Ceaseless Fables of Beyonding

This is a general public update to let everyone know where things are at in my life right now. I hope this makes things a little easier to grasp when dealing with me. Thanks in advance.

1. Today my computer monitor finally croaked. For the time being I have no way to use my home computer. I am typing this on my laptop, which does not have Photoshop, Acrobat, Debut, VideoPad, or any of the other programs I use for work/creating content.

2. Until sometime later this week, I will have not had home internet for several months. 

3. I haven’t had phone service for over a year. I couldn’t get my old number and it screwed everything up. I’ve been using a TracFone burner that picks up wi-fi. 

4. I can’t afford a car. Not even ZipCar. Most of the time I can’t even afford public transit. 

5. For the past four years I’ve had to run two fans in my bedroom to drown out the sounds of the woman next door violently beating her children, the woman downstairs who shouts into her phone for an average of ten hours a day directly beneath my bed, and other random sounds of the hellhole I can’t even afford to live in. I have nowhere else to go. I have no one. There is nowhere I can go for peace and quiet. Not even the library where I use the wi-fi.  

6. Today I had the second anxiety breakdown of the week. This makes a “regular job”, whatever that is, improbable. If I can’t sleep at least five hours a night, which I can’t, my alarm doesn’t wake me up because I can’t tell dreams from reality. I’m not going to take sleeping pills just because I live adjacent to shitty people. Melatonin is more than enough. 

7. I’ve been going to Grady for years for treatment. I’m not going to humiliate myself by having a breakdown in front of someone as proof. If I’m around anyone it just comes out as uncontrollable apoplexy, and then I become catatonically embarrassed. Typically it manifests as me not being able to get out of bed for hours, like today. If anyone thinks I’m “faking”, fine. Do us both a favor and never work a suicide hotline. 

8. My cousin is helping me out with a new monitor. If he and several devoted fans and/or friends weren’t helping me out financially since 2017 I’d be dead. Try to think about the options someone who spent 30+ years drawing subversive cartoons has in the 2020’s. I can assure you it’s slim to none. I have to invent opportunities for myself. The computer I’ve been using for years now (a sweet Dell Optiplex) was even a donation from a very good friend. I have this laptop and my Wacom tablet only because there were stimulus checks under Trump. Without Trump I’d be worse off than I am now. I don’t care what anyone thinks about that. I really don’t. 

9. I have considered pawning my amazing Wacom tablet because I had to cancel my Adobe subscription, and I barely use it anyway since I have to go to the library for wi-fi (depending on when they’re open). Both Adobe and Amazon overdrafted my bank account in the past two months, costing me over $100 in fees. 

10. Amazon will not let me access my account or cancel it because my old phone died and I can’t get the number back. I can’t access or cancel it from someone else’s phone. I haven’t been able to use Amazon Prime in over a year because of this. 

11. I have been experiencing piercing headaches and random chest pains for a while now. The only reason I was able to get some rest today was because I dragged my old boom box out of the closet and cranked up radio static to cover the animal downstairs who yells into her phone for ten hours a day. I woke up about an hour ago with a worse headache. 

12. I want everyone to think about what it is like living above a foreign person who screams and yells for ten hours a day. I want you to think real hard about it. My monthly rent, which I ostensibly pay half of, is $1,200. Think about killing yourself trying to make enough money to live in this situation. Think about all the things you saved from childhood, that you loved, that you had to sell for just another month. Think about the lengths to which you’d go to try not to lose your mind needing a mere quantum of peace and quiet. Before you ask- the landlord could give a shit. Nobody cares. Really, think about what years of that would do to your attitude and your mental state. And it’s nobody’s fault but my own. I made the wrong choices in life. 

13.  Not only did my beloved hamster Gomez pass on this month, but so did a wonderful sweet kitty belonging to my roommate, who was around 17 and suffered a long, painful decline. For months we were cleaning up her accidents rather than putting her down. That’s how wonderful and sweet. 

14. I’m not quitting what I do. I’ll die first. 

Thanks as always for your support and understanding. I think I covered everything. Probably not. 

I’m making this entry free to the public because I can’t imagine anyone would pay for it. 

I’m going through a bad time right now. I had a terrible dream sometime this morning that caused me to oversleep. Then I made the mistake of watching Pollock with Ed Harris, a movie I love and have seen before, but which cast a very sobering (no pun intended) pall over the day. I forget on a regular basis that the artists I admire led very painful lives and made little to no money. I confuse the lives of artists to whom I look up with the idea of their lives in my own mind, when these things could not be more different. I judge my own lack of success against the huge impact an artist has had on my life. That doesn’t make sense on any rational level. 

Once the movie was over I sat motionless for I don’t know how long, one shoe on, having intended to get on with the events of the day but possessing not even the desire to put on the other shoe. I can’t convey properly the futility and malaise I feel. There is no point to anything.

Ten years ago I was turning out page after page of new material. I was surrounded by friends who encouraged my efforts. When I wasn’t drawing, I was plotting out stories and hammering out ideas. I had a network of friends that I could bounce ideas off of. Now I feel like such a bothersome burden that I don’t even want to type this. I can’t imagine why anyone would care what I have to say, or what I think. I wonder why I should even bother to speak out loud anymore. I can count the times I’ve laughed this year on a single hand.

I’m tired of living like this and I wonder if it’s just my time to fade out. The “pandemic” did its job and destroyed interpersonal relationships. Literally everything I enjoyed about life and being an artist has been ruined. I belong nowhere. I don’t get inspired anymore; I just try to pull something from the shell that was my life and hammer it into a saleable object, before I watch it sit on a shelf and not sell. It’s extremely difficult to satirize pop culture or current events when you don’t really care about any of it. Nothing I have created will endure after I am gone anyway. It seems silly to keep at it. I’m not even angry. I’m just tired. 

Already I am predicting the callow reactions to this entry. Why wouldn’t I just “be a man”, “suck it up” and keep going? Haven’t I dealt with “hate mail” since high school? Well, that’s the problem. I can handle hate. I like hate. It’s honest. It’s indifference I can’t take. And for some time now, indifference is all I’ve known. Nothing I create matters unless it makes money. That’s reality. And brother, I don’t make money doing anything. I am as useless as tits on a boar. I could drop off the face of the earth at this very moment and no one would give a shit. The work of every artist that ever inspired me could disappear forever and no one would give a shit. Don’t kid yourself. 

The terrible dream I had earlier, which felt so real that I wasn’t moved in any way to wake from it, involved going to some labyrinthine shopping center teeming with people and actually purchasing a new Transformer, a favorite activity of mine that it’s been literally years since I’ve done. Somehow I had the money to buy a gigantic box that contained a Transformer so huge that I had to spread it out onto three tables to assemble it. His name was “Anarky”, which I’m aware is both a DC and a Quake III: Arena character, but resembled neither, and was instead a colossal six-foot robot that would transform into an utterly enormous WWII bomber plane. I was agog. 

As I set about putting the thing together out of literally thousands of small pieces, customers began to pass by the tables upon which I was building it. Many of them began to pick up pieces and look at them, before placing them somewhere outside of the arrangement I’d been organizing. At least half of the robot had taken shape on one table, and was so large that I could no longer lift it. Kids started swiping pieces I had carefully laid out. I tried to shoo them away as I still unwrapped new parts from the original box.

The new parts felt different. They were soft and rubbery, like dog toys. When I looked closer at them they weren’t parts of the robot at all. They were cheap models of what I suppose were intended to be buildings from The Simpsons, complete with cheap decals of the characters, drawn sitting inside. Noting my confusion, my friend showed me another sheet of instructions from the Transformer box, stating that the robot’s other leg had yet to be rendered, and that I would have to wait another day for the leg parts to arrive. It was some sort of mix-up at the factory, and the cheap Simpsons toys were some kind of consolation gift. 

The dream makes no more sense to me now than it did while it was happening. I thought typing it out would make me understand it more, or feel better, but it didn’t. It was just something that confused me into thinking I was normal for a few short moments. That life had some kind of point, for me. It doesn’t. I don’t know what the point is in anything anymore. I’ve never felt more selfish about the idea of taking time for myself, or creating. In the end nothing about my life will have mattered or made any difference. Before yesterday I lost an entire day. I thought it was Wednesday. It was Thursday. The food pantry was closed. I lost a day. What day it is hardly seems to matter. Eating hardly seems to matter. I eat to survive for another faceless day, in the hopes that things will improve. I don’t think I can fool myself into hoping anymore. In my heart, I feel that things will only get worse. They always do. 

Thanks for your time. 

My desire to be liked is waging war against my desire to be honest, particularly in what I draw and create. This is the central conflict for me much of the time. 

I am slowly coming out of a summer-long period of creative emptiness. I am out of practice and filled with self-doubt, because simply put, my work isn’t selling and I have been working construction and odd jobs most of this year. This would be fine if it was cutting the mustard money-wise but it isn’t. I owe people all over the place and I feel like shit all the time. I have no personal support structure; the only communication I have with other artists is parasocial. Oftentimes I feel trapped. I always feel like I can’t finish anything, either because I don’t have the time, or because I feel worthless as a functioning artist, and that I’ve wasted my life chasing a pipe dream. 

I’m not fishing for compliments here, I’m being real. Just a few years ago I had a system in place where I was coming up with new ideas every day, and every week I had at least one full page drawn. I’m just barely back in the game with Ceaseless Fables now, and only because I’m doing it in black and white, on unfamiliar paper, which has thrown my technique off temporarily. That prized “aha, I’m actually good” feeling after completing a page is vapor. It’s like I’m pretending my heart is still in it. I look at my past work and feel like I’ve lost something. 

I really screwed up trying to temper my output to “modern attitudes”. Creatively I am adrift. Nothing inspires me anymore; on rare occasions that I do have new ideas, I second-guess them by pondering whether or not they’ll be profitable. That’s fatal and it’s not how I used to operate. I create work that I like and hope that other people will like too. But now I’m in this constant battle with myself over how best to spend my time. I can’t even afford to get the wi-fi turned back on at home; I’m at the public library like I’ve been for a couple months now. As far as a space to express my ideas, it sucks ass. Everything sucks ass; my dwelling, the town I live in, the pigs who eat food and use their cell phones in this library. The library itself doesn’t suck ass. 

I feel sorry for myself all the time and no one wants to be around me. Okay. I get it. I have friends and acquaintances who would rather do anything else than hang out with a pill. But no one understands that I have lost the ability to creatively express myself that I developed over three decades. Working in my bedroom, as much as it sucks, is fine if I have an internet connection. If not, I’m just some loser wasting time playing at being some sort of “artist”. Not to mention my eyesight is going and I literally have to use a magnifying glass to read my laptop screen, or draw fine details in a cartoon. It’s a serious morale killer. 

Any time I attempt to convert the miseries of my everyday existence into comic form, I  become embarrassed and give it up. Like I’m just making myself more unfuckable than I already am. Typically I resort to putting these miseries into the lives of characters I’ve made up, but then we’re back at the barrier where I feel like I’m wasting time drawing comics no one will read. Again, I’m not fishing for compliments. No one seems to read the comics I came up on, either. It used to be considered a sign of sophistication if you enjoyed books and music that existed outside the mainstream. Nowadays you just get treated like an out-of-touch asshole. I’m really, really tired of it. 

I want a steady income that is commensurate with my level of skills, talent, and ability. Until I get that, I will never be “happy” or “satisfied”. I also refuse to temper my work to any sort of outside editorial guidelines or standards. If I felt it was necessary I would. I look up to guys like S. Clay Wilson and Ivan Brunetti. Their finest output came straight from the gut and spleen. Were Bill Hicks still alive, he would be a pariah in today’s media. I don’t understand why being uncompromising, a quality that has bore me the most artistic fruit, is such a deal-breaker in the 2020’s. Being uncompromising as an artist was once no sort of financial obstacle. The best comedy and art came from the surliest renegades. Now unless something is astroturfed into inanity, it may as well not even exist. Well, fuck that. Fuck being any part of that whatsoever. 

The encouragement I have received from you folks means a lot. It’s literally the only encouragement I receive. I sure as hell don’t get any from people in my everyday life; quite the opposite actually. 19 years ago I was a guest at the yearly festival at NYC’s Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art (MoCCA). Two years before that I was a guest at Atlanta’s DragonCon. I have no interest in “starting a second career”. I put everything into life as a cartoonist, for better or for worse. If I was alive to do so in the 1940’s, I’d have a bigger house than anyone you know. In the 1960’s, the world would be my oyster. In the 1970’s, I’d have a support system of publishers and cartoonists that would keep me in the black until the 21st century. That’s how much I have to offer. I literally live to form new ideas and create comic books. If I cared about anything else, I’d be doing it already. 

I feel a little better having purged all this. Thanks for listening. Of course I need money, worse than usual. I am fucked. Depression Trigger Numero Uno is not being able to make enough money. Why don’t my comics sell? Why don’t I have more patrons? I’m brilliant. It doesn’t make any sense. If a thousand people sent me a dollar every month, I’d be set. 

My PayPal is anderson72pod@gmail.com (Mike The Pod). Again, thanks for putting up with me.