I think I can run with this one...

Back from the wedding in Mass., where we drank for 8 hours in a row after the ceremony, as New England tradition dictates. My stomach feels a little like I've been eating out of a dumpster.

I think I came up with a workable thesis in my girlfriend's bathroom, though: in the last 25 years, the American culture industry has failed to come up with anything that approaches Calvin and Hobbes for sheer, overall greatness. Bill Watterson took Charles Schultz's sense of anarchy and existential bent, and made something more eloquent, critical, and humane than any of the serious art of its period. Also, it's incredibly funny. And awesomely drawn. It asks all of the big questions, so many of the little ones, is chock-full of the keenest observations, and gets it 100% right in its cynical stance toward the hypocrisies of the adult world. One of Calvin's main roles is as a mock-Sophist, expressing his 5-year-old desires in the language of academia.

Watterson's a genius. Fuck him for retiring.