Take What You Want, Make No Apology

In other news, after 7 years of failing to buy out this old man's farm so they can expand a military training base there, the Canadian government is just taking it away from him anyway. Apparently, it may be necessary to erode our citizens' right to their own home and sense of security in order to save them from those who would destroy our democracy from within. Hurrah! Oh wait... Let me try that again.  Ummm... hey! Just think about how many jobs will be created by expanding this base...!

Even though apparently this is all about National Security. Or jobs. Same diff, right?  Because otherwise what we just did might be wrong or even illegal. Hey, don't blame us, pal, this is THE NEW NORMAL, where words mean what we say they do. You can either swallow it or choke on it, the true north strong and free...

AND IN SO DOING, BECAME LIKE UNTO A SORT OF VIRTUAL PANCAKE, WHICH HE NAMED WICKLES

Just as the microscopic world never seems to run out of new strains of bacteria and germs for us to sharpen our immune systems on, so human society never seems to run out of new kinds of crap human behavior for us to deal with. And it never will. We can lament that fact, and we should. We can also embrace the opportunity to sharpen our skills at dealing with crap and maybe develop one our two new tools for next time.

Bleah, right?  But we'll be dealing with the Human Crap Condition our whole lives, so we might as well do something with the experience. In some cases it may be the only silver lining we get.

LEST IT BECOME OBVIOUS, HE DID HIDE HIS TRUMPET BETWIXT GOD'S SUSPENDERS

Meh. So after not posting anything for over a month, I've decided to let this whole "blog war" with Mr. Geigen-Miller go. Here's why. I've discovered that fretting about word count, or even thinking about word count, is toxic to my creativity. So is worrying about whether what I have buzzing in my cerebrum today will make a proper micro-essay, or whether I have time to make it conform to that.

Word count is kind of a silly way to measure a blog, anyway.  It's one of those post-industrial-revolution ideas for high-mindedly productivity-focused institutions, invented by burnt-out middle-school teachers to keep lazy students from handing in one-sentence exam answers like, "Because Hamlet was pissed off." I'm not really sure how useful it is in the adult world unless we make it so. Do we measure poetry by word count? More than half of my own creative output is graphical rather than written verbal, so setting targets by word count is not a thing I customarily do. I mean, I get that books and short stories and works of journalism need to have a certain word count to fit into their assigned slots when dealing with a publisher (I measure my own comics work by page count), and that professional prose-writers need to have some way of measuring their creative output in order to drive themselves.

But for myself, I already have enough creative targets in my life I'm trying to meet, and I don't need this blog to start competing with them. If that happens, I'll probably give it up and go back to my earlier "I don't have time to blog" position. Bad ju-ju for me.

Instead, I think I'll let my posts be exactly as short as they want to be. If I only have three sentences today, then that's what you get. If I feel like "Here's a cool drawring I did," than that's what you'll get. I think that's what a lot of artist-blogs look like anyway, like quick postcards from someone who's rather busy with deadlines at the moment.

I'm not an essay writer by nature. It's a skill I have and can pull out when I need it, but it's not my preferred mode of communication. And I have zero interest in letting it eat up precious free hours of my day that I could be spending either finding new clients or writing or drawing actual stories... which is actually the thing I'd rather be doing, and what I think most people who know me would rather see me doing anyway.

In other news, here's a cool drawring I did.