Category: Personal

Bring, Brang, Brung

I haven’t put up any strips for bring it in a while. Just one in all of February, and nothing this month so far.  Early on I was on nearly a daily schedule.  Right now, nothing.  It’s weird, when I was doing it before, ideas would pop into my head all the time, say, when I was showering.  Oh man, that’s it!  I haven’t showered in a couple months! Dang!

No, seriously, I can’t think of a damn thing to do a comic about anymore.  I guess I’m getting a little tired of the two main characters being a kind of Dilbert/Dogbert, Jon/Garfield clueless-straight-man and smartass duo.  I might be able to come up with some more comedy along those lines, but I don’t like it very much.

Ah well.  Thanks to people who’ve encouraged me on it.  I do appreciate it.  I just don’t know if it’s going to go anywhere from here.

Blink/Think

Wandering about the bookstore, I came across Th!nk, by Michael LeGault. It is a reaction against the popular Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. And just reading the description of Th!nk made me loathe it with every fiber of my being.

Here’s the loathsomeness:

Outraged by the downward spiral of American intellect and culture, Michael R. LeGault offers the flip side of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling phenomenon, Blink, which theorized that our best decision-making is done on impulse, without factual knowledge or critical analysis. If bestselling books are advising us to not think, LeGault argues, it comes as no surprise that sharp, incisive reasoning has become a lost art in the daily life of Americans. Somewhere along the line, the Age of Reason morphed into the Age of Emotion; this systemic erosion is costing time, money, jobs, and lives in the twenty-first century, leading to less fulfillment and growing dysfunction. LeGault provides a bold, controversial, and objective analysis of the causes and solutions for:

• the erosion of growth and market share at many established American companies, big and small, which appear to have less chance of achieving the dynamic expansion of the past

• permissive parenting and low standards that have caused an academic crisis among our children — body weights rise while grades plummet

• America’s growing political polarization, which is a result of our reluctance to think outside our comfort zone

• faulty planning and failure to act on information at all levels that has led to preventable disasters, such as the Hurricane Katrina meltdown

• a culture of image and instant gratification, fed by reality shows and computer games, that has rendered curiosity of the mind and spirit all but obsolete

• stress, aversion to taking risks, and therapy that are replacing the traditional American “can do” mind-set.

It’s classic Cranky Old Man, talking about how the world is all going to the dogs and we need to return to the old days, when men were real men, women were real women, you whipped your child twice before breakfast every day just to keep the fear of God in him, and the Coloreds knew their place!  Well, that last part usually doesn’t get said out loud.  But you get the idea.  It’s Conservatism in its worst caricature.
So, we usually hate things that we deny in ourselves.  Am I in denial of my inner Cranky Old Man, that I react with such knee-jerk emotion to the Cranky Old Men I see?

I Still Dream Of Organon…

I bought a copy of Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting the other day, because I’d bought her new album Aerial and it made me wistful for her old stuff from the 80s.

I knew that Cloudbusting was about Wilhlem Reich, but back in the old days we didn’t have no Inter Webs, and I couldn’t google around and learn the details. The details are pretty cool. It’s inspired by a book that Wilhelm’s son Peter wrote, about growing up in his father’s care, believing everything his father told him, and realizing only when his father was imprisoned and his books burned by the federal government, that almost nobody believed the things his father believed or thought his father was the genius that he considered himself.

I’d never made out the word “Organon” in the first line of the song (I’d thought it was something like “I still dream of all the noise…” — whoops). And other things about the song’s lyrics, which were puzzling before, become clear when you know what it’s about —

You’re like my yo-yo
That glowed in the dark

What made it special
Made it dangerous
So I bury it and forget

A yo-yo that glowed in the dark? Well… Reich experimented with radium at his laboratory, Organon. A yo-yo that glowed in the dark might well be special… and dangerous.

It’s an especially thought provoking song becuase Reich is such a character. He was in many ways a reprehensible fellow — the word “megalomanic” leaps to mind when one considers that he’s the author of a book-length rant called Listen, Little Man! (which reads exactly how you’d think it reads from the title). And, well, you know, “orgone energy” ain’t exactly, um, real. But… I don’t know.  For all the craziness, it seems like at heart he was a man who saw how much society can hurt people, and fill them with anger and fear and hate, and who wanted to do something about it, and who convinced himself he’d found secrets which allowed him to change the world.

I would like to read the book that inspired the song.

Everytime it rains,
You’re here in my head
Like the sun coming out –
Ooh I just know that something good is going to happen
And I don’t know when
But just saying it could even make it happen.