How to Turn an Enemy Into a Friend

My favorite line in the comic is “Mint juleps.”

At one time, Ric was married to a woman who liked the idea of living on an old-fashioned farm. I mean no offense to her. She was, and is, a great person. She once helped me get a job when I badly needed one. In the end, she simply wasn’t able to withstand the incredible pressures of life with Ric.

Anyway, she watched a show called Frontier House, where modern families tried to live as people in Montana did in the 1880s. I’ve always been interested in how, thanks to distance and cultural differences, time is strangely non-uniform. For instance: in my home town, the Great Depression seems to have lasted well into the ’50s. So, Ric and I would joke about how funny it would be for Ric to ruin Frontier House by showing up claiming to be one of the participants’ visiting cousin, the white suit-wearing southern dandy who refuses to help with chores and sits on the porch all day demanding mint juleps.

Once they got used to him, I would then show up as another cousin, the Saville Row tailor from Victorian London, who’s constantly measuring people’s inseams and offering to make them suits that cost more than their entire farm is worth.

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How to Tell a Kid How Lucky They Are

People often say that Millennials are lazy, unfocused, and entitled. As near as I can tell, the primary difference between Millennials and Generation X is that we Gen-Xers had the good taste to wear flannel and listen to Pearl Jam while our parents told us that we were lazy, unfocused, and entitled. We were also a clear improvement over the Baby Boomers, who wore bell bottoms and listened to Country Joe and the Fish while their parents told them that they were lazy, unfocused, and entitled.

Of course, the Baby Boomers’ parents were the Greatest Generation, many of whom spent their twenties fighting Nazis. But I’m pretty sure that many of those Nazis told them that they were lazy, unfocused, and entitled.

(NOTE: I write these commentaries several days in advance. In the time between when I wrote this and when it published, John Scalzi published some similar sentiments about millennials on his blog. This is a complete coincidence, and we don't say the exact same things, but I thought the similarity was striking enough to mention.)

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How to Live with a Disturbing Memory

Yeah, about panel 1: the idea is that in order to be a purebred female, both of the cat’s genetic parents would have to be female. I’m not sure the joke landed well.

The second, third, and forth panels are, sadly, based on a true story. A large, hirsute, and perpetually sweaty coworker announced that he had adopted a puppy. He asked a big group of his work acquaintances, myself included, if we wanted to see a picture. We said yes, because, puppy. He pulled out his phone and showed us a picture that is basically the second panel, only with a tiny puppy instead of a full grown cat.

It was a deeply uncomfortable situation for everyone but him. He seemed perfectly comfortable.

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How to Explain That You Are, in Fact, Not Cold

My thermostat runs hot. Ever since I was a kid, hot temperatures and bright light have been a real problem for me. As such, strangers might be surprised that I voluntarily moved first to Florida, then to Arizona. But anyone who knows me well, and has experience with the quality of my decision-making prowess, is not very surprised at all.

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How to Appreciate a New Album

As I remember, I considered calling the album “Tromb-osis.”

There’s a series of documentaries on Netflix called Too Young to Die. One of the episodes is about Falco, the artist who recorded Rock Me Amadeus. At one point, they interview some Austrian dude who was a good friend of Falco’s. He says that if you ask anyone who really knows, Falco was right up there with Grand Master Flash as one of the fathers of hip hop.

I heard that, and I thought, “No, Austrian dude who probably tells everyone that he was good friends with Falco, if YOU ask anyone they’ll tell you that. If I, or anybody who wasn’t a personal friend of Falco, goes around asking if Falco was one of the fathers of hip hop, I suspect we’ll get a very different answer.”

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How to End a One-Sided Conversation

All of my comics bashing the trombone are based (pretty loosely) on actual conversations I’ve had with a real friend.

That friend is Rick.

He used to be a professional jazz trombonist, and is still quite good. It’s also true that he has no respect for the valve trombone.

After all the grief I’d given him about every other aspect of his life, I thought picking on him over the trombone was a step too far. In retrospect, giving the trombones to mullet boss was still a pretty grave insult.

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How to Display an Item of Great Historical Significance

After this comic ran, I heard from more than one reader informing me that Gandhi had no problem with guns. That may be true. I’ve done minimal research on the web, and found sites claiming both that he was for and against guns.

I stand by this comic’s central premise, however: that Gandhi owning a fancy silver-plated six-shooter with ivory handles engraved “The Passive Resister” would have been, at best, off-brand.

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How to Save the Earth

Missy and I lived in Seattle for many years. Seattle is a pretty green place, both literally and in terms of people’s attitudes toward the environment.

Then we moved to Florida, which is also a very green place literally, but in terms of environmental attitudes, not so much. We had difficulty finding a used hatchback to buy, but if we’d wanted a full-sized truck there’d have been no problem. I asked a neighbor at our apartment complex where the recycle bins were and she laughed at me.

The biggest surprise, though, was the ready availability of Styrofoam cups. The first time Missy and I went into a mini-mart and saw a stack of white foam cups, we thought it was some sort of illegal pirate operation that the authorities had yet to shut down. Whenever we had visitors from Seattle they’d mention the Styrofoam cups. The very sight of them was unnerving.

We swore that we wouldn’t use them, just on principle. That lasted almost halfway through the first summer. 98 degrees with 100% humidity gives one an appreciation for Styrofoam.

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How to Figure Out "WHAT?!"

Missy doesn’t actually pull this kind of thing. What’s far more common is for her to be in a fine mood, but I, in a fit of neurosis, convince myself that something’s wrong and pester her about it until she finally has to tell me that something is wrong, and that something is me.

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How to Maintain a Peaceful Break Room

I just read about a meme in which people improve the open lines of books by following them with the line “And then the murders began.”

Take the opening line of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. And then the murders began.”

I would argue that one could also improve almost any book by doing the same thing with Jenkins’ line of dialog from the second panel.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. And then the boobs come out.”

Also, thinking about this comic, I’d be surprised if there isn’t a subgenre of erotic literature made up of stories that take place immediately after the rapture.

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