A Day In The Life of This Cartoonist
People often ask me what a typical day for me is like. This question usually comes shortly after they find out I’m a syndicated cartoonist, which is a job almost everyone has heard of but very few people have actually come across a practitioner of in the wild. They assume that because I have an unusual job that my day-to-day routine must also be unusual. The following is a fairly complete rundown so you can judge for yourself.
I’m a morning person, so I rarely sleep past 6 A.M. Most people hate getting up in the dark and that’s understandable—getting out of bed before dawn usually means a) you have to get to an airport to sit around for a few hours in service to the Theater of Security which countless studies have shown not to make us any safer, or b) you are a stockbroker who lives on the West Coast and you need to be ready to make money when people in New York are getting up to make money, and this is a job that will smother a person’s soul and rob them of their humanity even without inconvenient hours. So I get why most people loath getting up that early.
My beloved wife, Olive Oyl and I, however, adore it and we fairly silently rejoice in it together as we go through our daily routine. I feed one of our two dogs and she feeds one of our two cats, then we make our hot morning beverages, gather our laptops and whatever books we are reading at the time, and head up to our small, third-floor sala which has a lovely view of most of our town, over which the sun rises an hour-or-so later. I only feed one dog because she’s the only one that wants to eat at 6 A.M. (the other won’t eat until 11 A.M. for some reason only a dog would understand, I assume) and O2 only feeds one of our cats because the other one is on a sabbatical of some sort. She left our property a couple of months ago and has not returned. We hope that once she gets settled, she’ll at least text or email a forwarding address so we’ll know where to send her medical and dental records.
The silence of the early morning is our favorite time of day. There is little traffic noise, no one comes to the door, our phones don’t buzz, and the dogs don’t rush to the front gate every five minutes barking wildly because one of the thousands of local Chihuahuas has tinkled on the tree in front of our place. Once ensconced in our lair, we read for a couple of hours and enjoy a 30-45 minute meditation.
Around 9 A.M., we head downstairs and start our day. O2 goes off and does whatever the hell it is she does, while I take the dogs on their daily 3-mile walk. Just to break the monotony, I wear a very realistic dog costume and conduct the entire walk on all fours. It’s terrific exercise and it helps me bond with them in a way that they can really understand.
I do everything they do with the exception of defecating in the street.
Upon returning home, I eat the same breakfast every day—a package of Skittles sprinkled over a bowl of powdered milk (no liquid, just the powder) and the skin of a fresh pineapple. The insides are too sweet for me. After breakfast, I sit down to make my sales calls.
I make 8 or 10 cold calls each day and I speak with a Chinese accent. This isn’t the most common Chinese accent that you’re probably familiar with, this is a less-widely-known accent that is used in the Chengdu-Chongqing dialect. I don’t actually need to make sales calls and I don’t actually sell anyone anything, I just like to randomly call businesses and pretend to try to sell them something. I get a lot of good cartoon ideas this way.
After my phone time is over, I grab a tape measure and go to the gym. I don’t use the exercise equipment, I just measure it. I particularly enjoy measuring each machine while a person is using it. I’m careful to be very respectful and not interrupt their routine—as a former exerciser, I know how distracting that can be—so I just carefully measure the length, width, depth, height, range of motion, and distance from the next machine and surrounding walls silently so as not to bother anyone.
If someone asks me what I’m doing, I answer in a phony foreign language that sounds like it might be Finnish.
I find that people are much less likely to question the behavior of a person of unknown Scandinavian origin than some random American.
This usually takes me up to 4 P.M., which means I’ve got 20 minutes to kill before I smoke some pot. I’m a traditionalist and still believe that 4:20 means something, thankyouverymuch. It’s not the only time I smoke pot during the day, nor the first, but it’s a ritual and I’m not about to change it now.
That brings us to 4:21, which is nap time. The dogs like to sleep with me at nap time but I do not wear the dog suit for this, as much as they probably prefer I would. Instead, I dress them both as humans: wigs, dresses, and sensible, low-heeled pumps.
After nap time it is usually dark, so I head up to our rooftop patio and sit behind our signal lamp. Our town sits in a kind of bowl and our place is on the upper part of the western rise, so from our rooftop, we can look across the city and see thousands of homes facing us on the eastern rise of the bowl. So each evening just after dark, I flip on my signal lamp and send Morse code signals to anyone on the other side of town who happens to be looking in my direction. I figure sooner or later, somebody who can decipher Morse code is going to be watching. My messages say various things: “Please close your bedroom drapes, I’m trying to eat dinner,” “Help—I’m being forced to watch Sean Hannity,” “Four minutes & thirty seconds to detonation,” “Leave the money in the designated place or you will never see your grandmother again,” that sort of thing. So far, no cops have come banging our door down or anything, but I have hopes.
And that’s pretty much my day—by 8:30 or so I’m ready to go to bed. I know that doesn’t seem late but I get up at the fucking crack of dawn, so what do you expect?
You might be wondering when and how I actually do my cartoon work but I’m afraid that’s a trade secret. If I told you that, you’d all create your own cartoons and graphic novels, and I’d lose my readership.
Now let’s find out what Bizarro cartoons Wayno created this week with his secret process…
I expected to get at least one person asking what this cartoon means because they didn’t know that a group of crows is called “a murder,” but I did not.
I did not expect to get a person asking if Wayno and I were aware that a group of crows is actually called “a murder,” but I did.
In this situation, I think I might elect for the audit first and lay out all of the ways in which I have cheated on my taxes all these years, then drop dead before the IRS guy can slap me in cuffs.
When I began my career in the late 1900s, I never thought I’d live to see a time when a newspaper comic could include a cartoon pile of shit, but here we are.
For you fans of operettas and also gay culture (there is a slight difference) I used to live in a town that had a gay bowling league and one of the teams was named “The Pirates of Men’s Pants”.
I wish my ophthalmologist smelled of pipe tobacco.
At the end of Wayno’s blog post this week, he includes a very funny email complaint we got about one of his cartoons and his brilliantly hilarious response. You don’t want to miss it.
And that marks the end of this week’s cartoon catastrophe, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for sticking around to help us pick up the pieces and rebuild. If you dig our crazy vibes, man, and think we’re groovy for doing this each week for FREE, without ads or clickbait, please consider sticking it to the man by leaving us some love beads via the links below. We’ll think you’re far out.
Until next time, beware of edible patio furniture salesmen with Chengdu-Chongqing accents.
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