I’m Back!

Which, depending on your politics, might not be a good thing…

Recently I went to California to celebrate my mother’s 98^th birthday and didn’t draw a cartoon for about two weeks, so now I have a reader wanting to know when the cartoons are coming back and apparently, today is the day.

But first…some travel stories.

I brought my son up from LA for his grandmother’s birthday and took him to one of my favorite restaurants, Poor Red’s, which is famous for ribs and a drink called the Gold Cadillac, both of which you see here.

The waitress said she remembered us from the year before when we did the same thing and when I said we were here for my mom’s 98^th birthday she hugged me and went over to my son and said “you deserve a hug, too” and now I really wish I’d known women were such suckers for anything to do with being sweet to your mother because I would have been playing that card a lot earlier.

Guys, if you’re looking for a good pick-up line forget all that “you’re so hot” bullshit and ask women to help you pick out a gift for your mother’s 89^th birthday even though she’s 62 and is currently serving time in a women’s correctional facility and you haven’t spoken to her in 10 years.

(Man, that tip alone is worth the price of a subscription.)

As we left Poor Red’s I told the waitress we’d be back in a year if my mom made it to 99 and then told my son we’re coming back in a year no matter what and saying she made it to 99, even if she croaks.

As Donald Trump has shown on numerous occasions, you can get away with saying pretty much anything if people don’t do some fact-checking and two years from now I eagerly anticipate celebrating my mom’s 100^th birthday whether she’s alive or not and I’m pretty sure I can talk my way into a couple Gold Cadillacs on the house to commemorate my possibly-deceased mother’s birthday.

OK, we were staying in a Folsom hotel which shall remain nameless because I can’t afford lawyers and one morning the above vehicle is in the parking lot.

Assuming there was a story behind it (and there was) I asked the woman at the front desk what’s up with the prison bus and she tells me that every Wednesday LA County sends a busload of prisoners to Folsom Prison and the driver spends the night in their hotel before driving back to LA.

My son immediately asks if anyone on the premises has seen Con Air recently and wonders if the bus driver checked under the seats to make sure all the prisoners got off the bus when they were supposed to.

All of which makes me wonder what the hell is going on in LA County that results in having a busload of prisoners bound for Folsom Prison each and every week and California has 58 counties, so Houston, we may have a problem.

When we checked into the hotel they gave me some cards good for a free breakfast from 6 AM until 10 AM which we never took advantage of because I was working on Central Standard Time and was up by 4:30 AM and my son was working on West Coast Slacker Time and was up after 10, but the morning he was leaving he had to get up early so I said why don’t we go get one of those free breakfasts we’ve been missing, but were informed that the cook didn’t come to work that morning because she’d eaten something that didn’t agree with her at home.

We figured we’d been shot at and missed and went to McDonald’s.

BTW: The breakfast you just looked at is definitely not on the McDonald’s menu even though we all wish it was and you have to go to a restaurant called Friends with Benedicts to get it and my brother and I both like it, but it’s called “Fruity French Toast” so we both try to get the other one to say it first so we can say “I’ll have what he’s having” and I won this year’s competition which is kinda pathetic because we’re both avoiding the word “fruity” which means our possibly-non-existent masculinity is hanging by a thread and I for one am enough of a man to admit it.

This cartoon was inspired by a news story (and I forget where I read it along with the location of the reading glasses I read it with) that the 2024 election is going to be a bigger shitstorm than usual (although it’s hard to beat an attempted coup) because the social media platforms have been firing people and some of those fired people were the ones who tried to keep the worst bullshit from being dumped on the internet so without those watchdogs be prepared for claims that Kamala Harris is actually a man and Joe Biden is secretly controlled by Lizard Beings from the planet Neptune and Donald Trump is the Anti-Christ and I’m not completely sure that last one is bullshit.

Time will tell.

Also…

We now have a Hurricane Me which is not my fault because when you have a couple hurricanes every week you go through names at a pretty good clip and eventually your turn is going to come around so it’s kinda like jury duty although in this case there doesn’t seem to be any way to get out of it.

Once again Mitch McConnell froze up and couldn’t do anything and as the cartoon indicates that’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to politicians.

According to the Weather Channel website this year weather disasters (which may or may not include Mike Thompson and that’s an inside joke just for Kansas City residents) have cost the U.S. a combined total of $39.7 billion which is almost enough to make Defensive Tackle Chris Jones end his holdout (yet another high-quality Kansas City joke) so I added one more disaster site to the list.

BTW:

If you’re thinking the first cartoon and this last cartoon are remarkably similar in set-up you’re totally right and even though they were drawn two days apart that didn’t occur to me until I started writing this piece and here’s the deal on that:

I’ve been drawing cartoons since 1976 and let’s say you draw 300 hundred a year that’s over 14,000 cartoons and I have a hard time remembering what actually I drew and what I just sketched or thought of and I’ve had people tell me I drew something when I was pretty sure I didn’t until I looked at the signature and there I was.

Drawing similar ideas close together is less of a problem now that I don’t have base paper and don’t know where or when my stuff will appear and if you want to know where I’m going to appear without fail just hang out in Poor Red’s next August and we’ll celebrate my mom’s 99^th birthday.

First Gold Cadillac’s on you.  

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