Succession Regression

Episode Ninety-One: Succession Regression.
...in which Squid Man points to the door. 



1 comment:

  1. Constant suicidal thoughts.

    Or, rather, the flowchart that maps my brain around specific life struggles that inevitably leads to suicide. That, living where I do, there is no way I will ever be able to find gainful employment, or find affordable health insurance, or provide a worthwhile home or a college education for my children.

    The disparity between the economic prospects of my father, who was successful as a broadcast financial analyst from the '50s until retirement in the '90s, and my own dismal financial landscape is stark. Ergo, I cannot meet his model.

    The thought process involving any of these issues always goes to one place only: a dead end. So many people puzzle at that fact, and yet, to me, it seems totally natural.

    This comic is about a recurring discussion I have with someone at my current workplace about that thought process: the conviction of the inevitability of the dead end, the elusive, unattainable American Dream Home (that I don't even want to have, but will always feel bad for not attaining).

    The Pharm Life frame recounts the moment when an office colleague at a former workplace, a blue collar native Vermonter, a plant mechanic, who shared an office with me, turned to me in disbelief at the sight of that headline on his computer: a Rothko sold for seventy five million dollars. I was stuck having to acknowledge that the price was indeed absurd, but that Rothko was actually perhaps my favorite painter.

    Rothko, of course, killed himself. And this colleague, like his father before him, eventually shot himself at home. I had purchased a print of that very Rothko to give to him as a joke at his retirement party. But, the plant was flooded, and he lost his job, and never actually had a retirement. And then he was dead.

    The resolution is a quote from my current workplace colleague, who, frustrated with my moral laziness, has tried to reason his way through my faulty thought process. I put it in Art's mouth both because I am intrigued with it as a potential argument against any dead end thinking, but also because I am bemused by the idea of someone trying to employ logic against a thought process that clearly is not based in reason of any kind.

    The title came up while searching on synonyms for flowcharts and thought processes: succession seemed nicely alliterative with regression, and I thought it indicated how the thought process was not progressive, that it was self-destructive. And then, hours later, it occurred to me that it perfectly refers to the inability to provide succession (via success) to my legacy. Funny, that.

    Quite happy with the Soap Strip frame here.

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