A Narrative Essay On The Near Past

2019 was a year for enjoying hazing rituals.

It’s difficult to watch the news without spasming from all the controversies on popular entertainment, or get a real sense of what’s going on anymore. Far easier to drop offline, get dinner made, and relax on the couch. Yet the old life wire conducted its voodoo, and you’re the one that has to change the channel. Pretending as if there was only one event to focus on at any one point. While smoking a joint.

In such an environment, it’s difficult to get essays written. Combine this with a cat that always wants your attention, and external sources of loud noise, it’s way to easy to overreact and block people that are offering advice, although I’ve always had trouble with taking unsolicited advice. Contrast with listening to different music on the tube channels, and my minds swims inside of another sea. No more can I focus on any given thing, when so much is coming at me at once. Drowning in a sea of acid, dissolving before coming up for air. While watching television about the controversies of Tony Blair. And other “current events” that fill space.

Although right now my cat is sleeping, so I’m able to get a little bit of writing done. But everything is unpredictable; some claim its appropriately unpredictable. Though I wonder if such people have ever tried focusing on one thing. A few week ago I had to leave a discord server, being blamed essentially for a constant onslaught of targeted harassment by other people that do web comic. Like #comicsgate in miniature. I’ve started blocking people for created frivolous hashtags, during the few points in time I still use centralized social media.

The reality is, people that upset people in this industry, aren’t really conservative. Sure some people are, but that leaves a lot of social and economic leftists on the outs, simply because they refuse to go along with the most current witch hunt by mainstream comics.

Even if you weren’t involved in the initial controversy, it’s easy to get dragged in. It doesn’t matter what your comic or graphic novel is about. Some people just have a penchant for wanting drama.

On networks where there is less of this, there are still people that confuse the meaning of what it means to be an actual leftist, when they’re not busy conflating the things you’re saying to being preachy or dogmatic. The strangest part of that whole package, you could be a trans person and it wont stop some of these people blood thirst. In other comics industries, they’re not politicized at all. So the whole fear of Japanese take over doesn’t age particularly well, like some classic antique you struggle to be the right amount of polish, so that old shit brown ceramic continues to shine.

Instead I watch movies about tap dancers, watching different dance routines. And hope that someday maybe our world will get just a little bit less crazy. And I can focus on something other than internet controversy. But that’s like asking for the Soviet Revolution to never happen. Among other historically important events; our consensual historical experience is one of scatters pictures across the net. Scattered images across time and space. And at the end of the vanishing point, a tap dancer who tap to some arcane funeral march.

And hops out of time.