Television

I live in a western suburb of a major city. I’m not sure what the economic makeup is — it used to be working class, now it’s probably closer to middle class. I think it used to be more conservative, but as younger families move in, might be a little more liberal.

The houses are pretty close together. At night you can walk down the street and see the glow of a television from a fair number of houses. We have a television but it’s down in our basement, which is not really warm and inviting. This is mostly because we don’t have lot of room in our house, and we have some big things taking up what would be our TV room.

I never watch the television. We canceled our cable a couple years ago. We had this span of time (probably years) where we paid for cable but didn’t watch it. We did a similar thing for our telephone landline. After a couple years of receiving only calls from telemarketers, we finally canceled it. My wife would have canceled it sooner, but for some reason I hesitated.

There’s wiring that every house in our town has to allow for a telephone line. It seemed like a big deal to turn that off. Disconnecting cable didn’t seem to have that kind of weight. I don’t know why — maybe because telephones go outbound and inbound and television is only inbound? One thing connects to other people, and one thing doesn’t really do anything meaningfully social.

I do still watch some television shows. I watched The Bear on my computer, also have been watching Venture Brothers with my son, also on my computer.

I imagine what it will be like to walk my block in 10, 20, 30 years. Is the glow going to be gone from all these windows? I’m honestly surprised there are still so many televisions glowing at night. That’s possibly a sign of the state of my suburb — old customs still being followed, but gradually fading as the old people leave/die, and the new people arrive.

Is This Loss?

I did this comic a few weeks ago not realizing there was a very infamous comic about loss that was widely parodied over a decade ago.

There is even an iconic minimalist representation of this comic done in straight lines (see below).

My 18 year old son told me all about this old comic. Otherwise, I’d still be blissfully unaware.

It makes me think a few things.

  1. Is my Loss comic kinda lame? Is my overall comic in general kind of lame? The Loss comic might be lame without this meme floating around. Kind of embarrasses me, and makes me reconsider even doing a comic at all.
  2. How cool is that something like a comic that was mocked, but then refactored and reduced into a recognizable pattern of perpendicular straight lines? That is *so* cool!
  3. My son says he likes my comic and he reads a lot of comics online and thinks I’m doing interesting things, so I will keep doing it. I said in an earlier strip that it is a thing that is forever becoming, not something that already is. If I keep at it, who knows what it can turn into. Maybe it’s garbage, and maybe that’s all it will ever be. I think it’s nice to try and see what happens.
  4. I might have already made dozens of missteps in any writings I have done online, and will probably make many more. That’s the way it goes, I guess.

Love, Splotchy