My Life as a Cartoon Character

Every morning I pick up the newspaper to see what I’m up to. I run out to the driveway in my BVDs and grab the paper before the neighbors call 9-1-1 to report Tarzan on the loose.

Then I zip right past the front page — nothing there but politicians and weirdos (alas, I repeat myself).

I rummage past the business section, where all of the rich guys cry and moan about losing more money in a day than I’ll ever make in my life, and the sports section — go Blazers!

I go straight to where all of my alter egos reside — the comics.

Since the time I was in college, I’ve been finding myself in the comics.

It all started with “Doonesbury,” which came along in the 1960s, thus dating both me and its author, Garry Trudeau.

A girl in my dorm at Beloit College in Wisconsin surreptitiously painted a portrait of BD on the door of my room.

She thought I was the human incarnation of the football-loving, beer-drinking counterpart to Michael Doonesbury.

“Every time I look in your room, you’re sitting there in your chair, drinking beer and watching the Chicago Bears,” she said.

“Guilty as charged,” I said.

Somehow, time has transformed me from BD to Charlie Brown, the character in Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” who proves that nice guys don’t always finish last, just most of the time.

Every time I come up with a great idea that will make me rich and famous, some Lucy pulls the ball away just as I’m ready to kick it.

Lately, I find myself in two other comic strips, “Dilbert” and “Zits.”

I used to work for one of those multi-national companies that make “Dilbert” look like a documentary. One time — and I’m not making this up — I attended a three-hour meeting. The subject: why supervisors should never rate an employee a “5” on a scale of 1 to 5 in their annual reviews. The reason was employees would think that they were good and want a bigger raise.

In the middle of the meeting, I asked the human resources lady why, if that was the case, they didn’t just rate employees from 1 to 4.

“That’s a good idea,” she said.

Then the meeting continued for another hour of tortured logic, as I waited for the boss with the pointy hair to come through the door.

“Zits” is another comic I often find myself. I don’t know who the writer and artist Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman are, but I know they have teen-agers, because I find myself identifying more and more with the fictional parents, Walt and Connie Duncan, as they survive their son Jeremy’s adolescence.

Recently, they have been teaching him to drive. As a parent who has survived teaching two teen-agers to drive I feel their, uh, pain.

Some folks say they don’t have time to read the newspaper these days. I guess I understand that, what with all of the important stuff on TV and the Internet.

But I’ll never give up reading the newspaper. I have to see what I’m doing.