AJM INTERVIEW: Dr. Belch
In the hot seat this time is Dr. Belch, AKA Jonathan M. Sweet.
*This interview was like no other I've ever done before. It was the pinnacle of interviews maybe so far, because there is so much to learn about this person we call Dr. Belch. A whole hidden world yet to be seen, as is with all of our members. So without further a-do, here is our little sit down. Red is my words, and the white is Dr. Belch's.
I'm here with cartoon fanatic and AJM STUDIOS shrink, Dr. Belch....
Happy to be here.
So, Dr. Belch, how did you find AJM STUDIOS.NET?
I clicked on a link at the
Kim Possibleforum at tv.com, and, as they say, the rest is history.
What keeps you coming back?
It's a great little forum. People seem to understand me here. I'm afraid I've worn out my welcome at my fair share of boards in the past. My politics rub someone the wrong way, or somebody gets offended over a joke I make, or someone says the wrong thing to me and the teeth come out. I mean, I can take honest criticism, but some people confuse it with abuse. Often I make an enemy out of one person in a forum, and then others run to their defense--no matter what crackbrained or vitriolic thing they might say--and then a huge stupid flame war starts. This forum, I like. No one's cussing at each other, there don't seem to be any old grudges that keep getting dredged up over and over again pointlessly, and no matter how heated a debate gets, folks can shake hands and still be friends afterwards.
Anyone on this site that sticks out to you that you'd figure a role model, or not?
Kim's a lot like her animated counterpart--smart, strong-willed, not afraid to speak her mind, always friendly, never without a kind word. Ron would be like his cartoon self if John K. [creator of
Ren and Stimpyand
The Ripping Friends] or maybe Kevin Smith [director of
Clerks,
Chasing Amy, and Jay
and Silent Bob Strike Back] wrote for Disney. He's a riot. He's pure id. He's all about boogers and butts. I dig that kind of honesty. You have to be a strong woman to love a man like that. Kim's a rare breed. She and Ron are a great couple. They will have very interesting children. [laughs]
Anyone just stick out?
Definitely Ubs. He's a crazy kid, but smart too. He's like the son I never had.
As you know, I'm a conservative too....
I'm always wary when anyone starts out a sentence that way. It always means they're about to tear into me. [laughs] But you I trust.
...but how do you feel about our debate board's leftys? We know you're a regular user there.
Yes. Well, to understand the left, you have to understand liberalism's roots. A spirit of meanness began in the Democrat Party with Woodward and Bernstein in 1974, '75, although I believe it didn't really come to a head until about '94, when Newt [Gingrich, former Speaker of the House] and the New Guard came in. The leftist Democrats and a few RINOs [Republicans in Name Only], who'd been steadily simmering through eight years of Ronald Reagan and four of Bush The Elder, finally boiled over. They'd owned Congress for at least forty years, had just installed their Golden Boy [Bill Clinton] in the White House, and weren't about to cede power to the Republicans. Liberals love power, you see. They feel they're entitled to it. They and their buddies in the media started the ongoing assault against the right: Newt, Reagan, Bush, Rush [Limbaugh], [Sean] Hannity, [Glenn] Beck, [Ann] Coulter, anyone they feel is a threat to them. They don't even feel it necessary to back up their claims. If you ask them to offer any speck of evidence to support their outrageous accusations, they start howling that you're a Nazi who wants to march them into a burning furnace. Their arguments are so flimsy and transparent, and they know it, that they'd rather scream you down than debate intelligently and substantively.
I've developed quite a reputation as a fire-breathing right-winger, ever since my [Arkansas State University] Herald days, but on the whole I'd say I'm pretty live-and-let-live. I welcome all comers in the arena of ideas. The problem is, liberals don't have anything new to offer. They haven't seriously updated their playbook in over thirty years. It's worn-out, tattered, stained, and has the name "NIXON" crossed out and "DUBYA" written over it in crayon. I've been hearing the same tired buzzwords and the same long laundry list of insults, from every liberal I talk to, for ten years. I've talked to them face to face, I've read hundreds of their inane rantings on message boards and blogs, I've sorted through dozens of vulgar and badly-spelled posts in my guestbook. I get bored with it, then I just get angry. An intelligent, well-spoken liberal is a treat for me, but even then they don't stray far from the Party line. I've never gotten a one to admit that his is an ugly, exploitive philosophy of life that needs to die, and die quickly.
One time some liberal idiot asked me [in a whiny, mocking tone of voice], "What the hell is conservative about you?!" [normal tone] It seemed he questioned my loyalty because I didn't fit into his prefabricated little template of what a conservative is. We aren't supposed to be writers or artists; we should all be something boring like lawyers or CPAs. We all have to wear blue suits and red ties, not teeshirts and flannel and denim jeans.We aren't supposed to tell rude jokes or laugh at anything unseemly. This person was upset because I transcribed a conversation I had with a left-wing thing word-for-word into my blog. I quoted them exactly and didn't misrepresent them. But see, we're not supposed to openly criticise folks we disagree with, but keep our mouths shut. We're supposed to be [imitating Jim Backus] above the fray and act aloof and look down our nose and sniff a lot. [normal tone] Maybe this worked for the movement in the beginning, with guys like Bill Buckley and Bob Bork, but today's conservatism needs to get in there and not be afraid to get its hands a little dirty. Today's conservative is a younger, hipper breed. I still believe in the traditional values--smaller government, getting to keep what you earn, pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, traditional family values, a return to God--but I believe more drastic measures need to be taken to get things done. Now we don't always agree on just how to do that, so we set to squabbling amongst ourselves a lot of the time--the rock-ribs, the marshmallow moderates, the RINOs, the sunshine soldiers--which on one hand is nice because it shows we aren't monolithic, there's room for ideas...but very disheartening on the other because little real work gets done. We on the right need to present a united front. We need to shout louder to be heard over the Small-Minds' screaming.
I wasn't really political in high school. It wasn't until college that I started really waking up and realizing the stakes. If I had to point to one incident, more than anything, that cemented a lot of my views about right and left--and those who know me, or have read my work, know this well--it'd be getting fired from The Herald. When I worked there, the op-ed page was two columnists, two cartoonists, one columnist/cartoonist...and me. So we're talking five hardcore leftists and one conservative, which is the industry's definition of balance. In early 1997 I was told the copy editor had filed a charge of plagiarism against me. I was shocked. He claimed I had stolen an idea for a piece I'd written on the new TV ratings system from an episode of
Saturday Night Live. I denied it. I had not seen the sketch, I never have seen it, and to this day I don't even believe it exists. The editorial editor, who I thought was my friend, said he thought I was innocent. I really thought he was in my corner. A week later his name turns up on my termination papers. Imagine how I felt! This liberal, whom I really liked and respected, sold me out for the sake of his own job and his future! I felt hurt that he'd stabbed me in the back. I mean, cripes, I wasn't a perfect staffer. I know I sometimes rubbed people the wrong way. I'll never forget the day the faculty advisor told me flat out, "We need another columnist about as much as we need another light table in the office." But I still loved it. I loved my duties. I loved the people. For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged.
"Rhea Borstein" decides how to handle a young upstart writer in "SweetTart" (#25).
Now, here I am, out on my butt. My honor, my good name, they'd just been run through the mud. I felt scared and lost. I tried to get back in. I begged them to rehire me. That just made things worse. Basically I wound up having to leave school, and I lost some valuable friends, over this huge, stupid dispute. If they had been honest, sat me down, and told me they didn't think I was working out, I'd probably have stepped down graciously, and there wouldn't be all these bad feelings. But, you know, that's what liberalism does. It takes something beautiful and then chokes it and twists it and turns it to something hideous. Liberals may be smiling and personable, but they simply cannot be trusted. They are disgusting, soulless creatures with no integrity, no moral compass. Betrayal pounds in their substandard brains like a heartbeat. All they has to offer is a diseased gospel Karl Marx penned a hundred years ago, which was failed and outdated even then...and which was then spread by its prophets Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, who dipped the Party Bible in blood. Its emphasis on the culture of victimhood, dependancy, and entitlement programs keeps us down. It survives by killing any sort of desire for self-improvement in people. Why work when you can steal? Why try to better yourself and get a job when Big Government will cut you a check for sitting around scratching your
cojones all day? Liberalism fosters racial disharmony, class envy, religious intolerance, gender inequality--any two groups it can get cussing and fighting between themselves, it does, to keep itself in power. I think without the millstone of liberalism hanging on our collective neck this country could make greater strides both domestically and abroad. That is what's conservative about me.
((Continue to Next Post. This is Part 1.))
((Dr. Belch Interview Part 2.))
You're from the South. Do you like NASCAR?
I'm not that nuts about it, but I have friends who are. In fact, I was with a group of them the day the news came that Dale Earnhart died in a crash. Grown men wept. It was amazing. Racing fans afforded Big E's death the same respect they would a President or a Pope. I think, thanks to the left, we Southerners have a reputation as a pack of ignorant beer-swilling, gun-toting, NASCAR-loving morons with half our teeth missing. Well, I don't drink, I don't own a gun, my IQ's 137, and I only have a couple of bad wisdom teeth.
What are some other Southern things you do down there in Arkansas...or Missouri... whichever state is your town in... it's on the border?
Yes. I'm on the Arkansas side, near enough to the state line to spit on it. However, since Arkansas has such a negative connotation, I set most of my stories in Missouri. So I think that may confuse some of my readers. Yeah, I like to go on long walks around town. The quiet helps me think. I go to the post office a lot. I pick up aluminum cans by the roadside. I used to do yard sales every Saturday for a couple summers. Sometimes I go into the woods. I take pictures of trees, old houses, gravestones, whatever strikes my fancy. I watch geese around the lake. There's a lot of wildlife here--birds, field mice, possums, foxes, snakes, turtles, frogs. I even saw a couple of armadillos, which you really don't expect this far northeast--but they were flat dead on the road. Once I walked by a horse pasture, and I watched wave after wave of these mighty beasts galloping over this big green knoll--black, white, tan, plain, spotted, big, little, a whole sea of horses. It was really something.
How is life at Armorel?
Quiet. Just the way I like it. I used to enjoy coming home from college to unwind and decompress for a weekend.
Describe the town and its folk and what goes on there.
It's a small farming community of between 300-500 souls just off Hwy 18. We grow mostly cotton, corn, and soybeans, plus you can pick pecans and wild blackberries if they're in season. On the main drag is a garage, the volunteer fire department, the Armorel Planting Company offices, the p.o., the elementary and high schools, the Baptist church, a few private residences. Just outside of town we have a cemetary, Factory Row, and a tangle of county roads that mostly go to dirt and gravel when you get into the woods. We had a small general store, but that went belly-up after the big snowstorm of '94.
The KISS bridge.
One of Armorel's oldest and stateliest houses.
It's your typical small Southern town, probably dozens like it throughout this part of the state. The beauty of it is, the town is so generic I've used it as a setting for several stories. I just change its name, alter the name of certain roads and geographical features. A neighbor who reads one of my pieces real closely might recognize my description of their house. [chuckles]
Tell us a little about your childhood. What were you like as a kid?
Oh, I was a crazy kid. I used to run around with a red bath towel pinned around my neck pretending I was a superhero. I read a lot. I was really into Roger Hargreaves [creator of the Mr. Men and Little Miss series], and his characters appeared in a lot of my work. So did Q-Bert, Pac-Man, the Press Your Luck Whammy, and Snuggle--you know, that teddy bear from the fabric softener bottle?--among others. I wrote a slew of short stories about me and the neighborhood kids I chummed around with. We were a team of heroes, fighting crooks and kidnappers, having a series of crazy adventures.
Our 5-year-old future hero ("Once Upon a Time Warp", #21)
My team incorporated a lot of characters culled from my favorite books and TV shows. I lived in my own little world a lot. I imagine my schoomates often thought I wasn't quite all there. [chuckles]
As a kid I spent a lot of time at my best friend Josh's house, playing, or watching television. I grew up on all the great superhero cartoons the eighties had to offer:
She-Ra: Princess of Power,
Lonestarr,
Thundercats,
G.I. Joe,
Transformers,
Silverhawks,
C.O.P.S,
Inspector Gadget,
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles...but
He-Manwas the big one. I was a He-Man nut. I had all the action figures. And I dug the old Looney Tunes and MGM cartoons--which were all uncut back then, so I got all the blackface gags and cartoon violence I could eat. Plus I used to watch the 1966
Batman, the one with Adam West, religiously. I loved the fight sequences, you know, with the words popping on the screen. I actually used to take notes. I never realized there were so many ways to spell the sound a punch in the gob makes. I think that's what paved my path to comic-book writing.
We moved to Armorel in 1993 after a racial incident. Someone close to me was attacked and injured by four black kids right in front of our house. It was just the last straw. The neighborhood had been going down the toilet for years at that point. That attack happened during the Rodney King riots out West. It was an ugly thing. You don't expect it to happen here in this part of the country, in your town--much less in your own yard. But the ripples of that incident were felt throughout the country. And I think this event really colored--if you'll pardon the small bon mot--my views on race relations. It was a pivotal moment for me, as a writer, and as a man. You can see how the neighborhood I grew up in influenced my work. I took a lot of heat for the cover of
Belch Dimension#14. The left called me a racist. But that witless bunch throw around and misuse that word a lot without really knowing what it means. A racist is someone who goes around thinking that their race is superior to another, and I've never said that. Where I grew up, if you were white you couldn't go to certain areas of town, or the blacks would get you. I'm sorry to say that, but it was just a fact of life. [points to the cover of BDC #14] There's a story called "Ear-Phonies" in there, the second half of the ish. It's got a running gag where a gang of blacks--the same ones on the cover, in fact--keeps showing up to beat this poor white kid up. It's a very funny, very surreal joke, but there's some truth to it. That's me when I was a kid. I mean, it's actually my brother Benjamin and Billy depicted there, but, eh, you see what I mean. That's my world. That's my childhood.
http://www.freewebs.com/smokingcatcomicsandcollectibles/14-00.jpg
The infamous "Broke Black Mountain" cover: social satire, or racist propaganda? You be the judge. This is a image.
I'm a social commentator, holding up a mirror to the world, and I can't help it if some folks don't like what they see. I mean, I had black friends growing up, and black teachers I respected, but for the most part I stayed out of neighborhoods where I knew I was going to have trouble. Of course there were trashy white kids too--The Tony Moneran character in
Belch Dimensionis actually based on this bully who used to give me problems over on the north side. You probably know the type: he hangs around with other punks like him by the liquor store or the welfare office or the church parking lot, he drinks beer and smokes cigarettes even though he can't be much older than 15, he cusses, he's got homemade tattoos running up and down his arms...I think every town's got one. He's as iconic as apple pie and the bald eagle. Anyway, I never meant [the cover] to be so controversial. It was a got-dang
Brokeback Mountainspoof. It was frigging satire. If the left sees a racist component, it says a lot more about them than me. If it had been, let's say, a Looney Tunes comic I drew, and the art showed Sylvester the cat and a couple of his pals about to beat the snot out of Bugs Bunny and Tweety, and the caption had said, oh, I don't know, "Broke Black Cat Mountain", no one would say boo. It's amazing how [liberals] get so up-in-arms over an ink-and-paint picture of a black person, or an actor playing a Muslim [makes quote fingers] "insurgent" getting tortured on 24, and yet they don't seem to care about actual racism, terrorism, or evil going on in the real world. They're so upside-down and backwards. They have no sense of reality, no perspective. Liberals have to work to be offended. They love to be all mad and slobbering and looking to hurt someone. I can't even imagine what's its like to wake up every morning and say, "All right! Who do I get to screw over today?"
I went back to the old neighborhood a few years ago...man, it looked small. It was all so little and dirty and broken. A few of the houses on the block had been torn down. The house I grew up in was all run-down, the lawn all overgrown. The corner candy store had closed. All my chums had grown up and moved away. It kind of hurt to see that. I felt uncomfortable. I guess when you're 11 or 12 the world looks a lot bigger to you. I've written about that feeling quite a bit in my books. In one a writer returns home from college, sees how the street she used to live on has changed...and she sums up her views on the passing of time by saying, I'm home, and I'm homesick. Cripes, that's grim, isn't it? [laughs] I should learn to write happy books.
Belch Dimension Comicsare very fun to read....
Thank you. They're very fun to draw.
...and many AJM STUDIOS members love reading your updates.
Thanks. I must admit audience reaction to the series seems to be very split along party lines so far. I'm finishing up the "cheerleader gurl" story I started a couple months ago. SweetTart's about to confront her crazy coworker Tom on murder charges, and this one's for all the marbles. I timed this story special to come out around the tenth anniversary of my firing. It'll get a lot of folks mad, I know. But [in soothing voice] remember, liberals: it's not real. No one's really getting tortured or beat up. It's make-believe. [normal tone] It's like what Orson Welles said when he directed
Citizen Kane: if he really wanted to make a movie about [William Randolph] Hearst [the famous newspaper magnate in the early 20's and father of yellow journalism], the truth would be far more shocking than the fiction could ever be.
Mind telling us some about your characters and how the comic started?
Certainly. I used to draw these crude stick-figure doodles of my friends and me to illustrate my stories. So that's where my distinctive characters come from. My first real bad guy was Snakeman, a.k.a. "Hiss Hole". I was maybe eight or nine when I came up with him.
A flashback sequence explains how Jon met his bete noir, Hiss Hole. ("Demi-Jon", #19)
He was a brilliant scientist who was turned into a monster and driven insane by an experimental snakebite cure, and now wants to turn the world into mutants like him. When I first created him he was sort of part Shadow Weaver [an evil sorceress from She-Ra, Princess of Power]. part Kobra Khan [a snake warrior from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe], and a good bit of Skeletor thrown in for good measure. Basically my hero started out as a copy of He-Man, carrying a magic sword and riding a giant cat, and all Hiss Hole's minions were based on The Evil Horde. I redesigned one character, Jimmy, to look like Orko because he was too similar to Billy [Josh's younger brother in BDC] and it was hard to tell them apart. And since of my favorite animals is the gibbon, I redesigned [Billy's cousin] Jason as a boy who was turned into an ape by an evil spell--and I know somewhere Ron is peeing himself in terror at the idea of a talking monkey. [chuckles mischeviously]
So gradually my character became less a He-Man clone and more his own man. He's me, I guess, but sort of an, uh, idealized version. He does and says things I always wanted to, or wished I did. He's me at a more innocent time in my life, when I was, in high school, before I learned how the real world works. I revealed that he was given superpowers in a chemical explosion, which seems to be how a lot of superheroes do it. Later he was exposed to a magic crystal--and I think this idea came from a He-Man episode too [
The New Adventures,
"Sword and Staff", 1990], which made him even more powerful and turned his costume from red to yellow, a change I kept in the later stories. He's funny, he's smart, he's always ready with a quip. He has fun with his powers. He's got a very firm sense of justice, and he gets mad when it gets bruised, or someone does him or one of his friends or family wrong, but on the whole, he's an easygoing guy. He just wants to do the right thing. He lives in a small town in the South, which is unusual to begin with right there because there are no great redneck superheroes. Superman's about the closest you get, because he's a farmboy--and even he had to move to the big city to find himself. All the cape-and-tights boys and girls are working in New York, L.A.--well, we've got plenty of crime, injustice, and corruption right here in the breadbasket of the United States. Where's our superman? Or supergirl? I mean, I can see where Spiderman would be pretty useless in a cotton field with no place to do this [does a Spidey web-shooting gesture] and Batman can't swing around without a few tall buildings to moor his Batrope from...but if they can fly and they don't mind waching miles of farmland from above, come on down.
It was my mom's idea, actually, to do a comic book. I thought it was a great idea, because I was feeling limited by the conventional book format and I thought a more visual medium would suit me. Basically I cut a lot of derivative characters from the early stories, phased out several characters who simply didn't do much, or combined useable aspects from several characters into one. Then I wrote the script for Belch Dimension #1. I was...15, I think. I called it
"Hiss Hole Comes to Town". I tried to capture the spirit of the old cartoons I watched when I was 8, 9, 10. I thought it was a great little story--very funny, good introduction to the characters, your basic "enemy of my enemy is my friend" plotline. The artwork was a little raw, but I thought that was part of its charm, sort of early
Simpsonsmeets Jay Ward. I sent black-and-white copies of the first few pages to DC and Archie Comics. I never heard back from DC, but I got a letter from Archie saying they only use in-house characters and talent. Most of the big houses don't even look at an unsolicited manuscript for fear of legal problems, so that was probably a standard boilerplate letter. They probably never even cracked open the envelope.
So that's what led me to join the Herald staff, in hopes of building a portfolio to show the big comic-book houses...and that ended badly. But I continued drawing. I switched from pencil to pen at the advice of a fellow Herald cartoonist, who told me that pencil lines don't scan too well. I found this gave me a smoother, darker line. So the comics have been drawn in a combination of pencil and a basic blue or black pen since, oh, 1996 or 1997.
I started my own little webcompany, Smoking Cat Productions, in the fall of 2004. I debuted the first few pages of BDC in a Stephen King message board on April 15, 2005. It went over like a lead balloon. One critic claimed her 5-year-old daughter drew just like me. A few issues later the critiques had become downright abuse, mockery, and insults. The mod told me I was stupid to try to sell a comic book online when there were plenty of free webcomics out there. He said there would be no more talk of my comic book there, locked and deleted a number of my threads, and banned me from the forums. Which, again, proves my whole point about liberals. It's a way of thought that exists in the Bizarro universe. It hates achievement, despises ambition, seeks to destroy anything good and beautiful, and celebrates its most corrupt and incompetent members.
So, long story short, a good lot of what goes into the comic is condensed from a ten-year-old stack of stories written by a kid with a got-dang towel around his neck. [laughs]
What is your favorite comic book?
I'm a huge Batman fan...I also dig Spider-Man, and I was really into D. Tracy--sorry, this stupid auto-censor won't let me say the first name because it's too Freudian--for a while. Oh, and who could forget The X-Men? Wolverine was my favorite, because he was all dark and conflicted and broody, he had that mutant healing factor--and he wore a yellow costume. He was the only superhero I ever saw all in yellow. I used to say that if they ever made an X-Men movie, I'd like to play Wolvie, because he was so cool, and because of my huge bushy sideburns I'd be a natural. But I guess Hugh Jackman did an okay job. [laughs] Oh, and I enjoyed the Kids' WB series-based books DC was putting out in the late nineties: Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, Batman: TAS, Superman: TAS, Batman: Beyond--which are all out of print now.
Does the AJM STUDIOS Comic stand out to you at all?
Oh, yes. It's a fun little romp. It's like if Kim and Ron grew up, broke away from Disney, and founded a super secret spy network. Which is good for her, I guess, because all that flipping and kicking and bounding about has to be hard on the knees, and when she retires from fieldwork she'll need something to fall back on.
[I just smile with a cheesy grin.]
I like the frentic artwork and the layered storylines, where there seem to be ten million things going on all at once. And it always seem the threats frequently come from within AJM--first Sven's mucousy machinations, then Hoomajockey's near-treasonous coup and Fredmickmuffin's splendidly passive-agressive attack. Perhaps on her next adventure Kim goes to another country to fight a crazy dictator--there's plenty to choose from as a model--and Ron flips out because the guy is such a monster he's banned all Bueno Nacho and Pop-Tarts in his banana republic. [laughs]
Most members on this site are in their late teens, but you'd be considered a wise adult.
[just chuckles]
You're always coming up to people with stories only you could give us. Very unique, and usually related to burritos and passing gas.
[laughs heartily] Yes, well...burritos come ten in a pack for $2.79--very reasonably-priced. So I eat a lot of them. And, well, with my hedonistic eating habits over many, many years, I fear gas is a way of life.
Has the age barrier ever made you think twice about posting things?
Well, I can't use some of the language Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy do in their routines, of course, what with the auto-filters. I know I am basically a guest, so although I enjoy a ribald joke or two I will watch my manners. Now I do write an urban comic book, with a lot of salty language and violence. So I'll either not post some images, or if I do, I give a content warning first. Some folks might not like rotting zombies and spilling blood. Of course, what with the video games these kids play and the movies they watch, that might not cross their eyes at all. I grew up on Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees myself. Slasher flicks. Buckets of blood. Man, I love that stuff.
How do you view the site's younger class compared to your age and wisdom?
I tell you, these kids today are a lot more sophisticated than we were at that age. Or than I was, at any rate. They're more savvy about...oh, I'll come out and say it: sex. In college I was with this girl who--well, she said she was 18, but she padded her age by a couple or three years, if you catch my meaning. And she told me she wanted me to do things to her that I, at 22, didn't even know about. I'm like, [imitating Jeff Foxworthy] "Uh, really? Honey, I weigh over two hundred pounds. I'd probably slip, fall down on you and crack one of your ribs. Try explaining that one to the guy at the emergency room." I had to go online later and look up some of those things. And I'm on a college library computer. Imagine how embarrassing that is. I'm sitting there feeling like the biggest pervert in the world. [imitating Larry the Cable Guy] "Aw, lookit this. This'un's got hand-drawed diagrams." [laughs like Ray Stevens in "It's Me Again, Margaret"]
Yeah, there's some bright, upstanding kids here, like yourself, Kim, Ron, Erin, Ubs, JMT...I don't want to leave anyone out, of course, but...yeah, today's young'uns have all this technology we didn't have a generation ago. When I was ten, twelve, I would wish I had a magic all-seeing crystal that could give me any information I wished to know. Ten years later, badda-boom, along comes affordable home computer and the Internet. Now, one better: that magic crystal is pocket-sized, so you can have your 'Net on the go, carry all your music and pics right in your hip pocket. Absolutely amazing.
Any future dreams you have?
Well, dreams do change as you grow older. In 1999, I was pretty torn up and angry about what happened on The Herald. My big desire was to publish a best-selling book that would expose the conspiracy, fire up the masses, destroy all my enemies, tear apart their lives, and let me reenroll at A-State within the year. After five years of rejection letters, and either overwhelming public apathy towards my plight or outrage and vitriol directed towards me rather than them, I realized that was a fool's dream, and ASU was a fool's paradise. Everything bad in my life started there.Why did I want to go back? Three buffets daily? Faster Internet? Good cable package? Hot, no-questions-asked sex with mindless callgirls? Not worth it. So I decided that if I couldn't lead an army of pure, unquestioning followers to some imagined apocolyptic final battle against liberalism, I would change and narrow my focus. If I can reach just one person through my books, and help them to not make the same mistakes I did, then my work is done. And I guess, once you get right down to it, my real dream is redemption. The fabled second chance.
Anything you want to say to everyone, or specific members as advice?
If there's something you can do well, it's a marketable skill, and it's legal, you can succeed in America. Ignore your detactors. Drink plenty of water on hot days. Trust, but verify. Learn something new each day. Be true to yourself. If you can't be a shining example in life, be a cautionary one.
Thank you for being here Dr. Belch and it was a pleasure interviewing you. I feel this was the most thorough interview we've ever had. God Bless you.
And so concludes our AJM Interview this time. Thanks for reading.
A flashback sequence explains how Jon met his bete noir, Hiss Hole. ("Demi-Jon", #19)
