That dumb cartoon

Considering my affiliation with graphic arts over my lifetime, it is only fitting that a lot of my life and world out look was colored by three works of graphic art.  I talked earlier about my challenge to accrue wealth coming from that stupid sign my father put up.  At some point, I will explain how a Wallace Wood cartoon from Mad Magazine forever changed my perceptions of female pulchritude.

But this time I would like to talk about a cartoon that has kept me at bay from achieving almost everything I have ever truly wanted for many, many years.  Back in my day, one of the "strips" in the Sunday comics section was, in fact, a weekly horoscope.  Besides listing a prediction for the week for every sign, it also spotlighted a sign for some feature or purpose or another, accompanied by a single panel illustration.

Well, being a clever young toddler (I forget how early I started reading but I was an old pro at it by Kindergarten), I knew my astrological sign, which is Cancer or Moon Children depending on who's laying out the horoscope.  And on the fateful Sunday in question the feature was on my sign.

The illustration was of a young boy looking wistfully into the inside of a toy store IIRC, but it could have been a candy shop.  It was clearly something that a young kid would yearn for, long for, desire.  And the caption was something amounting to my sign being forever frustrated in achieving our desires.  I don't remember the exact wording, but the line from the song Desperado always remind me of it: "You only want the things that you can't get."

Now I think astrology is without merit or basis in much of anything.  So now, with my adult brain, I believe that dumb cartoon was a bunch of hooey put together to meet a deadline.  The problem is that poor little impressionable toddler did not realize that he was reading bunkum.  And he believed it.  And he owned it.

And for most of my fifty years to one degree or another, I have lived it.  The more I really wanted something, the harder it seemed for me to get it.  The knowledge of the adult has never triumphed over the fear of the child, at least until recently.

The thing I have been doing for a number of things lately has been turning over my needs and desires to the Higher Power, operating with the understanding that I will be given that which I truly need and that which I desire that is within the Higher Power's greater plan for me and everything else.

And so now, many years later, I believe I will soon be free from one of those three drawings.  Good bye, dumb cartoon.

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Linda Ronstadt again.  And I've also included the Eagles.  Your pick.