My parents (my father in particular) placed an incredibly high value on thinking. Not necessarily memorizing facts and figures, but getting to an actual understanding of a topic and, sometimes more importantly, getting creative with it. Problem solving involved using our education for analyzing the issue, but using our imagination for coming up with a solution. If we couldn't work through a problem, we tried to find a way to work around it. Part of my education was solving riddles and brain teasers. Questions that required heavy doses of lateral thinking.

When I was a kid, we didn't have a lot of money, so my parents were environmentalists out of necessity. Clothes got handed down repeatedly until they wore out, and then we'd still find other uses for them. Any products that came in a container -- the containers got saved/reused. This was so ingrained in me that, on my first day of school, Mom packed my lunch and I brought home the plastic baggie my sandwich was in so she could reuse it. She was in tears as she explained that was something I could throw out.

Remember when companies experimented with toothpaste pumps? Dad saved our empty ones. Not for anything in particular; he just thought he might have need for the pump mechanism at some point in the future. "Save that; I might be able to use it for something" was almost a family motto. Mom saved empty milk jugs for an emergency water supply. Dad saved old peanut butter jars (the glass ones) for everything from loose screws to turpentine. Old newspapers got rolled into "logs" and bound with wire for our fireplace. Then we'd fish the scorched wire out of the ashes and use it for another newspaper log. Everything got used and reused until it couldn't be used for its intended purpose any more. Then we'd reuse it for something else until it was no longer good for that. Then it'd get stripped for parts.

That was all done for financial reasons. We could save money by not throwing away something just because it didn't work any more or was no longer useful. We'd find a use for something because it was cheaper and more efficient than buying something new. Mom & Dad hated living like that, frankly. Not that they were saving money, but that they felt like they had no other choice. Early on, there were arguments about whether they should buy bread or milk that week because they couldn't afford both. I have a massive scar on my finger from when I was 7 because they didn't think they could afford even the co-pay of an emergency room visit to have it stitched up. (This was in the '70s, too, before health care costs really skyrocketed.)

For me, that was just how things were. You saved everything you could, re-purposed it multiple times, and you damn well got your money's worth out of something. It wasn't done FOR environmental reasons, but it still had a positive environmental impact. We were being good stewards of the environment, even if it was incidental, because doing so had a direct, positive affect on our daily lives. I've salvaged vacuums, furniture, bikes, workshop spotlights, long boxes full of comics... all sorts of still useful goods from people's garbage. Even the broken stuff that can be fixed with a little elbow grease, and a few replacement screws or belts. Not only do I wind up with useful goods that I didn't have to pay for (or only pay minimally to fix) but I'm keeping those items out of landfills. Environmentalism by way of saving money, due to creative thinking.

I try to carry those lessons forward to this day. How can I solve this problem in the most efficient way possible? Can I address this issue with things I already have on hand? Can this item that no longer works be fixed? If not, are some of the parts still functional and worth saving? I've been reluctant to leave the house much less go into stores particularly the past few years, but I've been able to care of issues using stuff I had lying around. It's cheaper, it's more enivronmentally friendly, and I don't have to take huge chunk of time to make yet another trip to Home Depot.

My wife and I picked up a saying from a friend a few years back: if you stay ready, you don't have to get ready. (I suspect she cribbed it from Suga Free.) It's similar to the old Boy Scout motto: be prepared. The idea in both cases is that, if anything unexpected pops up, you're okay to deal with it.

There's actually three aspects to that, though. First, can you handle the expense? The most recent statistic on this I've seen said that roughly 60% of Americans could not cover a $1,000 emergency, and the same study found that the average emergency -- the type that affect a little less than a third of people every year -- is actually more like $3500. That's not even getting into health care coverage issues. So to stay ready here, how much should have socked away in your emergency fund?

The stock answer is six months of living expenses. If you spend $3000 a month on rent, utilities, groceries, etc., that means your savings account should have $18,000 in it. The thinking is that, if you suddenly lost your job, you'd still be able to cover your bills for six months until you landed a new one. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most people are able to find a job in about one month -- but I think that's absolute horse shit. My current job took a month and half just for the interview process. I think six months is WAAAAY too conservative a number. I've seen more than a few financial experts say an 8-10 month emergency fund makes more sense, and a full year would be ideal. But regardless of what number is "right" here, the idea remains that you should try to set up some financial cushion in case you're hit with some unexpected expenses.

The second aspect to staying ready/being prepared is your knowledge and skills. Do you have at least the knowledge, if not the pracitised and honed skills, to deal with whatever gets thrown at you. This one is, admittedly, a little ambiguous because there's an infinite number of different types of emergencies you have to face, so what could you learn and/or practice to be ready for anything? Dealing with a stalled car on the highway is obviously a radically different problem than getting bitten by a snake on a hiking trip. Both of which are also radically different than having to put together a new resume after a sudden company-wide layoff, which is radically different again than the power going out on your block for a week. So what do you prepare for? How do you narrow your focus enough to what's "most useful"?

Honestly, I don't have a good answer for that. I think one of the things that's helped me over the years was being adept at applied knowledge. That is, I can take learnings from one book or situation and apply them in a meaningful, practical way somewhere else. I'm no electrician by any means, but I did learn about circuits back in school so I can deal with some basic electronics issues. I knew why it was important to hook up jumper cables on your car in a certain manner well before I had to actually do it, thanks to that basic education for example. The other thing that's helped me here is that I keep trying to learn new things every day. Whether that's through YouTube videos, or "Instructables" articles online, or just good, ol' fashioned practice, I keep trying to pick up whatever I can because you never know when something might come in handy.

The third aspect to staying ready is emotional. If you suddenly have to face some emergency, can you keep your head well enough to deal with it? Certainly, taking care of the first two goes a long way towards this third, and not having those first two makes this third one insanely more difficult. And it doesn't even factor in whatever emotional baggage you might be stuck with thanks to PTSD or domestic abuse or something equally (or even more) horrible. But it's absolutely a consideration. All the money in the world and all the skills in the world won't do you a lick of good if you're in a state of panic.

I think this can at least partially be addressed in your considerations for the knowlege/skills area. If you think about which emergencies you might need to prepare for, you can also mentally work out some of your plans in advance (even if you haven't gotten the skills part down yet). By reviewing what you'd like your reaction to be in a variety of emergency situations, you've already started steeling yourself for the event itself. If you think about how you should react if you ever find your house on fire, you're less likely to be frozen in place when it does happen as you try to assess all your options in a matter of microseconds.

Of course, there's always something that can come completely out of nowhere and blindside you. But the more situations you've planned for -- financially, intellectually, and emotionally -- the more you're able to roll with things as they start getting thrown at you.

I've often heard that young people think they're immortal. That's usually a shorthand meaning that they often don't consider the consequences of their actions and, thus, sometimes behave recklessly.

Looking back at my own youth, I certainly don't ever recall thinking, "Of course I can do this stupid thing! That won't kill me!" But I also don't recall ever thinking much about death or life-long injuries or anything like that. Any of those behaviors that might be considered reckless rarely got more thought than, "That looks cool!" (I seem to recall in particular a number of "stunts" on bicycles as we attempted to emulate Evel Knievel.)

Of course, as you age, you start seeing more friends and relatives die. The finality of life starts to sink in, and you begin to understand what consequences can really mean. But, interestingly, what caught my attention was less the consequences of big actions that lead to immediately dramatic results (e.g. drunk driving leading to car crashes) and more the consequences of a number of little actions that lead to extended, deteriorative results. That is, you're less likely to get killed in a fiery plane crash than you are to slowly grow old, start having lung problems from smoking, go through years of painful chemotherapy for cancer treatments, start having to lug around an oxygen tank, which gets more and more difficult to do as arthritis sets in, before you eventually find yourself bed-ridden as your brain atrophies with little to engage your mind.

In my lifetime, I've been to one closed casket funeral because the person's body was too mangled to display. By contrast, I've been to dozens of open casket funerals where I could look down on the withered and weathered faces of people who I knew hadn't even remotely enjoyed the last years of their lives. Strokes leaving them unable to speak, hearing loss preventing them from holding a conversation, broken hips making them wheelchair bound, dementia keeping them from even recognizing the reality around them... Seeing those people go from being bright, vibrant, engaged friends and family members to barely even shells of a human has had an impact on me.

Of course, some of the problems people encounter as they age are genetic in nature, and all you can do is hope you didn't get that bit of DNA from your folks. But many of those same problems are amplified by how you live your life. Maybe liver cancer does indeed run in your family, but if you throw a lot of hard drinking on top of that, you're going to radically increase your odds of getting it yourself. By contrast, if arthritis runs in your family, you can slow its onset by working to keep your joints limber through stretching and exercise. It's that last piece that I think is worth expanding on, throughout your entire life.

I think about it in kind of Sisyphean terms. You eat healthy and you work out to push things up the hill. At some point, though, you'll experience a set-back. Whether it's age-related or genetics or maybe you do indeed just randomly get hit by a bus. That's the equivalent of falling back down the hill. BUT, the higher up the hill you are in the first place, the set-backs won't push as far back down. Say something happens that impacts your ability to lift and you lose half your stength. If you were bench-pressing 100 pounds, that means you can now only lift 50. But if you were bench-pressing 200 pounds, you're now lifting 100. There's a greater numeric difference in the losses of the latter case, but you're still able to lift 100 pounds... which is still twice as much as in the first case!

As I mentioned briefly yesterday, I was in an accident in 2017 where I was struck by a reckless driver. I broke and dislocated my shoulder, and my left leg was pretty well shattered. I spent three weeks in the hospital and another year and a half doing physical therapy. It took me nearly three months before I could even attempt to walk. But virtually every doctor, nurse, and therapist I saw during that time said that I would have been phenomenally worse off if I hadn't been running marathons prior to the incident. I was in good physical shape, and I was used to the mental rigor of working long hours through a lot of sweat and pain to achieve a goal. Had I been more of a couch potato, I might still be able to walk, but there's a fair chance I would've needed a cane and I wouldn't be able to run at all! (I'm not able to run marathons, but that I'm able to run at all is amazing!)

The same holds true for mental capacity. The more you're able to stay mentally active -- not just doing the daily crossword or whatever, but continuing to engage with life by remaining curious and trying to learn new things -- the less of an impact cognitive declines will have. One reason why people often have serious declines after the loss of their sight or hearing as the grow older is that they're no longer able to engage in ways they used to. They can't see to read and they lose the stimulous of addressing and analyzing the news from reading the paper, or they can't hear and lose the stimulous of engaging with other people. Those parts of the brain that process those inputs gets turned off and they often can't find substitutes.

Our bodies, like everything else, will break down over time. We can't stop from aging and we're not immortal. But by continuing to push ourselves both mentally and physically over our entire lives, we can keep from growing old. When aging does start to catch up with us, the higher up that hill we are to begin with, the longer it's going to take to slide all the way down to the bottom.

So I try to push myself every day. To learn something new. To push myself in some way. I'm not always successful (man, this year has been difficult to even just maintain, much less pushing forward!) and there are occasionally major set-backs (like the aforementioned accident). But rejecting complanency, refusing to stop pushing myself, that's what's going to set me up for a better life.

One question I ask myself a lot is, "Why did I do that?" I don't ask in a derogatory or demeaning type of tone; it's not a form of passively aggressively calling out my own bad behavior. It's an actual question that I use to figure myself out.

Every action I take is for a reason, whether I consciously realize it or not. Some are fairly obvious -- if I haven't had meat in a while and I'm hungry, it wouldn't take a genius to figure out that's why I got a cheeseburger for lunch. Some reasons for my actions, though, aren't so straightforward. In fact, some might not even be easily discernable to me. And figuring out why I make those decisions and take those actions helps me to better understand myself (primarily) and others. If I understand why I make a decision, it can help me figure out if it's a valid response or not, and whether I should continue making decisions in that same manner.

Of course, I don't always have an answer readily available. Sometimes, it's not always practical to address a question like that in the moment. Sometimes, the answer lies buried within decades old memories that haven't consciously come to the surface in ages. Sometimes, the root cause is from a less-than-obvious tangential incident. Sometimes, you just need a little distance to properly assess the situation.

Not every action is one that needs to be re-assessed and changed. There could be a perfectly reasonable rationale behind that decision and/or it doesn't have a material impact on anything anyway. I still find it a valuable exercise to ask "why" though, so that I can validate the choice.

Why do I procrastinate?
Why do I keep a blog?
Why do I hold a knife and fork that way?
Why do I mostly keep to myself during group discussions?
Why do I wear clothes that are mostly mono-chromatic?

The impact of the questions vary. I did change how I hold a knife and fork after asking myself that question, but it's a pretty trivial aspect of life ultimately. Procrastination, on the other hand, can have a huge impact on everything I work on, but by knowing why I do procrastinate, it allows me to indulge in it when the stakes are less critical.

Of course, part of the challenge in that internal reflection is setting aside the time to do it, without a load of distractions to pull you away from your thoughts. Personally, I found running to be very useful in this regard. The rhythm of my legs acted as a sort of physical white noise, and there's little to do besides think. Biking is fast enough that it requires reallying paying attention to my surroundings at all times to avoid an accident, and swimming requires enough precision (particularly when it comes to breathing) that I have to focus a lot of my mind on that. Running allowed me to get lost in my own thoughts, and address that question of why. For me, at least, it was almost a form of meditation. I think I've gotten to a much better, more comprehensive understanding of myself after I began running and I led a much more fulfilling life as a result.

(As an aside, that's not why I first started running. And I'm using the past tense above because I haven't been running for a few years now. I was hit by an SUV and it shattered my left leg. After a LOT of physical therapy, I can technically run but not nearly at the level I used to, and I would finish my runs more pissed off than when I started. Running had started making me feel worse becuase I began comparing my current performance to my past performance, and I couldn't excuse myself for that despite knowing full-well why it would never realistically be possible to return to my pre-accident abilities.)

But by continuing to ask myself why I do everything I do -- not just on those decisions I regret making or consider a mistake -- I have a better understanding of who I am. While it might be seen as a bunch of navel-gaving, that I'm actively trying to answer a specific question, I suspect I come away with more resolution than un-directed meditation. It's not the broad, open-ended question of, "Why am I here?" but asking the questions with specific, discoverable answers ("Why did I do that?") takes me ever-closer to figuring out who I am.

This week, I'm going to try to do something different. Rather than talk about actual comics or the comics industry or any of the usual topics I tend to cover, I'm going to go a bit afield and talk a bit about some of the philosophical tenets I hold. Not necessarily as they relate to comics, just the broad ideas that I just generally follow in life. Chalk it up to my being unusually reflective after the shitshow that's been 2025.

"Who am I?" is one of the most fundamental questions of philosophy. Naturally, there are any number of answers to this depending on your philosophical bent, but a reasonable answer might be: the sum total of my experiences. What makes a person unique is that no one else has done exactly the same things they've done in exactly the same way with exactly the same results. Who I am includes: getting laughed at on the first day of first grade for pulling my pants down around my ankles to pee, breaking my wrist on Thanksgiving when I was 10, trying out for the eighth grade basketball team and being one of only two people to not make the cut, having one of my assigned college roommates in freshman year never show up and another drop out after the first quarter leaving my one remaining roommate and I with a dorm room designed for four people... I could go on and on with everything I've seen, everything I've done, everything I've had done to me. All of that makes up who I am today.

But there's something of a paradox here. Even though I've got all those experiences to make up who I am, they don't define me.

Everything in my past is just that: my past. I can't change any of it. I can't re-experience any of it. It's over. Done. It's no longer relevant. As has been said before, time travel is possible, but only in one direction.

But how can it not be relevant if those same experiences make up who I am? How can that not matter if those experiences shape the person I am today?

That's because I am not just the sum total of my experiences. It's what I choose to do with those experiences, what I choose to take from them make me who I am right now. I have nearly half a century of life experiences now, and I act based on them. And it's those actions that really define me today. From what clothes I choose to put on first thing in the morning to what I tell my boss when he asks me how any given project is going to whether I choose to work out or not to what I choose to read/watch/listen to. Those decisions are informed by my past but they're still new decisions. And in the moment I act on those decisions, that is who I am.

We obviously don't all start at the same point in life, and we certainly don't all wake up each morning with things being completely reset. But every time you get up, you get to choose how to act and react to the day, whatever that looks like. I'm not talking about trying to maintain a positive attitude or anything saccharinely simplisitic like that; sometimes shit just pisses you off. But whatever you wake up with, that's what you've got going forward. Take what you've got here and now, and move on from there. Doesn't matter what you did yesterday or last week or last year. Wherever you are right now, that's your current starting point. You can try to go forward, or not, and whatever progress you make (or don't) sets your starting point for tomorrow, a starting point that you can't move retroactively.

Everything in my life up to this point has shaped me. But who I am depends on what I choose to do right now.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Ziggy's Gift

https://ift.tt/tCuJRha

Kleefeld on Comics: Today's Fandom Behavior Is Not New

https://ift.tt/xw9ZTel

Kleefeld on Comics: How Are You Getting Webcomics News These Days?

https://ift.tt/laoOGcT

Kleefeld on Comics: Multiple Publishers IP

https://ift.tt/LijzuEM

Kleefeld on Comics: Where Are the Cut-Out Promos

https://ift.tt/jAu7Pap

Back in the day, the number of toys licensed from comics books was paltry (certainly by comparison today) and what was available was often made cheaply. Much of which had to do with the materials that were available -- you couldn't afford to make heavily articulated, plastic action figures. So what happened on occasion was that toys were made out of paper or light cardboard; those were materials that were pretty accessible, fairly cheap, and easy to transport. So you got things like the set of Marvel Family fliers pictured here. A little Tab A/Slot B action, and you've got yourself a Captain Marvel figure that fly around.

The thing I don't get -- and I've been trying to figure this out for a quarter century -- is why creators and/or publishers don't offer things like this as downloads today? Use them as promos for your new comic? A downloadable PDF that can be easily passed around and shared that people can then print out and put together some figures or a small playset or something.

I know Chris Schweizer has done some things along these lines for his Patreon backers, and Brian Fies did one at the conclusion of The Last Mechanical Monster, but I don't recall seeing someone try something like this as a promotional tool. There seem to be plenty of fans who put together custom-designed cubees of comic book characters, so it seems to me there's no real objection to the notion of papercraft or anything.

And while I get that there's some time and effort involved, a company like Marvel or DC literally has this material from years ago sitting in their archives. Back in the '70s, Marvel did a full playset featuring the Baxter Building, the Daily Bugle, the Sanctum Sanctorum, and Peter Parker's apartment. There's the Captain Marvel fliers noted above, and I'm pretty sure both Marvel and DC later had similar versions for other characters.

Maybe it's just me. I think it's a clever, fun way to promote a comic and wouldn't cost anything more than a little time to design. Hell, I designed my own HERBIE the robot back when I ran my old Fantastic Four fan site. My point is that it's not that difficult. Just take a few cues from a half century ago, and put together some new promotional material that no one is else putting out there!