How's It Going

My surrealist-writing chops perhaps aren’t as up to snuff as I’d like; does that visual analogy in the first sentence of paragraph 2 make sense? The idea is that the “barista telling me about his day” scenario is such an immediate and grotesque descent into abject horror, that it would NOT ONLY be akin to someone opening up the gates of hell and unleashing it upon the world, but would MORE ACCURATELY be akin to someone doing so via a grotesque asscheek-pulling-apart motion, just to add that extra layer of disgusting and shameless depravity. Do the demons and such LITERALLY fly out of this hypothetical person’s ass? Maybe; it would certainly be very Bosch-esque. But in my mind, he’s simply opening the gates out thin air, and simply chooses to do so via this grotesque pantomime, as opposed to a traditional gate-opening movement. Isn’t that even worse, in a way?

I think anyone who’s ever worked a retail or service job is familiar with the type of person this comic is about. And honestly, more power to them. If your primary character flaw is being overly positive and high-energy, I’m not going to waste my breathe shitting on you. Er— any more so than I already have, I suppose.

Design-wise, our barista character here was primary influenced by

1. That dude who roundhouse kicked that anti-abortion woman

2. Eric Wareheim in that Bedtime Stories episode where he’s an aspiring actor in LA who speaks in broken spanish

3. And a dude I briefly worked with at summer camp who went by the moniker ‘Bouncing Brian’ (again, super nice dude. But he would probably do this)

and any resemblance to Rocco Botte is purely coincidental, though certain parallels can definitely be drawn with the “annoying Starbucks guy” who has been repeatedly referenced on the Mega64 Podcast.

On the flip side, you know who is even more annoying? Customers who say “How’s it going? No, I mean really; how are you honestly doing right now?” as if allowing you to unload the details of your crushing miseries is somehow a generous gift of catharsis on his part, and not just more emotional labor (don’t shoot me) than it’s worth. Go align your chakras elsewhere, hippie: you are the customer, and we are therefore intrinsically not friends.