Eastman & Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Mirage Studios Volume 1, Issue 13
Story & Art by Michael Dooney
Read it at NinjaTurtles.com

The Tortoise and the Theoretical Physicist

Hey, take a look over there to the right.  See where it says something about “write a little something, a few times a week”?  (You don’t? Yeah, I changed it. Why? Because…) Yeah, I haven’t really been living up to that.

I have no great excuse.  Other things come up and I just put the latest Eastman & Laird spine-tingler aside, telling myself I’ll get to it this weekend.  Then this weekend comes, and I’m distracted by charity work and tending to my horses and elk.

Motivation shouldn’t be a problem.  I enjoy writing these, and I enjoy reading the TMNT books.  For some reason.  And while sure, I’m not getting much along the lines of feedback, I never expected to.  You don’t write on the Internet to garner fame and adulation.  Though I have been comment section drunk-dialed.

What will it take to get me back in gear, back to those glory days when my failure to live up to the original schedule could be measured in days, not months?  How to break free from this slump?

First, we must identify the slump.  I thought this would easy enough, a world of knowledge being at my fingertips as it is, but I was mistaken, for one area where Wikipedia is sorely lacking is in a page on types of slumps.  I must pursue the answer by myself.

Is it existential?  No, I’m as confident of my existence as I ever was.

Is it economical?  I know the world as a whole is facing troubled times, but I’m personally more stable than I was when I started this project.

Is it epistemological?  Unlikely, as I don’t even know what that means.

Then is it temporal?  Yes, I think that’s the one.  These last few months, I’ve really felt like I’ve had less time in my day-to-day to do things, specifically things like writing for blogs, as well as writing for various archaic, non-blog formats.

But I’m not sure why that is.  I return home from a hard day’s work (my job, for those curious: improving the world), and things aren’t all that different.  There is nothing new or unusual on my plate these days; in fact, I’d say I’ve got a few fewer things to take care in my eveningtimes.  And still I can’t squeeze in a decaminute here and there to read a comic book and write some easy jokes about it?  It doesn’t make sense.

Unless there’s a larger force at work here.  Could it be that we’re bearing witness to a modern Einsteinian time dilation?  Could an incredible decrease in the mass of some nearby celestial object, as relatively predicts, have sped up time?  Is this proof that the sun is dying out?  Or that the Earth itself is somehow shrinking?  That’s the kind of shit a wizard would pull.

If these theories are true, then surely the end is nigh.  And even nigher than we might think, if you consider that time speeding up is a symptom of this end.  So that’s probably the worst part of all this.  But second-worst has got to be the effect it’s having on this page; the frequent delays are a bitch, and on top of that, I’ve kinda forgotten what I wanted to say.

In my Issue 12 post, I promised that I would explain here why I had problems with using hillbillies as a villainous “other,” hell-bent on destroying the purity and goodness of our heroes, whomever they may be.  Well, when I churned out that post, I had big plans, I was going to whip up something good which would vindicate rednecks once and for all for all o’ y’all.  I knew exactly what I was going to say.  But now it’s gone.