Soup or Powers

Bizarro is brought to you today by Invisible Headphones.

I've often wondered if I had a choice between invisibility on demand or being able to fly (without apparatus), which I would choose.

As a teenager, I thought the best thing about invisibility would be access to the girl's locker room. As an adult, I think more about standing behind the President at a televised news conference and yanking his feet out from under him every time he lies.

The ability to fly at will would be amazing, especially with the escalating price of gas and mass transit. It would be a blast, but only truly useful if you could carry luggage.

The Invisible Man had to be naked to be totally invisible, a caveat that would allow you to use the ability only when weather conditions permitted. And what if it was a bit chilly so you wore clothes to the location of your planned caper, then disrobed, then returned to find your clothes had been stolen? It would be a cold walk home. People stepping on your feet would also be a hazard.

I personally have experienced invisibility on a number of occasions at singles bars. And I wasn't even naked.

Cat Butts

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by Zen Industries.

This is an old cartoon from '04, and one of my favorites of the past few years. I like cats, but find their personal habits disgusting. True, even after years of yoga, I can't lick my own butt so I guess I shouldn't criticize. But I feel fairly confident that even if I could, I would refrain.

And the fact that they swallow so much hair that they barf is beyond belief. I get one piece of hair in my mouth and my head turns inside out.

Cats clearly hate to be wet, but they'll slather themselves with saliva if you drip a couple of drops of water on them. Is saliva not wet to them? Is there a difference between the sort of wet that water and saliva possess, that we humans cannot perceive?

One of my cats often slinks along the back of the sofa when I'm watching TV and licks the top of my head for several minutes. Even though it's pretty disgusting that my head is covered in cat saliva and she's using the same tongue she was just licking her butt with, I let her do it because it feels good.

Maybe that answers why they lick their butts.

Cookie Faith

Bizarro is brought to you today by Fortune 500 Cookie Company.

Seems like fortune cookies used to actually have fortunes inside them, but now they all seem to have bits of useless wisdom instead.

"A good friend is a good neighbor."
"There is no more beneficial exercise than smiling."
"A screaming child is the most powerful form of birth control."

Yeah, I know all that stuff –I don't need a cookie to tell me. I want useful information from my desert. Like if my taxes are going to get audited or whether I should change my flight because the plane is going to crash. What has happened to the prophetic powers of pastry in this country?

One confession: As a small child, I ate fortune cookies for several years before my parents noticed I wasn't taking the fortune out first. If I ever get a terminal illness, I'm going to blame it on the ink and sue China.

Blogging About Not Blogging is a Sin

This is a heads-up that activity on this blog will be even lighter than usual for the next week or so.

Popsicle Psycho

This Bizarro cartoon is made possible by Mind-Numbing Confections, Inc.
Like anyone, I loved hearing the ice cream truck coming when I was a kid. But now I've got this damned OCD-type mechanism in my brain that hangs onto any melody I hear for hours or days, playing it over and over in my head.

My studio is on the second floor of our apartment, overlooking our street in Brooklyn, and I like to have the windows open when it is between 65 and 85 degrees. For most of the summer, this leaves me totally vulnerable to the local popsicle vendors and their satanic soundtracks.

How a person with any hearing at all can work these trucks is beyond my imagination. I'd rather drive a school bus full of hungry badgers.

Stress Mess

(Click on image to biggy)

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by Eternal Gardening Equipment. "Helping people reap what they sow since 1846."

There are many good gags to be had in hospital situations, the inherent vulnerability of health issues sets the perfect stage for comedy. The one drawback is that with all their clutter and equipment, hospitals are tedious to draw. I've solved that somewhat with this empty hallway, but I still had to make up a bunch of electronical junk for the testing room. In truth, the hallway, too, would be a visual cacophony of gurneys, shelves, doors, and god-knows-what-else, but that would have confused the gag. Plus, more tedium.

I don't know if anyone can tell, but all of the machines in all of my cartoons are totally made up out of my head. That includes airplane cockpits, UFO consoles, operating rooms, engines, etc. I'd actually like to be able to research these things and make them more accurate, but I fight down the anal retentiveness in my nature and just make crap up.

Speaking of which, I'm due for a colonoscopy soon. If you haven't had one yet, you really don't know what you're missing. Knowing it is long overdue, each day I play out an internal battle over whether to call to make an appointment, or throw myself in front of a bus.

So far, it's been a tossup and I've done neither.

Punch Rolling

This cartoon is brought to you by AFGO. (Another F***ing Growth Experience)

I'm not the sort to buy into self-imposed myths like the power of profanity, but I like to keep this blog safe for all ages and sensibilities, so I dug out the asterisks for the above headline. It's been so long since I used one, I couldn't remember where I'd put them. Turns out one of my cats had eaten the entire bag, so I had to dig them out of the litter box.

As for this cartoon, because I'm not the sort of person who can keep anything to himself, I must tell you I've had trouble enjoying moseying lately, too. Some bad mojo stopped by my Brooklyn apartment to visit recently and I've been going to counseling to try to get rid of it.

I'm a big believer in counseling, it has saved my life more than once, and the therapist I'm going to now is the bomb. I'm not the Woody Allen sort–seeing a therapist regularly year after year for my entire adult life–I only go during a crisis, usually for a few months, then quit when I've solved my dilemma. The same way you'd treat your car.

I'm on the road to solving this crisis, but I'm metrosexual enough to admit it's been damned difficult, and I've spent most of the past couple of weeks feeling like something left in the yard by a passing dog.

There have been many times recently when I've wanted to give up and disappear, even give up my career and just wander off into the night, never to be heard from again. A self-imposed witness protection program. But the temptation passes quickly since I have no other means of making a living and I dislike sleeping outdoors.

I hope my blogs and cartoons haven't suffered (the comics written during this struggle will appear in a few weeks). I've always prided myself in being able to hide my despair from my readers and complete my appointed rounds without interruption. I went through a hideously painful divorce back in the mid-90s, I never missed a deadline and most of my readers never noticed a thing. But as a blog reader, you have unwittingly placed yourself into a special group of those privy to my most private thoughts: fair warning, free country, view at your own discretion.

For instance, when I was a toddler, I was convinced I was not one, but several girls trapped in a man's body. And the man wasn't even me. A story for another time, perhaps.