OBSERVED 🔭

Play-doh weiners & thoughts on god from my daughter's kindergarten class

Hello, friends.

Just a heads up, this will be the first paywalled post for Gopher Snake. If you’d like to see the entire comic, please consider subscribing below. I once heard someone say, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Now, I don’t know if that phrase applies here, but it seemed app pro pro Nope, try it again. It seemed apropos. A fancy man! Look at that. Thank you kindly to those who’ve already signed up for a paid subscription. There’s plenty more to go around. Not everybody at once!

I found an old memory lying in a notebook the other day. Usually, if I hear something odd or exciting while I’m out in the world, I’ll quickly add it to a folder on my phone called “Overheard.”. I’ve had this list since around 2011. Somewhere in the past few years, I stopped keeping the list. This was depressing to me. I tend to stare at the ground or a wall or unfocus my eyes when I talk to unfamiliar people up close. I usually don't speak at all when I’m in the world with strangers unless they talk to me first. Normally, I’ll quietly absorb the whole scene, allowing me to hear interesting snippets of conversation. Observe the environment, ya know, stuff like that. If I write down the dialogue in that moment, I’ll be able to remember most of the details in vivid color later on: the temperature, what was on the shelves of the store, how uncomfortable my clothing felt, and how a specific parking lot might have smelled. I often use these lists to develop character ideas. A goal of mine is to continue contributing and turn some of them into comics. Obviously…FOR THE SAKE OF HUMANITY.

So, here’s something that I observed when I volunteered in my daughter’s kindergarten class: