Colors of the Earth -- A Moment's Reflection

I look out through the massive full-length windows lining the far wall of my work place, last recalling the sky to be bleak and gray. It is not. Sometime between then and now, the sun has erupted from the clouds that once prevented its warm light from reaching the planet’s surface. The veiled beauty of the flora scattered everywhere has been unmasked, exploding with color luminescent and vibrant.

Proud hues of amber and orange standing starkly against an endless blue. The expanse is dotted with fluffy white giants that gently drift in the same breeze that causes the trees to sway and wiggle, providing a gentle swishing ambiance. Every shift makes magnificent ripples that cascade through the body of shimmering leaves, flashing a slightly different shade than the one before it. The trees outside look alive, animated with color and movement. It makes me think that I’m doing this all wrong – stuck in an office maintaining ephemeral trivialities.

Living a life belonging to the dominant (and very self-involved) species on this planet can cause one to forget their place. A moment like this serves to remind me what the larger picture looks like. That there is so much out there. So many incomprehensible exchanges and transformations - the complexity of nature. We humans marvel at our accomplishments, gloat and swell with pride over feats that in the grand scheme of things are wholly insignificant.

So it feels good to catch glimpses of the infinite machine that drives everything around us. To stand on the precipice of natural ingenuity and marvel at the sheer magnitude of it. It’s like living in a backyard for your entire life and then one day opening the gate to discover that your entire world exists as a miniscule part of something much grander. Mostly because that’s exactly what it is.

We fight and squabble and die over patches of grass in our little backyard. Spend years of precious life toiling away to rise a few ranks in the social system we created to prevent our backyard from destroying itself. Maybe if we get really lucky, we’ll “own” a few more inches of grass than others. Won’t everyone else be jealous then, because just look at all the grass we now have. We have obviously succeeded at life – achievement unlocked. That isn't to say I don't understand the desire for improvement, but I think all too often we’re trading away our lives for phantom feelings of accomplishment. It’s so pointless in my eyes, and sometimes the thought of leaving everything and living outside the bounds of society doesn’t seem so outrageous.

I once heard that evolution is like running as fast as you can just to stay where you are. The implication of that statement is that unless you keep running at full tilt, you will fall behind and perish. That saying can also be applied to human advancement, as we are always striving to outgrow ourselves and push the limits of our capabilities. But really we only seem to change how we play the game, never the game itself.

It seems silly that our fear of stagnation, death, is so great that we devote our lives in a vain attempt to avoid it, all the while being too busy to really live. It reminds me of the Cold War, where both sides continually escalated just to keep the other in check, which in turn caused further escalation. It was a vicious cycle, and in the end all the nukes and all the men couldn’t make the world feel safe again. As I seem to recall the lesson learned from that was “okay seriously let’s not do that again.” Can we not apply that lesson in our personal lives and take a critical look at the rat race we've entered in under the assumption the grand prize is happiness. Have not endless generations before us made that same decision, only to cherish the simplicities and regret the bullshit.

That's why it’s hard to take things so seriously, when so much of what we do is bullshit. Doing something for a task that's part of a list of tasks that you have to complete before the end of the day so that you can stay on track for the week to meet your monthly quotas so that growth is maintained and more money is made so that more stuff can be bought that will make you happy. Layers upon layers of nested bullshit. If that doesn't seem silly at all to you then you'll have to excuse me, Mr. Businessman, while I take a moment to admire the trees outside the window.

That's why I enjoy taking those moments, to stand in the shadows of countless miracles that keep us alive on a day-to-day basis. Basking in the comforting knowledge of their existence, and in the outwardly simple pleasures they allow me. The knowledge that simply by existing, I am a speck of brilliance floating in an inconceivably expansive ocean of specks, all radiant with ingenuity and positively sparking with life. It seems wrong to me that these specks spend so much of their existence fighting tooth and nail over everything when they already have all they require to be happy. In my life so far, none of my best memories involve trophies of our system.

They are things like holding hands and gazing into the eyes of someone I love and trust so intimately I feel we are more like one person than two. Things like spending a timeless evening shouting obscenities at close friends while we mindlessly slay each other in virtual combat without a care in the world. Things like riding down the road with sweet, crisp air filling my lungs as a falling sun warms my face and drapes the rolling hills around me in dramatic shadow. Little things like looking outside to see a veritable wall of shifting color, paralyzed by a true natural beauty living at the heart of a boring office complex. It’s been said before – and for good cause – but it’s all about the simple things.

But as I look back outside, the sun has retreated behind the clouds and the landscape has regained its former gray tint. The dazzling light which acted as a physical metaphor for the luminescence of mind I was just experiencing has faded, and I feel the backyard obscuring the rest of the universe again. It’s time to get back on the treadmill. If I had the courage, I would get up and walk right out of this place. Go somewhere that engaged me and spend the rest of the day there. If I was brave enough I would do that every day, and live life entirely by my own terms.

But not today.

Today I will continue on the path I’ve chosen, resume my ongoing gamble that it will take where I want to go and that I will be fulfilled by the experiences contained within its boundaries. The path is comforting and well-tread which is why, for now, I’ve chosen it. But I am young – barely 21 years old – and the events of tomorrow are always a mystery. Who knows what may happen and change things forever. I guess we’ll see, won’t we? It’s not like I really have a choice.

"This Is How It Works" -- Midnight Magic

Posted to my facebook wall on March 12th, at roughly 6 o'clock in the morning.

Be warned: unlike the comic above, this post is not funny. Continue reading at your own risk.


To put it plainly, stuff happens. All day, every day. That might sound so obvious that it doesn't even need mentioning, but I think it does. And I think it does because human beings cannot comprehend all that created information, everything that's happening in the entire world. It's too much to handle, sensory overload, critical system failure.

Luckily for us, that practically never happens. People scale their respective worlds down to a comfortable size, and live within that. They do this out of necessity, because life demands such attention to detail and yet propels forward at such a rate that people cannot afford to expand their gaze beyond their immediate surroundings lest they overlook something and suffer for it. We live for ourselves because we must in order to survive. The daily information we glean is categorized and prioritized by its relevance to the situation at hand. Anything that isn't useful is often discarded or perhaps at best, briefly fancied.

I hate doing that.

I absolutely hate discarding interesting little tidbits just because I'm doing something more pressing and have no time for them. I'll sometimes try to package them away and label them, shove them into a dark corner of my mind in the hopes that they'll be rediscovered some day. That's the best I can do for those thoughts, because unfortunately they are almost never relevant to what I'm doing at the time.

When an idea or thought occurs to me, for a short moment I'll see it with absolute clarity. All I want to do is explore it, watch it evolve into another thought. Follow each iteration until I'm somewhere completely different. I have no idea where I could go, where my trains of thought will take me, and that's the allure. The problem is that unless I indulge right then and there, drop what I'm doing, I start to lose focus.

The structure of the thought will become more muddled and fuzzy as time goes by. The feeling I had at its creation, once intense and riveting, has now become a memory; just a part of the past I cannot resurrect. It's like trying to remember a dream, and it's a horrifying and tantalizing process to watch the bits and pieces of something that moved you so powerfully slip away, never to be fully seen again.

It's similar to watching a really great movie or reading a wonderful book for the very first time. You become completely absorbed by it, committed to the fiction, and it makes an impression on you as a person. It changes you. You might try to recapture that fleeting, timeless feeling you got by re-reading it or watching it again, but it's never the same. Never quite like the first time. Every time the experience is diminished just a little bit more. The magic is gone.

I desperately try to hold on to those thoughts, those feelings, because they make me feel. Feel enlightened, or awestruck, or depressed, or giddy, whatever. And feeling is what I define being alive as. It is so intangible, and precious. There are thousands of jobs I could pick up or drop if I wanted to, and money will always come and go. It's a manufactured resource. But raw emotion, an uncontrolled physiological response to a stimuli isn't quite so malleable. It's truly rare when something just gets to you; sneaks right by all your defenses and barriers and takes control.

That's what this comic is about -- it's about how much I love the night. It's because that's the time of day when nothing is going on, I have no responsibilities and nothing to worry about. Nobody is around so I don't feel obligated to interact with them. I drop my guard, sit and relax, and just be. I exist as the person that I truly am without the need for any auxiliary subroutines. No bullshit, no etiquette, no rules or regulations or laws or any of the things that shape my behavior during all other parts of the day. I am free.

When something interesting pops into my head, I can afford to entertain it. Let it take me where it will, jump from one point to another one and so on and so on. I can take the time to get lost in thought, relinquish control and go for a ride. I can joyfully paint the insides of my skull with the colors of every passing cogitation. I love to ramble and muse, and at night - when time is on my side - I can spend hours doing just that.

The reason there is a computer in the comic is because the internet is such fertile ground for interesting information, just teeming with inspiration waiting to be discovered. You can so easily connect to so many people and viewpoints you would otherwise not be able to. It's very difficult for me to look at just one Wikipedia article, browse /b/ for just a few minutes, listen to just one song or look at just one picture or read just one webcomic. It's a constant stream of interconnected stuff, and it's fucking awesome. I will soak up all that readily available information like a sponge, and fill my head with things from all walks of life. It's all incredible, all very educational.

The more sources I have to pull from, the more layered and intricate my little mental trips can become.

Now, all of this might sound very silly to some people. Or stupid. Or both. If that's the case for you, it's because you're just not there, not in the right state of mind to appreciate it. It's one of those things you have to see or do yourself to "get". I can't take a vacation for you, and you can't take one for me.

Everyone has their own preferences -- things they enjoy doing. Everyone reserves pieces of themselves for times when they're alone, fragile parts of their personality they keep hidden from scrutinizing eyes. Silly behaviors they wouldn't dare display to others. Everybody keeps secrets. What I've told about myself isn't a secret, but it's certainly not something I can do in the midst of a blazing day. It's not easy to let go and drift when there are others around tethering me to the "now". My life, like everyone else's, is busy. So when I get the chance to sit around and dream completely carefree, it's a real treat.

And on the rare occasion when I stumble across something truly moving, I hope the morning never comes.

Distractions At Work : Nightmare Mode

Okay.... so I'm gonna warn you straight up, this is a long one (that's what she said). It's certainly not a journey for those weak of will or faint of heart. Here's the dealio:


I was definitely planning on regurgitating all my old comics before posting new ones so they would be in a convenient, chronological order. I planned on annotating them a little bit, explaining what inspired each one, and maybe reworking them a bit to better fit their original vision. I still plan on doing all that. However... there’s no way I can refrigerate something this juicy. I have to eat it now.

This post won’t contain any stories about heartbreak or loss like the first one did, please keep in mind that stuff happened a long time ago. I’m not trying to confuse anyone by suddenly jumping to the present day (I try to help by time-stamping the old ones at the top). Like I said, I wanted to do this in order of occurrence. But after stalwartly trying really hard to pack away my interest in the topic of this post, I simply couldn’t do it.  I mean, who doesn’t want to talk about cybersex?

“…what? Cybersex?!”

Yeah. That’s what I said too. Well, at least not out loud. That would've resulted in dangerously catastrophic levels of awkwardness the likes of which man has never seen. I mean... not really, but I still wasn't about to say anything. You’ll understand soon.

So I work at this place, right? At that place I do data entry work. Not the most thrilling stuff in the world, but the job has some nice perks. The work is easy, the pay ain’t bad, I can listen to music and (discreetly) surf the internet all day, plus the work environment is pretty comfortable. Apparently a little too comfortable... But I digress.

So this is the shweet setup I have going on at work:

As you can see, I’m smack-dab in the center of a pair of dudes. They’re pretty cool dudes, too! I’m a new hire at this place and they’re really helpful when I do stuff like use the wrong software for a certain task, mix up my search queries, incorrectly enter some client information, accidentally destroy the entire database. You know, stuff like that…

Anyways, so I’m at work, just doin mah thang:

Now, in the course of a regular work day playing god for the numerical masses, I very commonly utilize both of the computer monitors at my desk to maximize efficiency (and also to look twice as busy when really I'm systematically torturing every piece of data I run across). While looking at the secondary monitor - which I have labeled in the first drawing - my head is turned to the left roughly 45 degrees away from my primary monitor. From there, I have a decent partial view of my co-worker’s primary monitor.

Explanatory Diagram 4-a

There's a reason why I’m spending so much effort describing  the setup of this situation. It's because I want it to be perfectly clear that I wasn’t spying on my co-worker. Trust me, this is one of those things I wish I could unsee. I didn’t want this to happen, it just did.

I realize that kind of sounds like a teenage girl explaining her newfound pregnancy to her boyfriend who will probably soon be her ex-boyfriend, but it's basically like the same situation so whatever.

But back to me going through my normal daily work routine. I'm rubber-necking back and forth between my monitors when something off in my left-side peripheral catches my attention. Without telling them to, my eyes flit over to my co-worker's semi-exposed computer screen. I think very little of this at the time. Sometimes there will be a neat background picture on his desktop or he'll be viewing an interesting Google maps image, whatever. The point is that this glancing reaction happens quite naturally several times per day.

On this occasion he happened to be looking at this beautiful vista with Google maps' streetview function. Nothing out of the ordinary for this job. He also happened to have a chat window up. Once again, no biggie. I mean, everyone in the office chats all mother fucking day. At the moment he happened to be typing something, and the visual movement caused my eyeballs to lazily focus in on that particular section of the screen. I couldn't see the first part of the sentence he was typing, but he ended it with "...and then I trace your lips with my finger."

That's when red flag #1 went up.

I was now much more awake, and much more entertained than I had been a few moments ago. This is the part where I thought, “…What!? Cybersex?!” to myself. Maybe now it's more clear how my verbalization of that phrase would've resulted in a fair degree of awkwardness.

To make things even more interesting, I happened to notice - as a result of my heightened state of awareness - that the chat client he was using was the one used for in-office communications. So he wasn't just e-fucking any old chick, he was virtually banging a co-worker. This was getting better by the moment! In all likelihood, he was "interacting" with someone he physically saw on a semi-regular (I mean... you have to be kind of comfortable with someone to sex them regardless of the mode) basis, probably someone on this floor. Since all the cute girls on the floor are clustered around our section, the culprit was most likely in the immediate vicinity. A smug grin made of pure satisfaction began to spread across my face.

But, it was at about that point when I decided that regardless of how humorous or intriguing it was, this shit was not my business and I should butt the fuck out. So I did. I went back to work, and continued to lord over my numerical domain. But he made it hard, though. Very hard (that may or may not have been what she said). You see… every time he vigorously rattled off a string of keystrokes in a way-faster-than-normal succession,  it became more and more difficult to not focus on the palpably growing aura of sexual energy that exuded from the co-worker to my immediate (like 3 fucking feet, dude) left.

I valiantly tried to ignore him; I really, truly did. I cranked up the volume of my music, refrained from turning my head to the left any more than I absolutely needed to, and genuinely tried to blank my mind of any and all thoughts. But just like that guy at the end of Ghostbusters who attempted a similar feat, I didn’t last very long. (That is, again, what she said)

With every passing second I lost psychological ground to the pervasive knowledge that this guy - who was arm’s length away - was intimately describing his sickest fantasies to another fellow co-worker. I'm not one for gossip or "dirt", but at that moment I simply could not wipe the shit-eating grin off my face. I felt like this was the juiciest shit ever, and I was the only one who knew. I had the power , and it felt good. 

I needed more...

Eventually, I gave into temptation and risked another glance over. "One quick peek won't hurt..." I thought, like a crackhead cooing to themselves before shooting up again for the 10th time that day. I shot a glance across the desk, pretending to look at my own monitor. The first line I see is cut in half - much like the first one I saw - but I can still clearly view the end of it, a response from whoever he was talking to:

"...and rub your huge biceps." 

My condescendingly arrogant grin grew to titanic proportions, crossing my entire face from ear-to-ear. I felt like I had this man by the balls, and he didn't even fucking know it. But in the midst of my self-proclaimed victory, things went wrong. Perhaps I had been too hasty in my reconnaissance, let my guard slip and alert him to my presence, maybe he's a Jedi. I don't know. But he chose, at that exact moment, to slowly turn his head and look back at me with the corner of his eye.

Shit! I scramble to appear as if I'd just been looking at my own monitor the whole time. A moment of intense apprehension rolls by; I know he's looking at me. However, he lingers only briefly before turning back to finish his filthy conquest. I'm still recovering from that close call when when my brain registered something. I had seen him turn like that before, with the same exact facial expression. It took me a minute to realize why that was significant, and that's when everything came together in one epiphanic instant like I was Sherlock mother fucking Holmes.

This sort of thing had been going on for weeks...

Flooded with a sudden jolt of enlightenment, the images blew into my mind riding hurricane-force winds, one after the other. All those times I had been absentmindedly staring off into the distance in his general direction and he would turn with that weird look. This was why! 

The scope of the situation now fully realized - the gravity of it all weighing down - hit me like a ton of bricks. I instantly launched a massive and thorough investigation to find the woman he'd been in touch with (lol pun) for so long. I needed closure or this would eat away at me, I needed answers... 

The hunt was on.

All real work ceased as I converged all of my energy into discovering the identity of his partner. I spent a solid 20 minutes exhausting various avenues of attack: scouring the company website bios for possible matches, attempting to observe nearby coworkers to see if their keyboard clatter corresponded to his, trying to remember if I'd seen him flirting with any girl in particular, etc. Alas, facebook stalking skills do not translate into real world stalking skills, and my efforts yielded no results.

With the thrill of the chase dying and my interest waning, I resigned myself to return to actual work instead of searching for my coworker's internet mistress. It wasn't long after that when my co-worker rose from his chair (presumably after cumming coming to a conclusion with his engagement), feigned a yawn and a stretch, and audibly called it a day. Feeling obligated by the rules of social society, I said my farewells for the day and bid him a safe journey home. After gathering his belongings, he headed towards the front of the office. 

After getting a few steps away from his desk, he paused and looked back at me. The uneasy smile that had adorned his face only a few seconds ago had vanished, replaced wholesale by the exact same expression he'd had earlier. Our eyes met for the tiniest of moments, and one truth was plain to see...

He knew that I knew.

Work is going to be a lot more interesting from now on...



UPDATE:  We both ended up pretending it didn't happen.


UPDATE #2:  What is now a few weeks later, I caught him looking at some Second Life screenshots. For some of you, this is meaningless. For other (more gaming inclined) folks, chances are you'll react similarly to how I did: 

"It all makes sense now!" 

It's now obvious why I couldn't find the partner. I was looking for the wrong sex.

"You're Doing It Wrong" -- Apathy and Airplanes

Posted to facebook on March 12th.

This second comic is pretty similar to the one before it, which makes sense cause I drew it like 5 fucking minutes after the first one (though I apparently didn't post it til later that night). I hadn't exactly changed my mindset in that period of time. It was also drawn in MS paint, and the main joke was also formatted to fit the mold of a popular internet meme.

Whatever. Short story time. (Particular emphasis on short, because I can't remember exactly why I drew this one, so I'm basically just making guesses from a present day vantage to fill the holes)

Ahem.

They say good things take time, but great things happen all at once. Well, the same seems to be true of bad and terrible things too. They also seem to lean much more on the "happen all at once" part as well.

Have you ever been in the sort of situation where things just keep getting worse? The sort of situation where the phrase "out of the frying pan and into the fire" seems to have written about you? Well have you ever been in the kind of mood that results from that sort of situation? You're (presumably) human so I'll assume you have. You know the mood I'm talking about. It's the "fuck it" mood. The reaction you'll sometimes get when you've ground your gears for too long without real progress. Allow me to examplify:


It's studying for a huge test for hours and still not getting it.

"Fuck it."

It's continually getting lost on your way to a party when it's dark and nobody is answering their phone.

"Fuck it."

It's trying your best to win back your first love after things fizzle and then she goes and gets a new boyfriend.

"Fuck it."


It's a more common reaction for some than others, but certainly something everyone has done at least once in their life. Usually it's with little things that don't matter and can be easily disregarded. Insignificant things whose neglect will produce meager consequence. Usually it's that shit that at the end of the day, you simply do not care about.

In this particular instance, that was not the case.

I remember being in a pretty "fuck it" mood at the time, so for fun I tried to visualize what that mood might look like if given form and taken to the extreme. I ended up imagining a dude who was fed up with his situation, and purposefully went skydiving without a parachute. For lulz, I wanted to focus on the annoying redundancy of someone else commenting on the shitiness of the situation without offering any help in return.

It's like if in the situation above the person trying to locate the party finally gets a hold of someone and after describing their surroundings the other person on the phone says, "Yeah... you're lost." If you're a nice person you might respond with an overly sarcastic thank you. If you're not a nice person you might respond by calling them an idiot and swearing never to interact with them again. Similarly to what I said earlier, peoples' reactions in that sort of situation tend to vary. It just depends on how large of a prick you are.

Anyways, I attempted to epitomize that reaction of sudden and virulent apathy in conjunction with a useless and annoying douchebag all the while making use of the popular "you're doing it wrong" internet meme. I know, I'm so fucking clever.

Well... it was funny to me, at least. But much like the first comic it didn't receive much of a response.


Whatever, fuck it.