Reading · It's Good to Be Here

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I’ve written a lot here about githerments, and what it means to have a sketchbook where you keep track of whatever’s attracting your attention. Notice what you notice. Find all your weird little interests and write them down, no matter how peculiar or obscure or seemingly insignificant they might be.

Just recently I listened to this interview with Matt Groening on Marc Maron’s podcast and I realized that sometimes, writing about all the things you hate—all your pet peeves, minor irritations, existential angst—can turn out okay, too.

Some notes from my notebook:

Slightly condensed quotes from Groening’s interview:

When I moved to L.A., I hated it so much. I got a job working at a Xerox place, and I made my own little zine called Life in Hell, and it was all about Los Angeles and living here and how much I hated it… Then I got a job at the Los Angeles Reader, a weekly paper. And they let me have a comic strip in the back of the paper in the classifieds…and for the first six months, it was very angry and nobody liked it. And then I just made Binky, the rabbit, a victim. [I switched it from] existential rants to an underdog. And that changed everything.

Okay so first, it took him SIX MONTHS of doing a WEEKLY THING that he’d already been noodling around with for a while beforehand…six months of doing it badly and no one liking it, before he figured out how to make it into something that people liked.

Now, some of y’all are old enough to remember the glory days of alternative weeklies, and you probably saw Life in Hell back there in the classifieds. But guess what happened next with that angsty comic?

In 1987, the Fox Network started, and they hired me to work on the Tracy Ullman show. They wanted the Life in Hell characters [for interstitial cartoons]. But I found out that if I signed a deal, I would lose control over the characters. They’d own them. And so I made up the Simpsons in the waiting room [before the meeting with Fox].
And what did I do? I drew humans. I used to only draw animals. [But I drew] my dad, my mom. Bart was a combination of my older brother Mark and me.

Think about that. The creator of the Simpsons got his two big breaks by making cartoons about everything he hated about living in LA, and then from desperately sketching cartoons of his own family right before a meeting with the network.

The stuff in your life is worth writing down, that’s all I’m saying.

Free stuff on the sidewalk

In my ongoing cataloging of free stuff people put out on the sidewalk in my neighborhood, recently I spotted a neatly-folded faded denim jacket, with a note inside saying that it was a men’s jacket, size large, previously owned by a non-cigarette smoker. The specificity of cigarettes vs other smokables on that note seems noteworthy. Welcome to Portland, folks.

New rule about fruit

Last night I stopped off at a food truck pod with some friends and there on the little beer porch was a table filled with peaches. In case you’re not familiar with Portland food truck pods, they are not farm stands. You would not expect to buy peaches there. But we all immediately felt that the peaches must be something special, otherwise why would they be there?

So. New rule: If If there’s fruit for sale at a place that does not normally sell fruit, you should buy it.

The peaches were excellent, and a bargain at only five bucks for a little carton of five peaches. The guy who runs the beer porch is a lifelong farmer who just stops at a farm in the morning and buys them, because he thinks people ought to have these peaches.

Take a walk through a sketchbook with me

Flipping through this sketchbook reminded me that it really doesn’t take much—in this case, three splotches of color and one black pen. You can do this too! For extra dispatches and deep dives on all things sketchbook, please join us, and get access to this whole archive.

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