Sloth and Manatee

One of the great privileges of life is to do something and not do anything else: Effing off and telling everything else to eff off. Even for a few minutes. In fact, it’s even more than a privilege, it’s something we have to fight for.

Effing off is a special state of being in which you are there, existing, doing your thing, not zigzagging around or reminding yourself of stuff or otherwise making noise that is not The Thing You Are Doing. Making something. Fixing something. Mooshing paint or clay or dirt. Writing a letter. Just, fully Being There.

This is often where beauty is, it is where we are, it is where we touch the world.

The state of the world now, especially in the US, is putting a very fine point on just how privileged it is to eff off. How special and hard-won it is to just be, doing what you are doing, and not doing anything else. Even for a few minutes.

It is also showing us that we cannot ever surrender our ability to eff off. Power and greed want all of you as a resource from head to toe and from morning to night. Power is not happy unless it is being expressed or imposed. Greed searches for the next thing to grab, and the next. And so they invade your day, your phone, your neighborhood. Grabbing around and searching for what they want, and using you as a medium. Parasitic.

The greatest cultures of our world have effed off under duress. Many of the greatest songs and art forms and pieces of literature have happened as a big ol’ middle finger to cruelty or calamity or both.

When I see a work of art, I often think, here is a person who effed off and stuck with it. Here is someone fully present. They got their butt into the studio, and they stayed there. Or they went back again and again. Or they hid their stuff under the floorboards. They did whatever it took. They stayed on it, because they knew it was worth doing no matter what.

I tend to make things in a cumulative way. I add a page, and then another, and another, and I keep doing that. That is how I ended up with over 2,400 cartoons. I didn’t start out to do that. I just kept drawing them.

I try to draw energy from thinking of all the people out there effing off, even under the worst circumstances, making their things and playing their songs, from century to century and out of the reach of grabby hand after grabby hand.

Sloth and Manatee Page

Brainwaves

Best of Brainwaves Volume One: The Fountain of Stuff

Best of Brainwaves Volume Two: Mom, Dad, I'm a Cat

License Cartoons from CartoonStock

Art!

So, my friend Grant sent me this video that his friend Dan shot of this effortful grub, and then I animated it into the smallest effing-off story ever.

Here is the animation:

And here’s the original:

Print Shop

BunnyFrogCatSnake

Bit of a walk. Maybe the friends are in there?

Things Of The Week

Planthony is effing off in this masterpiece https://www.instagram.com/p/DTQrTqZElte/?hl=en

We Will Rise Again(Bookshop) is a collection of speculative stories that I’m enjoying quite a lot right now.

Here’s another kind of effing off, which is refusing to eff off by bearing witness: Observation as a Radical Act(Art21)

Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.

May you eff off, may you make something and share it with somebody, won't you be my neighbor? - Betsy