When I was in fourth grade, my friend Kevin and I went through a one week ninja-drawing phase. The rub was that in this same week, another kid named Brock also went through a ninja-drawing phase.
Buddy Kevin, being the competitive but artistically untalented one, told Brock he was copying us and his ninjas sucked ratbags anyway. To prove his point, Kevin enlisted our (Asian not Irish) buddy Patrick to judge a ninja-drawing contest between big Brock and me.
For some reason I had a yellow sticky pad at school, and I immediately got to drawing my ninja on it: guy had a mohawk, badass 80's visor, pistol in one hand, Tiny Tim in the other, and a big saber on his back. He was more badass than ninja, but these were heady days for badasses.
I was pretty dang impressed with him. This guy, I thought, could tear Stallone a new penis. I showed the stickie to Kev-man and he assured me we would kick all ass the morning. Now all I had to do was redraw it on big white typerwriter paper.
Skip ahead three hours, and my badass ninja has somehow acquired Tyrannosaurus arms. His visor was too thin and his mohawk made him look like Bert. But I knew my guy was actually way cooler than anything Brock could come up with, so I still assumed I'd win.
The next morning, Patrick quickly declared me the loser. Kevin, competitive sumbizzo that he was, snatched the original yellow sticky from my bag and demanded a rejudging. I won the title back just as quickly.
Click forward about 20 years. The first thing my work buddy Sandy told me when I got back from Kenya was "You're really balding." But the second thing and more germane thing was that he thought a lot of my blog writing was better than the stuff I did for Newsweek. Sandy knows almost as much about writing as he does about balding, so I had to take his words seriously.
So: these little post-it drawings will continue to be posted regularly, even while I remain in Nowheresville, USA. If snackheads like this and this and this can get people to read about their meaningless lives, I should be able to turn this mother out with M-F regularity.
