A Waste of Time

I’ll leave the blog that was originally with this comic when I posted it below, but just a couple quick updates.  Gonna have a new Thanksgiving comic posted tomorrow, so check back, and another new comic will be posted on Friday.  Then, next week I’ll probably be back to a Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday schedule.  To keep updated, you can start following my Tumblr , which I’m gonna start updating more, and where I’ve actually been posting some drawings and different bits that aren’t on this website yet, so if you like these comics you might find some cool stuff on there.  That’s all for now, bunch of new stuff coming up soon :)

So, this website passed 100,000 page views today, and while I’m aware that that’s not a huge number compared to some other webcomics and know that doesn’t mean 100,000 different people have viewed these comics, that’s still pretty amazing to me since, in the very beginning with these strips, they were mostly just little jokes for me and immediate friends.

Simultaneously, today Borders filed for bankruptcy, and, for those that don’t know, I’ve worked for Borders for over five years as kinda my day job while I wanted to devote my real energy to writing and art. Let’s be honest, it was a retail job, it was braindead and I hated it, but it also wasn’t taxing at all and most of the things I did could have been done by a monkey that knew the alphabet. Toward the end, their standards were slipping and they kept cutting staff, and alphabetization in the stores really wasn’t all that amazing, either, so really a monkey who didn’t know how to do the alphabet could have done most of my job. But I’ve also done these comics since around roughly a year or so after I started at Borders, so obviously having a job that required no input from me has, at times, allowed my mind to wander. The mind wandering alternated with soul-crushing horrific boredom, but I’m not sure that it was worse than having a dayjob that would have required something from me.

Yesterday was my first day back at Borders since I got hit by a car in December, and the bankruptcy following the day after makes me think that maybe there are gods, and they saw the need to intervene to alleviate my suffering. Or maybe I just like to see coincidences where they don’t really have significance, but it also coincides with a friend of mine, who also works at Borders having coffee with me after my shift last night and pointing out to me Bob Dylan’s Grammy performance, which I hadn’t been aware of. That’s significant to me because of the song Bob played. See, for years now whenever I hear Bob Dylan singing Maggie’s Farm, I’ve fantasized about playing the song a million times and posting it on my Facebook, Twitter, whatever, when I quit Borders to announce to the world that, YES, I AIN’T GONNA WORK ON MAGGIE’S FARM NO MORE. Bob, being Bob, of course performed an awesome version of Maggie’s Farm at the Grammys and I saw it last night and was planning to post it on Facebook and such today, before it was announced that Borders was filing and that my Downtown San Francisco location was among those that they were closing. I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more!

This comic that I posted today is meant to tie into the robot’s continued love affairs, which you can partially read on here already, but there’s more about it that I’ve come up with that I haven’t drawn and posted on the website yet. When it comes to my feelings about relationships and my experiences with them, it should probably be obvious why Truckstop there is reading Justine. It was also coincidental that today, after I’d already decided to post this comic and just a few minutes after I read about my Borders location closing, I got the “Let’s be friends” speech from a guy I had gone out on a few dates with and who I actually kinda liked. There’s a little bit of masochism in pursing relationships at all, and there’s something about that that’s a common theme through most of the writing that I do about it.

But still, there almost seems to be some sort of serendipity and some amount of things happening the way that they should happen, when you manage to step back just a bit and look at everything when it all comes stacked together. And squint a little bit.

BOB DYLAN, MAGGIE’S FARM, GRAMMY AWARDS 2011: