Dave-watch

I'm reading this stuff, so you don't have to.

Issue 300

"Almighty God, I also renew my vow (this morning) that I will never again marry and I will never again cohabit with a woman. I vow further to exercise all caution, all restraint, all common sense, all good judgment and what wisdom you have seen fit to bestow upon me by your grace and by your mercy and to exercise all those to the uttermost in all of my dealings with womankind."

Issue 299

"I think that you like most women misunderstand the limited contribution which the female makes to an embryo with her 24 chromosomes. I think the evidence suggests that women provide the "back end of the horse", primarily the legs. Men who are born "intersexuals" — with two "x" (female) chromosomes as well as a Y (male) chromosome — invariably have longer legs. I'm not saying I would want to try living without my legs, but if it came to a choice between the bottom half of my body and the top half of m body, it would be no contest. There are many traits that women pass on to their unborn babies, but the most valuable of these traits originate with the masculine chromosomes. Women can be carriers of masculine chromosome traits, but I don't think the evidence supports in any way that masculine chromosomal traits originate with women… Given the limited female contribution to the embryo, I think it only sensible that all men be consulted about the disposition of the unborn fetus which they themselves implanted within a given woman. If genuine fairness is to be achieved relative to the respective contributions to the fetus, I think women should only have control over the fetus's legs and be permitted to decide which babies are to be born with legs and which babies are to be born double amputees. The man imparts the seed, women are just the box the seed grows in." <My ellipsis>

"No husband, in a real sense, in this day and age, would break wind without asking his wife's permission. This seems like a marriage of equals, it seems to me, because women are self-absorbed and power-mad."

"To feminists, the grass is always greener on the boys' side of the fence. / And of course it is./ But that's because boys are generally nicer people ad more interesting people than are girls (only a homosexual male would be accused of bitchiness. It's a female trait. Not a male trait.) "

"Until we entered our current age of feminist lunacy, men had jobs. There were jobs for women (witch I think was a mistake, the thin end of the feminist wedge) : secretary, nurse, school teacher. Everything worked fine."

"If breast cancer is increasing at an exponential an alarming rate, when did it begin to do so? Might I hazard a guess? 1970, anyone? What about the vast number of stillbirths and SIDS mortality among babies, entirely inexplicable to medical science? Post Roe v Wade, anyone? Or what about the fact that recent studies show that women face roughly twice the likelihood of developing lung cancer than men and that this is the reverse of the situation as it stood in 1974, constituting a four fold increase in the female risk factor, a four fold increase which scientists are completely unable to account for, even theoretically? My own best assessment? God is not mocked. And feminists are now reaping what they have sown in their three-decade long effort to mock God."

Issue 298

"1: My God 2: Scripture 3: Prayer 4: Fasting 5: Reading the National Post 6: Not going out 7: Not talking to anyone (apart from amiable chit-cat with store clerks and waitresses.) The 7-step guide to a satisfying life in Canada's feminist dictatorship."

Issue 297

<< I've been very seriously considering removing the various Sim-related documents from this site. In issue #295, Dave referred to having been diagnosed borderline schizophrenic. In #296 he mentioned in passing that he tries to masturbate without sexual fantasy because the spirit word is telepathic. Suddenly, asking "is Dave mad?" stops feeling like an amusing rhetorical question. It starts to feeling as if I am poking fun at a seriously poorly man. Having gone this far I decided to hang on for the last three issues. Please believe that it is more in sorrow than in anger. >

<<As ever, please keep in mind that in Sim's cosmology the "YHWH" of the Old Testament is not God, but a female adversary of God. Sim seems increasingly inclined to identify this figure with the devil. >>

"It seems to me an implication of incarnating physically. A substantial number of spirits hurled outward from the Big Bang, it seems to me, chose to incarnate physically for the exact reason that it allowed them to get away from the realm of spirit. Part of the price that you have to pay for incarnating physically is that you have to keep your rotting carcass from rotting too quickly. You have to expel rotten bits from your rotting carcass on a regular basis. The fact that my spirit inhabits a rotting carcass, to me, is no different from the fact that YHWH's spirit inhabits the rotting husk of rock known as the Earth—except, of course, that his/her/its rotting carcass is going to take a lot longer to rot than will my own. A rotting carcass insulates you from the realm of spirit except in indirect tangential connections like sleep, hypnotic states, mystical events, voices in the head, UFOS and so on…"<<continues in this vein for four columns>>

"When I begin fasting in Ramadan… I saw it as, basically, just cleaning up my act. A twelve step programme with God at the head of it, so to speak. What I hadn't anticipated was the level of (again, I'm hesitant to use the term because of my largely atheistic audience, but there isn't a more accurate one) demonic possession in the world. The net effect of that was to come to see family "love" and "girlfriend "love" and "love" of friends as a scam…. A perfect example of this "demonic possession" would be this March just past when I finally "broke" with my family—the last phone conversation with my sister—when she said "You know it's interesting that with all the praying that you do, you never once prayed for your parents. Well, you know, get thee behind me Satan. How the hell would you know that I've never once prayed for my parents? (Of course, it's true, as I assume YHWH well knew. I don't think it's right to pray to God for anything or for anyone (in fact the only thing I ever prayed to God for was the strength to get through Christmas with my parents.)…)" <<Continues in this vein for a total of five column>><<my ellipsis>>

"You would have to have experienced having the whole mob turn on you and having no-one raise one word of protest (apart from the "Dave Sim is entitled to his own vile and sub-human opinions the same as any other Nazi is") to understand what I mean, I think."

"(Saint) Paul's syntax always makes my head ache."

Issue 296

"The natural reaction to homosexuality isn't fear, but repulsion, disgust. If I'm walking down the street and I see a pool of vomit on the sidewalk, , the most natural reaction is repulsion. I don't hate the vomit, I'm not afraid of the vomit, I am repelled by the vomit. Which is a natural, sensible, reflex reaction. The very recently invented notion of "homophobia" implies that my natural, sensible reaction is wrong—that is, that I should learn to overcome my repulsion for the pool of vomit, force myself into closer proximity to the specific pool of vomit and into a greater acceptance of vomit in general. "Look Dave. The pool of vomit isn't going to hurt you. The pool of vomit is complete natural and as much a part of life and living as you are. Here put your hand in it. Let me show you." Uh. no. Thanks, but no thanks."

"I suspect that a lifetime of incontinence—a society-wide aspiration to completely lose all forms of self-restraint in all areas of appetite—implies its own reward: fecal and urinary incontinence in old age. Sales of adult diapers are soaring."

"That was another discussion we <<Dave Sim and Chester Brown>> had, where I told you I masturbate without thinking sexual thoughts: that I suspected the corruption lies in the fantasizing, particularly if you conceive of the spirit world as telepathic (which I do)."

"…but remember, this all started with giving women the vote. I'm sure the vast majority of men thought at the time "It's a bit of a stretch, but once they have the vote, they'll be satisfied." In my view, all of these things follow one on the other, and women and homosexuals are never going to be satisfied, no matter what you capitulate to. Same-sex marriage is the latest one. Most men delude themselves that if we capitulate on same-sex marriage, that will be the end of it. I have no idea what comes next, but the surest way to find out is to legalize same-sex marriage"

"Feminists tend to have "zero-tolerance" for any sort of death threat. Probably because everyone, at one level or another, wants to kill hard-core feminists."

Issue 295

"To me, it's a gender thing. When I had my breakdown in '79--when I was diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic--it scared my wife and she called my mother and my mother came over and both my wife and my mother proceeded to get scared and decided that I needed to get medical help (the court of first resort for emotion-based beings.)"

"Families don't have values. If you support your son and love your son no matter what he does, this is the exact opposite of a value, it is evidence of clinical insanity...Which is a given with families, particularly with mothers, which is why such ideas shouldn't be allowed within a country mile of jurisprudence."

"Virtually all of my conversations with Diana Scutz and all the other women I've known who are considered intelligent consisted of her trying to convince me that men and women are equal. And to me that's a lunatic idea and the degree of your lunacy can directly be determined by the extent to which you are absorbed in a: believing it b: trying to convince other of it and c; ostracizing anyone who refuses to capitulate to your insanity."

Issue 294

"A lot of guys agree with me privately (like, over the phone) but they're too afraid of women to go public, which they admit. "

"I think Australia sensibly saw that the Solomon Islands situation was closer to hand and that Tony Blair's squishy Marxist government--not Tony Blair himself, but his government--and Canada's squishy Marxist government aren't about to do anything.

Issue 293

<<This month's text piece runs to 23 pages. It is the final part of Sim's essay, "Why Canada Slept", about his county's refusal to join the coalition against Iraq. It turns out to be to do with Marxism, feminism, homosexuals, oh and bi-lingualism.>>

"With the SARS outbreak, God, it seemed to me, was saying something quite eloquently. "You don't want to participate with the United States in the war on terrorism? you want to abandon your friends and allies, the US, Australia and Britain, to take the side of Syria, Russia, France and…China. Okay, here's a little gift from your new friends the Chinese. It's called SARS and they got it from wild animals whose flesh they eat in the misbegotten pagan belief that it will make them stronger."

"Allow me to indulge in a short digression which somewhat widens the aim of my heavy artillery to include the tendency of all the Western democracies at budget time to cut funding to "everything except Health and Education" the two professions most overwhelmingly dominated by women… "

<<Annika Sorenstam, a woman, was allowed to compete in a professional golf tournament against the men. She didn't do very well. So why, asks Sim, can't the male golfers enter the women's tournament?>>

"For a man to win an LPGA tournament would be humiliating for the man. It would be like entering a children's T-ball tournament and really tearing up the base paths and smacking some major home runs. There isn’t enough m money in the world to overcome the resulting humiliation of knowingly competing against…(pay attention "ladies")…inherently, self-evidently, inferior beings."

"I think fathers have to accept a certain amount of the blame for how the daughters have ended up. I think most fathers secretly hope that if they encourage their daughters to be career-minded feminists that that will somehow steer their "little girls" away from having sex with anyone and thereby reinforce the incestuous (albeit scrupulously platonic) relationship all father have with their daughters and which compels fathers to believe their daughters are virgins or near-virgins (that's so cuuuute) years past the point where that is even a remote possibility. A deception which daughters are at great pains to perpetuate so there exists at least one person on the face of the earth that sees them as the diametric opposite of a slut."

Issue 292

<<When Dave was 30, he dated a teenager. It made him happy. So why, asks Chester Brown, rule out ever doing it again?>>

"And the answer is because I was with the same girl again in her early twenties and it just wasn’t the same. She had the hard edge of feminism about her. She was an adversary, an opponent, as all feminists have been in my life. Everything charming and delightful—everything that made me happy being with her—was gone by then. In my experience…this is the case with all women once they are over the age of seventeen or eighteen. They become hard, adversarial and masculine. They see themselves as interchangeable with men, and they look and act that way. …I can think of nothing more unbecoming than a man of my age getting involved with a teenaged girl. But, in our hard, adversarial world of hard, masculine women, nothing else appeals to me…"

Issue 291

"The self evident need to eliminate the more flagrant violation of basic human freedoms and the equally self-evident need to perpetuate the former religious protections should prove to be a no-brainer for all but the most extremist of Wahabis Iraqis: extremists who are (presumably? hopefully?) in a somewhat shorter supply than was the case prior to 20th March—and in even shorter supply with the American policy of using lethal forces against rock-throwing demonstrators who have been whipped into a frenzy by the radical Imams at Friday prayers. The deaths (thus far) of the dozen of so of these benighted individuals, in my view, falls into the category of "a stitch in time"…and should help to keep the Iraqis focused on the task at hand—creating a democratic form of government which assures basic freedoms of all Iraqi citizens—in much the same way that in a happier, healthier and less feminized day (pardon the triple redundancy) "the strap" used to keep unruly schoolboys focused on productive learning rather than unproductive mischief making."

"If there was some doubt as to whether Jesus could have summoned legions of angels to assist him (not from his father, in my opinion: I think—unbeknownst to Synoptic Jesus—his actual father was either God's spirit a.ka. the Holy Spirit or YHWH neither of whom, as far as I know, has an Angel to his/her and/or its' name)….

"Although the Jews have been worshipping God and YHWH as interchangeable beings for millennia, I think I'm safe in saying that they have, all along, obviously and sincerely meant to worship God. There are monotheists, heart and soul (well, maybe not the women, women are perverse by nature, but male Jews I believe, are sincere monotheists.)"

Issue 289/290

<<With this issue, the question "Is Dave Sim mad?" becomes redundant; the question must now be "Is Dave Sim's madness quite creative and interesting, or has it taken him away into a private little world which doesn't have any means of connection with anyone else's?" Having completed his commentaries on the Torah, Dave now sets out, apparently seriously, to create a new scripture of his own. The entire 40 pages of this double issue is given over to the text of a Bible-style book, along with commentaries written by Dave in his own persona. (Cerebus appears every few pages in a little panel indicating that he is dreaming this.)

<Sim is not the first mad person to create his own personal scripture, and the products can be quite interesting in their own special way. I don't think anyone would call William Blake a sane man, but the prophetic books are a fascinating stream of consciousness account of what was going on in the mind of a very clever man. The most extreme example I know is Phillip K Dick's awesome Valis which uses a sort of Gnostic scripture commentary to explain his personal perceptions about the illusory nature of reality and consciousness. But Dick is very well aware of the problems of "personal religion"; the theme of the book is the complicated interface between madness, creation, dream, and reality. Dick, like Sim, experienced a nervous breakdown, but unlike Sim, Dick is quite upfront about the possibility that this breakdown could be the source of his "enlightenment". Sim doesn't step outside his personal world for one second: he seems quite seriously to think that he has stumbled on the "true" meaning of the Bible and what is "really" going on in the world, and everyone else is being bloody-minded for not instantly seeing that he is right.

TEXT:

20: Wherefore it came to pass that those spirits which repented of their multiplying and likewise those sprits which didst seek to become the equal of God began to merge with sprit of God as he had spoken unto them.

21: And two sprits merged with two spirits and two spirits merged with two sprits increasing and becoming greater and heavier than those spirits which multiplied only."

COMMENTARY

Helium and hydrogen, the two elements which make up 99% of every star. The process by which hydrogen is converted into helium (the source of energy in every star) involves four hydrogen atoms joining to become one atom of helium, with a small residue of energy. My thesis is that hydrogen is the multiplying sprit of God and helium is the result of those multiplying sprits multiplying and merging.

<<When his account of the history of the universe gets up to the creation of the human race, things go from being quite strange to totally unhinged. Remember that in Sim's cosmology, "the spirit of God" = the rebellious, female principle.>>

36: So God created man in his own Image, in the Image of God created he him. Forming of the dust of the earth a man (in the Image of God) and bringing forth in the midst of the man, an image of Gods spirit.

37: Being two sacs (folly and nakedness) collapsed in upon themselves, like unto all the great fires in tandem which the divided spirits of God bring forth upon each Word everywhere upon the face of the deep.

38: (None of which are equal and none of which are joined and all of which do collapse in upon themselves.)

39: And in between those two sacs, collapsed in upon themselves, is the sprit of a man. For it was the Will of God that the spirit of man (in the midst of him and lying between nakedness and folly) shouldst sore vex and trouble man (who is the image of God) even as the spirit of God hath, from the beginning, sore vexed and troubled God.

COMMENTARY

My speculation here is that, although man-as-a-total-being was made in God's image, man's penis was made in the image of God's spirit….A man's relationship with his penis is, I believe, another "living metaphor" of God's relationship with his spirit…Taking the above as a given, I think, as "living metaphors" go, it only stands to reason that God created woman (basically) as an enlarged counterpart to the man's penis. That is a woman's size relative to a penis is analogous to the size of "the light" relative to God's spirit (the disparity in size originating in the mandate to create equality—God's spirit having come forth from within God and thereby containing more inherent greatness in a small "space" than the primordial "light" which was for want of a better term, 'non-deistic' in origin) which is, in turn, analogous to the vastly greater size of the human egg as compared to the size off the human sperm. At essence (as I see it) the ongoing vexatious and troubling relationship, the battle of the sexes, isn't between men and women, but between penises and women. It isn't men who desire to "go in unto" women (the way God's spirit desired to "go in unto the light"). It is penises that desire to go in unto women…

Issue 288

Cover blurb: "The year is 132 and menopause….just became a verb. Chasing YHWH VII: the last cobweb. Because there's nothing funny…about a woman over forty."

Issue 287

<<Cerebus's exegesis has now reached the book of Exodus.>>

Cerebus: "You wouldn't remember because we haven't had a war for so long, but this is what camp followers are like. Women and homosexuals. The Egyptians are lucky they were drowned or all the women and homosexuals would have…well. It's like the difference between dogs and cats. Men are dogs and war is war. You have to kill guys so you kill guys. That's, you know, what a war is. But women and homosexuals are like cats. You ever seen a cat get hold of a mouse when the cat isn't hungry? The way they'll break the mouse's leg or gnaw off one of the mouse's ears just to make it suffer?"

<<Meanwhile, Dave himself is still banging on about the war. His typewriter has evidently run out of full-stops.>>

"For those of us who see as self-evident a clear demarcation between good ("not amputating tongues") and evil ("amputating tongues") there is a lunatic "Alice in Wonderland" quality involved in having -- out of even handedness -- to qualify clear-sightedness by acknowledging the existence of the dissenting left liberal quasi-socialist viewpoint which holds that disapproving of tongue amputations and taking military action against those who perform tongue amputations is just another example of Eurocentric patriarchal cultural insensitivity --a wrong, in the left liberal quasi-socialist scheme of things, which far outweighs whatever inconvenience or discomfort might be experienced by those individuals who have had or will have their tongues amputated."

"Given that I am staking out the "extreme right" position here--tongue amputations are evil and those who commit them should be removed from power by whatever means necessary--and that I cannot either in good conscience and/or for political effect, pretend to find anything nice to say about tongue amputations (or sulphuric acid baths, genital electro-shock, nerve gas or the other forms of torture practice by Saddam Hussein and his thugs), I've decided to skip ahead in my file of news clippings to "Canada's Military Today", choosing to balance my presentation not along the lines endemic to this country's feminist dictatorship ("Something nice to say about tongue amputations") but by taking a few pages in the midst of explaining my views on "Why Canada Slept" to acknowledge those areas (few as they may be, and they are, indeed, few) where my country is and has been fully awake and is and has been discharging its national "grown up" obligations on the world stage despite the best efforts of a succession of hollowed-out-ventriloquist-puppet-husband Prime Ministers from Quebec to make the discharging of those obligations as difficult as it has been humanly possible to make them."

Issue 286

"In this, my country metaphorically resembles nothing so much as a Bad Marriage in which the shrewish, inept and materialistic Wife (Quebec) is fundamentally dissatisfied with every aspect of her union (including the very idea of the union itself) save one: that the union is able to provide her inept self with an infinitely higher standard of living than she could ever imagine--even in the wildest extremities of her feverish imagination--achieving on her own."

"The goal of the French is never to reach a resolution or an agreements. The goal of the French is to impede progress by whatever way possible, however unlikely or ill-founded. You have an agreement with the French one day and the next don't. No earthly reason apart from the fact that it was possible for them to impede you and therefore they did. It's what the French do."

"…Whenever and wherever the French --intermittently--show up on everyone's radar screen it is not because of French ideas, French political philosophy, French thought. They haven't got any. Modern French ideas, French political philosophy and French thought--oxymorons all--are to the on-going international political and cultural dialogue of the global community what a five-bound bag of sugar is to the internal combustion engine."

" 'You are either with the United States or you are with the terrorists' is a good example….It's common sense. Of course there is nothing that qualifies as common sense that--once the left-liberal quasi-socialists get a hold of it--they are not able to 'on the other hand' into a kaleidoscope of myriad and daunting complexities which in turn breed still more 'on the other hand' intricacies until there is nothing visible but billions upon billions of 'other hands' and no idea even where 'square one' is, let alone how to get there…"

Issue 285

"No-one printed my press-release, so the usual process by which I express my intention to accomplish something worthwhile and it is then transformed into a Misogynist Plot Against the Good Denizens of Comic-Book Land on the Internet (while simultaneously imparting the information I intend to disseminate) was subverted and the Misogynist Plot represented by the instituting of the Howard E. Day Memorial Prize was allowed to unfold in complete obscurity…"

"Jeff Smith is the beloved creator of Bone. Dave Sim is the despised creator of Cerebus. (I hasten to point out that I am not complaining. Being universally despised in a feminist society is, to me, the surest sign that you are doing something right.)"

"….those for whom (let me be perfectly blunt) convention partying is not a peripheral aspect bur rather the entire raison d'etre of his…or usually her…comic book career."

Issue 284

<<Cerebus-Dave's exegesis of the Torah has now been going on for 80 pages of very small print and has not yet reached the end of Genesis>>

Cerebus: "And Abraham said vnto his eldest seuant of his house, that ruled over all that he had, Put I pray three, thy hand under my thigh." (Thinks) (To me) Uhh. Better put a star next to that and a little star at the bottom

Me: A footnote?

Cerebus: (Thinks.) Okay. Sure (Thinks.) As long as it's got a star next to it and another little star at the bottom, and it says "Note--This is just how they swore to tell the truth back in those days. This does not mean that Abraham is (dangles his hand from a limp wrist.)"

Me: How do you want me to write that (dangling my hand from a limp wrist)?

Cerebus: What? You mean (dangling his hand from a limp wrist)?

Me: Yeah. How do you want me to write that?

Cerebus: Oh, uh. Hmm. (Thinks) "This does not mean that Abraham is a…a…"(thinks)….a (thinks some more) (irritated). Just leave it for right now. Cerebus will fix it in the transcript.

Issue 283

"However, as is always the danger in these cases, "Hell, no, we won't go" which began life as a concise reaction to an unjust and objectiveless war was swiftly eroded into a universal statement of left liberal quasi-socialist--which is to say feminized--policy: Hell, no we won't go -- anywhere, anytime, under any conditions, no matter what is at stake."

"I had assumed -- such was my level of disengagement from feminist social reality -- that overnight the military in the Nato countries were going to be up to their eyeballs in volunteers (comparable to what happened in 1914 and 1939)--countries like Canada would volunteer for the dirty jobs of sending wave after wave of ill-equipped soldiers into the caves of Tora-Bora and, over the course of a year or two, the military authorities would find out what to do with the real soldiers based on what had happened to the cannon fodder. I prepared myself to volunteer for cannon fodder duty."

Issue 282

"If the planes that were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Centre buildings had been hijacked by members of Irish Republican Army, all of whom had been trained in Ireland and had been living in West Germany, Spain, the United State, England and France up until 11 September, I would think it only sensible that every guy with an "O" and an apostrophe at the front of his last name or an Irish passport or Irish accent or who was arriving on a flight from Belfast would reasonably have to expect to be subject to increased airport security, surveillance and scrutiny. It also seems to me that -- if the government of Ireland had expressed as little contrition and accepted as little blame and was as unforthcoming in assisting the United States in investigating the perpetrators of the crime, their organization and their associates as Saudi Arabia has been since 11 September -- that would more than justify--would, in fact make mandatory-- the erosion of the human rights of al Irish nationals living in the United States for a period of time that could (again in my view ) justifiably remain…fluid…until such time as the conditions of war (and I'm sure the U.S.A would have declared war on the Irish republican army) changed"

Issue 281

"Although the Catholic Church appears to the women and women-with-penises to be holding out against their best efforts (this can, I think, be attributed to the fact that --as was the case with colleges and universities--feminism accepts only total capitulation. Not for too little is Zero Tolerance a catchphrase of feminist origin: to women and women-with-penises there is only one way, their way and their way is absolute) the fact remain that its evisceration is far advanced. For all intents and purposes the Catholic Church is now a secular feminist social engineering bastion, like the universities and colleges."

Issue 280

"Whatever problems I see in modern Islam (and I see no shortage of problems in modern Islam) I don't think the solution is to be found in fashioning some variation on North American Muslims in Touch With Their Inner Child Saving the Gay Whale."

Back to somewhere relatively sane