Whenever Newsletter 6-1

It's been so long since I've done this that I don't remember how. I blame it all on the blog. You wouldn't believe how much blood a blog can suck out of your life.

"I vant to suck your BLOG."

Speaking of vampires, we're revamping the website, which is doing volume traffic despite my general stupidity. The site's outward changes will be minor compared to the underneath. My main man Tristan is reinventing Jason Love while Jason Love takes long weekends in Big Bear. I mean, while Jason writes blogs!
Share Time

My wife took a few pictures for a presentation tentatively called "How a Bill Becomes a Law." Wait. That's Schoolhouse Rock. "How a Note Becomes a Cartoon."

It all starts when I'm in the shower and can't possibly get to paper. That's when the best ideas come. If I remember the note, I jot it down and toss it in a bin labeled ... now stay with me ... "Notes." At the end of the month, I dump the notes on the carpet like so:



(You should see it during a full moon.)

Then the elves -- my wife -- organize the notes by subject:



and those stacks are shipped to a nearby storage facility, otherwise known as the wall closet:



At harvest time, the ideas become cartoons, columns, and blood-sucking blog entries. My primary job is to drink lots of coffee to free up more cans. I've had so much caffeine, I'm developing a stutter.

The big stack contains 1,200+ cartoon ideas, all awaiting judgment. Some will be yeses, some will be maybes, and the rest will be crumpled to death on the spot.

The Chosen Ones are typed up a second time, emailed to Vladimir in Serbia, and then, after addressing such weighty concerns as Which is funnier -- "urine" or "pee"?, we arrive at the finished cartoon, which most people read in two seconds. On a good day, they don't roll their eyes.

Later I color the cartoons in a way that offends my wife, who feels, in her layperson way, that the colors are "scratchy." She prefers creamy colors like the ones being used by my competitors.

You can imagine my pleasure when the homes across the street were finally painted like so...



Snapshots colors come to life! It was like destiny or synchronicity or, according to my wife, general stupidity.

J.