1000 Exposure Therapy.

Well, there you go, a thousand pages of the rambling lives of a group of twenty something kids. Still rambling along as though the page number makes no difference at all.

Almost no one who started their comic at the same time as mine, that I knew, still makes theirs, and without that common ground they vanished from my life. We met at a point between failures, and parted ways when it came. Back then everyone made a big deal about 100 pages, now I see that even 1000 is peanuts. Super awesome peanuts in my case.

By happenstance I spent a while yesterday in one of the stores that many of the stories in to comic were inspired by. I talked to one of only 2 people that still worked there when I did, and it seems that things are moving along the same way they always did. Later on one of my best friends joined me in regaling one of the younger employees with many of our tales of retail horror. I actually have a hard time remembering a lot of that stuff now, because I blocked a lot of it out. As much as the comic makes it seem like I have sort of a twisted love affair with retail they were actually some of the worst years of my life. What I remember more easily, and thus mirror in my fiction, are the good people that made my daily life bearable.

The kid working what amounts to my old job told me about how the music department had changed in a world where people download most of their music. It’s not called “music” for a start. Of course, when I left they were playing around with the idea of a “lifestyles” department, but over time the latter became the former. There’s not a lot of music anymore, but what they lack in discs they make up for with knick knacks. Their lower volume buying makes the deals terrible, but I guess you do what you have to do to survive. There’s just something better about holding a thing in your hand before you buy it. Getting a chance to see if it’s in good working order, or what have you. In that way having a higher price is offset.