Joe Intro

Lately I've been compiling a book of the complete Fetus Joe cartoons, including the contest cartoons and a couple of cartoons Sam drew after the boy was born. It also includes an introduction to the book by myself. Here it is, for your amusement.

Fetus Joe Intro

I’ll never forget the day in 2005 when my friend Sam, then recently married to his wife Terry and living off in Massachusetts, called me and told me that Terry was pregnant. My reaction can best be described as a conflict between joy and fear, coupled with mild catatonia. The catatonia, of course, is an all too common reaction to big news—faced with a gargantuan change in their reality, people often need to take a few moments to stammer, drop their jaws, and maybe shriek like a monkey. I have little doubt Sam, himself, reacted in much the same way when he got the news from Terry.

As for the conflict I experienced of fear and joy, what can I say? Of course, I was proud and overjoyed for my friend that he was going to be a father, not to mention wholly grateful to him for playing his part in ensuring the survival of my species. But that word, Parenthood, gnawed at me at night when I was trying to sleep. Just that one word was enough to tighten my breath and send my heart into arrhythmia. Parenthood meant the end of the Sam I once knew. Soon he’d be moving to the suburbs and driving a minivan, taking the kid to soccer practice and weekending at amusement parks populated with colorful cartoon characters. The day would come soon when I’d tell him about some new beer I’d found, and Sam would hike up his over-sized sweatpants and say “That sounds too wacky for my tastes…I’m more of a Bud man, myself.”

Then one day, I received an e-mail from Sam with the subject line “Fetus Joe vs. the Wolverine.” Inside was a cartoon of a wolverine, it’s leg torn and bloody on the ground, its face frozen in the ghastly horror of a bully just beaten down by the class nerd. And above it, a fetus gloating its victory to the world. I was so relieved. What a fool I had been even to worry. Of course! Parenthood wouldn’t destroy Sam…it would just be an opportunity for him to bestow his wackiness onto his offspring.

We can only speculate as to what forces inspired Sam to spend the next nine months pitting his unborn child against wild beasts of all shapes and sizes. A sociologist or a cultural anthropologist would likely tell us that the cartoons came out of a desire to quell his own fears for his child, to symbolically imbue the boy with health and strength, much as cavemen painted images of animals on their cave walls to ensure a successful hunt. But they would be full of shit. Warm, smooth shit. In truth, I suspect they came mostly out of boredom and the occasional need to comment on the events of the pregnancy (such as when Fetus Joe attacked Terry’s sciatic nerve) or the everyday trials of living in Boston (such as the amazing exploding turkey, a common nuisance on the Massachusetts turnpike). Whatever the impetus, all can agree that they were funny as shit. And they proved to me, once and for all, that I never need fear the loss of Sam’s wackiness. For it is a font that springs eternal. In his pants.

Memeify

My friend Mr. B. has tasked me with carrying on a meme that he received from a friend and that his friend received from a friend, and so forth. Technically, I'm not sure if this actually qualifies as a meme. Since I'm actively aware of the fact that I'm passing it on, I think it falls more in the realm of peer pressure. The Internet equivalent of convincing me to smoke pot or have unprotected sex, because, hey, everyone is doing it. Which, given Mr. B.'s intro of the whole deal, makes me think I'll soon have a nasty case of e-clap. But hey...wouldn't want to be uncool, so here goes:

"Bloggers must post these rules and provide eight random facts about themselves. In the post, the tagged blogger tags eight other bloggers and notifies them that they've been tagged."

Luckily, I don't know eight other bloggers. So I'll be less virulent than Mr. B. was.

Eight random facts about me.

#1 I've recently discovered that I really enjoy making up fictional biographies for my friends' MySpace pages. In them, I turn my friends into great historical figures--assassins, radio personalities, former vaudeville stars. It's one of the most freeing writing exercises I've ever experienced, and I love it. So much that sometimes I make up fictional biographies, even if my friends don't actually ask me to.

#2 On occasion, I think I might actually be God and not know it. More to the point, I don't think I am God, it just occurs to me that I have absolutely no proof that I'm not God. This started several years ago when I was, I don't know, 23 or so and I would meet people on the street who didn't know me. But I knew them and I could tell you a lot about them. Maybe not everything, but certainly a lot more than I had any rights to know. Which is how I imagine God feels when God walks around on Earth. Anyway, I once used this line of thinking in an argument to disprove that Jesus is the son of God. Because I know I don't have any kids.

#3 One time in middle school, I very nearly killed another boy after he and some jock friends stole my bike from me and held me down between two very thick wrestling mats until I couldn't breathe and panicked and screamed for them to let me up. When they did, I ran after him, determined to kill him. Had I been a faster runner at the time--fast enough to catch him--I can say with some certainty I would have beaten him to within an inch of his life. I wouldn't have given it a thought. So if you're out there, Mark, and you're reading this, consider yourself lucky I didn't catch you. I know I do.

#4 My favorite kind of pie--and possibly my favorite all-time dessert--is key lime pie, the best example of which I've ever tasted came from a coffee shop in Asheville, NC, called Old Europe about a eight years ago. I could have eaten that stuff for hours. I've since been back there and, while it's still good, it's not as good as it was eight years ago. Back then it was perfect--just the right amount of tart and sweet with a creamy, custardy filling and graham cracker crust. It was a great joy to have a slice, at a time when great joys were sometimes hard for me to find. The worst slice of key lime pie I ever had was at a diner at a truck stop somewhere in God-knows-where. It looked like a slice of nuclear waste, topped with merringue. This was also the first slice I ever had, so I went around for a long time thinking I didn't like key lime pie until a friend's mom set me straight. Seriously...if you ever make key-lime pie, don't put merringue on it. For the love of all things.

(As a complete sidebar, or fact #4.5, a close contender for the favorite all-time dessert is rich chocolate mousse served with a glass of neat single-malt scotch to sip alongside each bit.)

#5 Once when I was in grade school, I got in trouble with a teacher for taking the bolts out of a standing coat rack she had in her room while I was sitting on the floor watching a movie. She was really flipped out about it, no doubt a reaction brought on by deep neurosis from years of having her coat rack spontaneously fall apart after showing movies, and she demanded that I not only put back the bolts I had, but replace any that were missing on the rack. For some reason, I decided that this was the kind of thing my parents would also really wig out about, so I made up a lie for them that I needed the bolts for a class project in which we were making metal dolls out of thin steel plates and assembling them with bolts. The children were to provide the bolts. My parents happily complied and some weeks later, grinning ear to ear, asked if they could see the metal doll I made in class. I told them the teacher had liked them so much, she had kept them for herself.

In retrospect, my parents knew I was lying from the first word out of my mouth. As they often did because:

#6 I'm a terrible liar. Most people who know me know I'm lying almost as soon as I start. This is because practically the only time I ever lie is if I think the lie will make the world funnier somehow (the exception to this is if I'm skipping work and have to fake sick...but that's not lying, that's acting for fun and profit). So I smile at the lie and people know I'm lying. The amusing side effect of this is that sometimes I'll be telling someone a fact--an actual fact--and it will amuse me, so I'll smile, which makes them think I'm lying. Then the irony makes me smile bigger, and it just goes downhill from there.

#7 The only failing grade I ever received was in a meditation class in college. The teacher had a no-skip policy with only three possible exceptions (so he had a three-skip policy, I should have said). I was really depressed that semester and frequently woke up not wanting to go to meditation class, so I skipped more than my three. At the end of the semester, he gave me a choice: I could either take a failing grade or I could write a three-page paper on some issue of how meditation could help someone's health. I had a writing comp course that year and was so bogged down writing papers, there was no way I ws writing another. So I got an F.

#8 I've only ever won two contests in my life. The first was a call-in contest for a Nintendo videogame system. To win, you had to watch the Mario Brothers cartoon hour after school and call in with a code. I was calling on a rotary phone, so by all rights, I never should have gotten it. But one lucky day, the guy who called in first got the answer wrong and I was next. It was the happiest moment of my eleven-year-old life.

So I think I'll pass this along to, oh say, Ian, Lindsey, Ed, Dan, Bonnie, Jeff, Eric (assuming he still reads my blog), and...oh...let's say Neil.