How to get through your day

Expert advice from a life-long slacker…

Here in Kansas City, Mayor Quinton Lucas has extended his stay-at-home order until May 15th. He said it was OK to go out and do certain things and one of them was visiting an essential business.

Policies like that inspired the cartoon above.

While drawing that cartoon I started thinking about how people are making it through their day and thought I’d share my schedule with you, just in case it helps and even of it doesn’t.

6:00 AM: Wake up whether I want to or not. Sleeping less is more common as you get older and it seems to me your subconscious is realizing the end is getting near and maybe you should get your ass out of bed instead of lying their having weird-ass dreams, which I do.

I recently had one in which I was playing baseball and the pitcher was standing about five feet away from me and I was protesting that the correct distance was sixty feet, six inches.

Dream analysis would indicate they really need to start playing some kind of baseball before I have a dream where I argue against the designated hitter rule in the Supreme Court.

6:10 AM: Start reading the paper looking for cartoon ideas even though there are fewer and fewer stories available each day and the news media has failed to answer my most important question:

In an emergency, will newsprint flush?

8:00 AM: Post something on the internet. If I can be a ray of sunshine in just one person’s life, that’s worth it. I’ll also settle for pissing off just one Trump supporter. You guys voted for this moron, now the rest of us have to listen to him.

People who get pissed off about my anti-Trump cartoons remind me of a friend who worked in government and told me: “First they want you to eat a shit sandwich, then they want you to tell them it tastes good.”

If you got the president you wanted, it only seems fair that the rest of get to complain about the shit sandwich we didn’t order.

9:00 AM: Time for first of several walks of the day. This is when I think up cartoon ideas – or at least that’s the hope. There’s a theory (and I can’t remember if I read it somewhere or just made it up) that your subconscious will continue to work on a problem while you do something else.

You can try, try, try to solve a problem and then when you take your foot off the gas, the answer suddenly pops into your mind while you’re busy deciding whether you or the guy walking his pit bull will be the one to step into the street when you pass.

Rule of thumb: guy with the pit bull straining at its leash while looking at your throat has the right of way.

10:00 AM: Start drawing yet another Trump cartoon, even though I’m really tired of drawing about this guy. You do have to give him credit: he may not be a good president, but he supplies political cartoonists and stand-up comedians with tons of material every day.

12:00 PM: Lunch, which often features a peanut butter sandwich. I’m a crunchy peanut butter guy and if you’re a creamy peanut butter advocate, I won’t say you’re dead to me, but I will say I don’t understand your choice.

If you like creamy peanut butter and voted for Trump, we might have a problem.

2:00 PM: Finish up the cartoon and email it to the syndicate.

2:30 PM: Relax and have a cocktail; in the summer it’s a beer, in the winter an Irish coffee. I used to do this at 5 PM when I got home from work, but since I’ve been working out of my house the cocktail hour is creeping ever closer to noon.

If it helps you decide when it’s OK to start drinking, remember; when it’s 2:30 PM in Kansas City it’s 12:30 AM in Tokyo, assuming I did the math right, but you might want to remember I’m working on getting a buzz on and math might not be my best thing once we reach 2:31 PM.

3:30 PM: Decide whether to have a second cocktail and tell myself that if I do, I shouldn’t have a snack with it and ruin my appetite.

3:35 PM: Fix the snack.

4:30 PM: Take a nap or passout and as life goes on I’m having a harder and harder time telling the difference.

5:00 PM: Take my second walk of the day and try to wake up in time to eat dinner.

I often bring along one of my favorite books of all-time, Elmore Leonard’s Hombre. It features one of my favorite characters of all-time, John Russell. I re-read some of the lines I’ve highlighted like:

• Why talk about something you couldn’t prove?

• “It makes you angry, why talk about it?”

• “Maybe if I don’t speak it’s better.”

As you might have guessed, John Russell is the strong, silent type and time has shown that I’m the weak, loud type…but I’m working on it.

If you’re looking for something to watch, the movie version of Hombre is excellent although Paul Newman was too old for the part of John Russell. Nevertheless, he gets everything else right and Richard Boone is one of the best bad guys ever.

7:00 PM: Turn on the news and get depressed. I recently saw some Harvard professor suggest we might be doing some version of social distancing until 2022 and it raised a question:

How come every expert on statistics, algorithms and anything else to do with computers looks like Woody Allen’s less attractive nephew?

I’d speculate that computers emit some kind of radiation that sucks the attractiveness out of a man’s face, but my guess is that guys who look like Brad Pitt were out getting laid and didn’t bear down in class.

So were now following the advice of people who couldn’t get a date in high school.

9:00 PM: Turn off the news and read for an hour which is an optimistic goal because if you get me in a horizontal position on a comfortable surface, the Sandman seems to show up sooner rather than later.

10:00 PM: Lights out.

Feel free to steal any part of my schedule that looks good to you and will help you make it through your day. I can highly recommend afternoon drinking and just about any movie Paul Newman starred in, assuming you drop Pocket Money and Quintet off the list.

But you really need to watch Hombre, it will be time well spent.

Stay safe, everybody.