The Clumsy Interloper

When I was a young boy, the Sunday comics section held a special place in my imagination. My parents would always set it neatly at my place at the breakfast table and while they read about world affairs, politics and other boring b&w adult things I read and re-read the “daily intelligentsia” as my Pepere would call it. The technicolor sprawl, page-upon-page, uniformly crinkled and folded in my lap. For six days previous I had to settle for one page of monochrome frivolity – but Sundays, oh glorious Sundays! Sometimes I would dismantle this vibrant bounty and spread it out on the table. A showcase, an event. The Far Side, Peanuts, Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, B.C., Non Sequitur. Each one got studied, critiqued and ranked. I would ask my parents about Doonsebury and they would attempt to explain why George Bush putting his manhood in a blind trust was clever satire. I nodded vacantly and obediently until the explanation concluded.

Week 2 of the Artist’s Way revolves around the concept of “Recovering a Sense of Identity”. In Week 1 we recorded our blurts and turned them into affirmations, now we must pivot towards our creative muses that lie dormant. Those things we have long thought but seldom explored. Cameron describes it thusly:

“I like to think of the mind as a room. In that room, we keep all our usual ideas about life, God, what’s possible and what’s not. The room has a door. That door is ever so slightly ajar, and outside we can see a great deal of dazzling light. Out there in the dazzling light are a lot of new ideas that we consider too far-out for us, and so we keep them out there. The ideas we are comfortable with are in the room with us. In our ordinary, pre-recovery life, when we would hear something weird or threatening, we’d grab the doorknob and pull the door shut. Fast. Now that we are in creative recovery, there is another approach we need to try. To do this, we gently set aside our skepticism -for later use, if we need it- and when a weird idea or coincidence whizzes by, we gently nudge the door a little further open.”

When I was at UVa I had a friend, a Chicago guy and Jefferson scholar, who created a comic strip for the Cavalier Daily. He would smoke pot in his room and storyboard absurd premises until he found a joke, tack it to the wall with a push pin and move onto the next one. I was secretly jealous of him, because he spun up 5 ideas a week and roughly sketched them into existence. I was always impressed at his dedication to focus his creativity on something so trivial. What I’m learning in Week 2 is that sometimes those trivial things are the MOST important. One of the tasks this week is to target things we enjoy that we have suppressed or neglected, write them down and then commit to do them… so with the help of ChatGPT, that’s what I did.