Dreamt last night. My girlfriend and I were walking from my condo to my garage when I noticed a sort of beat up truck parked on the street. The truck had a few really large Wal*Mart bumper stickers on it. I thought it was amusing and turned to my girlfriend and said, “Look at this – who the hell has big Wal*Mart bumper stickers on their car…” just as the owner of the car came walking up. He definitely heard me. I realized that this tall, lanky, goofy looking guy was my new neighbor who had just moved into my building (though not really – but in my dream he was). He gave me a stink eye. So I tried to smooth it over by saying hi and changing the subject. I don’t think he bought it at first but he seemed pretty dumb so, eventually, he seemed to forget my insulting of his love of Wal*Mart. He mentioned he played guitar and I told him I was a keyboardist and said, “Oh yeah … we should jam sometime…” in that way that only musicians will appreciate – in musician speak, if done right, it’s like when a girl tells a guy, “We can be just friends right?” and you know you’re never going to see each other again. Then I woke up.

In hindsight.. or is it “hind-thought” as I really never saw anything.. The guy looked like one of my fellow cartoonists when I worked as a cartoonist at the Daily Nexus at UCSB in college. So as not to drum up more drama on my blog, I’ll keep the guy’s name and comic’s name (which were the same) anonymous and I’ll just call him / it Fred Walrus. Fred had a daily comic strip called Fred Walrus in the Daily Nexus and it was never particularly funny. No one seemed to get it. You could talk to anyone on campus and no one really understood it. But there it was. Day after day. At one point during my first year, I decided to document some of the idiocies that occurred in the off-campus dorm in which I lived (like ceilings that leaked, the cafeteria promising a 50-foot burrito and then never delivering on that promise, etc.) into a comic strip which I would draw maybe once a week. That went on for a few months.

At one point, I decided it would be funny for my comic strip to interact with Fred’s comic strip . So I drew a comic that was 4 panels. Each panel consisted of effectively the same drawing of two of my characters looking directly up towards the top of the panels. The first two panels they were talking to each other like they were discussing the mysteries of life: “What does it all mean?” “Is there any rhyme or reason to what is going on up there?” etc. The third panel they were silent. The fourth panel one of the characters commented, “I honestly don’t know. Fred Walrus has never made any sense to me.” Then I’d have to convince the editor of the Daily Nexus to modify his layout so my cartoon could run directly beneath Fred Walrus (which was much easier than I thought) and bam. I had a funny.

I ran into him at one point in the middle of campus and he felt saddened that I poked fun at his comic strip – although it was hard to tell because the guy was seriously the most boring, emotionless, box of hammers you’ve probably ever met. So I said, “Dude it was just a joke. C’mon…”

So maybe my dreams are telling me not to make fun of people. Or talk ill of people? I don’t know. There’s some merit to that. But I still think having really large Wal*Mart bumper stickers on your car is really lame and that Fred Walrus comic really sucked.