The New Normal 4/16/21

If you are like either of us, you start making more and more noises accompanying physical exertion. Bend down to pick something up - that’s a noise. Stretching while getting out of bed - another noise. Leaning over to retie an untied shoelace - yet another. Sitting down in a chair, getting up from said chair, exiting and entering a car, and let’s not even talk about going to the bathroom. The point is the older we get, the more noises we make. John and I thought it would be fun to do a comic on this. The only trouble was how to spell the specific sounds. Like how do you spell the sound when you stretch in the morning? I spell it Uhharghhhh! To John it’ s more of a AAaaarrhghh. Guess who pens and inks in the letters? Guess who wins. I’ve got something to say about that. Unnnnnnhhhhh! Now I promised myself I wouldn’t be like that when I got to certain age, but creeeeeakkkk, here I am. As the saying goes, Man plans, God laughs.

Our other comic is about America’s new favorite phrase to explain everything, “in an abundance of caution.” In an abundance of caution will you please wear a mask before entering, wash your hands before touching, don’t rake the sand trap or touch the flag stick, and subject yourself to the temperature gun. In an abundance of caution my favorite beachside roadstand stopped serving fried whole clam bellies and soft serve ice cream, which were the only two reasons I liked going there. Now don’t get us wrong, we realize much of this is necessary, but some folks take it a little too far. Example, friends who ask, “Have you gotten your vaccine yet?” before they’ll talk to you on the phone. Okay, I exaggerated a little bit there but you get the point. I used to use Lysol wipes to germ-proof the groceries and the grocery bags before putting them away. After receiving our second doses, no more of that. At last, now that we have the vaccine, we can all breathe a little sigh of relief. Just don’t do it if you’re less than 6 feet away from me, okay?

That’s it for this week and we’ll see you next week with two new ones. And if we see you, please make sure to wear a mask.

Andy and John

How times have changed 05/08/2020

One thing about this pandemic…it reduces the amount of personal “touches” we have in our daily lives. I’m not just talking about the family members you can’t see and hug. I’m talking about all the tangential people in your life that are suddenly gone. For a suburban New Yorker, there are the people you knew on the train into the city every day, the guy at the bagel and coffee cart, your coworkers, the people behind the counter at the place where you picked up lunch, etc. You also did stuff like going out to dinner, going to the occasional ball game, movie theater and Broadway show. Now all of this is temporarily gone. And the people you do run into are all wearing masks. Andy went to the local coffee shop to pick up a 1 lb. bag of beans last week and two people on the six-foot-apart line he was standing on had the following conversation. Larry: Jim, is that you? Jim: Yeah, who’s this? Larry: It’s me, Larry. Jim: Oh, I didn’t recognize you with the mask, (at which point they each pulled down their masks, which kind of defeats the whole purpose). But that incident is a perfect segue into our first comic.

Andy and his wife Joanie took advantage of Whole Foods’ Senior Hour, where the entire store is open only to people age 60 or over, for one hour, from 8-9 am. Once they got going, they heard, from behind a mask, “Andy, Joanie, hi. It’s my first time taking advantage of being over 60. This is great.” To which Andy thought to himself, is he REALLY over 60 or just close enough so he thinks no one will notice? You know, the only thing worse are the people who bring 12 items to the ‘10 items or less’ express lane. But who’s counting? Anyway, that was the impetus for this week’s first comic.

The second as you scroll down comes from the pandemic giving us so much free time, we can get to those projects we’ve been meaning to get to for the last 20 years. This is clearly more of a John thing than an Andy thing, since Andy has a rule that if something stays in a box through two moves and has never been opened, it’s outta here. If you haven’t gotten to the kids’ bar and bat mitzvah books by the time they hit 30, it ain’t happening. John, in contrast, actually gets to those things. And it is there he noticed he had two prints of every photo he had taken, even the accidental ones of his foot. Good old Fotomat. We guess the offer made sense at the time.

So what’s up for future comics? It seems we only go to two types of places, supermarkets and drug stores, and what’s more exciting than that? We will spend the next week washing our hands and coming up with more CITOC (Comics In the Time Of Covid).

Stay safe,

Andy and John

Now what??? 3/27/2020

If you’ve come to the New 60 blog for advice on how to handle the corona virus, you are just as clueless as we are. And while we don’t know exactly how to handle our isolation and social distance, at least we can make fun of it. Apologies in advance if anyone or their loved ones are suffering from this horribly scary virus. We would never make light of suffering. We are just poking fun at how we’ve had to change our lives.

And just as Corona has changed everything we do in real life, it also has an affect on our comics. This week we heard from two of our loyal fans, Bill and Diane Mech, who pointed out that the guys should not be meeting in the diner since just about every restaurant in America (and most of the world) is closed. In fact Bill suggested we put them in separate booths, which we did. And then we went a step further into the land of the absurd and had them break in, of course. Thanks Bill and Diane.

In coming up with two new comics per week, we try to stay more than a month ahead of when we publish, so we have a stockpile of finished work. Well, when you get ahead you run the risk of being out of touch with what is happening here and now. We will be sure to serve up some off kilter takes on our changing reality but also, we will just do plain old life. A) because we’re optimistic the world will eventually return to “normal” and B) because we already thought up all these cool ideas and we’re too stubborn to scrap them.

Now the second idea you’ll see is based on another result of living with the threat of Corona. If you’re into sports like John, you’ll notice this. If you’re really, really into sports like Andy, you are suffering without anything to watch at night. In fact, one of Andy’s favorite activities is to watch a game while texting with his son or to actually watch with him. They get passionate about the games, the strategy and the moves and they debate what moves their teams should make. What do you do when you no longer have any games to watch? You can’t yell and debate over a replay of a game from last year (yes, Andy has lowered himself to watching the occasional Mets and Knicks 2019 reruns) when he already knows the result. One night when on the phone with his brother-in-law Buzzy, he heard about people so desparate, they were watching chess. Bingo! A comic was born. John and Andy imagined the same passion for baseball strategy being applied to a chess match. And chess, by the way, is considered a sport. Really. C’mon. I mean it’s easier to imagine an NBA player being good at chess than it is to imagine a chess player being good at hoops, but we digress.

At any rate, we want to thank you from 6 feet away for continuing to follow us. As we see it, everyone can use a little laugh, especially in these troubling times.

See you (digitally) next week,

Andy and John