I don’t get it. Kids are forever bored.
By everything.
No matter how entertaining the world is to an adult, for a kid there is little that can compete with screens and manufactured entertainment: nature, life, the universe itself.
Readers won’t see some of the strips I’ve been drawing this past week for a while. In fact the stuff I drew this past weekend is officially in the hopper and scheduled to go live in… uh… well, Saturdays over the next month or two. I’m going to slowly trickle it out. And you’re just going to have to wait for it. That’s patience for you. Patience. A theme that I just happen to be writing — drawing — upon lately.
My point in putting together some of my next few comics is going to be to explore that disconnect of fatherhood: the mash up between being a middle aged guy who has not enough time to ever be bored, pressed to squeeze every moment out of his life, and forever seeking activities to fit into the narrow slots of time that maximize every second… clashing with the kid who seems like she would sit on the couch and watch youtube all day if I let her.
That’s my fatherhood experience these days: modelling how not to be bored by the real world. And there is a bit of humour in the gaps of that. So the comics I’ve been drawing — and which will publish in the coming weeks — exaggerate that gap and if you’re here with me you’ll get it. The frustration is real: Sometimes youth really is wasted on the young.
Stay tuned.