Frank took time out from drawing and chilling with me to chill and talk with Brian on COMICS COAST TO COAST. When you have a moment check out the podcast!
going viral… without any chicken soup
What power does talent have anymore when you can just go viral? Those two little magic words that can either make you or get you what you wished for. Either of those things has the potential to ruin your life, make you known for something you’ll have to repeat over and over and over… and the REAL stink of it is, it’ll probably only happen once and within a few days, you’ll be forgotten…relegated to the bottom of the other viral patients.
Why do we strive to be famous? Money? Attention? Am I missing something? What else is there that is attached with the notion of famous? Seems to me it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
And before you think it… it’s not sour grapes. It’s not sour anything. The more and more I sit in this tree the more and more I see. Things have patterns, ebbs and flows… it’s never always even. Sometimes the valleys are a lot deeper than the peaks. Sometimes, the patterns begin and end in the valleys.
Would it be nice to not have to worry about certain things? Absolutely. But, you’re always going to worry about something. What’s that? You now have so much money that you never ever have to worry about it? That’s cool… but if I were you, I’d now worry about who is watching all that money that you don’t have to worry about. See? One worry is transplanted into another.
So go ahead, get famous by going viral. It’ll be the toughest cold you ever catch.
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the calling…
I didn’t really have the calling that day. I wouldn’t even know where to start. You’d think that a calling would be hip to the changes in technology. Maybe the sign would come via a pop-up window on some site you were wasting time on… a text message? an email? What if you’re not there when the calling is ready to contact you? Is it the same when it comes via a voice mail?
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nuts…it’s what’s for dinner…and breakfast…
Nothing really philosophical here… just nuts.
Life can be really nuts sometimes. You can never be too sure even what kind of nuts life will be.
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calculated and ignored…
Can you imagine what I would have been if the calculated calculations weren’t ignored?
Me neither. Do you know why?
(This is the part where you say, “Why Bob?”)
Because thinking about the would’ve, could’ve and should’ve are wastes of valuable, healthy brain cells and time…both of which are precious and shouldn’t be wasted. Like Popeye says…”I am what I am and that’s all that I am…”
Easy to say that when you have magic spinach.
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Bullying ends when you end it…it does get better…
Bullying …It does get better.
Frank did this panel way back in 2010…November 7, 2010 to be exact. I can’t believe how different I looked back then…I wonder why he used to draw me like that… I look so… flat.
Anyway, the message remains the same…and this happens to be one of my all-time favorites… simple and direct.. just like me.
I’ve seen Frank give lectures on bullying. It’s stuff that is really sad to hear. I sometimes forget all the tormenting that he had to endure just to get through the day. He used a great deal of what he went through in his graphic novel “better man” I know it was hard for him to be that honest… but I think that it was harder NOT to be honest. He never really stood up for himself until later on. I think if he had stood up earlier, his life would have been VASTLY different. Who knows, maybe he and I would have never been a he and I.
Frank always likes to say: “You can let it define you or refine you.” I pretty sure he made that up on his own. Pretty cool, huh?
I’ll post more on bullying later on our journey together… stay safe out there tonight.
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anywhere but here…
Am I wrong? Does “anywhere but here” make a tear drop’s worth of sense to anyone? I mean, there will be here as soon as you get there. So in essence you’d be replacing one here for another here. A here is a here but it almost always starts out as a there. A that place becomes a this place. It’s the law…
I don’t like it, but I accept it. Even paradise, which I talked about earlier, ends up being a here when you find it, label it and finally get there.
Wherever you are is a here. Okay?
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Halloween tickets and paradise…without Eddie Money
I had all this great Halloween stuff I wanted to rant about…. honest, I did. But between where ever there was to this moment, the rant ranted right out of my head. I’ll talk more about the whole “there” and “here” thing later on in the day.
What is paradise? I really don;t know how something so specific to the individual can have a very precise definition. We have to settle for the vagueness of Webster or the inconsistency of Wikipedia or we can just look within ourselves to figure out our own definition.
I will not define my paradise. If I have to constantly think about there being a better place than the one I’m currently in, what kind of attention will I pay to my place? I mean, if there is a paradise, what’s the point of here? Maybe if I did define my paradise, I’d be happier… but I doubt it. What if paradise isn’t a specific place but rather a state of mind, a presence, an emotion? What if I figure out what it is and then later find something that is MORE paradisical? (is that a word?)
No matter what, I’m probably not going to be right. So when Eddie Money sings on and on about buying two tickets to paradise you have to wonder how well he knows the other ticket holder. What if that isn’t their paradise? It’s be a waste of a ticket.
I wonder if Eddie Money lies awake at night thinking he may have upset some philosophical balance?
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Since Disney is in a purchasing mood…
If it seems like I’m begging you Disney… good, because begging is what I was going for. Everyone has a price… for those out there that say they don’t they’re lying. There’s always a price… even FREE has a price. After shelling out for Star Wars…your boy Bob is a bargain!
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How do you get to be Godzilla? Practice…
If you wish to be Godzilla, you can be Godzilla.
But, be very careful what you wish for, you might end up smelling like two day old seafood. The grass may not always be greener on the other Godzilla. I’m just saying…
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Randomness, fate and the single squirrel…
I like to play both sides… that way even if I lose, I kinda sorta win. This is why I tend to embrace both fate and randomness. If you are a student of both, anything weird that happens can be explained using either schools of thought and outlook. NOt that anyone really wants to hear that a broken leg was all because of fate… or randomness.
Randomness, to me, makes you feel more like an innocent victim. Something bad happened…but it was a random act. No pre-meditation. Fate tells me that if something bad happened to me, it was already written somewhere that it would happen.
Either way, the only way to deal with it, is to deal with it.
I think there should be a third school of thought to deal with dealing with it… but I’ll leave that for another time.
