Cartoon Attack

How I Preserved My Imagination, and My Sanity, at the Office

“Mad Juggler and Puppeteers in a Meeting,” from my sketchbooks.

I used to have to go to meetings. Lots of meetings, where lots got said and little got done. They drove me to distraction.

After a certain point, I gave up all pretense of paying attention and sketched my colleagues, who were more lovable as people than interesting as speakers.

Brother Ben was a monk and a math teacher. I loved him. He was a little roly-poly man of God who had a deep reserve of joy, that laughter of love that makes a man wise.

Walter was a film professor, an excruciatingly slow lecturer with a macular degeneration that required him to wear dark glasses all the time. But behind the shades and the slow speech burned a passion for film that made me love him too.

During the week, sketching my colleagues at meetings was sometimes all I could do. It grounded me. It eased my frustration with meetings. Best of all, it turned some of my boring, work-a-day moments into spots of beauty.

By week’s end, though, I needed stronger medicine, a good dose of imagination. So on Saturday morning, at the coffee shop, I attacked the workweek sketches with cartoons, acting out my frustration and boredom through imaginary mischief.

On the page above, I played the mad juggler, tossing a dozen drops of black watercolor over Brother Ben’s head. I laid under his chair a highway of toy cars and colored them noisy red. Then I built a wall and put behind it some puppeteers, who tried to hijack the meeting using Lilliputians on strings.

The dinosaur whipping sedate old Walter in the ass? I don’t know where that came from.

People in the coffee shop thought it was so charming, so vintage—so present—of me to be painting in the electronic 2020’s. They said I should post it on Instagram. But I was in art therapy, deep in childhood doodie. It was either that or the psychoanalyst’s couch.

I was entering my 60s, and still I was finding relief from a week of school in Saturday morning cartoons.

Theodore Roethke, an American poet from the early 20th-century, wrote a poem that has to be one of the most powerful evocations of office depression ever penned by a modern poet. It’s called “Dolor,” and it ends with these lines.

I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

Art really does help to wash off the dust, and I know of no better way to redeem the work-a-day world than by plunging into the pure fantasy of cartooning, but I hope my grandchildren don’t have to.

I hope, someday, their work-a-day world itself glows with imagination.

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How do you preserve your imagination in the daily grind? Let us know in the Comments!