Today's This Modern World 'toon features colloquy between "Biff and Betty," two archetypes of 1950s people, who sometimes share their thoughts on the modern world. And, in the email that brought today's TMW 'toon, the 'toonist also wrote:
I think the cartoon this week is self-explanatory. I’m writing this on New Years Day, 2020, having finished up a little early for the week after a slow start (even taking a single week off can make it really hard to get the whole cartoon-writing part of my brain back in gear).
Okay, so that was a hell of a year. But here’s the thing, for me personally: *three* years ago yesterday, I was moving into my new apartment in New York City on the coldest day of the year, with absolutely no clue what to do next in my life. As I have discussed previously, the collapse of my marriage was unexpected, sudden, and happened under circumstances I will politely describe as "regrettable," and I was reeling from it. I thought about taking a hiatus from cartoon-writing, but as it turned out, the weekly deadline was the only stability I had in my life, so I kept at it. There were weeks I didn’t get much else done — I’d catch myself staring at the wall sometimes for hours on end, in a sort of disconnected fugue state — but I hit the damned deadline each week.
I think I’ve written 154 cartoons in the past three years (allowing for the couple of times I ran evergreens, like last week), and published one book, which is a slightly lower-than-average output for me, but it’s not nothing. My friend Bors kept trying to get me to contribute something to the print editions of the Nib, but I didn’t have a lot of mental energy for extra projects through a lot of this.
Of course, I had a few things on my plate. I successfully negotiated a divorce, which took most of the first year and sapped a *whole* lot of energy and time. And eventually, sold a house and dismantled the remnants of an entire life. Oh, and I had two different crises involving my aging father, two years in a row, which required me to spend several weeks in Iowa dealing with … a lot of stuff.
However: a lot of good things happened over the past three years as well! I got involved with a great person early on, too early, before I was anywhere near ready for a serious relationship. I can’t help but wish the timing had been better, in retrospect, but I think we were pretty good for each other, in the time we had together. And of course there’s the most recent relationship, the one that required airplanes, the one that didn’t survive the pandemic (the relationship I mean, not the person!). I wish things could have been different there, too, but I’m grateful for what we had.
So many things happened over these past three years that would have been incomprehensible to me in, say, November 2017, in my quiet, isolated, suburban family guy life. All the people I’ve met, all the time I’ve spent exploring various corners of the city. The birthday party in my crowded apartment whose attendees included twitter personalities, a famous filmmaker, several cartoonists, writers, and an actual former supermodel. The time I had beers with Trump crony Felix Sater (the guy who did time in the nineties for stabbing somebody in the neck with a broken wine glass stem!). The time I got to take part in a comedic political roundtable onstage at Upright Citizen’s Brigade, another fantastic venue lost to the pandemic. The time I met Mark Ruffalo at a party upstate, and he recited the line from the Avengers movie that’s almost been a personal motto for me throughout the Trump years — “that’s my secret, Cap, I’m always angry.” (A genuinely nice guy, by the way.) The time my friend Weird Al gave my son and me second-row tickets to his show, and then later that night the kid and I got caught in a bomb hoax on the subway home. That was exciting! (Even though it was a false alarm, I’m glad to say that it turns out I have good reflexes in a crisis — I sized up the situation and got us the fuck out of that station within a few seconds, without a moment’s hesitation.)
It was a weird and hard and occasionally great couple of years, and then March 2020 hit and everything kind of flatlined. Those first few months, during the initial lockdown, when we didn’t really understand the virus and there were morgue trucks in the street, were … something. I don’t think I’m the same person I was before that. Three months of near-total isolation, of being afraid to go outside or go to the grocery store, were not great for anyone’s mental health. It did inspire me to adopt the cat, at least.
However: one of the most amazing days I’ve seen since I’ve been back in New York was November 7th of this year, when Biden was officially declared the winner and the entire city poured out into the streets in a spontaneous demonstration of sheer joy and relief. I walked from Times Square to the Village that day, and it felt like I was walking through history. How often in your lifetime do you see an entire city dancing in the streets, cheering, celebrating as one? Maybe big sports victories, but those are less monumental, less universal. What I saw that day was what you might see at the end of a war or an occupation, or … after the fall of a tyrant.
But when I think about things I miss from back when the world was normal, the thing that really comes to mind is this weekly media happy hour at a dive bar in the East Village that I used to go to a lot. I met a lot of great people there, made some good friends. I fell out of it in late 2019 for awhile, went through an incredibly ill-timed reclusive phase, and man do I regret *that* in retrospect. I look forward to the day that things like that can resume, but I think we’ve got awhile to wait still.
If there’s anything I’ve learned these past three years, it is that the only way out is through.
A friend sent me this lovely poem, which somehow captures the hopeful melancholy of this New Years Day for me:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver
"Wild Geese" (2004)
And so, onward to 2021, which hopefully won’t be quite as terrible as I predict in this week’s cartoon!
Knock on wood.
Dan/Tom
If this is a (fair & balanced) melancholy farewell to 2020, so be it. And as The Worst President Ever seeks to stage a coup and overthrow the US government...
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x TMW]
This Year Will Be Better!
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)
[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the US, as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in the SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]
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