I'm trying to get back at this, but it takes a lot of belief in these awful, scratchy little drawings, and belief in your stamina for reading my bad handwriting.
The thing that makes me want to do it the most is, many years ago, when I first started trying this, my brother saw the cartoons and thought they were funny. It made me so happy that he thought some of them were funny. We are both getting older and I take it for granted that I will always have him, or that I myself will be around. So I wanted to try again.
This one was started right before Hurricane Helene, and depicts my work-reality of cooking lunch around coworkers, who sometimes make conversation about what is being cooked for lunch. Then the hurricane came and I was out of work for several weeks, and I tried to finish the post by squishing it together with stuff that happened after the hurricane.
------- Why I Haven't Made More of Myself ------------
I spend 75% of the time in my head explaining myself to someone who understands.
It's 100% unlikely these will ever make it out.
I don't know who this imagined listener is. Maybe it's like the unseen Vern character in the old Ernest commercials starring Jim Varney:
I also spend a ton of time taking moments that just happened, and imagining
a completely different version of them where I do something more fun or real-- what I wish I'd done if I had the courage or the creativity in that moment.
This is actually what happened:
But while I walked down the street with the rejected cabbage, I really wished I had remained, to convince them to take it, by singing about it:
Who could resist?
Sometimes these thoughts are so delightful they reverberate in my head for a long time after, taking up valuable space for other processes.
I think all of this imagining and explaining is a good distraction
from whatever I don't want to look at, or from being in an actual moment.
But I often wish there were translation processes for getting some of it out,
in the moment it needs to come.
What would that involve--permission?
Maybe that's what this is.
