Holy Hangover, Batman

Carefully nurture your career. Know what you want to do with your gifts and your training and go after it, but don’t be afraid to take a detour or two, or three. And know your profession, know how it works, what’s happening in it, who’s happening in it. Be savvy, too–savvy enough to know that once you start putting your work out into the world, you will be categorized immediately as a cartoonist who makes that kind of comics. And be savvy enough to know that there will be a price you’ll pay, often a steep one, if you suddenly surprise that world by doing another kind of comics. Follow up your exquisitely nuanced childhood memoir with a run on “Dial H for Hero,” or vice versa, and you’re going to be kicked right in the blogosphere. Don’t be naive; you can’t afford it.

All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn’t your pet — it’s your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.

Eighty people waited in a darkened meeting room at the Hyatt, wearing mass-produced paper hats. The White Hats were Beginning to Begin. The Pink Hats were Moving Ahead in Beginning. The Green Hats were Very Firmly Beginning, all the way up to the Gold Hats, who had Mastered Living and were standing in a group around the Snack Table, whispering and conferring and elbowing one another whenever someone in a lesser hat walked by.

So these football players were doing that Bubba Gump shrimp thing with dead unicorns (unicorn is the fruit of the sky… unicorn kabobs, unicorn creole, unicorn gumbo blablabla) and she was crying and I could not believe I had moved to Texas at 14 when I’d been dating this INSANELY dishy rugby player from the American school who I’d just heard was seen waiting in the line for the movie theater with this one chick who was 13 (slag!) from the French school and I was obsessing and obsessing and getting a real good lather going and SNAPPED to scream the following: “OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE LEAVE THE SPASTIC ALONE YOU NECKLESS TWATS.” Except that for some reason people in Texas who straight-up strafe vowels, like NBD, pronounce it “TWOTT” and not “TWAATT” and no one had any idea what I was talking about and was so shocked that the token gook thus spake that I felt weirdly compelled to leave but faltered (did that uggo animated GIF up-down thing in my chair for a splitsecond OMGAWG IT WAS LONG ENOUGH) and was so flustered that I flung the door open ON MY FACE and chipped a tooth. I was really popular after that. Oh, and I murdered everyone.

People ask me if he’s better than Bob Lanier. Here’s what I know: He’s our Bob Lanier.

‎The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of Earth, neither mortal nor immortal in order that you may, as the proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.

Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile. So this morning he said to me “We’re going to do five.” I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.” He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears, and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” I said, “Okay hell, I’ll go for it.” So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, and I can’t go any more and I say to him, “Bruce, if I run any more,” - and we’re still running - “if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.” It made me so mad that I went the full five miles. Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, you know, “Why did you do that?” He said, “Because you may as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.

For my whole career, I always said that the best path to making someone laugh is to put up something that honestly made you laugh. Honesty. I was thinking about putting up a piece of paper on my monitor that said “be honest,” so that when you’re fucking around and you’ve lost the plot, you can remember to just be honest about what you’re thinking, because that’s the best way to connect with people. We’re all sitting here saying the same things. We’re trying to achieve goals that don’t mesh with reality, or just trying to get along.

The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself because the economy has already totally subjugated them. It is nothing other than the economy developing for itself. It is at once a faithful reflection of the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers.