Ridiculous Opinions #230
Greetings on this beautiful Saturday morning! The sun is out and I can see the ocean from my balcony. The sky is blue and the pollution is at a minimum today, so you can see clearly across the city.
And I have a cold.
It's not a bad cold. It's one of those mild ones that makes your eyes swell up; where you feel lethargic and grumpy. I managed to avoid being sick the entire time that my daughters were here and as soon as they head home, it's illness time. Sigh.
It is now 2024 and what was once the far future is now reality. I read a good post on Threads the other day that said if Marty McFly from Back to the Future went back thirty years from today, he would be at the 1994 Lollapalooza trying to fill in for Kurt Cobain. Time flies.
There's something to be said for relativity when it comes to aging. Relativity is the absence of an absolute. That means that what is true for you might not be true for me, depending upon the situation in which we find ourselves. I find this to be true, as when I am running, my sprints, which are short in length, tend to feel ridiculously long, and my walking time, which is ridiculously long, tends to seem very, very short.
But that works in the long range as well. I remember when I was young, I had a tendency to find time passed SO slowly. It didn't help that this was before the internet, so boring times in Oklahoma were REALLY boring. I would have these long afternoons with nothing on television and nothing to do, and in all honesty, I have no idea how I passed the time. It was the same with car rides back then. An hour and a half ride to Tulsa was excruciating. A day-long trip to some further destination was awful.
But you get older and your frame of reference changes. I started to notice this a few years ago when we lived three in Ontario. "Hey, let's zip down to Toronto for the day," I would say, and we would zip down to Toronto...which was three hours away. It didn't seem that long.
Now, the days just fly by, as if I'm picking up greater and greater speeds as I head towards my inevitable end. When I was a kid, I wanted time to move faster. Now that I'm fifty-one, I want it to move slower. It's a weird feeling.
I guess part of this is that I have a greater frame of reference. I've lived a lot of lifetimes in this one life. But man, oh, man, do I want things to go more slowly, especially when it comes to time spent with my daughters and (of course) break times.
Creative Stuff
I just finished off almost three weeks of publishing Maurice Comics on a daily basis and am now taking a break. I wanted to see if I could do what old school cartoonists like Berkeley Breathed, Bill Watterson, and Charles Schultz used to do. I did just what I wanted. However, by the last few strips, I started to grow sick of it. I guess the key difference is that I am not getting paid to do it, and I don't have to slog through all of this, year after year, using actual physical tools. I just whip out some cartoons on my iPad and make generous use of cut-and-paste to fill in the work. It makes for easy cartooning, but I wouldn't say that the quality is there all that much. Here are a few comics from the last couple of weeks...
https://www.instagram.com/p/C1d5glYJgob/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Hilarious. Here's another one...
https://www.instagram.com/p/C1gcdmUpUno/?img_index=1
These embeds may or may not work. I'm still fiddling with Buttondown and don't necessarily know how to make all of these things work.
Work begins again on Monday. I'll keep you informed as to how things are going.
