August 23rd, 2005
Commencement Speech

   This past Friday, I had a minor medical procedure that require several days of 'taking it slow & easy' (to answer your unspoken question, yes, I'm still a man!)

   'Taking it easy' is generally not part of my vocabulary, as I tend to pride myself on being a Type-A personality. A Type-A personality does not watch 40 hours of television a week, unless you don't require much sleep. I'm a self-diagnosed workaholic and that's part of my problem. A Type-B personality waits for someone else to make tough decisions. A Type A acts.

   It's hard to admit weakness to the public at large (or as large as my audience is, anyway), but dismissing your weaknesses is a far worse sin. You have to embrace the reality of your weaknesses if you are to improve on correcting them. When I was an angry young man, as the Billy Joel song goes, I needed that focused anger at myself to overcome my tendencies to allow things happen to me, rather than making things happen. To refer to a line from another song, "Anger is an energy", courtesy of Johnny Lydon/Rotten from Pubic Image Limited.

   I became one of those hard-ass rebels-without-a-clue for a few years. I'd do push-ups on my knuckles on concrete. I'd touch a sun-seared streering wheel on a summer day and held on until it stopped hurting. I welcomed pain, growing physical and emotional calluses, the whole mosh-pit mentality (where are you, King Missle?). This got me through a lot of what I call the wilderness years. But you have to let go of the angry young man mentality eventually, before that anger sabotages your aspriations, or rots into bitterness.

   I don't suggest there's an age where you flipswitch from Rock n' Roll to New Age, then spend too much buying imported exotic herbal teas from indigeneous peoples, and watch Sandra Bullock movies. It's essential to life, according to me, to store some reserves of anger, so one doesn't get walked all over. It's a survivalist mentality. Particularly helpful when you're an independent contractor, i/e freelancer.

   Back to type A personalities: Opportunities present themselves, and when they don't, Type A's forage for them. And there's a lot of obstacles, financial, personal and fear of taking your own future in your hands. The last obstacle mentioned is perhaps the largest. Type A's don't run from problems, they immediately calculate plans to fix them.

   Where am I going with this? Allow me to digress to buttress my point: Over ten years ago, there was a softcover book which published High School yearbook pictures and activities of celebrities-before-they-were-celebrities. Once you get past the dorky haircuts and dated clothes, and pay attention to the years they graduated, it's quite informative to calculate the years that passed since high school before most of them became famous/successful. An example, who immediately comes to mind, for no particular reason, is Cybil Sheppard. She graduated high school in the late '60's, Appeared in the movie The Last Picture Show in the early '70's, but really didn't become 'known' until the TV Show Moonlighting in the late 1980's! I averaged the timeline of the celebs (the book covered acting, music, sports and other noteworthy achievements) between high school and 'making it big', and it was fifteen years.

   Even thought I personally think there's a lot of dopes and/or dupes in the entertainment industry who get involved in politics (on both sides of the aisle), one thing I can't deny is that they had to become Type A personalities to get as far as they do in their careers. I'd have never been working in comics, and this site wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't have been a Wizard Award nominee in 2003 if I didn't develop a Type A personality (pardon me for a little horn-tootin' there, pards!).

   So I've had to shelf my workaholic leanings for a few days, and I caught up on a ton of reading, mostly crappy comics. Special thanks to Michael Greczek for sending me that batch of Atlas '70's comics from Austin, TX's Bedrock City. Scholars have claimed comics rot your mind, and these Atlas books don't necessarily disprove that notion. But the art is great. Ernie Colon, Ditko & Wood, Howard Nostrand, etc.

   These days, I'm a bit of a softie with a hard candy center. One of the simple pleasures in my life is watching my dogs enthusiastically drink from their water dish. Lucky little bastards...

   But I still won't watch a Sandra Bullock movie, so don't worry about a downward slope...

   And yes, I'm available, for a price, to do graduation commencement speeches. With the school year just beginning, there's plenty of advance time to book me!

   Last piece of business: Three new pieces are on display in the Commission section of the site: A Kirbyesque Cap, a Colan greytone Drac and and a peevish-looking Thing!
 
To be continued...
 
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