It's all reading & drawing right now, along with a few messages to the right people.
I'm dog-sitting for Ayize right now, while he's visiting an old friend of ours in Arizona. His apartment is right next to the freeway, and every night I listen to the ocean sounds that the speeding cars create on the tarmac, along with the totally unnatural interruption of cop-car bullhorns warning drivers to pull off at the next exit. I sit here reading & drawing & letting that noise sink into my subconscious, cranking my anxiety levels up like a street-fight.
The first leg of the comic needs to be done, then I'm off to Pittsburgh at the end of next month, then it's San Diego in July, then who the hell knows what. There's always something.
Is there always something? I was trying to work that one out earlier today. Running through my head some silliness I read in a comic book: There are two great questions a man's gotta ask himself; "Why did god create the universe," and, "What do I do now?" I kept running over it and over it and kept coming back to the same thing. I kept coming back to a conversation I had with my step-dad, when I was probably about 10 or 11. We had been talking about the seemingly random behaviours of humanity, and it was getting rather heated. I asked him if he honestly believed that there was a purpose to life. He said, "Of course there is. There is absolutely a reason for our existence."
"Then what is it?"
"I'm not telling you that," he said, as though I were some spy-assassin, working for some anti-cosmological/humanist revolutionary group, "but if you don't think that life has a purpose, then you're a fucking idiot."
"What exactly are you saying? Do you really know? Is it one of those 'you must find your own path' things? Or are you just being an asshole?"
The conversation didn't really progress much from there, but it occurs to me as I write this, 20-odd years later, that we may have had a somewhat unusual relationship.
I do seem to be slipping toward digression again though (damn me).
Point is, I was thinking about this today, and muttering to myself all of these old conversations when I realized that I've never had a worthwhile conversation on the matter that managed to get any further than, "We've all gotta just find our own rationalizations for getting out of bed in the morning."
This was all (in this instance) brought on by learning that Kurt Vonnegut died on Wednesday. I kept thinking about his take on the matter, a take which always pleased me greatly: "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different. "
