CSotD: Comical Complaint Dept.
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We’ll start in a good mood with a cartoon that hits several bullseyes. It’s the time of year where, if you haven’t got your woodpile already set up, you’re in trouble because green wood invites chimney fires.
And, yes, chopping wood is such a practical, important task that you can fool yourself into thinking it’s necessary and worthwhile if the alternative is banging your head against your desk hoping for inspiration.
I laugh at the size of his stack because I’ve been there, only I just piled up clean dishes. Cutting wood is better for you.
Well, getting to work is better for you, but never mind.
And here’s Scott Fitzgerald, flailing as he struggles to come up with clever phrases he can drop into his next novel. So many people have praised Gatsby that I gave it a second chance recently, but, having read Fitzgerald’s notebooks, I recognized some of his clever phrases and felt the disjoint elsewhere as he broke pace to drop in another prefab gem.
Fitzgerald was a very good writer, but great writers achieve a flow which may include a particularly memorable phrase or two. Memorable phrases, however, can’t be your goal and you can’t pile them up in advance like firewood.
BTW, this talk of firewood reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Twain:
Write without pay until someone offers pay. If nobody offers within three years the candidate may look upon this as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.
Which brings us here:
I wish I’d had today’s Pearls the other day when I wrote about people telling my young reporters to follow their dreams. Pig makes the critical point, which is that there is a very great difference between vague nostrums and genuine criticism and advice.
There is something you’re really good at and would enjoy, but maybe you need to knock the stardust out of your eyes before you can see what it is. I used to ask kids what someone should do who loved sports but would never be a pro, but who also had fun babysitting, and they would quickly suggest a job teaching phys ed and coaching.
If being a high school coach is your goal but you end up quarterbacking an NFL team, you’ll get over it. The trick is to flip that plan and still come out smiling.
The only complaint here is the number of cartoonists making back-to-school seem like total misery. I was always happy to get back with my friends, but there was often something I hadn’t gotten around to, which was less a cause for disappointment than a springboard for dreaming of next year.
A kid’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a summer for?
Okay, here’s a complaint: Eldest son lives on a hilltop farm several miles from the nearest streetlight, and even further from the nearest little town, and Harry Bliss lives in JD Salinger’s old hideaway not so far from there. They get fabulous lightshows nearly every night while I’m down in town between buildings that would block the stars if the ambient lighting didn’t cancel them out anyway.
Red and Rover is set in an indefinite past in which I think even kids who lived in town could see the sky at night. Unfortunately, we’ve nearly all had to come in since then.
Fortunately, some people are working on the problem.
Now for the truly petty gripes
I remember when the Sporting News’ World Series coverage included declaring a “goat” and a “hero” for each game. It triggered a lot more interesting and passionate conversations than does arguing over who is the “Greatest Of All Time,” mostly because YA Tittle and Otto Graham played a very different game than Tom Brady and Joe Montana.
And also because most of the people passionately declaring GOATs aren’t old enough to have seen Tittle and Graham.
Well, yeah, the good men will all be taken if you wait that long. I wouldn’t mind seeing what Leroy and Loretta looked like when they were young, and I assume they’ve been married since the dawn of time, given how tired of each other they seem to be now.
I was — to borrow a term from Jed Clampett’s mother-in-law — a hairy little goomer when I got married at 21. By the time I was bald, I was at a stage of life where, if I’d wanted a second chance, I’d have been awfully darn choosy.
Love is lovelier the second time around
Just as wonderful with both feet on the ground
It’s that second time you hear your love song sung
It makes you think perhaps that love, like youth, is wasted on the young
Hair is also wasted on the young, but nobody writes songs about that.
Kids show up for the first day of school with a brand-new box of Crayons, a notebook, a calculator and a box of Kleenex, but kids staggering under backpacks filled with books should be coming from the building, not heading towards it. But to include the school requires — or at least suggests — this layout.
Similar perspective issue: The layout of a horizontal strip dictates left to right, but putting them in the near, righthand lane would cut off the 18-wheeler.
If this cartoon were set in Japan, McCoy wouldn’t have faced the problem, because we’d read the panel right to left. Flipping the direction would provide space to put everyone on the correct side of the road.
Except that, in Japan, they drive on the left, so this layout would work anyway.
Not sure about those helmets, but I’m more distracted by remembering a TV show about nuclear war, which I thought was Playhouse 90’s adaptation of Alas, Babylon, but reading the summary of the story makes me think it was something else.
Whatever it was, it involved having a fallout shelter and having to lock out your neighbors and extended family, which I think led a lot of people to decide survival might not be worth it, even if the shelter’s built to code and actually works.
Perhaps “especially if.”
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