The last comic in the FF mini series.
I feel like we know each other well enough that we can be honest with each other. I draw the pictures here at Penny Arcade. That’s my job and I like to think I do it pretty well. Tycho is the one who writes the funny news posts that we have all come to enjoy so much each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Sure there will be times when I chime in with the occasional anecdote but it’s always just a side dish in relation to Tycho’s main post. Like any side dish it’s only good when accompanied by something a bit more…shall we say substantial. I enjoy corn for example but if that was all I had to eat for two weeks I’d get sick of it pretty fast. With that in mind I have deiced that rather than ladle another pile of corn onto your plates today I would instead serve you a…uh dish from the…yeah this food metaphor is getting away from me. The gist is I’m doing a best of Tycho tribute today. Like when a sitcom runs out of ideas and they throw together a flash back episode. So without further ado I give you…Carrot Cake Soup.
-Gabe out
Originally posted by Tycho on January 14th 2002
Long story short, I’m getting my chicken soup on, it’s Sunday afternoon, and Gabe’s reading some Preacher in the Den, which is also the living room, the bathroom, and the foyer. I am interacting with pasta dough in what I think is a stern way, when I hear him say that he might like the soup better if it were, in fact, carrot cake. It hits us, hits us both, simultaneously, like a semi made out of lightning which is also a professional boxer. Carrot Cake Soup. You cube the carrot cake, some pieces have frosting and some don’t, and you put a handful of these chunks into a bowl full of milk. So let’s go do it. We’ll do it later this week, he says. But I know that’s the same as not doing it. Why not now, I say? I know a store where we can get all the stuff. You can just buy it, the way you can buy stuff in the household cleaners section and make a bomb big enough to kill God. The stuff is just lying around there and nobody’s doing anything with it. It’s not a crime to buy them separately, and what we do at home isn’t any of their fucking business.
I think someone might have been following us as we pulled into the parking lot, we walked toward the grocery store and tried to keep the conversation natural. We certainly didn’t discuss carrot cake or the soup one might make by cutting it into cubes and swimming islands of it in cold milk, pleasure islands, like you’d see in a magazine. At the bakery counter, a woman asks if she can help me, and I’m so nervous that as I’m pointing to the carrot cake behind the glass, my finger starts to tap in Morse Code that reads:
I AM ABOUT TO COMMIT A CRIME AGAINST GOD AND MAN STOP
And where is Gabe with that Goddamn milk? There he is, in the self-checkout. Idiot. There’s cameras all over that thing, it’s like a Goddamn surveillance tree. It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together. A red light flashes on, and off in my mind. At another checkstand, I pay with untraceable cash, assuring the woman that I will eat the cake by myself, without assistance from cows. I smirk. This woman has no idea that she’s just sold me the trigger to a flavor gun. Carrot Cake Soup is like the taste of watching girls make out. It has an extraordinary power that oscillates between gentle and overwhelming, between light and dark, between pleasure and more pleasure. When it was over, I realized that I was panting. I was in possession of carnal knowledge. And I knew that, somehow, every taste beyond this point was in the service of the one that still lingered, waited, to remind me that nature has laws, and those that break them are criminals, and though they roam free enough the knowing will hold them, and keep them, until the last.
(CW)TB out.
I am not sure but I think he might be a genius. Don’t tell him I said that, I don’t need him going all Megatokyo on me and kicking my ass out. This comic is my gravy train and as long as he thinks I’m the star I can ride it from hell to breakfast.
-Gabe out
