One of the empty glasses is blocking my view of the television. Through it’s streaky sides, I can see the freakishly warped and distorted face of Gallagher, who, for all I know, exists solely to fill an hour-long block on Comedy Central on Saturday afternoons. I roll towards the table to move the glass. An oversized paperback falls off my chest and lands on the rug below. The author, says the cover, is the voice of my generation.
For a moment, I imagine my generation as a vast amalgam of like-minded souls, holding secret telepathic meetings, electing this man to be our spokesperson, raising a unified voice against whatever it is that seems to have captured our unified attention that day.
Gladly I know this is not the case. Artificial groupings of people based on shared pop culture and fashion trends is no basis for forming any sort of a unified voice, whether it comes through the pen of a #1 New York Times Best-selling Author or through the nasal, whiny voices of spoiled children I went to elementary school with.
In Mrs. Goldberg’s class, we had an exercise where each child was called on in turn to tell the rest of their class what their "greatest fear" was. I imagine that this little forum gave our third-grade teacher masturbation material for months, sitting in the last stall in the faculty bathroom, stroking herself in that bad place, her secret pleasure accompanied by mind-images of teary-eyed toddlers, sitting alone in dark bedrooms and looking for solace in the warm mass of bedclothes.
When it came to her turn, Kerri Kramer announced to the class that her greatest fear was Nuclear War. I felt cheated by her answer, robbed of further insight into her limited soul. I was born in 1973, long after the shoe-banging days of Khrushchev. By the time I was old enough to understand what the Cold War was, I was also capable of understanding it’s purpose, of realizing that it was a show of public relations rather than a stand-off between nuclear powers. Nuclear War (or Nooc-yoo-ler War, as Kerri pronounced it) was not a realistic fear for a nine-year old.
Luckily I never had to share my fears with the class (the bell rang before it was my turn). At the time, I didn’t know how to voice them. I’ve had some time to think about them since third grade.
I fear being alone. There is a moment at which one realizes that one is inherently alone. You cannot reach into another human being’s mind and understand them. They will never understand you. And yet we will continue on trying to peck away at that shell that separates us from others, again and again like that mindless toy bird with the hat and the colored fluid inside. We cannot help ourselves; it is our nature to desire escape from our prison of flesh.
I fear the loss of youth; not of physical youth, but of spiritual. I fear that I will never again feel the naïve love that I did as a younger man. I am older now and I am broken now. I fear the loss of emotion and feeling that accompanies aging, that accompanies disillusionment and disappointment. I fear that my ability to experience the swell of excitement at the touch of someone’s hand has been stolen from me by a girl with brown eyes, a girl who, like Elizabeth Hudson, has moved on to find her fortune elsewhere.
I fear the future. I fear growing older, finding that I haven’t achieved anything of value, finding that I have wasted my time amongst Hostess wrappers and dirty glasses. I fear that I will never find greatness. I fear that I will never start a family.
I have found a lifeboat in the ocean of these fears in the form of this comic strip. For an hour or two a day, all else is forgotten as I wrestle to make Diablo harmlessly evil and Toothgnip suave and worldly. Email trickles in from people who found a chuckle here; The numbers of visitors in the logs grows slowly, but steadily larger. In that list of IP addresses and domain names, I know there are people who return daily, people who I have touched somehow. Looking at that list, I can feel my fears quielty slip away, if not forever, then at least for a moment of peace.
Thanks for reading.
-jonathan rosenberg, cartoonist extraordinaire
january 5, 1998