What’s all this about anyway?
Folly and Innovation is the time between 2:59am and 3:00am when merciless productivity turns into boundless silliness. It’s the yawn that breaks into a laugh. It’s the poem written in the back of a forgotten library book. It’s every great dream that’s been forgotten right after hitting the snooze button. It’s a newborn baby’s second through eighth thoughts. It’s the inspired graffiti on the bathroom stall amidst the tangle of nonsense and chaos.
It’s not your best friend’s mom. It’s not currency. It’s not to be taken lightly. It’s not a guy-meets-girl plotline. It’s never at a loss for words. It’s not what you would call the best looking guy at the office. It’s not a sarcastic tee shirt. It’s not Tales from the Crypt meets 21 Jump Street.
It’s the secret place where the socks go when they get lost in the dryer. It’s Shirley Temple the drink, not Shirley Temple the actress. It’s cool Autumn days and warm summer nights. It’s the shadow that a hammock makes when it’s caught in the moonlight. It’s the frozen piece of meat that your mom had you hold over your black eye when Jimmy Staletsky socked you in the fourth grade. It’s calling shotgun even when you’re the only passenger to get in a car. It’s coming through loud and clear even when you’re not listening.
But, most tangibly, it’s a webcomic…the very webcomic that you have taken a break from reading.
That was pretty cryptic…so who are you anyway? What’s your deal?
My name’s Tom. Do you mind if we just start…you know…from the beginning?
Not at all. Please…
I began life at the most humble age of zero spouting all manner of incongruous absurdities and babbling prattle. It’s said that when I was born I compared the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson favorably with those of F. H. Bradley–you can imagine the shock it caused among the doctors and nurses, comparing a transcendentalist to a humanist. But alas, I was young in the world and apt to make some missteps. In my youth I found myself living in a world set apart from reality as my parents were avid travelers and adventure archeologists. We survived many a harrowing encounter with angry natives before, at the age of seven, my parents decided I should receive a proper education and a settled life.
As any young lad should!
Indeed! But, it was not to be…at least not yet. As we prepared to board our final plane home from the hidden metropolitan jungle village of Guiratinga, I was separated from my parents and accidentally boarded a zeppelin setting out on a 365 day world tour. I spent the majority of that tour (which I was allowed to stay on because of my singing voice and spot-on Groucho Marx impersonation) learning the art of cartooning and writing from a Mr. Alessandro Pinchetti, the man behind the hit Italian newsprint comic La Famiglia Piccola con i Bambini. And so it would be that my passion for comic writing began.
Over the course of my youth, I ghostwrote and illustrated nearly 74% of the comics appearing in the Romanian language newpaper Cel Mai Bun Biar. All the while I was enrolled in the now defunct Milhouser School for the Young Genteel, causing all manner of ruckus and mayhem for my professors and headmasters. I took exception with the majority of my superiors–I felt that they couldn’t understand my critical genius…this led to an irreconcilable schism in my mind. You see, it was at the tender age of twelve that I found myself in a crisis of conscious. Suddenly, conjuring witticisms and quips to be spouted by my juvenile characters was just not enough. I had lost my way, caught up in the glitz and glamour that is the Romanian comic circuit. It was at this time in my life that I set out to find myself. And so, with a tattered copy of Kerouac’s On the Road in hand, I hitchhiked the entirety of the continental United States. The stories from that two year journey could fill several books, but suffice it to say I was a different man after that ordeal.
Well, that seems to be a bit of a cliché coming of age tribulation, wouldn’t you say?
Perhaps, but not all of us are able to foresee what will and won’t appear trite when recorded in our autobiographies.
Touché.
Anyway, after that I found myself in something of a series of fortunate happenings that landed me a position with the Krichner, Krichner, Nichols, and Dunn Investing Firm. I was able to bluff my way past anyone who questioned my age. After only three months of stock trading, short selling, leveraging, and money marketing, I was promoted to VP of corporate relations. It was at this time in my life that I gained the majority of my monetary fortune. And so, after three years of living the high life with the investment bankers on Wall Street, I again felt a stirring inside of me for something more. Around that time, one of my more vicious nemeses uncovered the truth about my identity and age. Suffice it to say, the partners were not happy to find out that their best investor wasn’t yet old enough to see an R rated film.
I wouldn’t imagine they would be!
And so with that, I finally allowed academia to have its way with me. I enrolled at the semi-prestigious, but little known College for Educated Lads in Ballymaccurly, Ireland. There I studied Aerospace Engineering under Dr. Seamus McGrady of Sputnik fame. It was in this previously foreign field that I found immense joy. In the circles that I now moved, I was free of my Romanian fame and Wall Street infamy and known only for my groundbreaking research and speaking savvy. I quickly gained recognition and was moved to serve in the Queen’s Royal Space Fleet in Canada. It was in a top secret Canadian space development camp that I spent ages 18-22. But there I was again at the peak of my career in engineering, needing something more. I had, at this point in my life, begun to recognize the familiar cycle of success and destitution that I had been calling a career and finally decided I had had enough. Instead of erupting from the pressure and going on another soul searching trek that would no doubt have carried me through the exotic parts of Asia Minor or the Australian Highlands, I had myself transferred to a small rocket company in the Florida tropics. It was at this time that I decided to rekindle my first passion of cartooning. And so, here I find myself engineering and cartooning. Designing rocket engines by day and inking my comic by night.
That’s quite a history!
Yes, well those are, of course, only my professional exploits. My personal adventures and romantic entanglements are stories for perhaps another time.
Awwwwww, man…
Disclaimer: The above is a somewhat embellished version of the life and times of Mr. Tom Sexton
