Can’t We Just Skip It?

I swear on the decaying blonde Barbie jammed in the background of the Luigi’s bandbox, if we do not get Ed Crankshaft on Monday, doing one of the eight or so things that Ed Crankshaft has done for the last 38 years, then I will create an effigy of Tom Batiuk from old pairless socks and ritually burn it at the stake! This is not (just) a joke! I’m serious! On Monday morning when I go to GoComics there had better be a comic strip with an elderly asshole buying another Bean’s End boondoggle! Or else!

Am I coming across as aggressive? Maybe it’s because of this stupid week of Batton blathering about his precious Bristol Board. Because Batton, as Batiuk’s wish fulfilment Mary Sue, of course needed no ghost artist providing pencils for him to trace.

Heaven forbid Batiuk give Batton his own Avers Chuckson! He might have to write Batton having a relationship with someone who isn’t a goat looking git with a smartphone.

Still aggressive? Hmm….maybe it’s because of this comment by my own dear Co-captain.

One of Batton’s most obnoxious remarks had spilled, nearly word for word, from my lips months before that August strip. Should I be mad?

See, I dabble with a bit of fanfic writing now and then. Every few years, some movie or show or comic or video game or web series will spawn some mentally completish narrative in my brain and I’ll spend a few months to a year binge building the outline of an epic tale of cringe and feels. Sometimes I’ll even start writing the story down. Sometimes I’ll even show a couple equally cringe friends, so we can cringe and feels together.

Thus far, I usually lose steam after a bit, and it becomes more and more tedious and frustrating to put words to word document. I go full GRRM mode and eventually move on to another project, promising I’ll finish what I started I swear. Once I even did! (Do not ask to see it, it is 15% lost to digital hell, and 100% too niche and cringe for even you, my wonderful nitters)

Anyway, I was talking to one of my friends, (the one with the epic webcomic, who did the Westviewcrumb Tinies for us.) As I whinged to her about once again getting bogged down in a fic, she asked me, “Do you like writing?”

And I said, right away, not knowing that I was copying Dorothy Parker and WOULD be echoed by Batton of all people.

“I like having written.”

Because that’s the honest truth, for me. I love having written. I love going back to reread stuff I wrote even decades ago. I find my own jokes funny. The scenes I put down give me just the feels I was wanting to be feeling. The characters speak to me because I put the damn words in their figurative mouths. The set ups and pay off feel balanced and satisfying.

It’s like cooking for yourself, knowing just how much garlic and lemon and sugar you really really like. If eating your own handmade pasta was 100% more egotistical and narcissistic.

But writing, unless I’m in one of those wonderfully manic moods, can be an absolute CHORE. If I could have my rough drafts extracted from my brain and into a word processor by a helmet covered in needles, I’d do it. Definitely.

But I know that my dear Banana Jr. didn’t mean ‘loving having written’ in exactly the way I do. He’s clear about that in the rest of his comment.

And this is demonstrated SO SO CLEARLY in this godawful Skip and Batton interview drivel. Nothing (heaven help us– so far) has been about the stories Batton wanted to tell, it has been about wanting to achieve the social status of a writer. Like a forensic investigator dissecting a rotting corpse, maybe this wretched storyline deserves a deeper analysis…

FARM REPORT FOR THOSE SO INCLINED:

Monday was about 10 degrees Fahrenheit with a foot and half of snow. Today it was 85. All four seasons in one week. Someone get Mother Nature some lithium because the bitch is bi-polar af.

Had our first calf of the year on St. Paddy’s Day, on a day barely warm enough to leave it out on pasture. We’re up to four calves today, including a widdle moo with widdle Ray Bans.