Banal Hemorrhage

I love stonks! I'm a boring stock owner though, no options, no meme stocks, no timing the market. I buy companies that I believe will have growth over 10 years and I hold them.  It's literally the watching-glaciers-melt of the stock world, but it's served me well. During the height of our last bull market I got a bit carried away and tested out some new things, like options, meme stocks and a few alt coins. I won some and lost some more last year, but it felt a lot more like gambling than investing.  I met tons of peeps like my version of Cocaine Bear during that time. They all gave me the whole stock-broker-on-copious-amounts-of-blow vibe. Because what could go wrong when you combine financial decisions with a drug that makes you feel unbeatable and overfilled with confidence? I can't wait for the movie Cocaine Bear, but I think my version would be fly AF too.  

Sometimes, I am driven by an idea. Like "how do I draw the effects of algorithms ?", or "why do some groups love people who rock bottom ?" Today, I'm driven by "what if Batman was dumb dog lol". I never said I was proud of what I do, how I do it or why I do it. It just is. Extra Panel…   

  To be completely honest, I didn't read Flowers in The Attic. Somehow a school friend read it or saw the movie and then told me the plot. Just this second hand retelling was enough to traumatize my young head. Incest, death and starvation will do that to you. It's crazy how trauma works, I dont remember what I had for dinner yesterday (Sorry Noom!), but I remember clearly the retelling of this story or the section in IT with the crawling eye or Luke losing his hand. Extra Panel: For some reason, my dad showed me Carrie when I was but a young lad. The image of the pig blood running down her face is burned in my hippocampus even more permanently than looking both ways to cross the street. Crazy stuff, trauma!  Notes: Our friend Tommy constantly tells me I should do one panels. I owe him one so, this is my attempt at that!

Deep, deep inside, I am an optimist. I don't let that side of me come out that often, because I think death, dystopia and destruction are way funnier and more entertaining.  I question my own use of a city as an example of humanity in disarray, but visually, it's the best way I could come up to display all of the stuff we are capable of doing in one panel. Personally my dystopia is a farmhouse upstate with neighborhood patrols and heavily armed "good guys" making sure there's no undesirables. A place where you need to use a car for everything you do and where solitude and a diet of everclear and deer makes you wonder if that Trump guy had some valid points. The kind of place in which you can yell at the wind and wonder when the open border policy you learned about in your loud cable news show will show up at your door. That’s hell on earth for me! Extra panel: 

  This week around my wife’s birthday I started thinking about all the ways she and women have had to do everything I do plus so much more.  They were talking in the radio about menopause and work, and how it is usually something kept under wraps. Additionally, they mentioned how some women had no idea this process can have its start as early as the thirties. Some women were so unaware, that they didn’t recognize menopause until it was already partly through! I spend a lot of time demystifying mental health issues and I wanted to make sure I recognize that women have some special biological and psychological processes that are also seldom discussed.  To Roxanne, I see you. You’ve handled this and other issues so well! Do you imagine me going through menopause? Based on how I react to colds, I would probably wallow in self-pity and make stupid jokes about it! I am forever humbled by your strength and I have no doubt in my mind that you and every other woman out there are and have always

This is one of the greatest ironies in the pharmacological world. Through sheer happenstance they found a medication that actually helps with depression symptoms. However, one of the most common side effects is the inability to achieve a literal orgasm, or to want to participate in sex. So you finally get the energy to say yes to that orgy e-vite, but you can't actually enjoy it as much. To this day it's not like I advertise that I'm on medication. Nobody does, even though as much as 13% of ALL adults in the US take them. And it's more staggering the older you get.  What is that shame that comes along with needing something external to stifle the darkness?  I know part of the answer. The moment you mention you're taking medication, there's 100 voices telling you that you wouldn't be depressed if you just exercised more, ate better, meditated, joined a club, found jesus, wrote, cooked, lifted, art-ed, cut social media, hire a life coach, went to a specific th

One thing I wasn't prepared for when I became a manager was the snitching. A few of the people I supervise love throwing other people under the bus. I have my own data, I can see what's up. It feels so weird to me that they feel the need to tell me who they think sucks, who speaks ill of me or who is on their underwear all day while working form home. That's information I couldn't care less about. I can tell some of them are frustrated because I don't bite, don't ask for more "tasty goss." In this era of worker empowerment we should just be focused on our own journey, why should an employee have to also burden themselves with what others are doing? The way I see it, I'm freeing them from that preoccupation.