You can bid and get these:
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And I heard from the Waverly Press and on Thursday when the TMNT #8 Ashcan goes Live, the rest of the site will be up to 75% off. (Which is more than the 25-50% I heard about and told you yesterday...)
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Cerebus in Hell?:
SIGNED & NUMBERED CEREBUS IN HELL 2023 PREVIEW ONE SHOT SGN ED
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Steve Peters Week 4 Life!!!
Friend to the Blog, Steve Peters did a new crowdfunding campaign for his latest book. He made it. Yay Steve! As Steve said in an update: "Apparently with Crowdfundr, the campaign remains open so you can still order items from it if you missed it."
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And Sean's has launched a new Kickstarter. You can get The Exile from your LCS too.
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Oliver's Cerebus movie: The Absurd, Surreal, Metaphysical, and Fractured Destiny of Cerebus the Aardvark it's currently available on "Plex", "Xumo", "Vimeo On Demand", "Tubi". And if you're in Brazil...
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Heritage has SIX pages of original art, and FIVE covers (three of them are a single lot)! Kevin with the scanner's cup runneth over...
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Up to 35% off site-wide:
They ain't said yet...
Tell your fans! Remind them that everything will be up to 35% off -- that means $13 tees, $20 phone cases, $30 hoodies, and way more!
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Jesse Herndon has been continuing the Herculean task of transcribing Dave and I's Please Hold for Dave Sim conversations so people who can't stand the crap audio can understand what the hell we were talking about. And then he sends them to me and I forget they exist.
Which is a major disservice to Jesse, and you the AMOC reader.
Sorry Jesse.
Sorry AMOC reader.
MY long term plan was to publish a collection of these with added bits from myself that clarify/expand/wrap-up/whatnot the topics discussed. The first batch of transcripts is 505 pages in Word. And there are more transcripts after that.
SO, the question is do people actually want a physical Phonebook sized collection of me prattling on while Dave waits for me to shut the @#%& up?
OR does everybody just want me to post the transcripts here and call it a day?
While I await your comments either way, let's continue catching up on Jesse's excellent work.
Here's where I'm at (blue link means it's been posted):
1/2021 2/2021 3/2021 4/2021 5/2021 6/2021 7/2021 8/2021 9/2021 10/2021 11/2021 12/2021
1/2022 2/2022 3/2022
So, Here we go:
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| I ain't gonna lie, I'm still proud of this one... |
Part One:
Dave: This is what I think is one of God’s stories, because with God’s stories, there are no convenient responds and nobody knows what they’re talking about so it’s really His way of entering in on His work and saying, “whatever is going to happen up ahead I’m the only one that can help you.”
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Dave: So, pray, I read scripture aloud, fast, do all of the things that you’re supposed to do as a religious person, and if you’re not a religious person, ya know, good luck! Because this is gonna get a lot messier before it gets less messy.
Paula: Oh yeah, it is! It is, that’s why I just can’t see arguing about something so, like… save the arguing about politics for when this is over with, like right now we have to come together and try to get through this, ya know?
Dave: Yeah.
Paula: But, people just don’t get it, they’re very bullheaded. [laughs]
Dave: Well, and everybody has different opinions. I’m one of those people that’s saying, I don’t think this is altogether a significantly different flu than last year where it wasn’t even a news story.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Dave: Yes, thousands of people died from the flu every year.
Paula: Yeah.
Dave: And particularly the [inaudible], the people who have something else that complicates it, and that’s very very unfortunate but shutting down your society isn’t going to change that. You’re still going to have that, those number of fatalities, with exception circumstances I think the biggest problem that we have right now is that we’re looking at the north of Italy.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Dave: We have to keep that from happening here. It’s like, I don’t think that’s going to happen here, whatever is happening there has more to do with Italy than it has to do with COVID-19. What we’re experiencing in North America looks to me like a standard flu outbreak that kills thousands of people.
Paula: Mm-hmm.
Dave: You could no more fight that than you can go, “we have go to down to the sea shore and keep the waves from coming in.”
Paula: [laughs] Basically!
Dave: Yeah, everybody come with me, we’re all going down to fight the waves! It’s like, they’re waves, you can try to convince yourself you can do that, but it’s not gonna work.
Paula: Mm-hmm, exactly.
Matt: I’m on the phone now!
Paula: Okay!
Matt: Hello!
Paula: [laughs]
Dave: Nice talking to you, Paula, don’t forget to breath.
Paula: Yes! Yes, I… ya know, the best part about home care is I have a lot of time in my car to think about things and ya know, it’s nice to be able to just sit and just like take deep breaths. In through your nose and out through your mouth and just kind of… recoup. [laughs]
Dave: Yes.
Paula: But anyway, yes, yes, it was good talking to you. And stay healthy!
Dave: Okay… do some praying while you’re driving around!
Paula: Oh, I will! Okay!
Dave: Talk to you later, Paula.
Paula: Alright, thanks. Bye.
Dave: Buh-bye. Hello, Matt!
Matt: Hi, Dave. I would’ve answered the phone, but I wanted to get pants on first.
Dave: Okay! [laughs] It’s the David Letterman thing, Worldwide Pants.
Matt: Pretty much! [laughs] So how’re ya doin’?
Dave: Uhh, as far as I know, I’m fine. My life really hasn’t changed, even fractionally. I’ve lived this way for easily the last 22 years and I feel kinda bad for everybody else because it does a certain amount of getting used to but I am definitely used to it at this point. I get up in the morning and I start on whatever’s the next thing in my bottomless pile of work and I work until it’s prayer time and go and do the prayer time a little early so I can get in more scripture reading that I would usually do. I would at least conceive that to the pandemic that I think reading scripture aloud is the most efficacious thing that you can do, so, alright, I’ll go in and do that 20 minutes ahead of time instead of 10 minutes ahead of time. And then, back to work, and work until the next prayer time, and then back to work until the next prayer time, and then time to go to bed! It’s the time of year when the last prayer is around 9:30, 9:15 sort of thing. And that’s when I eat, I’m also fasting quite a bit because it’s lent. And I eat, and by the time I’m done eating, well, okay, there isn’t really any working time left. I’ll fudge that because I’ll have something that I forgot to fax somebody or whatever and go back upstairs and do some faxing, or whatever. And then off to bed. I’m really more jazzed because I’m finally able to sleep again.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: I think, gone through those two bouts of, oh no, here we go again, where I fall asleep for an hour and then I’m just wide awake. I don’t need a lot of sleep, I need three and four hour chunks, but I do need those three and four hour chunks. And ever since this happened, I’ve been getting those chunks, so it’s like, that’s definitely a big improvement in my quality of life right now. So, don’t know why… I will say, God takes things away from you and then gives them back so that you’ll appreciate it. And that’s definitely a case with that one.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: So, let’s, as you say, “oh gosh, do I have the questions! So many questions”. I thought, nobody’s going to be even thinking about this, this time around, but it always surprises. So, as you say, let’s go, Margaret says, “Thank him for the voice mail about the picture for me.” And, no problem on that. I’ve got the picture sitting right here she put on the front of one of her greeting cards and I’m hoping she found a way to post that to you so that you have my voicemail message on it and the photo itself from her. Eddie Khanna has assured me that it’s easy as 1, 2, 3, to take a phone message from your phone and email it to somebody for posting on the various websites. That’s how I’m keeping the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Patreon supporters updated most of the time, is with phone messages to Eddie Khanna.
Matt: She actually transcribed it and put it up in a blog post and sent me an email sayin’, “you can post this whenever you want.”
Dave: You’re kidding?! She transcribed it?!
Matt: She transcribed it!
Dave: Oh, Margaret, there’s better uses for your time, but thank you! Thank you, that’s good. I still have no idea… have you posted it yet?
Matt: Yeah, I posted it… Monday? Or Tuesday.
Dave: Recently, anyway. So okay, yeah, cause I’m still looking at it and going, “why would Helen Finley have made the photo available with the pair of feet on the one side, and why would the PR firm have sent that to the Houston Chronicle?” Two questions that I’ll never have an answer to, I don’t think. But, at least a better answer than Margaret’s question, which was, “who’s standing in the fireplace? I think it’s Gerhard.”
PART TWO
Dave: Anyway… yeah, and then she asked, “So now that Diamond is on . . .hold? What is A-V's plan for distribution of Cerebus in Hell? (Rick Sharer popped in with: “web comics, come on Dave you can do it!”)” Well, I can do it with some help. I think we’re probably going to keep doing the COVID-19 strips. Any word from you on that? Have you heard from…?
Matt: Uhh, the third one is… we’re starting the ball rolling, they’re hoping to get it done by next Wednesday again.
Dave: Okay. I don’t know if that’s sustainable but when Monday rolled around I went, “c’mon Dave, you know how to do this. It’s Cerebus In Hell? And as usually happens, I do two strips, typing them out, getting ready to paste them up, and as soon as I’m done typing them I’ve got the third one, and then I’ve got the fourth one, and then I’ve got the fifth one. So how are we doing on next Wednesday’s COVID-19 free comic?
Matt: Okay, the cover parody is a cover parody of “Superman vs Muhammad Ali”, “Super-Cerebus vs” either Coronavirus or COVID-19, I have to fight with David Birdsong later on tonight about that. I say COVID-19 because it sounds lyrically more like Muhammad Ali.
Dave: [laughs] That’s a good point. That’s a very good point.
Matt: Sean’s got a couple of strip ideas he’s gotta type up, David’s got a bunch… I think, done. In the first free comic, Doctor Varkhattan shrunk down to microscopic size and invaded the virus. And that gave me an idea for… we pick up on that idea in the third one, which, because DC published “Doomsday Clock” which is a Geoff Johns written, and I think Gary Frank was the artist, sequel to “Watchmen” that brings the Watchmen characters, some of them, into the DC Universe. So Superman shows up.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And Doctor Manhattan, the last thing he can see in the future is that he confronts Superman and then everything goes black and he doesn’t know what’s going on. And, as the story progresses, ya know, Superman meets Doctor Manhattan. So of course, I’m going, wait a minute. We have Doctor Varkhattan and we have Super Cerebus. It’s the Super Cerebus vs COVID-19 issue. We gotta do a parody of “Doomsday Clock” and the last thing we saw Doctor Varkhattan he was infected with mad cow disease so he kept saying moo, so the parody in my head is, “Doooomsday C*ck”.
Middle of the "I ain't reading this" exclusive: The pages of Dooooomsday C*ck" that we completed before they got yanked out to their own book:
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| I'm not including the last three pages, because they're too damn spoilery... |
Dave: Oh-ho kay! Alright.
Matt: I sent it to the fellas and they thought it was hilarious but, we might have too many strips.
Dave: Well, that’s a problem that I think we can count as a blessing that to whatever extent there are people who want to laugh in the middle of this, we’re pretty much their one stop shopping center, I think, at this point. But, we will see. We will see.
Matt: Yeah, I don’t see us doing a fourth free issue and a fourth week. I think at that point, it’s going to be stick figures and all the captions are gonna be us crying.
Dave: [laughs] Well, you surprise yourself. The thing is, when you’re under the gun and you’re producing like this, you go, “that’s it for me. I’m just completely drained out of all of this.” But give it a couple of day and you find out, no, the unconscious mind is working overtime once you get it fired up in those directions. Like, I’m amazed with Benjamin Hobbs that, the guy who was hard pressed to do one comic book a year is the one that goes, “c’mon, we’re gonna do a comic book every week!” [laughs] What do you mean ‘we’, paleface?
Matt: When he said, “I think we can get it done for this week”, I wanted to send an email… I was about to send an email, sayin’ we should wait, make it every two weeks, that gives us a little cushion, we can edit, we can fax to Dave, we can get revisions, and before I could send the email two other guys chimed in with, “oh yeah, we could definitely get this done by Wednesday” and I’m like, hey, you guys are the ones doin’ the heavy lifting, I’m just goin’, make it funny.
Dave: Right, right. I made the point to Benjamin, don’t get stuck on the idea of doing 24 pages a week. Stick with doing an new issue a week. If you’ve got five home run strips that are really really funny and that’s all that we come up with, well, okay. It’s a five page issue week. Count your blessings, how many other people are giving you a weekly comic book during this mess? But, of course, as soon as I said that to him, then he faxed through five home runs. And it’s like, well, okay, maybe that was just me invoking of them that made it happen, and now I feel like, well, c’mon, I gotta do five pages of strips. Before you know it, we’re back up to 24 pages a week.
Matt: Well that’s… today, at work, I was thinkin’ about it, and I came up with an ending for “Doomsday Blank” and the idea is that Doctor Varkhattan absorbs all the Coronavirus in the Infernal Realms and infects one person and it resets the universe…
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: …And the next page is the recreation of page one of issue 1 of “Cerebus” that you and Gerhard did, only Cerebus’ head has been replaced with the Coronavirus and it’s “Coronabus the Sarsvark”.
Jesus Past-Matt "SPOILER WARNING!" for @#%&'S SAKE!!!
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| (Click for bigger) |
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| The fellas really nailed it out of the park on these pages... |
Dave: There you go.
Matt: And I’m like, I gotta type it up and fax it... or email it to the guys and they’re either gonna think it’s genius and we have to do this, or they’re going to kill me.
Dave: Uh-huh. Or, it ends up being the actual issue 300 reboot of Cerebus everybody’s been waiting for.
Matt: Only now he’s an infectious disease.
Dave: That’s right! That’s right. Oh-ho kay! That’s… in terms of the actual “Cerebus in Hell?” comics, we do have confirmation from Diamond that “Green Dante/ Green Virgil” did arrive at Diamond, which, there was a question about that, whether that was far enough along in the pipeline to go to Plattsburgh, or was gonna get turned back at the border and have to be stored at Marquee Printing. But no, it did ship, it is at Diamond, and of course, at that point, I heard from Diamond “we’re not paying for anything more than we paid for already because we’re not getting paid.” So it’s like, okay, they’ve got “Green Dante/ Green Virgil” there, presumably there are still stores open? Like, as far as I know, I don’t know if it’s still a 30/20 split on US states of 20 states going, “Uhh, this is just complete BS, you’re not closing our states down, we’re gonna keep everything open.” I know Sweden is doing that. Sweden has stayed open, although most other European countries aren’t. So, they’ve got “Varking Dead” and “Varking Dead” went to the stores in the states that were open and were sold there. Whether that happens with “Green Dante/ Green Virgil” I don’t know. If the whole works get shut down, at some point Diamond goes, “this is it, now it’s a Federal thing, we can’t ship to any stores anywhere from any of our warehouses” at that point, I think we’re into a blank spot where, because comic books don’t exist in the direct market and we’re not able to print at Marquee and we’re not able to ship, I think we’ll probably just move the dates forward. Which will be, I can’t say that that would break my heart, because it would mean that I would be getting my lead time back. Right now I’ve got the April 2021 issue done and David Birdsong has actually caught up to me doing the strips. So “Baby Yoda Cerebus” #1, which is the April 2021 title, at that point would get moved forward and be the May issue and I would be a year and a month ahead, and if this goes on for another month, that would become the June 2021 issue and that’s really… all we can do is just go on a month by month basis. If everything reopening? Are somethings reopening? If we’re not talking about reopening, it sounds like Ontario is now shutting down through May 4th for a definite thing. They’re not going to revisit the question before then. That becomes, whether a question of is Ontario going to be an outlier, is Canada going to be an outlier, and which states are going to be outliers, and just go, “no, we’re leaving everything open”. That’s something you will hear from Diamond, I think, on the internet long before I hear anything about it.
Matt: The last I had heard from Diamond was they were shuttin’ everything down and they weren’t shipping to stores as of April.
Dave: As of April? Okay. Well, in that case, I think, however long that goes for, we’ll just bump the cover dates on “Cerebus in Hell?”, getting back to Margaret’s question of what’s AV’s plan for distribution of “Cerebus in Hell?” AV’s plan is Diamond’s plan. Whatever Diamond is doing, that’s what AV is doing. But that’s really the situation that we’re sitting in right now. And I did want to interrupt myself here to say Alfonso at StudioComix Press got permission from the Frederick Street Mall to go into his shop, like he can’t open it as a shop, but he can let himself in as a printing place and printed the front labels for Cerebus Archive #8. So Rolly went and picked those up and brought them back and I signed them out back at Camp David, and Rolly has taken them home where he has all of the Cerebus Archive #8 portfolios already with their green labels on them and all of the content inside and next stage will be actually packaging them and then finding out is it possible for Packaging Too in Waterloo, who transports all of the US copies across the border to an individual ship site, where it goes across as one shipment, and then gets broken down into the individual mailers. Are they able to do that? Is that part of the border protocols between Canada and the US right now? That’s where that stands, so, very interesting to me that Alfonso had to get permission to go into StudioComix Press even just to do printing. It seems to me that that’s one of those private property situations where, as long as he’s current with his rent, he should be able to be in there doing whatever he wants. He’s not going to infect anybody if he’s just in there doing some printing. But these are all questions up ahead for the, what I call, the Beijing vs Washington people. We don’t want to turn into Beijing, and we don’t want to turn America into Communist China, although some of us do, and those are the borderline areas I think are critical and need to be watched very very carefully. Ah, okay! Moving on to John Glismann: “Please ask Dave if he’s ever seen Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. It looks just like the tower that delivered Cerebus to the Moon so he could get the bad news from the Judge.” He says: “Last summer my wife and I traveled around the U.S. and visited a place called “Devil’s Tower” in Wyoming. As a Cerebus fan, that tower looked VERY familiar. Apparently it was considered a mystical, holy place by Native Americans back in the day. I’ve never seen any indication throughout the years that Dave has seen this place- just wondering? The first picture is the tower and the second picture is a closeup of the tower’s face of a rock formation that actually looks like a skull (!).” Which, indeed it does. Um, yeah, that was definitely not something that I had in mind with the tower that the upper city of Iest is on, but sure as shooting looks like it in the photograph. Is the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, is that the same thing in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”?
Matt: Yes.
Dave: It is?
Matt: Yes.
Dave: It is. Okay, alright. Because, I think I saw “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and went, “this is starting to seem weirdly resonant with my comic book.” Back in the day, when weird resonances with my comic weren’t the norm… weren’t the exception rather than the norm that they seem to be becoming.
PART THREE:
Dave: Jesse Lee Herndon asks: “Speaking of this week's one, I have a few questions for Dave. #1 In "Latter Days", at one point during his time spent quarantined... err, bound, Cerebus thinks the word of Rick he's supposed to give the Three Wise Fellows is "Mungu Mkono", but he can't recall how to say it. Was "Mungu Mkono" the actual "word of Rick" Cerebus was supposed to answer them with, and if so, would the outcome of the situation have been any different if he'd done so?” I suspect that it would have, yes, it was intended that way, which I just thought was a really interesting thing to do. Making basic flawed memory a particular story point in the fact that I am sure Cerebus remembered very very vividly the dream of Rick, particularly with the bang that he woke up to as soon as he heard “Mungu Mkono” and I thought it would be very very funny that as a vivid a memory as that is, he can’t remember what it actually was. “He said something, but I can’t remember what it is, and everything is hanging in the balance. This is really really irritating” kind of thing. And at this point, I definitely see that as the way God tends to work, which is, “okay, now you realize how much you irritate me a lot of the time.” I mean, it’s, there’s just one thing missing from your life and you won’t do it and here’s all of these other things that are weirdly complicated and a lot more difficult to do, and you do those practically as second nature. It’s like, work on yourself, improve the sides of yourself that you should be improving. His #2 question, “I just heard that back in 2015 a previously "lost" F Scott Fitzgerald short story, entitled "Temperature", was discovered and published. Has anyone sent that to you, or did your interest in the subject of F Scott end entirely once the research into him in "Going Home" ended?” Uh, no, I always… Am still very interested in F Scott Fitzgerald, and particularly in this situation where it is a short story, yeah, I would be very interested in reading that just to see what a Scott Fitzgerald story that I haven’t read would read like. A short story is not going to take very much time at all to read, so if anybody runs across “Temperature” on the internet and can fax it to me, that would be great. That’s certainly something I would never find on my own. [clears throat] Excuse me. I went back through the earlier correspondence files for March, which are on their way out back to Camp David to get into their correspondence boxes and I had the letter from F Scott Fitzgerald, quarantined in 1920 in the south of France during the Spanish Influence outbreak that you faxed to me. Did you post that to A Moment of Cerebus?
Matt: Uhh, I think it went up on one of Oliver’s columns.
Dave: One of Oliver’s columns?
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: Anyway, I very much enjoyed that. “Dearest Rosemary, it was a limpid dreary day, hung as in a basket from a single dull star. I thank you for your letter. Outside, I perceive what may be a collection of fallen leaves tussling against a trash can. It rings like jazz in my ears. The streets are that empty. It seems as though the bulk of this city has retreated to their quarters, rightfully so. At this time, it seems very poignant to avoid public spaces. Even the bars, as I told Hemingway, but to that, he punched me in the stomach, to which I asked, if he had washed his hands. He hadn’t. He is very much the denier, that one. Why, he considers the virus to be just influenza. I’m curious to his sources. The officials have alerted us to insure we have a month’s worth of necessities. Zelda and I are stocked up on red wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, white wine, sherry, gin, and, lord if we need it, brandy. Please pray for us.” [laughs] And then it’s like, Scott, there’s your problem right there. But try telling that to him in 1920 when those most definitely seemed to him to be the necessities of life. Anyway, when I saw, “Dearest Rosemary”, I went, is this the actress, the teenaged actress that he got smitten with? And ended up pulling out my F Scott Fitzgerald A to Z and looking up Rosemary Hoyt, thinking that was the name of the actress and I had it wrong. Rosemary Hoyt is the name of the actress in “Tender is the Night” who was based on Lois Moran, who was the teenaged actress that F Scott Fitzgerald became smitten with around 1918, 1919, in and around there. So that was kind of interesting in itself. It’s “Dearest Rosemary”, it’s almost like he’s writing to his character instead of writing to the actress, which is, when you start mixing in that alcohol…
PART FOUR:
Dave: Uhh, Jesse Herndon’s third question: “Have you heard from Bob Burden recently?” No, as a matter of fact, I was thinking that because, particularly lately I’ve been… the issue before “Baby Yoda Cerebus” #1 is “Flaming Cerebus” #1 and I kept thinking, if I’m working on “Flaming Cerebus” #1, that’s gotta connect psychically with Bob Burden at some point and I’m gonna get a phone message from Bob Burden, so I was kind of surprised when I didn’t. “On his Facebook this week, he revealed he was very sick for the past month with pneumonia and ended up quarantined! He's better now, thankfully.” I was going to ask David Birdsong, because he’s finished “Flaming Cerebus” including the front cover and inside front cover, if he could go in through Facebook or some other means and find a way to contact Bob Burden and send him “Flaming Cerebus” #1, if anybody deserves to read “Flaming Cerebus” #1 a year before everybody else gets to read it, it’s gotta be Bob Burden. And I’ve also been quoting Bob extensively over the last two weeks, because I think, very very appropriate for the situation is Bob Burden’s “This calls for an emergency!” which I think is what we’re doing. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong and I hope that this doesn't turn into something like the 1918 to 1920 Spanish Flu influenza. I think this is just a garden variety flu but then, as we saw from F Scott Fitzgerald Hemingway thought the Spanish Flu was just the flu, so, it takes a while before you can find out about those types of things. But, yes, David Birdsong, if you’re listening to this and if you have some time, which we all do! Could you please email “Flaming Cerebus” #1 to Bob Burden with our compliments. And Jeff Seiler, Jeff Seiler wants to know, “My questions for Dave this month: Who? What? When? Where? And Why? Sorry, the former journalist in me couldn't resist.” Okay. So we’ll go, who? Me. What? ME! When? Now. Where? Here. Why? I have no idea and/or because. Uhh, moving on to Brian West. “Hi Dave! With #stayathome the words of the day in my home state of KY I found it interesting that there are still those who chose to dissent from the conventional wisdom of state officials here. This being that individuals and businesses must follow strict social distancing guidelines and/or to leave money on the table to stay at home for days, maybe even weeks at a time. Case in point is a bill filed on 03/19/2020 by House representative Savannah L. Maddox of Dry Ridge, KY which would, in principle, limit "the scope of a governor's executive orders issued during a public health emergency" and "also allow Kentuckians to sue the state if an order adversely affects their business." Uhh, the first one, I think, yes, definitely we want to be working on a lot of scope legislation not only after this is over, but in the midst of it. There has to be limits on how you can over… again, this is to me, the Beijing vs Washington question. Beijing has absolutely no limits on its government powers, Washington has a very very specific limit on its government powers. You can do things for a little while, but then the foundation of the democracy is that you can’t keep doing this without the support, the vote of the elected people who have been elected to make these decisions. As someone in the National Post was pointing out, even during the lowest point of World War II, where England was really on the ropes and had no idea if Hitler was just gonna come straight across the English Channel and invade England and all kinds of emergency measures were called for in very short order, Parliament still convened and Winston Churchill still had to make his case for “I want these powers and I want these powers” and he would only get those powers for a specific length of time. And Parliament had to actually meet in secret because there was no way that they wanted the Luftwaffe knowing that the entire British government was in one place at a given time. So that excused secret meeting so it wasn’t actual star chamber stuff, although it was verging on it. And had to make his case that, “this is what I want to do, this is the powers that I want Parliament to devolve upon me and my government and here’s the case that I’m making for it.” Usually he got exactly what he was looking for, but the point is, even when it looked like death would be raining from the sky and the landing boats would be rolling up on the south shore of England and tanks coming ashore, Parliament still met. We’re not in anywhere near! Near, that kind of situation anywhere in North America, so it’s appalling to think that Parliament would get suspended, or as Justin Trudeau was trying to do to get unlimited taxing authority through to the end of 2021. It’s like, no, that’s Beijing. That’s yours and your father’s muddle-headed appalling reverence for Communism, reverence that came from Pierre Trudeau’s friendship with Fidel Castro. It’s like, no, no we don’t want Canada turned into communist China because it’ll make things easier for you, because we’re already pretty much at the borderline there just because of this situation. A lot hinges…
PART FIVE:
Dave: …As far as I can see on, what is the US debt going to do? We already have proven to ourselves through the Iraq and Afghanistan wars unimaginable amounts of money can be created out of thin air, which George W Bush did. And then Barack Obama doubled and tripled and quadrupled down on going, “well if we can invent that much money for that purpose, then we can invent a trillion dollars so that everybody has socialized medicine in the United States.” As soon as you have that extrapolation from George W Bush’s creation of whatever he created, it was the hundreds of billions, to the trillions, then the question is, okay, how much money is Donald J Trump going to invent through the US debt and the United States is the only country on the planet that can do that. When I was talking to Jeff Seiler on the phone, I was saying, I think we have to just skip the quadrillion and go right to the quintillion, if not sextillion, if the United States is going to finance the entire country. The entire United States, top to bottom, for however long it has to do that, before we get back to some semblance of normalcy. Like, the amounts of money that you’re talking about are really really inconceivable, but then, for a country of 350 million people or whatever the United States population is, it’s around there, inventing a trillion dollars is already lunatic. That money does not actually exist, it never will exist, unless you’re going to invent fourth dimensional money, but it could go exponentially pretty much the way they’re talking about the worst case scenario the COVID-19 in Northern Italy. I think you could probably calculate it mathematically, and the United States, as I say, the United States would be able to do it and I think all of the other G7 countries would just fall into lockstep. I mean, right now it would make sense if the United States was inventing three trillion dollars, which is what we’re talking about, that Canada would invent 300 billion dollars. 300 billion dollars is not going to finance everyone in Canada, even just rolling it out, is going to be a very difficult path. But, definitely not impossible. I mean, this is one of the things were our governments have us by the short and curlies, and we have the government by the short and curlies because we can say, “I’m a taxpayer. You know my bank account. You know how to access them because you do direct deposit to it. You can invent money and you can deposit directly into my account and every other taxpayer’s account. How much money are you going to deposit?” Which implies, how much money are you going to need to create? That to me is the next game in this really really amazing chess match that I never thought I would live to see happening, but this is the question. I mean, I was just talking to one of the guys, one of the public service workers who works for City Hall and they’re doing some work outside, basically sealing off the outside of City Hall so that nobody is using any of the places to sit down, so that everybody stays home. And he’s getting paid to come in and do that, but then he’s not getting paid for anything else. He’s laid off, but as he points out, the Mayor and Council are still getting paid. So you extrapolate that upwards from municipal to provincial to federal, and the question at the top has to be, you’ve been inventing money for decades, invent money, but invent it on an exponentially large level and then, okay, now we’re into a whole different kind of environment. Now we’re into… how do we just do that temporarily and then get the government back out of that? Because, if we don’t do that, we will be communist China. We will have people living in animal cages and counting themselves lucky that they have an animal cage to themselves and a bowl of rice a day. Okay, Dave Sim gets down off of his soapbox.
Matt: Well, I was gonna say, you kinda already sort of told this story, cause, that’s, ya know, you’re talkin’ ‘bout Palnu at this point.
Dave: Right! Right. Um, I realize that a lot of people are going, “this is sounding really familiar to me” and it’s like, okay, I have a little better grasp of these things than, let’s say, your average Star Wars fan, where you can watch all of the Star Wars movies and then never come anywhere near remotely having to do with how things structurally exist. But you really don’t want to be looking at Dave Sim going, “well, what are the answers then, if you know all this stuff?” and it’s like, I have, as Tony Randall said when he was on the Tonight Show and Johnny Carson was saying to him, “you’re an expert on opera”, and he said, “I have a fan’s knowledge of opera. Which is very different from actually knowing opera.” Dave Sim knows funny books inside and out, but no, you don’t want Dave Sim telling you, except in terms of the broad strokes as far as he understands them, this is what I think is the next step in the chess game is the United States decides how much wealth can be created at one time and then, I’m hoping, because Washington is still Washington going all the way back to George Washington, the United States would then get as far back out of that once the COVID-19 crisis was past. Which, we have to look at if a basket case country as China can get pretty much all the way through it in two months, their big spike was in January and we’re now in the beginning of April. If they can get through it in two months, presumably we can get through it in two months, but, two months is still a long time. If you look at the statistics and the number of people who are paycheck to paycheck, they don’t save, they have absolutely no savings, every penny that they come in goes to buying the necessities of life. Months from now, those people are in serious, serious trouble. And then progressively from there, the people who have managed to put aside two or three months worth of money, they will be fine if this last two months. They won’t be fine, they’ll take a massive hit, but they will get through on the other side and start rebuilding from there. If you’re seriously talking about telling everybody you have to go home and not go out, there is zero commerce, absolutely nothing going on except selling food in groceries stores and leaving pharmacies open, then you’re talking about, a conservative estimate in my mind, you’re talking about inventing a quintillion of dollars and pumping it out through the tax system. The same as an oil pipeline. You can have an oil pipeline going this way, or you can have it going the other way, they’re set up to do that. Well, okay, in this case you go, United States will not take money from the American people for the next two months. United States will give money to the American people in the proportion that is necessary to keep people from starving to death. But, uhh… now I am [laughs] down from my soapbox.
PART SIX:
Dave: Brian West continues, “My question is how can an individual in a society, which is professed as open and free, hope to have autonomy if his rights as a citizen towards redress are curtailed, even abrogated, by fiat or by an executive order, even in times of public health emergency?” I think that’s one of those situations where you go, the solution to this isn’t people in Kentucky suing the state because the order adversely effects their business, you don’t want to have the state of Kentucky having to engage in their own court with their own citizens. A lawsuit is never the best solution to anything. A lawsuit just is make-work project for lawyers. So I don’t think suing is a good idea, but definitely autonomy has to be maintained. It is, you are still a citizen of a democracy. You still have inalienable rights as a citizen, but you also have inalienable responsibility. If the government census is, in Kentucky, we want everybody to go home and you’re not allowed to go out and do any kind of commerce, then again, it has to be, okay, we as the citizens, and as public spirited citizens, will allow that because the government serves at our pleasure, but we’ll allow that only up to the point where we can see the problem is being solved. Which, Kentucky’s effort, and the governor of Kentucky’s effort, I think are better directed towards Congress and towards the White House, saying the instruments do exist. We’ve proved that the feds can created money in unimaginable amounts and we know that we can pump it out through the system. What we have to do is say, here’s a reasonable amount to do that with on a state level or on a federal level, and here’s how long we’re going to do it and we will revisit the question in thirty days and have a free vote on, is this doing what we want it to do? Do we want to do this differently? Do we want to stop doing this? Or what is the question? I did write under Brian West’s observations there, you can vote to change a democracy into a police state, you can’t vote to change a police state into a democracy.
Matt: Yeah, I agree with that, very much.
Dave: So, it’s a matter of, if you’re going to go police state, and we can certainly all of us as reasoning people see the persuasiveness of the argument. If that has to happen, then it has to happen temporarily. It has to be, no we do this up to a specific point. Right now we’re at the point of two weeks of just executive fiat. Everybody stay at home. All aspects of the economy are shut down, except for grocery stores and pharmacies and vital infrastructure. Two weeks, we can go along with that, getting a little frayed around the edges. I don’t think you wanna go past 30 days before you say, no, we have to decide what we’re going to do here. And it does look you do have a consensus in the United States. I mean, given the complete poison of the red state vs blue state thing, the fact that everybody seems to be in unanimous agreement that creating 3.2 trillion dollars and pumping it out into the economy is what we’re going to do. Now we just have to figure out how we’re going to do it. It’s one of the things that I definitely always admired about the United States is, as with the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, you guys dive into the pool and teach yourselves how to swim when you get there. In Canada, it’s like, we won’t even go into a wading pool without triple redundancies and guaranteed safeties and a lifeguard and all the rest of it, and it’s like, there comes a point in the course of human events where you need that. You need the, we’re resourceful people, we have good will, we will get through this.
Matt: Uhh, I was shoppin’ when all this started, cause Paula and Janis got sick with the flu.
Dave: Right, right right.
Matt: And, I’m at Walmart and I’m only buyin’ necessities. Cause, they have the flu, I’m gettin’ chicken noodle soup, I’m gettin’ Gatorade, I was gonna get bread to make sandwiches and there was no bread. And then, at that point, I’m in a zombie apocalypse movie, I’m gonna walk around and just see what’s here. And I walked past the eggs and the eggs were gone, they had no eggs at all. And I ran into a guy I worked with and he’s tellin’ me, “oh yeah, I was here the other day” and he saw someone he knew who was buying 12 dozen eggs to get him through the next… and, both he and I are shakin’ our heads, goin’ “you’re gonna eat 144 eggs before they go bad?”
Dave: [laughs] Exactly! Exactly. It’s… man oh man, you really have to wonder about the “thinking” that those people do.
Matt: I read an article about why there is no toilet paper and it was boiled down, it’s psychology, in a crisis people try to control what they can, so, retail therapy. I’ll go shopping and then I’ll be in control of the situation. And you’re buying the necessities and your brain goes, “toilet paper! We’re gonna need toilet paper” whether or not you actually need it, your thinkin’ that. So you start stockin’ up, and that’s stage one and then stage two is, somebody comes through and sees, “hey that guy has a bunch of toilet paper, there must be somethin’ goin’ on. I’m gonna buy toilet paper.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: And then stage three is, you go to buy toilet paper because you actually need it and then there’s none there. And I think we’re at stage four of, well, the truck’s comin’ in on Tuesday so be here when we open and we might have some.
Dave: Yeah, yeah. Shoppers Drug Mart, which is the place where I’m shopping because it’s the closest at hand and it’s a pharmacy/grocery store, fusion thing, that Loblaw’s does in Canada. And I was in there a week ago Saturday and one of the girls was telling me they sold seven skivs of toilet paper in a pharmacy/grocery store combination. So it’s one of those, Galen Weston, who owns Loblaw’s in Canada… [laughs] It’s a license to print money for him right now. I mean, he’s got all of his supply lines worked out. He does the Loblaw’s grocery store chain, which consists of a bunch of different brand names and also the Shoppers Drug Mart chain, and he’s got all of the supply lines worked out, it’s just a matter of filling them. And, it’s like, if you’re looking for a stock to buy right now, if you do have some disposable income, I would say grocery store, because this is like a 500% increase that they’re all getting in people shopping. They’re not shopping once a week anymore, they’re shopping once a day and they’re clearing out whole sections that then get refilled and then cleared out and refilled and cleared out In North America, we’re very very good about grocery store supply line. We’ve got that part figured out, unlike Italy, unlike Red China, unlike Russia. So it’s… this will work out, it will work out, just everybody take a chill pill.
Matt: [laughs] That’s what I’ve been sayin’ for three weeks now!
Dave: Yeah, yeah. It’s very difficult, though, because it is complete human nature. Bob Burden’s “this calls for an emergency!” So, an alternate question Brian West had, “if the first question I offered here seems uninteresting: Who was a better goalie, Fuhr or Hasek?” And it’s like, you’re way past my sincere hockey level of interest beyond just the Toronto Maple Leafs, which is what it whittled down to. You should be asking about Johnny Bower and Gump Worsley, and my answer would be, check their goals against average and how many shutouts they had, career and regular season, and how many shutouts they had in the playoffs. I think, shutouts in the playoffs, that’s how you determine who the best goalie is. And, talk about from the sublime to the ridiculous. There we go. Okay! And Glen asks: “This question to Dave will likely only interest Canadian readers of "A Moment of Cerebus" like myself. What do you think of Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister?” It is necessary, according to Thumper’s advice, if you don’t got nothing nice to say, don’t say nothing at all. So, moving on to David Birdsong’s question… [laughs]
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: That’s unkind. That’s unkind. I’m sure Trudeau is in a very unenviable position right now and he doesn’t really have a background in too many things that would help him in this situation. One of the instances that I would use is, I think that Donald Trump is a better Christian than Justin Trudeau is a Christian, although they are both Christian in a very very loose sense. In more of a loose sense than… one of the really interesting things that I see going on right now is the war of wills going on between Vladimir Putin and King Solomon of Saudi Arabia. Which, I think, is going to come down to, who is the better monotheist? Is Vladimir Putin a better Russian Orthodox Christian than King Solomon is a Sunni Muslim? And whoever that is will end up prevailing in that situation. But, if you’re talking about the irresistible force and the immovable object, I think that’s the perfect example of that one that goes probably very very high up in the actual pecking order that eventually culminates at [inaudible]. God and his Angels will have to arbitrate between Vladimir Putin and King Solomon and obviously I have no idea what King Solomon is actually like as a Muslim or how Vladimir Putin actually is as a Russian Orthodox Christian. But I’m pretty sure that is pretty well known in the upper level in proximity to God and is probably causing, “ohhh we didn’t need for this to happen right now” kind of thing. But, that’s exactly what happens in these kinds of situations, where, as they say, when God enters in upon his work, God is not mocked. We’ve pretty much convinced ourselves that we were able to turn the clock back to September 10th 2001 and it’s like, mmm… no, you’re forgetting the impact of 9/11. You’re forgetting that that went on for weeks, that that went on for months. David Letterman’s completely incapable of doing a television show for weeks and then having to have a sob fest with Dan Rather on the first night back. Okay, you’ve almost completely lost that in the ensuing 18 years and six months, but, okay, here’s what happens when you try to go, “okay, let’s just forget that that happened and let’s go back to party party party.” One thing I can pretty much guarantee everybody is, I don’t think we’re going back to party party party. So, this is why I keep suggesting, ya know, humor me. You’re sitting at home, you have absolutely nothing to do, and you’re binge watching television and you’re doing whatever else. Download John’s Gospel in the interlinear form which is the most accurate form that you can get, as far as I can see, in the English language. Spend two and a half hours reading through it out loud, don’t interrupt yourself. Don’t let anybody else interrupt you. Say, this is what I’m doing, I’m going chapter one to chapter 21, and I think that’s probably the best thing that you can do, and that will become a more vital part of your life, I would venture to say, in the coming months, particularly than party party party. Party party party? No. Scripture, fasting, prayer. If you could only force yourself to do it once a week, or once every week, or once every three weeks, hey, at least you’re that much closer to God than you’ve been in the rest of your life. And that will serve you in far more good stead than anything else. If you’re asking my opinion, that’s my opinion on that. But, like I say, the King Solomon and Vladimir Putin, that, I think, probably goes up much higher in the hierarchy than what’s the situation between Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump. I’m hoping… I think is, as I say, that Donald Trump is a much better Christian than Justin Trudeau, but we’ll find out in the… the proof is in the pudding…
PART SEVEN:
Dave: …I would think. Uhh, David Birdsong asks, “Dave, Jesse Lee Herndon mentioned a while back that he thought both Cirin and Suenteus Po were both hermaphrodites and I didn't think so because Cirin's interest in Cerebus was quite obsessive until she found out about the "kitchen knife incident". At that point she appeared to keep him under surveillance but did not bother to even kill him. If Suenteus Po were also an hermaphrodite wouldn't she have had the same level of interest in him?” Uh, yeah, I would say so. I haven’t… I didn’t really resolve those, as I do have a kind of sexuality firewall with my characters of… the idea was, if Cerebus was a hermaphrodite and hadn’t has his female plumbing disabled in the kitchen knife incident, he would have been able to impregnate himself and what would have happened there? Cause, if he’s impregnating himself he presumably wouldn’t have a human child. He would have an aardvark child, which is what was of interest to Cirin as an aardvark and as a matriarch. Whether Cirin was a hermaphrodite or Cirin was female, and whether Suenteus Po was a hermaphrodite or Suenteus Po was exclusively male… you get two different instructions on the entire 6000 page storyline out of that. Like I say, as an author I wouldn’t intrude into that situation of saying definitively this is it, because I don’t want to be sticking my head into my characters’ underwear.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Which, I think, would be… maybe the overall contribution that I make to human society. Can we keep our heads out of each other’s underwear? I think we will be better and richer and more spiritually adept people if we can do that. Uhh, Dave Kopperman says: “I got one: is there anything that Dave regarded as a creative sacrifice when he went from the issue-by-issue mindset to the serialized novel format? I'd say the shift starts to happen in the middle of High Society but really starts to kick in during the C&S II and then becomes complete with Jaka's Story. Like it's clear that the long-form approach gave him access to some major benefits from a narrative, visual, and formal perspective - but opening a window shuts a door, as it were, so some things that were part of the more discrete issues approach were lost. The individual issue titles, for one, a thing that Dave had a real gift for.” and thank you for the compliment. “So, again: was there anything he regarded as a deficit to making comics in that shift?” Uhh, no, not really, because… opening a window shuts a door pretty much sums it up. I’m just doing the notes for Cerebus Archive #9, hoping to work ahead on that and have Cerebus Archive #9 come out far far closer to #8 than #8 did with #7, and I definitely noticed that because page 20 of issue 176 is one of the pages. So it’s a… it’s very noticeable reading issue 176 that… page 20 of issue 176 is definitely a… mind-messing cliffhanger for people who have been following this all along, where Suenteus Po suddenly seems to step out of character and get really really steamed. And it’s far more noticeable as page 20 of issue 176 than it is as page whatever it is of “Reads”. So that’s one of those, yeah, I definitely had to trade off in those situations, going, yes, I like having chapter titles and it is a big plus in “Church & State” that each 20 page issue was the start of an individual chapter, but then you’re trading off there where you’re going, well wait a minute, every chapter is 20 pages long? When was the last time when you read a novel where each chapter was 20 pages long? So instead of finding a halfway point in there, where, okay, I’ll start the chapter here, and when the chapter’s over I’ll do another title for the next chapter, and if that happens to be the beginning of this issue, that’s fine. If it happens to be page five, that’s fine. I opted instead for, I think it’s time for me to do a graphic novel as I conceive of that, as opposed to what people were calling graphic novels. The reason the Cerebus graphic novels are called phonebooks and a bunch of skinny little fat comic books are called graphic novels, we’re still not away from that because there’s still so few novel sized graphic novels. But definitely by the time I was doing “Mothers & Daughters” it was, mmm no, if I’m doing the chapter title that’s already skewing in the direction of these just being fat comic books and I want these to be graphic novels. And not doing titles on them, that was also, it seems more of an early novel approach to have chapter titles for the chapters in a novel. Most novels are just a number that tells you this is chapter 21 or whatever it is, and that’s done strictly as very very emphatic punctuation. This is a major break. We have stopped talking about what we were talking about in the last chapter and we’re talking about what we’re talking about in this chapter. And “Church & State” is the earlier form of novel and “Mothers & Daughters” is the latter form of novel. So…
Matt: And then, of course, right after “Mothers & Daughters” is “Guys” where, in the individual installments you got to the point where it’s here’s the cover, here’s the inside cover, and no “note from the president”, just… we’re here.
Dave: Right! You’re already in the comic book as soon as you read the cover.
Matt: Yeah, I mean… think about it, now that I actually think about it, that was pretty brilliant!
Dave: Well, it’s brilliant if people like it. It’s annoying if they don’t like it.
Matt: There was a… Vertigo did somethin’ one month, it was kind of a gimmicky thing where the cover was the first page of the issue.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And, for all the Vertigo titles for whatever month this was, and I only know because I was buyin’ Astro City and it’s normally an Alex Ross painted cover and this particular cover it’s an Alex Ross painted cover but the cover’s four panels. And you’re lookin’ at it and it doesn’t look right cause it doesn’t look like a normal issue of Astro City and then you get to the back where they explain what’s goin’ on and I’m like, well that was pretty cool!
Dave: Right. Right. As long as your reaction is “that’s pretty cool” that’s fine. But anytime you mess around with the structure of people’s entertainment there are people where it’s “don’t mess with my cover. The cover is important to me as a cover. I have to get my comic book”, and particularly Cerebus where the pattern response at that point was up above 200 issues of “there’s a cover, on the inside of the front cover Dave talks to you, and then you start reading the comic book.” You’re really taking your life in your hands by messing with any of that stuff, but at the same time, that’s, as Cerebus fans know, I reserve all of those powers, I was a real autocrat as the creator of Cerebus. Whatever I think is cool, that’s what we’re gonna do. If you don’t think it’s cool, I’m sorry, but I’m the one putting…
PART EIGHT:
Dave: Okay, the David Johnson part that you came up on. The Refuge Elf, the pseudonym this time… I’m not sure this is David Johnson or this is..
Matt: Ya know, he later on in subsequent comments came forward as, yep, no, this is me.
Dave: Well, I’m not sure that that’s true. There’s another guy in Evansville, Indiana, which is either where David Johnson is or where David Johnson was, who is a real troublemaker. Like, if you were to describe the two of them in terms of the Johannine Jesus and the Synoptic Jesus, David Johnson’s [inaudible] was always the Johannine Jesus and the other guy was definitely the Synoptic Jesus. You wanna keep one hand in your wallet at all times. I don’t know if David Johnson just drifted away and this guy decided, “hey, this will be interesting, I get to appropriate his identity.” Anyway, “Why don't you just shuck the questions this time Matt?” See, that doesn’t sound like the David Johnson that I knew. The David Johnson that I knew was a very very devout Christian and wouldn’t phrase something that way. “Mine too. This is just an idea. It's always the questions and selling Cerebus.” I don’t think David Johnson was see what you’re doing and what I’m doing as the questions and selling Cerebus. Yeah, we talk about Cerebus and I talk about CAN8 because I’ve got people who ordered it and I’ll talk about CAN9 because that’s what I’m working on and I definitely hope people will buy it. But making it sound like it’s always the questions and selling Cerebus is a very jaundiced way of putting that. “but to turn your money quote around for this post, I've always liked your talks about family and things with Dave. Just a fan talking to him.” Uhh, I’m on the same page with that. But I have to be careful with that, because the people who are listening to “Please Hold for Dave Sim” you have to assume they’re pretty much interested in what Dave Sim has to say. I’m not really interested in what I have to say because I know what I’m going to say!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: I’ve got pretty much everything that all the big questions in my own mind answered to the best of my abilities. I’ve revisited all of my math, so I’m always more interested in what other people have to say. Paula and I talking before you picked up, and it’s like, can we just hit switch on record and…
Matt: I recorded a little bit of that, I shoulda started it a little bit sooner.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: Because I picked up the phone, and I’m like, you guys were talkin’, I’m gonna wait until there’s a natural break to say “okay I’m on the phone” and I’m like, “I should really be recordin’ this.”
Dave: [laughs] Cause it’s… you’re not gonna come to a natural break if it’s Dave Sim just talking to somebody, because it’s… you know, I’ve been living like this for 22 years so any chance that I get to find out about other people’s experiences, that’s what I’m interested in. And the fact she’s in the medical side of things and has been for a long, long time, I was very curious about, okay, what about the new job? And okay, the new job is on hold. The one where you went out of the mall with her so she could buy more appropriate business style clothes for it. So, yeah, I’m sitting there going, I’ve got other stuff that I have to do and I’m supposed to be talking to Matt for an hour or as we’re at the hour and a half mark now. I would be very very interested in, there’s a lot of questions that I would have for Paula and, ya know, in the situation that she has and I hope that she can plug in some more of that at the beginning. Get her to listen to what the end of our conversation was like and plug in what she remembers of how that started and that’s probably the more interesting introduction for the first major COVID-19 “Please Hold for Dave Sim”. Let’s talk to Paula Dow first! Okay, “I think Dave is so like, Ok, it's talk to Matt Dow time now on Thursday at this time for 60 minutes, after prayer time # 3, then after talk with Matt, read Koran, then prayer time # 4, and then... You get it. Why not just surprise him and say, No questions....that's why I didn't fax them Dave...just want to talk to you today and what do you want to talk about?” It’s a nice theory, but again, I don’t really want to talk about anything. There’s very very little talking in my life. There’s a lot of thinking. There’s a lot of thinking and road mapping, what’s the next logical thing for me to do and that’s what I’m going to do, and where’s the logical place to start doing that? As soon as I know the logical place to start doing that, that’s when I start doing it. What’s the natural sequence? Okay, I just washed my hair, so before I have to put my toque on so I can go out and buy groceries, sit down and record the Weekly Update, because my hair looks like hair. After it’s had the… if you were watching, if there was a closed circuit TV in the Off-White House, there’d be this weird, “why did he get just that far working on the CAN9 notes and then all of a sudden washed his hair, and then all of a sudden did a Weekly Update?” and it’s like, oh ho, there you go! It’s the natural, logical sequence to do them in, and that’s really a major part of my job skill. So when somebody says, “what do you want to talk about?” it’s like, I don’t really talk. Talk to me is enjoyable, finding out about other people’s lives in enjoyable, but I’ve only got so many hours left in my life, however many that is and there’s better uses of it. There’s a pretty much bottomless pile of work to do that I’m working through, so, talking is, for me, and has been for sometime, is to communication what chewing gum is to eating. I enjoy talking to Jeff Seiler on the phone and we’ll talk for 40 minutes or something like that because we have stuff that we have to talk about. But, neither of us is going to remember what we’ve said. It hasn’t been recorded, so, like I say, it’s the difference between chewing gum and eating nutritious food. I assume that this will be, all of these “Please Hold for Dave Sim”s will be, this is us trying to understand Dave Sim as Cerebus fans. Oh, okay, so in that case, you people have given me all of this money over the years so that I’m able to do this, I will put in an hour and half talking about what you want to talk about. If you’re interested enough to ask the questions, then I’ll try to answer it as intelligently as possible, and in between that Matt and I will talk about things. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about is you are still going out to work, you are not housebound?
Matt: Not until next week. Next week I start self-quarantining cause Janis has got online schooling so, the way that it’s been working, Paula and I go out and work 8 or more hours a day, and then we come home, eat dinner, ya know, try and have a little family time and it’s, “oh yeah, at 8:30 at night, Dad, I need you to look over my homework.” It’s bedtime, it’s not homework time, it’s bedtime!
Dave: [laughs] Right.
Matt: So, the federal government has issued an order that employees of non… quasi-essential workers is how I’d phrase it. We’re not not essential, we’re still open, businesses you can get two weeks of paid sick leave and then an additional 10 weeks of paid family medical leave at 2/3rds of your pay so that you can stay at home and take care of your kids who can’t go to school or daycare. So startin’ next week, I become teacher Matt and gonna have to work with Janis on her homework, and she’s pretty smart so that won’t be that difficult, and also try to teach Natasha whatever she’s learnin’ in her daycare, which, this week, I think is the letters K and Y.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And, my goal, by when quarantine ends and they get to go back to school, which might not be until September. I mean, school might be canceled for the rest of the year, is that when Natasha goes to preschool she’ll know how to read a least a dozen words.
Dave: Right.
Matt: My plan is, I’m gonna take “The Cat in the Hat” cause there’s only 200 different words in that, and read it to her and ya know, she’s got an alphabet puzzle and I’m gonna put all the letters in a bag and have her pull one out and okay now we’re gonna count all the letter A’s in “The Cat in the Hat” and then we’re gonna count all the letter C’s and get her used to the idea of this is what a letter is and the two different kinds of letters cause… she know what a capital A looks like, but a small A confuses her and I figured out I’m gonna teach it to her by, “this is Mama A, this is baby A, do you understand the difference?” and I think she’ll get it.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Cause there’s Mom Mom and then there’s Baby Mom, which is her. So I’m hopin’ that works. Or, on the other…
PART NINE:
Dave: …that’s possible as well, it’s like, you’re not a trained teacher and neither is Paula, so it is a matter of, you do what you can. But I think, this is one of things where I do see the finger of God in this, of going, you’ve got the basic idea of a society but you’re still hanging onto the old ways of doing things and there are better ways of organizing them so that the children are being reared rather than raised and you need the parent to rear children. You raise cattle, you rear children. And it sounds like, okay, it’s going to take… it took this crisis and it took a crisis of this immensity and however open ended it is, however long it’s going to go on for, to say, here’s… you’ve actually got a number of solutions to your problems, but you’re not solving them because you’re still stuck on this everybody going to an office thing. And where are we going to get daycare from? No, if you just organize it differently you’ll find out you’ve got a lot more capacity than you think that you do. And a lot more ability than you think that you do, as a parent, the way we’ve been doing it is you get talked into just having your children indoctrinating by the public school. You go to the public school and they’ll indoctrinate you in politically correct thinking and that’s really all that you’re going to learn. As a parent, you’ll have a much bigger stake in this than any teacher or any public school system or any daycare. Have you taught… what’s your experience with teaching the girls?
Matt: Uhh, when Janis was about Natasha’s age, before bed, it would be, okay, ya know, you get to pick out three books I’ll read three books. And she, of course, being a kid, was tryin’ to pick the longest books or the books she liked the most.
Dave: Right.
Matt: She’s got a board book, it’s only like an 8, 9 page book of Dora the Explorer that’s only got like 5 to 6 words on a page?
Dave: Right.
Matt: Very, very simple, very small child book. And she had two of them. And they came into the house, and okay, we’ll read these books because they’re short and Dad can get… you want three books, this is one of them, and it’s only gonna take me 3 minutes to read it, so you’re gettin’ in bed sooner. And that book got taken out of the rotation because everytime I would read it I would read it like Mel Blanc doing a bad Mexican accent?
Dave: Right!
Matt: Very Speedy Gonzalez.
Dave: Uh-huh.
Matt: Ya know, “Hola, I am Dora”. And after about the 8th time that I did it, it was, “Dad, I don’t wanna hear this anymore.” [laughs] But then, it was a lot of Doctor Seuss, you know, and then… it wasn’t somethin’ I knew before I started reading her “The Cat in the Hat” but I found out “The Cat in the Hat”, the story behind how Doctor Seuss wrote it, was, the publisher said we want a new version of “Dick and Jane”. Lots of repetition, ya know, the same words gettin’ used over and over again. Here’s a list of 400 words, write a book just usin’ these 400 words.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And he wrote “The Cat in the Hat” and gave it back and “The Cat in the Hat” only has 200 different words in it. Like, he took the list of 400 and cut it in half, and that’s one of the reasons, I mean, the beginning of the easy reader books, which is what that series of books is, was “The Cat in the Hat” of, you’re tryin’ to teach someone to read, here’s a book where they’re gonna say the word cat 400 times, so once they recognize cat everytime it comes up, it’s, oh yeah! Cat, cat, cat, cat, ya know, same with hat, same with fish, fish is another, I think for word count fish is up there near the top. And it’s just readin’ to the kid, readin’ to Janis and she got into school and they did a reading assessment and she was supposed to know… she’s supposed to have like 5 or 6 sight words within the first couple of weeks and she had 10 or 15. This year, she’s in third grade, I took her in for a reading assessment and the teacher gives her, ya know, “can you read this? Can you read this? Do you understand…” ya know, tryin’ to gauge her reading level, and at the beginning of third grade she had a middle of fourth grade reading level.
Dave: Right.
Matt: The biggest problem that they have with her in school is they’ve run out of books at her grade level for her to read that have appropriate content for her age.
Dave: Right. [laughs] Which is not a bad problem so much that it is a problem.
Matt: This is me goin’, cause when I was in 5th or 6th grade, my reading teacher had my conference with my Mom and said, “Matt’s illiterate” and my Mom’s jaw hit the floor and went, “what?”, “Oh yeah, he can’t read, everytime we call on him in class he has no idea what’s goin’ on, he struggles in the book to find out where we are, he’s illiterate.” And my Mom’s like, “all he does is read. All I say to him is put down the book and take out the garbage, put down the book and do this, it’s time to eat dinner, stop reading. What do you mean he’s illiterate?” Well, it turns out we’re readin’ in class and I’m 17 pages ahead because everyone’s plodding around and I’m just reading!
Dave: [laugh] Right.
Matt: So when they go, “Matt, it’s your turn” I have my finger in the book where we were, so now we’re three pages ahead, so I have to find the page. And I know Janis is gonna have the same problem, cause my Aunt told me my cousin had the same problem. I’m just from a family of readers.
Dave: Right. And particularly in a time period where reading has gone so far out of fashion. I forget the statistics on the number of people to who… reading is an ordeal. It’s not something that they would do. Like, do you read for pleasure? Do you read things for comprehension? And it’s, no, they don’t and they actually haven’t. Reading is something that you do in school and as soon as you’re out of school, you never have to read again.
Matt: Well, one of my favorite things that I used to do at work was, on break, I’m on my phone, playin’ around on Facebook or readin’ emails, doin’ whatever, and I’d see something funny and I’d show it to somebody, and there’s a guy I would sit next to, I’d show it to him, and I could gauge that he’s pretty similar in his reading level with me, cause in the time that I’m readin’ it over his shoulder, he’s reading it. And there’s a woman who comes in the break room, and I’ll show it to her, and it’s about, ehh, 30 second delay of, okay, I know I’m done readin’, but I can still see her eyes movin’, and I’m like, she’s not that big a reader.
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: I mean, that’s… when I was 12, I think, I went out to visit my Dad and his girlfriend’s two sons came to visit and so the three of us were there and so my Dad instituted, “1 o'clock, you have to read for an hour.” And my Dad’s got a bunch of books, and I found he’s got a “Twilight Zone” book and it’s 23 stories that were the basis for 23 episodes of the original “Twilight Zone”. So I picked that, and I’m readin’ that, cause, it’s, ya know, short stories. And one of the other kids, I forget what he picked, and the third one, was just whining about, “why do we have to read?” and meanwhile I’m just breezin’ through this book and my Dad’s yellin’ at me, the hour’s up, you gotta put it down now.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: But for the two of them, it was well, ya know, “why are we bein’ punished?” and I’m like, we get to sit inside in air conditioning in California in the middle of July and read? Sign me up, Dad, sign me up!
Dave: Really? Is this a trick question?
Matt: That’d be like somebody comin’ to you when you were 17 goin’, “hey, do you wanna sit around and draw comics all day?”
Dave: Really. Really. And at that time, no, I didn’t. I wanted to do a cartoon for Playboy and then sit around reading comic books, and whacking off to pornography and stuff like that. That was my idea of the way to live, that’s why I wanted to be a cartoonist. “They pay $1000 for a color cartoon in Playboy? All I’ve got to do is crack that market and I’ll never have to actually work again.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And that was the…. it took meeting Gene Day and seeing Gene Day’s productivity to go, “ohhh, this is how you do it. It’s actual work and nonstop work. Always working. And, hey, this is actually pretty cool. Actually, this is really cool. Just doing this is the best idea.” And then, unfortunately, that turned into, “if I get really productive at this and I’m able to make a lot of money at it, maybe I can get laid. And if I can get laid, maybe I can get laid by different chicks” and then it’s like, uhh, no, no, no, no, that sort of stuff is for people who can’t draw comics. You’ll be much happier drawing comic books. It was funny that I was talking to Kevin Eastman on the phone a while back, and the surprise that that was to him. Once he was all done with the Turtles stuff, ya know, no longer owned the Turtles and no longer the chief executive officer of Mirage Studios. He was just writing and drawing comics, going, “this is what I was missing all along. I had no idea how much I was missing this, but this is who I am. I’m a guy who writes and draws comics. I’m not the CEO of Mirage Studios, I’m not a public figure, I’m not all of these different things. Put me at a drawing board and…”
PART TEN:
Dave: Uhh, let’s see, David Johnson “possibly”: “I think he'll think you mean Cerebus, and might need to be told you're just meaning, No, what do you want to talk about right now? I'm guessing it'll probably be to tell us to pray 5 times a day and to read John in the interlinear. But, if that's it, that's it. I'm not going to read John. Maybe, he'll read it to us. Then, you wouldn't have to humor him by reading it yourself.” I don’t think that that works. That would be the same as me saying, “take my prayer from issue 300 and record it on whatever you record audio and play it five times a day for God.” It’s like, no, the idea isn’t to program your computer so that it plays it five times a day. I mean, I could be wrong, maybe that would be fine, it’d probably be a step forward from not praying at all, but, no I think the point is that you interrupt your own day in order to acknowledge God’s sovereignty. God is more important than I am. Scripture is more important than I am. Prayer is more important than I am, and I think this is something that children should be taught and aren’t being taught, so I don’t really make a big deal about it, but that’s one of the things that I think is a major problem. Reading scripture aloud, if you read John’s Gospel for two and a half hours, it’s like, everybody, do your bathroom break, everybody do what you have to do the same as if you’re going to a movie and give me two and a half hours until you get up out of that seat. That’s what this is going to be, and nobody interrupt me, everybody shut off their electronic devices, and it’s gonna be just like a movie or just like a hockey game. It’s two and a half hours of, starts here, and ends there. Most kids, you wouldn’t be able to get them to do it, because they’ve been taught, I think really really incorrectly, that they’re more important than God, they’re more important than scripture, they’re more important than prayer. Something came into their head and they want to ask Mom about. It’s like, no, Dad’s reading scripture. Dad’s reading John’s Gospel, he’s already explained this. You don’t interrupt him, you don’t ask a question, this is scripture, this is bigger than you, this is bigger than Mom, this is bigger than Dad, this is bigger than the city, this is bigger than Donald Trump, this is important. I understand that our society is not there, our society is not going there, I can’t do anything about that. I have rearranged my life so that that is the case. Prayer takes precedence over work. Fasting takes precedence over work. Reading scripture aloud takes precedence over work. I think, it’s the best idea and I think it’s one of the things that we’re missing. We think we have this societal pyramid that has famous people at the top of it, movie stars and whatnot, that’s what’s the top of the pyramid. No, the top of the pyramid is God and you have to acknowledge that. You have to live your life in such a way to demonstrate to God, yes, I take this seriously. Yes, I do understand that you are more important than I am, that your scripture is more important than I am. Praying is more important than I am. So, ya know, that’s one of those, if you can only do it once, at least you did it once. That way, on Judgement Day when I’m asked, “Okay, what did you do as a famous person to advance God” and it’s like, I’m pretty sure I had absolutely no influence on anybody when I was here, I’m hoping that 50 years after I’m gone after we’ve worked through this whole deifying science, deifying feminism, deifying Hollywood, deifying every human vanity… that it did sink in with people, with a certain number of people, who went, “yes, this makes sense. As soon as we started doing this 50 years after Dave was dead, 75 years after Dave was dead, son of a gun! Everything started getting better! Ya know, he was right all along.” Maybe not going to be the case, but at least on Judgement Day, I can say that was my intent, was, if you’re asking me as a famous person what should I do as somebody who is influenced by you, here’s the best I can do. I mean, I can sit down and write a 800 page book about John’s Gospel and what I see in there, explaining all of the nuances that I’ve explained a certain number of them doing the commentaries on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” because it’s required to explain the concept of what I’m trying to explain of how reality works. But, that’s not the essence of it. John’s Gospel and what it will mean to you, if you get in the habit of reading it beginning to end once a week, that’s what it’ll be about to you. That’s between you and God. That’s got absolutely nothing to do with me. That’s… ya know, John Lennon’s “take this, brother. May it serve you well.” and there you go! I’m pretty sure John’s Gospel will serve you well in a way that “The White Album” never will do and never can. But that’s why I keep reiterating, yes, I could record myself reading John’s Gospel, but to me, that’s only part of the effect. John’s Gospel has to be coming in through your eyeballs, into your brain, and coming out through your mouth, so that you can hear it in your ear. You, you, you, you, you. Here’s actual you, here’s you participating in something much larger and much more important than yourself and much more efficacious than yourself. It’s not… I don’t see that as arduous. Two and a half hours out of the week? Think about all of the crap that you subject yourself to the rest of the week. Think of all of the time you devote to other things. Just… it’s the leaven in the bread. The thing that makes it rise. The thing that makes you spirit into the much larger spirit that it’s capable of being is, that two and a half hour then improves the rest of your week. All you have to do is get in the habit of doing it. And I know nobody is going to do that, but that’s why I keep saying it, because, if you’re asking me, you have to take my answer. You can’t say, “well, besides that, what should we be doing?” It doesn’t work that way.
Matt: That’s uhh… when I posted your fax about doin’, about readin’ John out loud, I found a, on I think Archive.org has, they’re scannin’ books and somebody scanned a copy of the interlinear and it’s “here is John’s Gospel from the 1984 printing of the Kingdom interlinear” and I also found a, I think it was the same site had, I knew that it existed but I never looked for it. Years ago I’d seen an infomercial, “James Earl Jones Reads the New Testament”. And I found James Earl Jones reading the King James version of the New Testament and I put that link up too of, “if you’re absolutely adamant that you’re not gonna read it yourself, at least, here ya go” and I even said, here, it’s Darth Vader. Because maybe somebody will be, “Darth Vader reads the Bible?!”
Dave: [laughs] Ahh, that’s great. Did you listen to it? Is it the 1611 King James or the…
Matt: I started listenin’ to it, but it was one of those, I was in the middle of somethin’ and I’m like, I’m gonna get back to this, and then, ya know, life happened.
Dave: Well, there ya go.
Matt: But now, I’m gonna have time next week.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I’m not sure which edition of the King James it is. The part that really blew my mind when I first heard of this is, so he’s only reading the New Testament and not the Old Testament, even though James Earl Jones probably has one of the most perfect Old Testament voices.
Dave: Right. I always correct people on that. It’s the Torah. It’s not the Old Testament, it’s… I always say to Christians, if you’re gonna call the Torah the Old Testament, I’m gonna call the Gospels the Old Koran.
Matt: [laughs] You could, I mean…
Dave: [laughs] And they usually get it, then. It’s like, oh yeah, yeah! Do you understand how Old Testament sound in that sense? It’s intentionally pejorative against the previous scripture.
Matt: I mean, technically, if you’re gonna go by describing the Testaments it should be the First Testament and the Second Testament.
Dave: Umm, yeah, and not necessarily because we’re not really sure how many testaments there are in there. Like, the Torah is the Torah but it’s also the Law and the Prophets. And the Law is one thing and the Prophets is something else, so, it’s not even a fixed testament in that sense. If you look at the Orthodox Judaic Bible and what that consists of, the Orthodox Torah, you realize that a lot of stuff have gotten grafted onto that. Which makes things like… even the Johannine Jesus talking about… when they’re saying you’re making yourself God, and he says “doesn’t it say in the Prophets ‘God ye are’”? And it’s like, well, it says in David’s Psalms “God ye are”, but that raises the question of, was David a prophet? Which goes back to Saul, previous to David, was Saul among the prophets? And unless you understand the nuances of the discussion you don’t even really know what it is that he’s saying. Which is why I’m saying we’re all in that boat. I have a far more highly developed sense of the intricacies of what’s in here, but compared to the sheer knowledge of a biblical scholar who has studied the John’s Gospel his entire life and particularly relative to God’s Angels and God, my understanding is completely imperfect. Which is why I always come back to the scripture itself. Don’t talk about it, read it. Read it aloud as close as you can get to its original form in your native language, which to me is in the interlinear. I think that covers… yeah, I think I’ve covered it in the sense that I want people to understand what it is that I’m talking about. Reading John’s Gospel outside of the council chambers in Kitchener and outside of regional council chambers was really my way of saying, may God judge between me and thee, because I was at a complete loss. I think that our society is going in completely the wrong direction and is hurtling in the wrong direction. So I’m not going to go to city council and tell them what they should do, I’m saying, I think if you do what I’m doing, which is reading John’s Gospel aloud and doing it in its complete form, which if you understand it as this single interlocking concept, that will have a beneficial effect on what you are doing. I think one of the effects that may have come out of that is the COVID-19 situation where, it’s pretty obvious nobody knows what they’re doing and nobody knows what the right suggestions are. We’ve just landed in the middle of an epidemiologists debate, between eight different epidemiology factions, and okay, I’m not talking about doing that. I’m talking about God’s word. John’s Gospel’s story. “In the beginning was the word and the word was toward the God and God was the word. This was in beginning toward the God.” It’s like, there you go, you’re getting everything all put in here in a way that you couldn’t possibly understand consciously, but will…
PART ELEVEN:
Dave: …that that’s the situation. Oh man, we’re up to 2 hours now, so I better skip ahead on this. Oh, the rest of it was David Johnson, as well.
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: “I don't know, I just really think it would make the man's day. He did Cerebus all those years and we all liked it mostly. So, I just thought if you asked the man, Do you want to read from John for however long you want to today? No matter if I or anyone else doesn't want to read it, it just seems Matt, Dave would like once to just humor himself, and especially during this virus because he really seemed to think the answer to everything was in John or something. Any thoughts there anyone what he meant?” Well, I hope I’ve explained that, that certainly I think of a better use of my time, the last two hours instead of me going, blah blah blah blah blah, would have been reading John’s Gospel aloud. But I have to do other things. Nobody is going to pay me to read John’s Gospel aloud.
Matt: In one of the many comments that came out, was he said “if I offered you and Dave each $100 you’d probably still wouldn’t do it” and I’m like, I’m sure we would. I can’t imagine Dave and I lookin’ at $100… hey, two and a half hours to read John’s Gospel? I mean, I can’t imagine either one of us would say, “I mean, no”?
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: And then he, later on, it was up to $1000 and I was like, I don’t think David Johnson has that kind of money to just throw around, but, alright. I mean… like I said, it was a long thing and people were gettin’ involved and I was just trying to cut to the heart of it of, this is basically what he was saying, as I interpreted it, was, “how about instead of doin’ what you normally do, why don’t you guys just read John’s Gospel?” Well, that’s the idea, I’ll send it up, and we’ll see what happens.
Dave: To me, that’s covered in the Koran, you don’t want to sell God’s signs for a mean price. It’s like, that’s a bad inference saying, “Dave Sim read John’s Gospel aloud because I gave him $100, because I gave him $1000”. It’s like… if we’re trying to find a halfway point in this, it would be, the next time that I’m reading John’s Gospel aloud I can definitely put the video camera on myself and put in one of the memory sticks that I do the Weekly Update on and read John’s Gospel aloud, as long as people understand that’s not what I’m talking about doing. Like, I want you to download me reading John’s Gospel and listen to me, or play it and pause it or whatever, or play electronic tricks to it or whatever. That’s the concern that I would have, do people understand what I’m talking about? This is why that I don’t think that this is David Johnson. David Johnson is, as far as I know, a very devout Christian and a very aesthetic Christian. He wouldn’t get to the point of trying to use money to get me to read John’s Gospel. He would, as any good Christian would, if he’s got that kind of disposable income, he would give it to the poor. I mean that’s the… when Mary took the pound of nard and anointed Jesus’ feet and it was Judas Iscariot who said, ya know, “why wasn’t this taken and sold and the money given to the poor?” And I think he was on the right side of the argument. Jesus says, “she’s doing this against my burial. The poor you’ll always have with you, me you’re not always having with you” and I think he reconsidered that which is why in the next chapter washes the feet of all the disciples, he was going, “yeah I got fished in on that one because of my love for Mary” which I think was more than just Jesus loved everybody. I think Mary was somebody who if he wasn’t Jesus and didn’t have his responsibilities, he would’ve liked to have had as a wife. And consequently, engaged with Mary in a way that he shouldn’t have because Mary was under the influence of YHWH, but that gets into Dave Sim’s individualized interpretation. “Does it address why the virus is happening or did he mean God is punishing us or what?” Ahh, I don’t think God ever really punishes us. There are consequences of our actions that rebound on us, but that’s our choice. If you do things that you shouldn’t do and you know that you shouldn’t do them, there will be negative consequences. If you want to call that God punishing you, you can call that God punishing you, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s… whatever is happening with COVID-19 is, okay, you’ve made it this far in the same sense that you made it to 9/11. You made it to 9/11 so this is going to happen, because… the same thing as the stock market, you need a correction. We need a course correction here and this is the easiest way to do a worldwide course correction. And it’s like, okay, that was effective for a specific length of time, now we’re gonna need COVID-19 because you need another correction. It feels like punishing, but it’s usually God is doing what he needs to do to get you to the point that he needs to get you to. Where you have a clearer understanding of reality and all of the things that he’s done in your life individually that has all brought us all to the point where we’re now ready for one of these giant course corrections. That comes down to the fact that we’re good and God knows that we’re good. YHWH thinks that we’re evil, but we’re not evil, we’re actually good. “I think he just meant reading it was to him a good idea, like he said he read it at City Hall or whatever.” I wasn’t it at City Hall or whatever, the same thing happened when I went to Queen’s Park in Toronto, a female security guard said, “you can do this at the library, or you can do this at Tim Horton’s”. No, I’m going to, what is in my world perceived to be the governing authority. This is my petitioning to the governing authority in my own method because I assume that the governing authority that leads its way up to God and his Angels is resonant above any administrative jurisdictional entity. City Hall in Kitchener, regional council in Kitchener, Queen’s Park in Toronto, Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Which is why I recommend getting as close to wherever perceived jurisdiction is and reading John’s Gospel aloud. Not aloud so that you’re irritating people, loud enough so that you can hear yourself whispering it. You can read it, it’s coming into your ears, it’s in your eyes, you don’t allow anybody to interrupt you and presumably that goes upward from here to God and his Angels and it starts getting sorted out at a higher level. At the same way that the Mayor and Council here in town. Like, I know the Mayor by name, but they’re perceived to be on an elevated level above me. So, okay, the only level that I acknowledge in that sense is God. Everybody is subordinate to God. So that’s what I’m doing here, reading John’s Gospel aloud every week outside of this environment that is supposed to be something that I don’t think it is. It’s strayed way off into secular humanist, which has nothing to do with reality. Certainly nothing to do with Reality. “Anyway, if Dave goes for it and he'd actually want to read all of John with or without you or whatever, and that would exceed your phone bill, I'd pay for the over normal time or whatever. Just thought it would be neat now that I've thought it all through. Oh, well, I hope we all find what were looking for.” I do too! I certainly hope that that’s the case, I’ve always said that I hope that everyone has a very very good experience on Judgment Day. I think it’s very unlikely that that’s going to happen, and, I dunno, I could be completely steering everybody in the complete wrong direction and that’ll just add to my punishment on Judgement Day for all eternity. That’s just in my nature. And having hit the 2 hour and 15 minute point, I think we’re going to call that a wrap.
Matt: I got one little tiny thing. So, Sean Robinson emailed me while we were talkin’, not realizing we were talking, and said, “So real talk time, does anyone else think the Coronavirus looks like a testicle?”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I responded, “you want me to ask Dave since we’re real timin’ it?” And he responded, “only if, ya know, it comes up naturally in conversation.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Then David Birdsong chimed in with, “Hey Dave, a question from Sean Robinson.”
Dave: There you go.
Matt: And then Ben Hobbs came back with, “Do we want you to ask Dave is the Coronavirus looks like a testicle? Yes, yes we do.”
Dave: Okay.
Matt: So I’ve discharged my duty. We’re endin’ on a sort of high note, so… thank you for very much for way too much time!
Dave: Well, I would say on that one, yeah, if all you guys who have testicles and all of you women who have seen testicles up close, yeah, if you picture those dimples becoming long spiky things, that could be exactly the situation that we’re going through. Guys, get your long spiky things back to dimples and we’re off to the races.
Matt: [laughs] That… that’s not the worst advice.
Dave: There ya go. I trumped your TMA.
Matt: [laughed]
Dave: Everybody have a good night, and we will talk to you, God willing, next month, Matt.
Matt: And hopefully we won’t have a long list of questions!
Dave: Well, we’ll see. Take care.
Matt: Yep! You too! Bye.
Dave: Buh-bye.
Matt: And we’re not gonna auction off this one, because this…
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I obviously going to have to go back to the original unaltered audio and see if the missing bits are there...
Next Time: Hobbs and the missing panel from page three?
1 comment:
millions dead
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