Funny Papers

Dearest Rachel –

As a fellow collector of comic books and authors, I understood what you were doing. Since we didn’t get the newspaper anymore (more on that later), you would, every time you went to visit your parents – and later, every time we would visit Twofeathers at your parents’ home – you would go through the old papers, pull out the comics section, and bring the bundle back home with you to read… someday.

Only, of course, someday never came.

And in the meantime, all sorts of other things would flood into our lives, clamoring for our attention. The latest Let’s Play from Ryan or Cory or Flamez? You and Daniel were on it. A new video from MatPat and Team Theorist? Check it out! More absolute legends from our ‘Boi with the Blaze‘? Let’s at that! Mealtime? Can’t eat without running one of the many meme channels (although our favorite closed up shop and deleted its content at the end of 2020). Oh and don’t forget Quarantine Quitchen every Tuesday night with Alton Brown and his wife Elizabeth.

And not just YouTube, although our enjoyment of those was part of what got me to make plans to start up a channel of my own… someday. You were pretty enthusiastic about Twitter, as well (although you never actually tweeted yourself, as far as I know). Politically, you followed the likes of Ted Cruz and Scott Adams, but your favorite person to follow was the ever chipper Jo Grant herself, Katy Manning. You and Daniel used to refer to her as a ‘cinnamon roll,’ and I think I follow the reference, but I dunno…

Anyway, I think you get the point. You had so much information and entertainment coming in, every day, that the materials you had stored up to get to some time ‘later’ would never be gotten to. Not so much that ‘later’ never comes, as such, but that newer, fresher material keeps showing up at our door – or more to the point, on our screens – that the old stuff seems less important, and not particularly worthy of attention in comparison.

And as a result, that’s why ‘later’ never comes. Not for you, with your time so abruptly cut short. And I suppose not for me, either.

So all this…

…is going to have to go.

It’s just like the newspapers we used to get when we were starting out together. It was the thing to do, to get a morning paper to read with breakfast. But we never had the time to read it, even in those more or less pre-internet days. Eventually, the rolls of newspaper began to stack up like cordwood by our door, until we finally determined we couldn’t deal with it any more, and cancelled our subscriptions.

And so, too, with these pages. I’m sorry, sweetheart. But I’m not going to be reading these either, and if I do, I’m not really going to be enjoying myself. It’s just going to remind me that you never got the chance to, and the days are sad enough already without dwelling on that thought.

I hope that’s okay with you, honey.

Until next time, I’ll… see you in the funny papers.