A Waste of Time

I had to write three versions of the title of this blog to make sure it didn’t have the wrong number of words. But more on that in a minute.

First, a massive and massively overdue thank you to Dave Baxter, who is the hidden coordinator behind this project. He’s done so much to push me to get my work out there that I really don’t know where to start explaining it. Without him, you might have eventually seen most of these comics from me, but it would have taken quite a bit longer. Not only that, I’m working with him to illustrate a story that he’s written, and that work will hopefully enable me to cut back on the dayjob soon and, all combined, these ventures just might make this whole crazy artist thing work out. Seriously, Dave’s been the light at the end of the tunnel, and if anybody’s enjoying the content on this website at all, they should send him an email thanking him for getting it out of me in anything resembling a timely fashion.

On to the purpose of this blog, which is basically just to touch on a few operational issues about the website. I’ve added blogs to my last two comics, so if anybody wants to, go and read ‘em when you get a chance. As the story Roll With It was posting, I kept intending to do blogs for the pages, but kept not doing it for one reason or another, but now, as time allows, I plan to go back and annotate them a little bit. I thought I’d post this notice about it to open it up to discussion about what anybody might like to hear about in those blogs when I get to them. On some of the pages, I can probably think of quite a few different things to say, but i don’t really know what would be of the most interest to people. I could talk about the process of writing it or drawing it, or the real evening that inspired the story.

As far as the other posts go, I think it’s probably discernible now that there are a few different storylines and types of posts emerging. One of the things that I imagine could be a recurring feature is the “What substance was I on?” game ’cause, not to be a total hippy about it, but I have a decent number of drawings that were done whilst in the throes of various forms of stimulation.

And now I’ll start with the part of this that’s probably going to be a little hard for me to get through. Hard because part of my brain is screaming out that there will be dire consequences for typing these words. When I’ve talked to people about my anxiety problems, the advice has generally been to just relax and follow what my mind is telling me. My New-Agey friends are especially fond of trying to get me in touch with my inner intuition as a means for increasing my confidence. The problem is that my inner intuition is usually screaming things like, “You turned that doorknob three times, not five– If something happens to Marshall now you’ll never forgive yourself!” I don’t know if this is too strange for some people, but I don’t actually think it’s that unusual. I think most people have some sort of OCD, or something that could be called OCD. Everybody has irrational compulsions, and if I was to sit down with a DSM for a while I could probably manage to find criteria for almost every common mental illness that I possess. They tried to put me on Ritalin in Grade School, and according to a little chart in a recent Newsweek or Time article– I can’t remember which– I have almost every symptom of Borderline Personality Disorder. One thing I don’t really think I am is a Hypochondriac (To crib a little Woody Allen, I think I’m more of an Alarmist), and I seriously doubt that I really have BPD, and I think that ADD is usually the technical term for drugging small children who are bored by bad teachers or ahead of the rest of the class. My OCD, though, seems to be a little different. At the very least, it’s much more Baroque than most people’s. I have a numbers thing, a germophobe thing, and things about how I walk down sidewalks, etc., and sometimes they interact with one another to create big formations of things that my brain is telling me that I’d better do unless I want Something Bad to happen. Like, I might be able to convince myself to walk on the wrong side of a streetlight, but then if I happen to notice that there are an unlucky number of streetlights on the block, I’ll panic a little bit and have to go back and rewalk it. Ask people who’ve walked with me for any length of time, and they’ll tell you something similar. Anyway, the reason that I mention all this, besides the therapeutic value of unloading a little bit, is that it’s a good portion of the reason that I never ended up doing the blogs that were supposed to be attached to those pages. I couldn’t very well start on the page with THAT number, and so I waited until the next page, at which point I certainly couldn’t start doing the blogs on the page that was posted on THAT date, and so on. I don’t mention any of this for pity, by the way. I think I’m probably talking about it for the same reasons that I talk about a lot of things on here: I find myself really, really interesting. The whole thing should make for some decent comics. If I ever find the perfect auspicious moment on which to begin them.