapes are being toyed with 24/7 through the double threat of a nature based killer and a human based circus of  mendacity and conflict. If we didn’t have Sarah Cooper or any of the other creative things b
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