‘Axis’ for January 23, 2022

Because I am a cartoonist, I do my damn best to try hiding behind the thinly-veiled veneer of just being an incognito personality around here. But this is Medium so I am more or less always beholden to at least write something that can be understood as a meaningful word count on the page. So, once again and quite contrary to my own concise nature as a writer, this meager paragraph is meant to satisfy the Algorithm. Perhaps someday one of my “daily feature” comic strips will qualify here on Medium as being more than just a “2-minute read.” There’s just something so sinister about Medium and the Algo which forces all of us to be verbose. Dammit. Dammit to hell.

Honestly, there have been many times where I fought back the graphic artist’s temptation to simply copy and paste a hell of a lot of Lorem Ipsum into these blocks of text and call it done and dusted before then clicking on “Publish.” Anything to satisfy the Algo, if you know what I mean. If you are not of the classic graphic artists enclave of aging folks around these parts and my reference to Lorem Ipsum confuses you, well, just Google and look it up. It really is a thing and it does exist, or at least it did way back in ye yonder times when I was a wee, young upstart of a graphic designer back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Of course, Adobe Corporation changed all of that in their own quite magical and innovative ways. I was already an eager learner and daily user of Aldus Pagemaker way back when the very first crop of trendy Millennials were being cooked up and born by their parents. As they were pooping their way through potty-training, I was delving deeper and deeper into the heady issues of Quark XPress, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Photoshop as a young graphic designer. I can still to this day remember my very first introduction to the Adobe Postscript file format and a bit later on, Acrobat and PDF’s. Alas, I am digressing. My apologies to both Millennials and the Algo.

The Stoic inside of me merely prods me to continue to move forward. There will be more of “Axis” to come in the later days. For now, I need to go eat some pizza and drink a hell of a lot of coffee. Memento Mori, everyone. Stay Stoic. Life is short, eat the damn pizza. You only get one chance at all of this, including your time here on Medium. Make it count. Write like your life depends of it, because in many cases, it does. I am Gen-X and I’ve reached midlife and it’s just now these days that I am finally learning many of these facts about myself. Fleetwood Mac is busy playing right now on my Pandora station and I need to go ahead and step away from Medium so that I can spend the rest of the afternoon listening to Stevie Nicks sing about Life. Rock on.