Well I feel very stupid posting this comic today. It’s important to me that the comic-at-large is a practice, which means the regularity with which I draw it diminishes the need for each individual strip to satisfy me. But it’s one thing to not quite think your joke lands and another thing to be making a joke about bitchy bees at all on a day when everything feels senseless and ripped in two.

Yesterday, my family gained a niece—well, to me she’s a niece, in general she is a baby. A small human person. I have not met her yet, but she’s obviously high quality. An excellent addition. What would be called a blessing.

There is a grand cognitive dissonance between the text thread I was on yesterday learning her name, seeing the first pictures of her, making silly happy jokes, and the news that I read with breathless horror later in the day. The photographs of children and teaches slaughtered in a classroom in a school in Texas.

I cannot understand why we let politicians get away with passing nothing, nothing, nothing, doing nothing nothing nothing while this continues to happen. Never in my life will I be able to stomach the phrase “thoughts and prayers,” so tainted has it become with the pretense that those in power cannot do anything about gun control. Never never never never never will I understand.

We should all be screaming at them, right in their faces; that’s what I feel. The time for decorum has passed, has it not? If it ever existed. There was never a time for decorum. There is nothing decorous. A child sees his friend shot in the face. A child, beside his friend, is shot in the face. Nothing nothing nothing makes it right.

The shape of the world feels wrong. I drew a comic about bitchy bees. I’m not mad at myself about that; it’s not the bees that makes the world wrong. But the way things line up, one after another, rarely rarely rarely make sense. The bees, in fact, make more sense than most things. The bees with their clear beginning and end, their bitchy dog companion, their stupid little joke, which went just the way it was supposed to.