The Anaether

I’d like to learn to make quicker drawings since they’d be easier to rapid-fire on Twitter. I’ve always felt like I had to make long developed drawings, but people do sketches all the time and my fast drawings aren’t very pretty right now. It would probably also help me with figuring out lighting quicker.

I’ve finished page 29 and I’m just starting on 30 tonight. Every night I feel like I’m totally going to finish the page I’m working on, but I don’t. I keep forgetting how exhausted I get.

On a more grim note…
One of my clients tested positive for Covid. Both she and her boyfriend did. It’s not sounding good at all. They both stopped working, they both have debilitating symptoms. I really hope they get better soon. But they’re in Florida. They got infected from others in their apartment building. Basically their whole building is infected. Fun fact, she paid 300 bucks to get a Covid test that would come back in 4 days instead of like 12. If they stick around in Florida, they’ll probably get infected again, seeing as how America isn’t united at all on getting this shit show under control. Especially Florida. It’s un-FUCKING-believable. I knew this shit was gonna get bad, but not this bad. No one could have imagined the magnitude of selfishness, disrespect and irresponsibility so many Americans truly have.

Which got me thinking. I mean, even though I’ve pretty much barricaded myself inside my apartment building, going out literally only to go to the mail room to get packages and mail, I could still get infected. This infection, when it kills, it can kill pretty fucking fast. It’s killed children. We keep thinking “Only the old and sickly are vulnerable,” which makes us again, selfish, disrespectful and irresponsible.

I’m having a bit of a psychological balancing act. On the one hand, I want to just be happy with how comparably safe I am and chill the hell out. But I feel like if I contracted Covid, I’d panic and start acting as if I’m going to die in a week or within a month. If that happened, I’d publish all the thumbnails to “The Anaether” that I made last year so that the world would at least see the first 800-ish pages of my graphic novel in some form. The rest… I’d probably have my closest friend write it for me, since he roughly knows what my story is and his writing skills are astronomically better than mine. Well, I’d probably publish the thumbnails and get the story written for me in the event that I die of Covid. God, I am being so melodramatic. But seriously though… over 150,000 Americans have died, every day we get tens of thousands of more cases, and there is no end in sight to how senseless people are being. From citizens all the way to the federal government.

I feel really bad for feeling bad because again, I’m probably at the lowest risk of getting infected and at lower risk of dying of Covid. I’m young-ish, well off, I work from home and I haven’t left my apartment building since March. I am not a hospital worker, I’m not a frontline worker, nor even part of an essential business. I can’t even begin to imagine how developing countries are dealing with this shit, but my country is a truly unbelievable embarrassment and an unthinkable tragedy. Last I heard, the Republicans are insisting on cutting unemployment benefits to incentivize the unemployed to go back out of their homes and find work. What a bunch of fucking assholes. 0 interest in getting this pandemic under control in our country, 0 flying fucks given to human life.

Yeah. I’ve pretty much become numb to the bullshit in my country. How else am I supposed to move on with my life? Every individual horrible thing that’s happening right now is a good reason to fly off the fucking handle. Police brutality, systemic racism against blacks, Trump, hundreds of Americans dying every single fucking day, Congress… yeah. Am I supposed to be having a meltdown every second right now?

So I’m totally numb now. I’ll just donate to BLM, healthcare workers, unemployed starving families and so on, and try to vote at the right times. Hopefully my mail-in ballot will make it to the Board of Elections despite all the voter suppression and the state of the US Postal Service. And I’ll be trying my damnedest to not get sick. And trying not to die.

Hope you guys are all doing alright and you’re also doing your part to try getting the infections under control wherever you are… if you can.