Cool Docs

Happy hello, Jazz Pickles! Thanks for pausing here.

If you’re under a certain age, you may not fully “get” my Sunday cartoon above. But it’s my impression that most of you blog readers are Baby Boomers, like me, so you shouldn’t have any trouble.

I attempted to depict a middle-aged guy who is stuck in the ‘70s, still living with his parents and employing the vernacular and fashions of that era. 

Embarrassing as it may be now, we used to call people “groovy,” “hip,” and “chicks” back then. I still do, but not because I’m stuck in time still trying to pull off a “shag” haircut as my hair thins, but because I’m an erudite urbanite who appreciates irony. (Judging by that sentence [and this one] I’m also an arrogant vocabulary exhibitionist.)

With that shameless display behind us, I’d like to share an excerpt from my most recent story in my creative writing project The Naked Cartoonist. 

It’s a true story of my first grown-up job and what it taught me about corporate culture’s relationship to honesty and fairness. It’s called “Catch Him if You Can” (an intentional reference to the film of a similar name) for reasons that become obvious upon reading.

When I was 22, without experience or education in the field, I was hired as a designer of high-fashion ads for a luxury department store. I was a stupid kid from a small town with all the savvy and maturity of Gomer Pyle, working with big-city creative types. Did I sink or swim?

It started like this: 

“It was a dream job: I was making several times the minimum wage; my boss was super cool; I was getting paid to be creative; and I got to be on photo shoots with famous models I’d seen on the covers of magazines. I occasionally even got a glimpse of them in their underwear as they changed outfits. What more could an aspiring 22-year-old artist ask for?”

But it became this:

“Enraged, I stormed into the Vice President’s office (he was a friendly sort with an open-door policy that allowed for storming) and told him the whole story. My every word was festooned with righteous indignation and it felt good to let the dam burst. I told him I was ready to walk if I had to work with that fraud for another day!”

What happened in between those two quotes is amusing. What happened after, was a lesson in human nature that we all learn one way or another. The story also includes a handful of fun cartoons about corporate life. 

If you’d like to give it a try, it’s five bucks a month and you can cancel at any time, which a very small handful of folks did a couple of weeks ago after I promoted my involvement in a fundraiser for Harris/Walz. Oh well.