Vetu articles directory – Free articles – Submit a new storySubmit a new story or post articles and submit link to our articles directory.

I was pretty much raised in the woods of Mississippi, but I’ve in most of America’s major cities, New York, Miami, D.C. and several others but returned home when my mom contracted cancer. I came full circle back to rural South Mississippi. A beautiful bearded collie mix that I named “Thor” found me. The vet could tell by his teeth that he was, perhaps ten or eleven.

,
Patrick Weathers who had been a best childhood friend and a featured performer for a year on Saturday Night Live in the early eighties used to talk a bit about the First Amendment and more importantly The Fair Use Act. It was something they had to observe carefully at SNL to avoid alligator-type unscrupulous attorneys. I was doing a pubic relations internship and honing my skills at standup comedy at night, in my twenties, still felt immortal immortal, and enjoying New York to the fullest. At the time, I never gave it a second thought how this document might be important in my life. Later it became part of my everyday conversation.

The other day I was twittering away, taking it for granted as usual, and suddenly it hit me. Imagine there’s no Twitter. Easy but you’ll cry. No Google below us, Bing could run dry. Imagine all the surfers stuck back on MySpace. You may say I’m a dreamer…but I retweet more than once……

It seems I was aware in my twenties,that I wanted to spend my life in cartooning. Though I was not a great cartoon artist, I was prolific at writing and blueprinting offbeat cartoons long before The Far Side was born, probably from my great admiration of Mad Magazinein my youth. I also learned that many cartoonist work as teams, such as Disney did. Disney could draw, but not to the level as to what he envisioned his cartoon so he hired illustrators. That would eventually be the model of my cartoons, which would be still panels, not animation, but same model. That was in the early 1970s when I was a business student in Dallas because my parents told me I should be. I stored my shoebox of at least a thousand cartoon concepts in a shoebox for another quarter century or so and worked “grown-up” jobs such as real estate, marketing, tv and radio production, owning my own bus tour company in Washington, and several other entrepreneurial ventures that would have made anyone motivated by money only content and living like a king. I was miserable. All I could think about was my, now dusty, pile of cartoon concepts put away somewhere of which I’d long forgotten.

Now reaching middle-age, reaching minnowpause, a good many folks think I’m mentally eel. My theory though is that I’ve haddock with life, not unlike Salmon Rushdie or Marlin Brando. Mahi oh mahi. Since I’ve always marched to a different drummer, you know, or sang like Tuna Turner. I live down on squid roe. and been a shad bit egocentric, people have tried desperately to save my sole. Holy mackerel, if I could count the times. Those bassturds. They just perch up on their high seahorse and talk down to me as if I’m pond scum. So what’s it all about, Algae? So you feel I’m shellfish and cruel but read between the line, swivel, and hook.