(e⋅iph⋅a⋅ny: a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.)

Life's a constant progression so you don't notice the changes and essentially you see yourself as an unbroken chain of events that lead to the current “YOU ARE HERE” red dot in the Mall of Life and hope you end up at Macy's (or perhaps Victoria's Secret) and not in front of Dollar General looking through the window going “If only I could afford that... damn you unattainable Shamwow!”. I'm probably somewhere between the food court and Sharper Image.

I HATE CLEANING. However, I was tasked months ago with clearing out decades of junk in my workplace, which for obvious reasons will not name. But it's an old company, and has gone through more than 2 decades of “I don't know what to do with this so I'll put it … back here and by the time someone needs to figure it out or find it I'll have a better job and it won't be my problem”. I found expired Sweet & Low. With the old 70s logo. That's like finding expired... I don't know, wood. I'm the new kid on the block, and the least qualified to make these decisions, but I have been told to do it, so most of my decision making has been defaulting to “dumpster”. Which totally led to a confrontation with a homeless guy that involved a rotten melon, a hatchet, and eventually a dented shopping cart.

Since I was in that mental gear, I started doing the same thing in my home. Going through and finding old VCR tapes from 1982 when I was a little kid. Old audio cassettes and the few drawings that weren't destroyed when my parent's house burned down over a decade ago (along with an impressive collection of pre-www early 90s pr0n). Do I really need a book on Amiga Basic? Oh, look, a 1200 baud external modem...

I went through photos that needed to be scanned for posterity, and found an old picture of my bedroom from when I was 13 at that special time in a boy's life when the posters on the wall change from cartoons and toys to girls in bikinis and cars with similar curves (yes, I had the Busty Heart “Think Big” poster before mom saw it and said “No way this hangs on a wall in my house!”. I watched a tape of myself at 18 and it hit me – I was surrounded by Things I Made back then. I sculpted, painted, and tinkered. I had the craziest electronic car in the state. Back in 1989 NO ONE had a TV in their 'Vette (okay, I admit it was a CHEvette) with an Atari to boot (joysticks were in the glovebox). I had a Halloween costume with a laser long before you could buy portable lasers without a license.

As I did this I looked around my home office. I have a sweet Weider home gym that needs more use, and a 24 inch monitor sitting above the 20” Cintiq next to my custom high end rig on a generic Office Depot desk. At 18 I had built my own and it was much, much cooler. There are a few nice wooden masks from around the world on the walls, none of which I made. There's a fountain I didn't make on the bookshelf I didn't make. I looked through the open door of the closet to the top, mostly unseen shelf. I saw Bhodi Li and Warriarr in their original box staring back at me, accusingly (look it up, if you dare). There's boxes of comic books and collected toys and … There was a sudden, horrible suffocating sensation - I couldn't identify it, but it felt like watching a friend lowered into the grave. Maybe this is what people think of when they talk about mid life crises, even though I'm still more than a half decade of more away from that (according to Women's magazines, at which point I'm bound by ManLaw to buy a red Corvette with a vanity tag and start wearing gold chains).

For weeks now I've been fighting this Thing sneaking up behind me. I turn around and it's gone, but I KNOW IT'S THERE just waiting to Get Me (I've tentatively named it Ed). I have always thought of myself as the eternal optimist, and tried to make other people feel that same exuberance, that life is better enjoyed than lamented. But for the last few years I have been saying it, not doing it. I've become a whiner, a complainer, and a worrier. Coming face to face with mortality by a long standing (incorrect) terminal diagnosis didn't help. But that I can overcome. So what has been making me feel like I don't Deserve to call myself an optimist? What is it that I stopped believing in?!

And it hit me, the epiphany.

I believe what other people believe about me. I always have, but apparently what they believe has changed. You see yourself in the light that others see you in, and it seems that I'm not so luminous as I once was. (OMG Johnny u r goin EMO on us, ack!)

When everyone wants to know you, wants to be your friend, you... believe you are a person that is worth knowing. That's the real reason I've been doing this for 20 years. The REAL reason. Everyone simply wants to be liked, and believed in. When I was 20something everyone wanted to get together and have a beer or … whatever. It's a wonderful, heady thing, popularity. You start believing your own hype. I've been told by more than one friend that they learned to see themselves in a better light because that's how I saw them. If you tell the truth, people eventually believe it. So reasonably, how should I see myself now? Now that everyone I meet sees a threat hidden inside a candy shell, an embarrassment, a drug that gives a good high but has to be hidden in a sock in the back of the bottom drawer of the dresser where you hope mom never looks. When everyone is suddenly afraid that knowing you will lead to some horrible scenario worthy of a Dateline segment... Someone recently told me … you know what, I can't even retype it but it was the most heartbreaking thing I've ever seen written about me. It wasn't meant to be cruel, it was an offhand remark that wasn't borne of strong emotion which made it that much worse. It was just... honest. I feel sick to my stomach every time I think about it, because I actually felt like the Creepy Thing I've joked that I am - but I can't think of a reason now to disbelieve it. It was the first time in my adult life someone said something to me that actually brought me to the verge of tears, which is pretty pathetic now that I think about it. I said VERGE! In fact, forget I said all that, I, erm, actually was so angered that I went out and broke a pool table over a biker's head and then got stabbed, but it was a flesh wound that I sewed up with a chicken bone and piece of barbed wire, and is just going to make a really tough-looking scar. Sweet. Fuck yeah?

...

But then... I realized that I've started doing the same thing to other people. I'm so worried that someone is going to connect "Johnny" to real-life "Johnny" that I divulge nothing anymore. I'm a cartoon character with all the depth of a paper towel (Brawny, or course). We've all come to see each other as slobbering wolves in sheep's clothing. That's so much more twisted than anything I've ever drawn that I can't even wrap sanity around it with a pretty bow and pretend it's okay. It's Wonderland – full of beauty and danger and insanity and if you stay too long or fall too deep down the rabbit hole you become part of it. I guess, from how people seem to see me now, that I've become too much a part of it and... it must show.

Does the Mad Hatter actually knows he's mad? It takes an Alice standing there full of fear and trepidation and the warm light of normal to reveal it.

If anyone is wondering why I'm hardly online anymore it's because I have to leave the insanity of Wonderland until ... Like I said, I hate cleaning but I have to do it with fervent hopes that I'll see the shiny underneath again, and maybe other people will, too? I'm going to pin that picture of me in my room at 18 when it looked like an inventor's workshop, and go back to building things I can surround myself with in the real world that I'm not ashamed to show flesh and blood people, this time with more lasers.

It's going to be a good Halloween.