How to Tell People About Your Accomplishments

I lived in Seattle for many years. I loved Seattle. I still miss Seattle. But (and this seems weird to me even though I’m the one saying it) the Seattle I miss doesn’t exist anymore. It’s been buried under an immense traffic jam.

One aspect of the Seattle I once knew that is still there is Red Mill Burgers, my favorite burger place in the world. I live within a ten-minute drive of several In-and-Outs, a Smash Burger, and a Shake Shack. I’d take Red Mill over any of them.

Why, you ask?

If you’d ever eaten at Red Mill, you wouldn’t have to ask, but I’ll answer anyway. Bacon. The giant pile of Bacon.

Here’s the results of a Google image search for the words “Red Mill Bacon.

And here’s a news story about the restaurant, and, of course, the bacon.

They also have the excellent taste to use Tillamook Medium Cheddar, the Cadillac of cheese.

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How to Figure Out Who You Are

Smoking jackets, dressing gowns, pajamas, ascots, slippers, all the stuff Victorian guys wore for lounging around the house in the evening seems to denote class and sophistication to us now. Makes you wonder if a hundred and fifty years from now, when trying to make a character seem stuffy, they’ll have that character wear terrycloth shorts and an old ugly t-shirt.

Just goes to show, the words “progress” and “improvement” do not mean the same thing.

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How to Slow the Spread of Germs (Re-Rerun)

This comic has appeared as a rerun before, but I’m rerunning it again now, for obvious reasons.

Those obvious reasons are that I am lazy and opportunistic.

An interesting bit of inside-baseball detail: you can tell this comic is from before Basic Instructions began running in some local alt-weekly newspapers because of the gradients in the backgrounds. It seems they were difficult to render in newsprint. Also, the appearance of “Classic Rick” is a hint.

Here, for your enjoyment, are three more old comics that are tangentially related to our planet’s current predicament. One is about people standing too close to you, another involves hand sanitizer, and the third involves bidets, which can lessen the need for toilet paper.

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How to Make a Positive Change

Sadly, it takes a lot of guys a long time to reach the conclusion that a woman not being interested in them is a dealbreaker. Society kind of conditions young men to view a total lack of interest on the woman’s part as a challenge to be overcome with persistence and aggression. Who knows how much misery this erroneous message has caused?

If I could go back in time and give teenage me one piece of advice to improve my social life, it would be that pretending to be what you think people will think is “cool” is self-defeating. You’ll never guess right, and even if you do you’ll mess up eventually and they’ll decide you’re a poser (which you in fact will be). Better to find people who already think what you’re actually into is cool. If you know some of those people but you don’t think they are cool enough, then look in the mirror and consider giving them the chance that you wish people who don’t think you’re cool would give you.

That, and I’d tell younger me to lose the Hawaiian shirts. You’ve never seen a palm tree in person, and everyone knows you bought that shirt at the JC Penney in Yakima.

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How to Gain Perspective

I understand wearing sandals. I understand wearing socks. I understand wearing sandals with socks; I don’t agree with it, but I understand it.

My father sometimes wears sandals with dress socks. That I don’t understand. The closest thing to an explanation I can come up with is that he knows people will see his socks, so for appearances sake he chooses to wear his fanciest socks.

One could argue that people who wear socks with sandals are sending the message that they don’t care what other people think. Admirable, but if it were true they wouldn’t care when we mock them for wearing socks with sandals, and I can tell you from experience that they do mind. At least my father does.

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How to Understand Human Behavior

I don’t have many of what you’d call “Core Beliefs.” I’m absolutely certain that they are counterproductive, and have built my entire life around that knowledge.

I joke. I actually do have a few core beliefs, and one of them is that liars think everyone’s a liar, and thieves think everyone’s a thief.

If you say that out loud, invariably someone will tell you that everyone lies. The proper comeback is to stay silent and raise one eyebrow, and hold your hands out as if the person who said it has proved your point.

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How to Give Someone Hope

This comic is, predictably, based on a real conversation between me and the real Rick about his love life.

One of the things that makes our friendship work is that we have similar inappropriate emotional responses. The worse things get, the more we laugh. Once Rick suffered some terrible setback at work. His wife at the time tried to console him. He only got more upset. When I showed up Rick shouted, “Yes, “Meyer! You know what I need!” I immediately started making fun of him, which cheered him up instantly.

I’m writing this mid-March, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic and attached stock market dip/correction/bear market/recession. When I watch the news, you’d think I was watching a Monty Python movie from my reactions.

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How to Handle a Failed Joke

For whatever reason I was never a huge SCTV fan. I recognize it was great, but it just never lodged in my brain the way Monty Python, Saturday Night Live, The Kids in the Hall, Bob and Ray, and Mitchell and Webb did.

There’s only one SCTV sketch I can remember clearly. I’ve embedded it below. I’m about to spoil it, so you might want to watch it if you have 10 minutes. If you don’t, or you’ve seen it, or you just don’t care, read on.

Anyway, it’s about O. Henry. In it he wrote a short story with one of his characteristic surprise endings, in this case the hero is in a bar, planning to kill himself. He decides not to, then a lion walks into the bar and kills him. O. Henry’s friends all make fun of him and his terrible ending. In his despair, he goes to a bar, gets drunk, considers killing himself, decides not to, and a lion walks in and kills him. His last words are “A lion! They do come into bars, I was right!”

Since I’ve become a fiction writer, I often come up with something based on what I’m sure is a common occurrence that everyone can relate to, but then self-doubt creeps in. I wonder if I’m the only one who’s had that experience. I remember O. Henry and want to say out loud, “A lion! They do come into bars, I was right!”

For Missy’s sake, I usually don’t.

Usually.

True love is not blurting out lines from sketches your spouse hasn’t seen every time they pop into your mind.

Thankfully, true love is also putting up with it when your spouse does occasionally blurt out the punchlines to sketches you’ve never seen.

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How to Find Out the Name of a Person You've Known a Long Time

At first glance the word “titles” in the first panel looked like “titties” to me. It jumped right off the page, for some reason. I prefer not to think to hard about the psychology of it, but this is a phenomenon I could have used for marketing purposes – I could have loaded my comics with words that looked like dirty words. Sure, readers would be disappointed to find it was about a trip to Virginia, but by then they’d have read the whole thing.

A long time ago Missy and I were both involved with a live show in the Seattle that involved prep work, and watching previous shows on video. As such, we had a videotape that pretty much lived on the TV stand labeled with the show’s name, “Twisted Flicks.”

One day my mother came to visit, and as we sat in the living room talking I noticed that her eyes kept darting over to the videotape. The label on the spine was hand-written, and in all caps.

“TWISTED FLICKS.”

For the first time, I noticed that the L and the I were slightly too close together.

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How to Give Your Opinion

Some things are so terrible that they must exist.

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