Posts

177. Fear Defect

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Besides falling leaves, our dogs are afraid of: Their shadows Doors Stairs Petting Toys Raindrops Leashes Things that our dogs are not afraid of: Huge dogs Feral cats Burly men in the shadows Cars barreling towards them Obviously we have our work cut out for us. These guys are the least befitting of donning the crown of evolution out of any other dog I’ve ever met. Admittedly, in just five months they have burrowed so deep in our lives that I have no doubt we would take a bullet for them. So maybe that’s how they evolved.  They transform whoever adopts them into soft, malleable, unrecognizable pieces of putty. Extra Panel: This is what I imagine when I hear about dog therapists. Here’s an extra: A video of Conan who, we are convinced, learned to dog by watching YouTube tutorials. 

176. Bubble Trouble.

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Well, by now most of you know the drill. Information has changed and we are all a bit screwed because of it. Our choices change our news in ways that have never happened before. The news are bottled up and served as a product to people. You are drinking Coke and your neighbor is drinking Mr. Pibb; a bizarre, dubious and objectively wrong choice. I know I can't claim to be right, I mostly jest. I am extremely biased when it comes to immigration, women's choice and LGBQT rights. I will favor those over stock market increases and regulation reductions, even though I am an avid stock market investor. I click on articles that show how immigrants are less prone to commit crimes, while my neighbor may click on articles talking about the hive of scum and villainy that files up to ask for asylum. Just like rashes, the amount of biased news you get grows the more you pick them. If you still are not clear how this works, there's an accessible documentary on Netflix: The Social Dilemma

175. A Little Perspective

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Have I been nauseating enough about our Coronapups? I’m gonna go with no.  We’ve had our  dobergoblins  (Conan and Xena) for the last four months and all I can say is that they’ve changed us. Roxanne and I look at each other and wince at what we have become.   There’s not an hour of the day in which these dogs aren’t an extension of our bodies. Furry, needy, whiny extensions. And what do we do with this dependent behavior? We encourage the hell out of it. Over the last month we’ve done incredibly disgusting things like:  Bought them little tiny sweaters  Put them in pouches attached to our sweaters Smuggled them into restaurants Handcrafted some masks for them Hiked with them on our backpack Only one of those is a lie. We are so screwed. Extra Panel:  They are our world. 

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.

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

172. Glucose Intolerance

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Every relationship is fake and I don’t know why, because the truth is funnier. Even I, lover of vulnerability and all things taboo, don’t post about our weekend-destroying arguments about sponges. Oh wait, perhaps I do sometimes. Am I being a cynical doo-doo head? Yes, of course. But I’m also speaking from experience. Walk back a divorce in modern times. Go back through the public postings and you'll find yourself going from "That wretched witch took all my money" to "Enjoying the sunset with my booboo" in a few swipes. Where’s the in between? How did it get from point A to point B so quickly? String Theory? More like creative editing. I find this a bit peculiar, but it actually makes things more understandable to me. That family you see always dancing in perfection, whereas it be in movies, books or your social feed... it’s about as real as farmed salmon is pink . Like a red herring, its image is set to distract. In the same way a jellyfish is not a real fish,

171. Worn Out

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  41% of adults in the United States approve of Donald Trump as of the writing of this blog post . 42% of adults in the United States say they will vote for him this November. I am telling them to get bent in this comic. I never said I was good at this whole create-a-following aspect of creating webcomics. When he got elected, I really hoped for the best, to the annoyance of my more leftist friends. I trusted that the system of checks and balances wouldn't let his flippant cruelty become policy. And for the most part it hasn't, but the effects that his intentions have had on the psyche of many of us is as indelible as his pronunciation of Yosemite.  There is a lot of fake news around this president, I will never deny that. There is fake news about everything these days, including stories denying the benefits of wearing a barrier between your saliva fountain and other saliva fountains.  The things that are terrifying and monstrous about this president are not fake news, however