Back when I wanted to make action comics, I had a little vigilante with no name. His original story was five issues, based on Hamlet. I wrote the first five scripts, but they are lost to history (Newcastle destroyed my laptop), and my attempt to make a novel of it failed when I couldn’t make five issues drag on for more than 20,000 words. The book would have been called Tantalus. I modeled the character after Bruce Lee, and I gave him a cane he never needed when he was fighting or doing parkour (symbolism) as well as a scarf that would have been a good visual. The book was always intended to be in black and white. I decided, after fifteen years, to draw the character again, and I went a little more stark than he had been in the past. It would have been called Tantalus.
Here is the one I just did.
Here is one of my earlier sketches from 2002.
A more dynamic one from 2003 I would like to have used as a cover:
As well as a couple of dynamic pictures from 2008.
I think I’m done with this character, but I loved his look, and he’s fun to draw. The one I just did didn’t turn out great, but I should give it another shot.
It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes people hear I’m an artist, and they think they could get a custom logo for their businesses. They rarely ever used my art because my style doesn’t necessarily have that clip-art, professional je ne sais quoi that makes it look corporate. What they needed was a graphic designer, but they still paid me, and it is some of my best work. Here’s eight examples.
First was for a post-apocalyptic novel series that I think the author did actually use. It’s a pretty good logo, in my opinion.
Second and third are for a Southern barbecue restaurant that never took off. This guy was never satisfied with anything I turned in, but some of the sketches turned out well regardless.
A friend wanted to write a kids book about a misbehaving kitten, and I mocked up a couple of character sheets, fourth and fifth, and some pages, but the book was never written.
I can’t remember what the sixth one was called, but it was for an indy publisher. This was the one ultimately used on the only book he published, but it took a couple of tries to get it right.
The seventh one came about when a roller derby team asked me to make a figure for their flyers. My style would have been a great match, but they didn’t like my first draft because apparently this is something you’re never supposed to do in the ‘derb.
And finally, the owner of the salon I used to frequent asked me to help with a warning label. The figure chosen from the sixth picture would have the circle/slash signifying “no.” They liked the idea, but it wasn’t slick enough.
Of course, I used to do work for PPC Hero, but my art was never clip-arty enough, and they eventually let me go. The blog no longer exists. That’ll teach them.
I’m happy to be doing my thing these days, with no hope of making money. I may turn in some fantastic work, but it’s usually not good enough for what the client has in mind. As I said, I’m not a graphic designer. Even the ones that used my ideas tended to replace them as soon as something better came along, which is what happened with the comic I wasted 2004 working on, The Book of Jesse. The one I am good enough for is myself. There was a long period of about four to five years ago when I wasn’t, and my art was bad (even my birthday self-portraits), when I was doing it at all (my birthday self-portraits). My renaissance began with a pushy coworker demanding a portrait, but once I shook the rust off, I’ve been amusing myself, and if I can’t do that, then what’s the point?
I had a brief dream where, in the next Fast and the Furious movie, Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto gets swept up in the evil shenanigans of his old college roommate, played by some famous slab of beef wearing a fabric baseball cap and a pair of cargo shorts. This is, of course presupposing Dom Toretto, or even Vin Diesel, went to college, much less finished high school. (Considering that it’s in Diesel’s contract that Toretto can never lose a fight onscreen, I’m inclined to think he didn’t.)
Anyway, it got me thinking about my roommates in college, and whether they’d come into my life as bad guys to be forgiven and welcomed back into my family to enjoy a chilled Corona. There’s Will, who’s certainly sharp enough to be a mastermind, but he’s a big softie, and I don’t think he’d take too well to being bad.
Then there’s Jeff. Anyone who knows Jeff knows that he’s got it in him to be a madman. I haven’t seen him in over twenty-five years, but I know he shaved his head, which is a prerequisite to evil. When I knew him, he was perfecting the wicked rubbing together of palms and giggling maniacally while tossing out wicked bon mots like, “When life hands you dilemmas, make dilemonade.”
He could also get inside the hero’s mind. For example, he never swore. He took to words more colorful than “damn” or “hell” like I take to the N-word, i.e. never, ever, not even alone in a dark room with all the listening devices turned off. That’s why it came as enough of a surprise that I fell off my chair when he caught me by myself and leaned in really close, whispering, “Don’t fuck with me.” He denies it to this day, and to this day, nobody believes me but Tim Lentz, who always knew there was something shady about that guy.
Jeff kept his cool under pressure, a necessary qualification for an overlord, but he also had little patience for malarkey. Even though we were a matched set through much of our freshmen and sophomore years, he didn’t tolerate my bullshit, and understand there was a lot of bullshit back then. Would he kill a minion for making a mistake? Maybe not at twenty, but certainly as he got older, his patience would dwindle.
The reason I know for sure that Jeff’s got amoral plans for the world is that he never left our room without a slip of paper he tucked into his breast pocket. He showed it to no one, but he’d occasionally take it out, read it, and chuckle darkly. One evening, when I was again protecting the purity of Altman Hall from behind the desk, he chatted with me for a few minutes, pulled out this paper, and opened it up, revealing the title: “Taking over the world checklist.” He crossed out a numbered item, “Befriend Jeremiah Murphy,” and folded it back up before I could read what else was on it.
To this day, I have no idea what my role in a global takeover might be. I’m all but hermit who writes novels and illustrates comics no one reads. I have a feeling we’re going to find out soon because we’re both turning fifty, and fifty’s a good age for world-domination. And if he tried to stop him, Vin Diesel find out that this is a fight even Dominic Toretto can’t win.
I love drawing comics. The comic book I’m working on, the second chapter of Best Fiends Forever, is not my first comic book. The first chapter of Best Fiends Forever was not my first comic book. The one I worked on nineteen years ago for those smug dudes in New York who badmouthed me after I quit was not my first comic book. My first comic book was MortalMan, in 2003, and I dug up some of my sketches from back then.
You probably don’t know this if you’ve picked up comic reading in the past twenty-five-to-thirty years, but once upon a time, issues were self-contained, and the only thing you needed to know was in a one- or two-sentence summary near the logo. For example: “When Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider, he developed abilities of a spider and learned that with great power comes great responsibility.” From there, you’d pretty quickly catch up on Spider-Man’s specific powers and enemies, usually through narration.
For MortalMan, the banner was: “When Joe Branford was bitten by a radioactive spider, he had a rash for three weeks and learned that with no power comes no responsibility.” Joe (first pic) was a good-natured teenager who watched TV and read comics perhaps a little too much. However, this prepared him for some of the weird shit to hit Gallup, New Mexico. For example, he was not fazed when he met a talking dog named Pete, figuring he was just bilingual. Pete is a goth. He sees the world as gray and bleak, he writes dark poetry, and he attempts suicide in the first issue (if I were going to write this again, I’d probably change that last bit). He and Joe hit it off, and they hang out at the mall.
This is Kgnydjll and Fphihln (pronounced “Nigel” and “Phil”) emissaries for the Galactic Empire who come to Earth in the first issue to welcome us to the fold. Unfortunately, they arrive in time for a Science Fiction Convention, and no one believes they’re aliens.
I had a lot of big plans for MortalMan, and I wrote a lot of scripts, but I never followed through with them. Joe and Pete were going to run afoul of a pair of John-Woo-inspired super spies and a mob of Tarantino-esque gangsters at a Mafia Convention being held in Gallup, and they were going to rediscover the long-retired superhero guardians of Gallup, Sewerboy and the Kactus Kid.
One of their rogues’ gallery was Irwin the God of Cannabis.
More on Sewerboy et al on a separate post.
At one point, Joe was going to get sucked into hell and would escape when a pair of little boys, attempting to tunnel to China, dig a hole in Perdition’s walls, leaving Joe stranded in Hastings, Nebraska. On his way home, he’d run into my most ambitious creation, M: the scourge of I-80, based on my dear friend, Emilie. With her sidekick, Pixie (based on our friend Abby), she leaps from car to car and liberates the change from drivers’ ashtrays. To pull her off, I’d have to learn how to draw a lot of cars and some very kinetic poses. Twenty years ago, I knew I had it in me. Now, I’m a little more humble.
I still have the original art for the comic, sans word balloons, but I don’t have the script, nor the scripts for future issues because Newcastle liked to sit on my laptop, and 18 years ago, he was much heavier and broke my hard drive.
And yet, I am starting to look for a projects after I’m finished with Best Fiends Forever…
Something unusual happened to me yesterday, and I’m still not sure what to make of it.
My office takes up five floors of our ten-story building, and on floors 6 through 9, there is an identical conference room. The rooms are made of glass and are not soundproof (which is not important for this story, but is something worth keeping in mind if you work here). They are located in the same corner of each floor as the elevators.
Every Thursday, my boss, my boss’s boss, and my fellow Editorial Coordinator meet in a conference room, very rarely the one on our floor. The table has four sides, but my fellow Coordinator Zooms in because she is disabled and works from home. Her face is projected on a forty-eight-inch screen, and therefore my bosses and I populate three sides of the table, facing her. I like to sit with my back to the window for reasons.
And here is where the event occurred. This week, we were located on the sixth floor. The only thing I know about the sixth floor is that the break room is there. I don’t know anyone who works there, but since I had the best view of the cubicle farm, I people-watched while our department talked amongst ourselves.
There is a really cute girl on the sixth floor. (I call her a girl when she’s in her twenties; also, get off my lawn.) I saw her approach from the far side of the office on a bearing that would have taken her straight through the glass conference-room wall and right into my lap (not in a pervy way; don’t forget I’m ace). It was hard to avoid watching her because my boss and my boss’s boss were seated in a way that I was facing the cubicle farm, but I didn’t want to seem like a creep, so I kept my eyes on my laptop, and eventually, she veered off.
She reappeared in front of the elevators a while later and pushed the button. While she waited, she started to dance. I am the prime audience for people being free and enjoying themselves, so I secretly applauded her. But the next time I looked up, her eyes were on me, and I felt terrible for invading her private moment. She smiled and continued to dance, and she kept turning toward me, as if to make sure I was watching. A coworker joined her, and they danced into the elevator car.
When I go to the elevators, and there’s a meeting, I get really self-conscious. At the same time, I feel like I have to put on a performance for the people who can see me. For me, that means pushing the button and stepping into the car with exaggerated panache. For this young woman, that meant dancing. Who knows? Maybe she was feeling self-conscious. I won’t dance—I have this pathological aversion to dancing—but there’s a show in me somewhere, and if I put it on, it’ll be because it was brought out of me by this nameless blonde in the white sweater.
I have been unusually social lately, which is to say I’ve been a little bit social.
It started when my desk moved to the other side of the office, closer to my boss (and farther away from the constant gossips who never acknowledged my existence). Sitting nearby was the new girl whose neo-eighties look I admired from a distance. And, completely unlike me, I introduced myself and engaged in a few long conversations with her.
As an introvert who becomes more of a hermit with each passing day, I’m fine not talking to people, and in fact, I prefer it. But there’s a difference between my new neighbors giving me space and my old neighbors not even acknowledging I exist.
For example, I overheard one of my new neighbors say, “… for when you rip your arm off …” I turned around and said, “What the HELL are you talking about?” And they laughed and included me and filled me in. My old neighbors would have laughed and carried on like I wasn’t there. I may be quiet, but I’m not opposed to conversation.
Anyway, eighties girl was not alive in the eighties, but like 80 percent of the girls I knew who were, her name is Jennifer. She moved desks a few days after I met her, out of sight, out of mind.
What typically keeps me from introducing myself to people is that I feel like I need an excuse. I don’t want to be (anymore awkward0. With Jennifer, it was telling her I liked her style. However, with the other new girl who just started last week, my excuse was she was my counterpart at the other journal we publish. I made myself available for questions, and I did the unthinkable: I asked her out to coffee.
(I don’t think I should have to say this, but I’m going to say this anyway to clear up any potential confusion: this was not a date. I’m ace, and she’s getting married in March. This was a friend date at the most.)
But what really alarmed me was when the boss’s boss’s boss put out a call for the Pumpkin Carving Committee. I volunteered, only to find out that all of the other volunteers knew I was an artist. (I photocopy pages from my sketchbook and hang them up in my cubicle, but I didn’t think anyone noticed.) So not only am I a part of a work-related fun activity, but I kind of took charge. I gathered everyone’s email addresses and contact the group with updates. Naturally, I designed it, marked it up for cutting, and also walked to the art store with the corporate credit card and bought paint. (Based on the recommendation of the gurus there, I purchased paint markers, which don’t dry out and are more convenient if I want to graffiti the place on my last day.)
I’m not going to do anymore to the pumpkin. As I told the committee, I’ve been hogging up the fun. My boss volunteered to gut, but no one is stepping up to give it a face. I am reasonably sure the pumpkin will go unfinished. But I don’t care because look what I did!
I’ve been prepping for a while now, and I have one more pre-production task to do, but this weekend, I’m going to start working on my third comic (technically my seventh, but the other four were done roughly two decades ago). I’m looking forward to this. I’ve got a script that’s been broken into pages and panels, and a lot of the obnoxious stuff has been edited out. All I need to do is finish layouts before I pull out the Bristol boards.
I learned some lessons from the last two comics I did, and I want to incorporate them into this one:
Don’t rush. I’m not on a deadline, and no one is clamoring to see it. I need to take my time on each page.
Don’t settle. I have an eraser, and I can use it as much as I need to. I’m never happy with the art I finish because I’m frustrated or I just want to get it over with.
Watch the eraser. I’ve come to realize that the larger erasers I’ve been using are smearing the paper. I need one I can control.
Backgrounds, backgrounds, backgrounds. I need to put as much work into those as into what I’d rather be drawing. A good background is invisible, and an over-simplified or missing background is glaring.
Most importantly, practice. If I don’t know how to draw something, I shouldn’t learn on the page.
On the last point, the first page of my new comic focuses on children. When you’re used to drawing adults, it’s tough to remember that they’re not miniature adults. Take this panel from acclaimed comic artist, John Byrne. These are toddlers.
Mindful of this, I gave it a try for myself (while also practicing how to do a playground and mountains, both which also feature on page 1). I did way better than acclaimed comic artist, John Byrne.
On the left is Max Fuentes, Criminal Mastermind of the Third Grade. To the right is his enforcer, Lisa Green.
Another problem I have is likenesses. My former neighbor, the eccentric bombshell Cleo, guest stard, so I gave that a shot (while also working on backgrounds). I still need to do her roommate, Brandyn, who also puts in an appearance, but I have plenty of time to practice until I get there.
No more excuses. Time for layouts so I can get started. Wish me luck!
In the summer of 2000, I had grown apart from all of my friends. I was then, as I am now, socially anxious, but one day, I set a goal: I was going to have a conversation with one stranger every day after work in Manhattan before I went home. I succeeded, and a couple I chatted with about the band The London Suede (or Suede in their native England) invited me to a party. Then, as now, I couldn’t imagine a worse place to be than at a party where I knew literally no one, not even the hosts.
I made myself a deal: if I would go to the party and stay for an hour, minimum, I would go to the free concert with Mike Doughty, formerly of Soul Coughing. (There was another band playing after him, a little group no one’s ever heard of called They Might Be Larger Than Average? They Might Be Enormous People? They Might Be The NFC Football Team From New York? They Might Be Something.)
I went to the party, and I went to the concert (Mike Doughty was a huge disappointment), and keeping with my goal of talking to strangers, I forced myself to talk to the really beautiful woman dancing to the intermission elevator music like she was a marionette and her puppeteer had the hiccups. I walked up to her and internally smacked myself in the head when I said to her the following, “You must really like this music.” After a brief chat, she told me that my liking and wanting to illustrate comics was a deal-breaker, and she would not go out with me.
During our first date, she kissed me. Our second date, she tested me, and I passed. We saw X-Men in the theaters. Her last boyfriend, the reason for the deal-breaker that wasn’t, would not have found the humor in the movie that was unintentionally pretty goofy. (She tested me again later with my favorite movie, The Matrix, which has a surprising amount of comedy between the grab-you-by-the-lapels philosophy and the pointless bloodbaths.) Our third date found us on the Brooklyn Bridge and led to her falling off the bed when she was taking my pants off.
Her name was pronounced AND-ree-uh, but I pronounced it Ahn-DRAY-uh. I don’t know why.
Speaking of goofy, she was really goofy. That was one of the things I loved about her. Our honeymoon lasted the first six or seven months we were together, laughing, holding hands, being horny, and just having fun with each other. Unfortunately, the summer of 2001, I lost my job and sank into a deep depression, which led to me being unforgivably unpleasant, which I usually am between Memorial and Labor Days. Literally the day the heat broke and I started to recover was September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, her thirtieth birthday was September 13, 2001. We limped along as a couple until February 2002, when we were heading in different directions socially, and I put our relationship out of our misery.
The thing about her was that her last relationship was the worst relationship she ever head, followed by the one before it, so she exited us hating my guts. I had friends who had mutual friends with her, and my name could not even be mentioned around her without a meltdown. And that makes me sad. I’m one of those people who sees the past with rose-colored glasses (despite knowing how miserable I was through much of it), so I knew it was over, and I understand why, but I still remember how good it was when it was good.
For a long time, I thought the was “The One,” and she’s still one of the most important relationships I’ve ever had, even though we didn’t even last a year and a half. I remember walking with her through Prospect Park, listening to her laugh when we watched an episode of The Muppet Show for the forty-seventh time, spending a Halloween party dancing like we were the only people in the apartment. I was really, really in love with her, and that was a good feeling. I will never forget it, no matter how much she hates me.
That brings me to twenty-one years later and the Doctor Who fanfic I’m tinkering with. I’m not sure why, but I decided to base the Nth Doctor’s companion on her. Like my Andrea, she’s impatient, self-righteous, enthusiastic, and goofy. She’s also a gifted collage artist. When it came time to illustrate her, I found an album of pics that her professional photographer brother took and tried to use them as a reference. That did not work at all. So this weekend, I tried again, but did it entirely based on memory. This time I think I nailed it. Only a handful of people, including my parents and Barry, have any experience with her, and they have likely forgotten what she looks like, but this is how I remember her. I just wish there was some way to share it with her.
I’m currently working at the best job I’ve ever had. The pay is pretty good, the benefits are the best outside of the federal government, and the workload is manageable, with deadlines that I would describe as “loose.” I have ADHD, so even with my tool box, I make mistakes and forget some details, but (most) people are really patient with me. My duties consist mostly of troubleshooting (my favorite job), and (most of) my colleagues are friendly. I clashed with my last supervisor, but by the time she moved on, we had a great relationship where my input and ideas were valued, and she encouraged me to grow in my position. My new supervisor seems nice, and I already trust her with any issues and suggestions I have. And I’m in publishing—science publishing, but publishing.
Lately, on top of my daily work, I’ve been helping out with an annual project. I have the bandwidth to handle it—I have to push back some of the work with looser deadlines to tackle this, but the pressure is minimal. (I have to be nudged occasionally, though.)
I say this because yesterday, my boss’s boss’s boss caught me at the latte machine and said, “Hey, nice work on [that thing you did].”
I said, “Thanks. I still have a lot to do before the deadline.”
“Yeah,” he replied, “but good job today.”
He was thanking me for doing my job, the one I got paid for. And you know what? It felt good. It felt really good. I take pride in my work, and to have it acknowledged that high up meant a lot to me.
When I got home, I painted a little so I could binge a show that was leaving Hulu by the end of the month, and one of the authority figures told a guy, “I don’t thank you for doing your job.” (This is the same show with the line, “How are we supposed to know what they’re gonna do next if we can’t predict their next move,” so I don’t put a lot of stock into it.) And that’s the problem with this country. Workers have spent so much time doing more than what’s in their job description that it’s expected, and it’s expected for free. Wages have stagnated, bonuses aren’t given out, promotions are withheld, and no one says thank you. It’s such a routine thing that, when Zoomers started doing no more than their job description, businesses freaked out, ran to The Wall Street Journal, and called it “Quiet Quitting.” Nobody’s quitting, they’re just recognizing their own value.
I may not get a raise or bonus for [that thing I did] because it was in my job description, but I still did it well. My work was recognized. I was seen. That meant the world to me, and it encouraged me to keep it up or maybe do more.
And so I passed it on. In a group email updating the managers on said project, I thanked the temp for doing [something really tedious]. It was her job, but it was [something really tedious], and she did it well and in a timely fashion. I wouldn’t have been able to do [that thing I did] without her. A manager wrote back, “I didn’t know [temp] had to do [something really tedious]! Great job!” I hope that lifted her spirits as much as my boss’s boss’s boss did.
I guess I’m saying, if you’re a manager or even a parent, and your underling or kid does what they’re supposed to do, a little attaboy doesn’t cost anything, it might make their day. It might encourage them to be better.
Yesterday, I was leaned back in my office chair, taking a mandated break from the sketchbook painting I was working on, my feet up on my desk. At this angle, the pear-like shape of my body makes a perfect day bed for Newcastle, who was purring and looking at me through hooded eyes, under the spell of the double-ear scratches he was getting. Once he was sated, he rested his head on my chest and drifted off to sleep, leaving me in this position for the foreseeable future, and I did something a little difficult to explain. I cried. I cried heavy sobs as I watched him curled up in a large, fluffy ball on my belly. It wasn’t particularly dignified, but I love this cat, and I don’t know what I’m going to do when he’s gone.
Nineteen years ago, I took a trip to Bloomington, Indiana, to meet my close friend, Kate. During the trip, we realized we were soul mates, and shortly after I returned home, arrangements were made for me to move from New York adjacent to her house on Stoneycrest Road. This was in June, and I would be moving in with her in August.
During this margin, she began to have dreams about a kitten who was about to die. She fancied herself a witch, so she took it as a prophecy and went to the animal shelter. She found the kitten from her dreams, and they were going to put him to sleep. He was a runt with pneumonia and a bad case of the worms. Also, he was ugly, with his greasy brown fur, looking like the transition from mogwi to gremlin. Despite the offers of a better cat, Kate adopted him and spent the next six weeks nursing him to health. She told me over the phone that she knew that this wasn’t her kitten. She didn’t know whose, but it wasn’t hers. This gross little thing was kept in the bathroom until he got better and her other two cats got used to him.
By the time he emerged, he was still a little greaseball, but he was a kitten who wouldn’t sit still for anything until he got tired and fell down to sleep. He’s also rock stupid. She named him Newcastle, after her favorite beer of the moment, because he fit in a pint glass and he had a foamy white chest.
Shortly after I moved in, he started following me around, occasionally taking naps with me when he slowed down long enough. Kate, who didn’t want to support another cat and was planning on adopting him out when he got well, knew she couldn’t break us up.
The runt grew.
And he grew some more.
My theory was that he ate some radioactive kibble. In actuality, he was either a Maine Coon or Norwegian Forest Cat mix. At only sixteen pounds at his largest, though, he was still a runt.
He never outgrew his kitten face, leading to Nicole calling him Baby Cat. (She had nicknames for all the cats when she lived with Kate and me.) Also, the brown darkened into a grayish black, with a spot of brown on his belly with the white chest, so that when we violated the two-pet limit in our high-rise apartment building, we pretended he and Magik were the same.
Like all of our cats while I was married, Newcastle is very social. He loves guests, and he especially enjoys parties, where he can beg for snacks, and he’s not even subtle. He loves people food, except for anything with tomatoes in it. When he was younger, I’d run to the bedroom and jump into bed, and he was right behind me, and we’d lie there together, cuddling. When Kate and I were taking a save-the-marriage quiz, guessing details about our spouses, her answer to “What’s your husband’s favorite animal?” was Newcastle. “You guys have a weird relationship,” she said. In our post-nuptial agreement that was the foundation of our divorce, we split up custody of the cats. She got the other two, and I got Newcastle. I almost lost him, though, because I separated broke and unable to afford his vet bills, which she generously covered for me the first three months following the split.
In 2012, we took him in for an ultrasound, and the vet made an interesting discovery. The reason he was often short of breath was not because of scarring from the pneumonia, as we’d thought, but because almost half of his liver was in his lungs. He recommended “cracking him open” and fixing it, but thankfully our second opinion said that wouldn’t be necessary. He was eight years old by that point, and he was doing fine.
Three years later, the vet noticed a heart murmur, and after another ultrasound, he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. It had grown too big and was folding in on itself, necessitating semiannual cardiology visits and three medications every day to keep it from getting worse. two years ago, they added a fourth. Every two weeks, I cut up the pills and fit them into capsules so I can enjoy my least favorite time of the day, shoving it down his throat. Unlike most cats, he takes it like a champ, though he does look betrayed afterward. Last year, his back legs got really wobbly, and they told us he had arthritis (requiring a monthly shot), and earlier this year, hyperthyroidism (requiring an expensive ear cream). I don’t want to go broke taking care of him, and I considered not treating the hyperthyroidism, but all the pet docs say he’s pretty spry for an old guy (guitar riff). He could have three active, healthy years left if he’s properly medicated.
Sure he’s wobbly, sure he’s eight pounds lighter than he was in his youth, sure he can’t jump on my lap anymore, and sure, all he does is sleep, but he’s nineteen years old, and he’s been the most consistent relationship I’ve ever had. Since he is coming up on the end, I let him have some people food (he loves Fritos), and if he shows up, meowing at my desk, whether I’m writing, drawing, or working, I will scoop him up and give him all the attention he deserves. He’s earned it.
There were tears yesterday, but they were happy tears. He may be a big, dumb cat, but he’s my best friend. We’ve grown old together, and I love him so much.
Jeremiah Murphy 