CSotD: Friday Funnies and the Meaning of Life

Not to worry, Pig. It’s Friday Funnies!

 

And you don’t have to actually turn it off, as Clyde demonstrates. You can just blow it off.

 

People like Winslow and Carmen will take care of everything for you. Hope you like their plans, by the way.

The difference between Pig and Clyde being that Pig will eventually complain about how things turned out, while Clyde will just go his merry way.

The other possibility, however, is that Pig spends a little time in the daisies and a lot more time in the Vineyard, and I’d suggest that all around.

But for now, welcome to the Friday Funnies Daisy Patch.

 

Spud is the guy I feel sorry for. He’s a great foil for Wallace the Brave, but, while Pig is puzzled and depressed by the world around him, it all terrifies Spud.

The rocking chair metaphor will draw me in every time, because back when I was about 25, I had a freelance job that ended up with somebody higher up firing the people I was working for, with a decision not to pay the freelancer.

It was one of those low-middle-four-figure debts where it would be more expensive to sue them than to swallow it, even though I had a couple of subcontractors to pay off.

(Nice thing about writing is, when you get stiffed, you’re not often out a lot of actual costs. The not-nice thing is that the IRS doesn’t allow you to count “what my time is worth” in writing off bad debts.)

I thought about avoiding the aggravation, but then I made a conscious decision that I was not going to find myself someday sitting in that rocking chair at the home, saying, “I should have sued those bastards.”

So I sued those bastards with the help of a friendly attorney who took it on a contingency. We settled out of court and, by the time he took his cut and my subcontractors got theirs, I was about even.

So it won’t matter whether the rocking chair has a cushion or not, because I won’t be uncomfortable in it.

I may have only broken even on money, but I was way ahead of the game on karma.

To which I would add that, if you can make that decision at 25 or so, you’ll be okay.

It’s the poor schlubs who wake up at 45 and realize they haven’t done the things they wanted to do with their lives who simultaneously tug at my heartstrings and arouse my contempt.

That is, I feel sorry for the Willie Lomans who do what they think they’re supposed to do and never seem to get anywhere. But I also want to grab them by the lapels and ask them why they didn’t wake the hell up sooner.

And, by the way, jumping out of airplanes may be fun, but ticking it off your bucket list won’t make up for the more day-to-day things you should have done.

Even Sal Paradise, patron saint of not being pinned down, spoke not of living dangerously but of thinking and speaking and living brilliantly.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

The jumping-out-of-airplanes thing reminds me of a time when my son was a new volunteer firefighter and we drove by one of those bungee-jumping cranes that were a fad at the time.

“You want adrenaline?” he mused. “Try walking into a burning building. It lasts longer and you’re doing something that matters.”

Anyway, fecal cohesion is something you achieve over time. You can’t just decide to go do it on an afternoon.

 

To which I would add — once more coming to Drew‘s defense as I nearly always do — getting your shit together rarely involves journals or Post-It notes or trust falls.

Not that Drew needs a lot of defending. I envy his ability to wait out Lizzie’s “Solution of the Week” barrage of good ideas, as long as they don’t begin to involve rice, old shoes, a picket fence and a station wagon.

Unlike Spud, who avoids challenges, Drew picks his battles, a talent I do not possess, though, if you can’t pick your battles, it’s better to contest them all than to avoid them all.

 

Meanwhile, over in Monty, Moondog has a new girlfriend who has cleaned up his apartment, which might sound like a pretty good deal for those of us who are not organizationally inclined.

 

But it comes at a cost.

 

As does avoiding it, as noted in the Duplex.

“Guy trying to pick up girls in a bar” is right up there with desert islands and psychiatrist’s couches as a cartoon setting that promises more than it usually delivers, but two guys contemplating pathetic failure is almost always a better punchline than the ones where a supposedly clever line results in rejection.

 

Jerry Bittle often featured Geech and Weldon in that position and kept the focus on their inability to get it together rather than casting the blame on snotty women.

 

In fact, the women in Geech were as desperately unable to put a competent foot forward as the men, which seems a lot more humane and insightful than the raft of “Man Dumb, Woman Smart” cartoons flooding the market.

 

From a personal point of view, Pickles holds out the best hope that a couple can actually be together for a long time and can needle each other affectionately, rather than with barely suppressed hostility.

If you can achieve it, this should make the rest of existence easier to deal with.

The question of maintaining meaning in your life being a challenge that requires you to use Pig’s daisy patch as a refueling station, not a permanent home.