2414 Self Reliant.

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I’m not 100% sure I’m going to leave this page as is. I am genuinely running mostly on muscle memory from making comics for 16 years. The Teen came to stay the night so my birthday won’t be the most miserable experience. Although technically I think the actual day is Sunday. But Mom is off taking care of my nephew. Fuck it whatever I can’t keep typing at the moment. I’ll see you all Monday.

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But, John, wildly successful people can always point to someone who helped them out – at least in the beginning. So if you insist on doing it all alone, you’ll likely not get very far.

Just sayin’

I’d put the number of “truly independent” (e.g. hermits) living in the USA functionally near zero. However, based on the media, social networks, and their ilk, the number of people /claiming/ to be truly independant measures in the tens or hundreds of millions.

This. You buy food from restaurants? You’re dependent on their cooks and cashiers. You buy food period? You’re dependent on the farmers who grew the food and the merchants and truckers who got it to wherever you bought it. You rent? You’re dependent on your landlord, despite how fiscally one-sided that relationship seems. You own your own home? Great, who built it? Who produced the materials that were used to construct it?

The closest I’ve known to someone who was truly independent was a homeless guy who camped out and depended upon a particular property owner to continue to completely fail to maintain his property to the point he didn’t notice a homeless guy having taken up residence in his forest and starting a small farm among the trees.

But that guy didn’t make his own clothes, didn’t make his own portable TV, didn’t pay for the electric used to power his portable TV, except in the form of buying food from Taco Bell that he also didn’t produce or cook, but did consume. He didn’t grow the flowers he sold to get the money for clothes, gadgets, and the roughly one meal a day he got from Taco Bell.

He also had some medical issues and didn’t perform or pay for most of his own medical care. Granted, that medical care cost a lot more because of insurance companies gaming the system so that their services are utterly necessary, and paying for it himself wouldn’t have changed the fact that he couldn’t ever possibly do his own heart surgery.

But he was far more independent than I will ever be.

Be, or do, whatever.

If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

You may be or do whatever, John, but if no one knows about it, then what’s the point? You were or did whatever…but it will only matter to you. And then you die.

Comic’s getting philosophical. That’s kinda fun.

Except we can’t just do things so that someone else will know. In the end we all die and if what you did only matters because of other people it’s pointless in the end. You need to find things to do that matter because you care about them. If it matters to other people that’s great but it’s not what’s most important.

You can’t really do whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want unless you’re willing to relocate to a deserted island. Otherwise, you’re bound by the laws of the land. Even a “free” country like the United States has its limits on what you can do with your freedom.

Besides, everyone in life needs support from others in some form or fashion in certain situations to even move forward. Like the old saying goes, “No man is an island”.

Happy birthday Jackie.

Some writes hate helpful advice from the audience, nevertheless I persevered. You can always spark something with some of the side characters. Like the furry club, or perhaps Vicky and her (yet unseen?) mom having awkward chat while buying antiques, or a day in the life of two mustachioed men (the dads meet up for a day at work with mutual help or something).

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