It’s something that everyone goes through. The brutal comedown. Whether your drug of choice is alcohol, LSD, or chocolate… It always sounds great when someone offers it to you at a party, and you get cruising on the high… But they you’re just lying in the fetal position in someone else’s bodily fluids in a public restroom. A tale as old as time.
Man, I don’t know whether it’s the plates I have or the shitty microwave, but ceramic ware comes out of that death box like hellfire. So, Rita’s ‘story’ is based on real events, every single morning, because I never remember that I have an appliance that is very much trying to kill me.
Poor Virgil. Working part-time as the beer vendor at the local concert venue, he had saved up about 85% of what he figured would be enough money to get through his junior year at Purdue University. Until that fateful night when that dude tripping on weird beer went crazy and spooked him. Virgil never returned to work, falling just short of financial freedom. He’d return to Purdue, but eventually would have to drop out, unable to afford living near campus. Eventually, Virgil would find a decent enough gig bartending down at the West Lafayette Dave & Busters. He’d keep in touch with many of his Engineering friends from the program, but he’d always deeply regret not being able to finish his program and pursue his dream of working with NASA and the space program. Unbeknownst to him, Lester lived the rest of his life, comfortably never realizing that he had drastically altered the life of a bright young man with a brilliant future.
I didn’t do this intentionally, but between getting all philosophical, being generally unaware of what’s going on, and straight up ripping into that Box ‘o Nuts, it sure seems like Rita is baked in this strip. Lotta drug stuff in CUPS these days, for some reason.
Went with *snort* as the onomatopoeia for the noise that Norah makes when she’s startled awake. I also strongly considered *snerk*, but that sounded a little to much like the noise someone makes when someone laughs, both suddenly but also completely under control. Snerk also toes a line onto sounding like ‘snigger’, which was always a term I felt pretty uncomfortable with. Any other type of noise being made in this strip seemed, otherwise, to be too confusing and not readable enough and… You know what? From here on out I’m going to leave all of these decisions under the hood, I hope that’s OK with you.
