03/03/22: Smallville/Vaudeville

Hey, y’all. Here’s a comic.

My grandparents were actually from Detroit. Michiganders who moved south to North Carolina and eventually Florida. As the rare members of my family without a southern drawl, they spoke with a clipped, exaggerated attack, a bit like actors in an old movie. Which seems to be the way a lot of their generation talked. So maybe there’s always been a chicken or egg thing between reality and fiction? I don’t know. I never met anyone born before radios or printing presses or Shakespeare.

But as we plunge deeper into a world with more and more entertainment on demand, I do think quite a bit about how much of life I’ve spent using the stories I consumed as a meter for how I relate to people in my life. And how silly that sometimes feels. At this moment it’s hard to see exactly how these changes are changing how people interact, but I can say that growing up with fewer options made the impact of what we had both wider and deeper. We sure sat through a lot of terrible shit just to have something to talk about.

End of the day it’s funny how much I’ve gotten out of time spent watching shows I didn’t even like all that much. Weird to miss doing nothing with someone.

More soon…

-j