Let it be known: puffins will mess you up. (If, that is, you are a tiny silver fish, swimming innocently amongst your brethren.) A life lesson we can all benefit from.
Moving on: I went to Los Angeles to visit a friend this weekend, so I was late drawing this comic, and last night as I scrambled to finish during my normal relaxation hours, all I could think was “H.R. Pufnstuf, H.R. Pufnstuf” over and over and over again. Just those words; not a theme song or anything. It turns out that H.R. Pufnstuf is HORRIFYING. Did you know? I didn’t. He (it?) is not even a puffin in any conventionally-understood sense of the word.
There may be a lesson in that, too, but it’s more of a choose-your-own situation.
LA was wonderful, and my friends are wonderful, and the ocean was wonderful. We went to a dog beach one day in Huntington Beach, and I forgot the specifics of this outing such that I was totally flabbergasted to see hundreds upon hundreds of dogs on the sand. Wow, I thought, stupidly. Everyone had the same idea as us!
(Turns out: yes. I just forgot what the idea was.)
We also visited a college friend of mine at the Bad Robot studio, where we saw a 3-D printer, a prop from Felicity (Megan’s secret box!), and JJ Abrams’s hat. (We weren’t really supposed to see that last thing, and were promptly ushered out of the room. To my knowledge it didn’t impart any secrets about upcoming projects to my subconscious, though time may yet tell!) The office itself was a surprisingly fun place to visit, making me regret anew that I don’t just spend all my time doing whatever I want. (The implication here isn’t that people in that office do so; rather, that an office full of whimsical trinkets will apparently make me a lazy critical thinker and an alienated member of the working class.)
I also bought a lot of books, and then came home and bought some more books on the internet. (From Powells! Don’t judge.) So my consumer impulses still seem to be in order.
Finally, since I don’t know quite how to sign off today, I’m leaving you with this disturbing video, which was a flash-in-the-pan some years ago. Every so often an ominous voice pops into my head and tells me that Ben Bernanke wants my teeth for the Federal Reserve, and now we all know who to blame for that.