To those who claim they are literate, educated and erudite, you should be ashamed of yourself for reading this comic. But please don’t stop – it gives me some kind of validation and sense of self worth.
After this week’s tragic events, there is no really easy way to deal with it. So with my psychological defenses and coping mechanisms, I will do what I usually do — and that is turn to humor. It’s pure distraction in my case, and it usually leads to me sitting in front of the computer and cartooning and, of course, eating and thinking of future episodes of the comic once referred to by the Dadaist painter Man Ray as “some garbage my eight-year old could do if he had been born with the umbilical cord around his neck.”
I spent a fair bit of time recently doodling on the computer, placing and drawing the characters, thinking of future episodes and dialogue, and then rationalizing how I could dream up dialogue this bizarre, and of course noshing on sugary things. Given the half-dozen so called choco-chip cookies I ingested with the speed and haste of the ancient Israelites hoofing it through the Red Sea on their way to the Land of Milk and Falafel, I may petition the drug companies to merge with the plumbing cabals of the world to come up with a clog removal product for my arteries that dissolves in butter or is coated in chocolate. Because that is likely the only way that anything will get inside my arteries.
But I digress.
As I was driving around this morning doing errands I heard a report about the best time of year to diet, which as it turns out is winter. It seems humans burn the bad fat we accumulate better in winter so we can keep warm and thus lose weight. And winter, at least in the northern (a.k.a. good) hemisphere, is often associated with endings that lead to new beginnings. Then again, with global warming I don’t see us being in for much of a cold winter any time soon, so that opportunity to burn bad fat seems to be going up in coal-fired smoke. And furthermore, why do we diet? To stave off death? No, so we can wear the clothes hanging in our closets that we think we look cool in, or once did. We diet to ensure a future wearing past clothes. Strange, no?
So when you read and subsequently recoil in horror at this episode of Stanko & Tibor, think of the future, of your loved ones, the arguments you have had with them, the future they hold, especially the younger ones who will one day choose your retirement “castle”. Think of the past they have misspent and how it made you laugh and cry. And then hug them. Or bear hug them if you don’t like them. Or retreat into humor and eat a chocolate or cinnamon danish. With icing.
May your slide into the new year occur without any twisted joints.
