A couple walks down the street, the man in a turban, the woman in a very high-collared fur coat. This is ASHWAY and BERTREX
A: You know that origami flower shop we keep talking about maybe one day wandering through?
A: I finally had an occasion for which I would have liked some paper flowers. But they’ve closed!
B: That’s a shame, they just opened like five years ago!
B: I wonder how much of our community is powered by people imprudently opening wildly unprofitable businesses, pouring their time and savings into them for the period of exactly one commercial lease, then letting them close.
B: Like, it didn’t turn out to be sustainable, but for a while, you offered some cool origami classes for kids, and some people in the neighborhood have some paper flowers in their homes now? I assume?
B: Sorry it didn’t make you a millionaire, but you shoved the big stone wheel back uphill a few turns, and that helped us all.
A: And, in this metaphor, the big stone wheel is...
B: The thing that’ll smash us all into dust with its uncaring inertia if we don’t hold it at bay with our collective effort, yeah
A: Okay, cool. And our collective effort, in this context, means buying forty-dollar paper flowers?
B: Is THAT how much they cost?
B: I kept meaning to look in the store window when I walked by, but I never managed to tear my eyes away from my phone.
That forty dollars goes to good use -- it allows the flower shop owner to buy a forty-dollar sculpted soap set from the soapery next door. The soapmaker will go on to buy some paper flowers with that same money. Then both of them will pay income tax on their earnings, which will go toward paying a defense contractor to build bombs for military drones to drop onto various strangers. It’s all part of living in an interconnected community
The computers tell me it was 20 years ago, June 9, 2006, that I arrived in New York for my first-ever comic convention as an exhibitor, MoCCA.
It was an important trip for me, a milestone in what would go on to become my career.
I wrote a little reminiscence on Patreon (free/unlocked) — including a first-since-then reprint of the photocomics I made at the time, documenting the trip!
Read the rest here: [ 20 Years Ago (In Photocomic Form) ]
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