For the morally, spiritually, financially, vertically and follically-deficient among you who still profess to follow this unending chronicle of the human condition known as silliness, I give you this 2cm-shallow thought:
As I was walking to the gym one frigid morning, while the biting December cold nipped and the tip of my bulbous nose and the sidewalks were covered in snow and slipperiness, I was given time to think, and that’s usually a dangerous thing as I tend to come up with the crap that passes for this comic and or blog. So in some ways this is all your collective fault for not having occupied me sufficiently.
My father, a man not to mince words, and the man who taught me profanity the likes of which approach poetry for merchant marines, also imparted his wisdom upon me many years ago when we were driving in his Cadillac Eldorado (a lemon of a pimp-mobile if there ever was one). He said a few simple words that burned into my long term memory like a bad tattoo: “People are stupid.” He, the legendary salesman of soap, also told me many years later when I gave up chasing a girl because she already had a boy friend that I had to convince her that “my soap is better.” Ah, always the romantic.
His “people are stupid” kernel of wisdom prepared me for the moronic news stories and miscellaneous events I would experience in my 4 decades on this planet. Things that make you shake your head are justifiably explained by this theory. Especially in any hot country, region of the world or state where they don’t have a decent winter to kill off the weak. Take New Orleans or the Middle East where acts of stupidity occur daily, and where my readership of this comic is zero so I face few threats and reprisals.
Am I tarring entire peoples and continents with a malicious brush? Do you read this comic? If I didn’t make outrageous, hurtful and baseless generalizations and accusations, I’d have no material to work with. I’m just not that creative.
But I digress yet again.
That morning time did give me a chance to think about what makes a person try and come up with an original idea that isn’t riddled with idiocy. The kind of idea that could maybe change the world, like electric pasties or caramel covered popcorn (both having contributed handsomely to the wealth of many a lawyer and dentist).
Are we asking ourselves the difficult questions that could lead to new areas of thought, kind of like my children asked as they were discussing which kind of milk to put out for Santa to go with his cookies. Should it be low fat or the one for lactose intolerant people? Is Santa indeed lactose intolerant? And has anyone, outside of the marketing department, even thought about Santa’s dietary needs? What a creative bit of thinking, I thought.
Yet most times we aren’t all that creative. We are mostly mentally arthritic. Like physical arthritis, the mental kind limits our range of motion, and often requires some kind of interference via pharmaceutically derived and delivered “support”, group therapy or a whole lot of booze mixed with fruit juice to loosen those rusty cranial joints. It’s so easy to be mentally arthritic, you don’t have to question anything, you can go about your routine and not stretch side to side or up and down. Why come up with that next crazy idea if you don’t have to?
What does this all have to do with this episode of the artistic and spiritual tour de force known as Stanko & Tibor and quoted in Wired magazine, the Chinese state media and the U.N. Human Rights Commission as “a reason to close the Internet”?
Because if we don’t occasionally try something wild, we will become arthritic and addled and then I’ll be forced to come up with all the humor and bright ideas for this part of the northern hemisphere and frankly, with my back the way it is, and my child-rearing taking up time (“go ask you mother” definitely counts as parenting in my book), I can’t see it happening. So you’ll all be required to break from your ways and think of something truly unique, like chocolate-flavored suppositories.
Wishing you a happy and healthy New Year,
The 14th Earl of the Grilled Sandwich upon River Druker
