Ms. Lindsey Toft, the lovely co-star of this strip, is currently abroad, perhaps working on turnip farm or saving baby chimpanzees from poachers. Either way, she’s gettin’ her paws dirty while doing good deeds, and she’s badly missed. Best of luck with the TKTKTK [turnips or chimps, to be edited later], Lindsey!

In case you didn’t get the veiled refrence in the post for Episode 610: Ryan and I submitted Dos Factotum for New York’s The L Magazine “Comix” Issue.

We had an inside source who told us to submit, which lead to a conversation between Ryan and I, which lead to me wholly remaking this difficult-to-read strip and adding a nifty white-background laout to our as-yet-unpublished strip where we refrence that condom is, in fact, a condom.

Later, when I saw said “inside source” at a get-together shin-dig, I told him/her that I had submitted only to get the response: “Oh, you didn’t get in.”

I’m not holding this against L Magazine specifically. For all I know, their tiny format (it’s a quarter-sized magazine) didn’t lend well to our strip’s dialogue, or maybe our layout looked more like an ad than an actual comic (though they shouldn’t hold that against free submissions). All I know is that every time I suggest to Ryan that we make the ol’ condom and cigarette saga into a zine when we finish it up, he laughs. Laughs at me.

Here’s the rejected thing, click it to make it bigger.

I’m not entirely sure why this was made, whose money was spent on it, what goals it’s trying to achieve, or what audience it’s trying to reach, but I think I like it. I encourage anyone who has yet to visit the flaxseed capital of the world to hop on a plane/in a boat and go.

If you’re not familiar with The Fixx’s “Saved By Zero,” then you haven’t been watching enough TV. A cover of the song is in an oft-played Toyota ad about zero percent financing. Anyway, I wanted to hear the original song, so I YouTubed it. The video is boring, but one thing worth noting about it is this upsetting comment by user alandlloyed:

yes, the 80’s was the greatest decade of all time. music sucks so much ASS compared to that time. we have amy fuckin weinberger , oh i mean weinstein, oh i mean weintraub, oh i mean whinehouse. sorry , im drunk. you get my point. music is a joke now. we get junkie lounge singers instead of real musicians. ah fuck it, who cares. maybe a comet will end our misery

Easy, man. It’s only The Fixx, for chrissakes.

Ever since I moved to New York I’ve been on the lookout for a subculture that would accept me and, ultimately, after years of devotion, come to consider me as their leader. I tried rock climbing, but those dudes are way too into wheat grass and group sex. I tried the Union Square Marxist revolutionaries, but I couldn’t bring myself to yell “Truth! Truth! Truth!” into the megaphone while decent people shopped for heirloom tomatoes at the park’s farmers’ market. So I tried to join the farmers’ market. They were all like, “Are you a farmer?” to which I responded, “I could be, if given a chance.” They drove me to an alfalfa orchard in Staten and told me to start farming. I’d forgotten my chapstick and all the picking and pulling hurt my fingertips. I only lasted an hour. I tried NY1, the local TV station. They kept saying, “Hey, man, we’re not a subculture. We’re a TV station.” I stuck around for a week in case they changed their minds about not being a subculture. They didn’t change their minds. I joined up with these dudes who steal jewelry from wealthy families while they’re on vacation, but after each “job” was over, we would never hang out together and drink or compare tattoos or discuss our broken homes. Not much of a subculture, if you ask me. More like a band of thieves.

While buying some live guinea hens at the poultry wholesaler on Humboldt yesterday, I overheard the owner talking about his fighting pollos and how one specific pollo was going to make him a lot of money later that night. I stuck around all day and, after closing time, followed him to a warehouse down the street. There were cocks there. Fighting cocks. I won $25 and met a lovely Hispanic woman named Lupa. I can’t say much more about it; unlike those blabbermouth rock climbers, us cock fighting enthusiasts keep shit discreet. But I will say this: I’m finally home.

—Ryan Grim

I write promotional copy/articles! This one’s about a writer who gets her ideas from Jesus.

Inspiration, Co-Authored by Jesus

Been tuning out Jesus lately? Don’t sweat it. One author is sharing his love.

Lauren Miller, author of the soul-enriching Hearing His Whisper, is not a typical inspiration genre writer. Diagnosed with stage three breast cancer a mere two weeks before her final divorce court date, she was told she’d be fighting for her life. She was only 38.

Before being hit with this life-altering double whammy, Ms. Miller, a devout Christian, wouldn’t only pray to Jesus for help. She would lend him her ear. Throughout her daily routine, while driving, for example, Jesus would speak to her, she says, imparting invaluable wisdom.

Being a lifelong writer, she recorded the messages in a journal and shared them via email to a small list of readers. Her readership grew and eventually urged her to publish the inspiring memos. But she put the project on the backburner, thinking, “God, if you want this published, it will be published.” And she went on her way.

Then her marriage fell apart. Next came the breast cancer, and the chemo therapy. She was hit very hard by “the red devil,” a condition which gives chemo patients a severe aversion to all things red, as the chemical used in the treatment is red. To overcome it, she sought the help of Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), a human energy-based therapy (often called “acupuncture without the needles”) that she now teaches and lectures on herself.

While losing her hair and, later, both of her breasts were blows to her sense of identity, it allowed her to truly connect with, as she says, her authentic self, a self apart from any external representations of who she was. (She would later draw from this experience while writing her second book, Mantras for the Mastectomies of Life.)

Ms. Miller also suffered deeply from “chemo brain,” which attacks a patient’s memory as well as the ability to read and write. While playing charades with her kids (she has three), she’d forget the words for basic, everyday things. For many people, writers especially, this would be debilitating, and yet she still managed to write down pages and pages of memos from Jesus. Sometimes she’d re-read a day’s worth of notes and completely forget writing them. The notes would later become the first draft of Hearing His Whisper, a book she says was written through her more than by her.

Some of the book’s passages speak directly to those who are suffering: “Since I have been stripped of everything through this battle, physically speaking, and I have experienced my soul remaining intact and even strengthened in endless ways through this experience, I know that nothing can take away my true beauty and identity.”

Others have a broader appeal. All of them could surely be useful to anyone (not only Christians) in need of a spiritual pick-me-up.