Comments
Loading Dream Comments...
You must be logged in to write a comment - Log In
ArtistA 12-panel autobiographical underground comic in detailed black-and-white ink with subtle sepia wash, crosshatching, and graphic-novel realism on warm cream paper. Inspired by Robert Crumb and classic alternative comics. No swearing. All text in bold uppercase hand lettering. PANEL 1: An older bald man with a long, melancholy face and plaid shirt sits alone at a table, staring into space. CAPTION: THE REVELATION. THOUGHT BALLOON: ALL THESE YEARS I WAS LOOKING FOR THE TRUTH… PANEL 2: The same man at age sixteen, with wild bushy dark hair and the same thoughtful expression, resting his chin on his hand. CAPTION: AT THIRTEEN, I KNEW SIMPLE THINGS. FLOATING WORDS: LOVE. JUSTICE. NO BORDERS. THE EARTH IS ALIVE. WE ARE ONE. PANEL 3: The older man imagines the younger self surrounded by towering books forming a fortress. BOOK SPINES: LOGIC, PHILOSOPHY, LANGUAGE, RELIGION, ECOLOGY, POLITICS, MYTHOLOGY. CAPTION: I BUILT WALLS OF KNOWLEDGE AROUND THAT LITTLE KID. PANEL 4: The older man stacks books labeled VEDANTA, BUDDHISM, RHETORIC, POLITICAL THEORY, DEEP ECOLOGY. THOUGHT BALLOON: WITH THESE, I CAN DEFEND WHAT I BELIEVE. PANEL 5: The books melt into a gigantic wobbling pudding on a silver platter. CAPTION: BUT TODAY I SAW THE TRUTH. PANEL 6: Close-up of the older man staring in astonishment. SPEECH BALLOON: I AM INSIDE A PILE OF PUDDING. PANEL 7: The pudding glistens like a surreal monument, soft and unstable. CAPTION: ALL THE BIG IDEAS—SWEET, WOBBLY, IMPOSSIBLE TO HOLD. PANEL 8: The older man lifts a curtain of pudding. PANEL 9: Hidden beneath sits the sixteen-year-old boy, calm and thoughtful. PANEL 10: Close-up of the younger self. SPEECH BALLOON: STILL LOVING. STILL HOPING. STILL RIGHT. PANEL 11: The older and younger selves sit together at a table with coffee cups, looking at one another with recognition. PANEL 12: They face a brighter landscape beyond the window. CAPTION: THE PUDDING IS MY TOOLKIT. THE KID IS MY COMPASS. BOTTOM BANNER: I STILL HAVE THE POLITICS OF MY THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD SELF. Highly detailed, emotionally sincere, humorous, philosophical, and gently surreal. The pudding is both absurd and profound, symbolizing decades of accumulated ideas protecting a simple, loving child at the center.
At some point in the long and peculiar campaign that passes for a human life, I became convinced that enlightenment would arrive wearing a necktie and carrying a stack of heavily annotated books. Logic, philosophy, religion, politics, rhetoric, and several obscure Sanskrit terms were recruited into what I imagined was a noble search for ultimate truth.
This turned out to be only partly correct.
The truth was not hiding at the summit of a Himalayan monastery or in the footnotes of some forbidding metaphysical treatise. It was sitting quietly in the center of my own nervous system, looking exactly like the thirteen-year-old boy I used to be.
That kid already had the essentials worked out.
Love was better than hatred. Borders were a bizarre administrative hallucination. The Earth was alive. Human beings were one family, however badly organized. Another world was possible, and the adults were doing a remarkably poor job of pretending otherwise.
Over the years I built an elaborate defensive fortress around this simple creature. Vedānta, Buddhism, ecology, mythology, political theory, and enough philosophical hardware to outfit a small revolution were piled up like sandbags around a very small and stubborn heart.
Then, in a rare moment of clarity, the whole edifice began to wobble.
The books softened. The theories sagged. The categories dissolved into one gigantic, quivering custard.
I looked around and realized, with the calm certainty usually reserved for shipwreck survivors and desert prophets:
I AM INSIDE A PILE OF PUDDING.
Not ordinary pudding, but the accumulated dessert of fifty-six years of thought. Sweet, unstable, and structurally incapable of supporting the weight I had assigned to it.
When I peeled back the trembling layers, there he was.
The same curly-haired boy.
The same grave expression.
The same impossible optimism.
Still loving.
Still hoping.
Still right.
So that is the secret.
The pudding is not the truth. It is merely the toolkit: useful, delicious, and liable to collapse without warning.
The child at the center is the compass.
And after all these years, I still have the politics of my thirteen-year-old self.
