The Last in a Long Line of Cartoon Cats

Recipe for a Timeless Cartoon Character

1. It is easy to draw
2. It is a cat
3. Or is it

Oh No, an Emotion

Can you cheer me up? I feel THE WORST, like there is a Goodwill inside me filled with the wedge shoes of the dead and hundreds of stained copies of Tuesdays with Morrie. Neglected babies wail in the background. The ugliest lamp in the world crashes to the floor. The one-legged grandmother who knocked it over is sent to prison for the rest of her life. Which is only three days.

Yet Another Dispatch from the Country of My Ignorance

The very same night, I dreamed that Ron Silliman got a makeover and no one liked it but me. "Don't worry about it," he soothed. "The arrangement of my face is a personal choice." "This is bigger than you," I shouted. I sat down at my desk and scrawled a letter to the President. "RON SILLIMAN IS TYPOGRAPHICALLY HANDSOME," it read.

State of Emergency

A hurricane wanted to chew me to death, but I was prepared. "A HURRICANE IS COMING," Elegant Choice screamed one day last week. "It is unexpected. Soon, your boobs will transform into potatoes, and my wang will become an actual baby carrot." "My mind gropes toward your meaning, but is fired for it," I responded. "Forgive me for talking like a weatherman," he apologized. "I only meant that it will be the end of the world." "Aha," I rejoined. "I thought you meant that the hurricane would 'pull them out of the ground' 'of our bodies,' but then I realized I was thinking of tornadoes." Once again, my joke was so powerful that it became reality, and a number of tornadoes touched down in our town. Here is a secret: before I moved to Florida, I had no idea that tornadoes were possible here. That is some Kansas shit, I would have told you. You love Bill Paxton and can't admit it. You long for a tornado to leave its windy lipstick on your dick. You want to get sucked up into a twister and meet an animal there and spend an airborne afternoon squirting hot cow milk into your mouth. Well, tough. Tornadoes can't touch the American Area. Little did I know.

Noof Noof, Trow Wow

I just saw a huge banner ad that read, "IT TAKES TWO HOURS TO POISON A DOG, but only one minute to save his life." IT TAKES TWO HOURS TO POISON A DOG. What does this mean?

Ashbuary in August!

Yet it says,
in such an understated way, that this is a small museum
of tints.

--John Ashbery, "Attabled with the Spinning Years"

Here is my museum of tints! You can tell it is small because I added a Comparison Rat, who is attempting to abscond with some Orange, believing it to be cheese. In other news, who needs to take a class in color theory? THIS PERSON. In other other news, who needs to take a class in Rat-Leg Anatomy? ALSO THIS PERSON.

Comics Is Icumen In, Lhude Sing Comics

"Solzhenitsyn...is DEAD," Elegant Choice announced dramatically when he came home from work on Sunday. "Solzhenitsyn? But I thought he was from the eighteenth century," I responded wonderingly.

In My Day, Young Girls Read Pony Books and the Bible

I swung by the bookstore the other night, and immediately noticed that it seemed fuller of teenage vampires than usual. "WHY IS THIS?" I groaned aloud, and received as my answer, "YOU ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF A TEENAGE VAMPIRE PARTY." Of course. Of course I was. I know nothing about these Twilight books, but I decided to enter into the spirit of the thing, and so before the night was over I had my nails painted by a child, wore a blindfold and participated in a smelling contest, and wrote a love note to a fictional character on an enormous poster. WHY DO WE LOVE JACOB? read the poster. I had no idea, so I cheated and read the other notes, which included a number of inexplicable dog puns, which eventually led me to understand that Jacob is a werewolf. JACOB, I scrawled on the poster in huge romantic teen loops, SOMETIMES A WEREWOLF, OTHER TIMES NOT. "This Jacob," I asked the nearest teenage vampire, "is he incredibly hairy?" "Um, when he's a werewolf, he is," she responded, empurpling with disdain. A diamond tear trembled down my alabaster face. "You have drawn a sword of words and pierced me with it," I told her, and took my leave.