Things That Suck, by John Ostrander
I’m growing older, approaching cranky-old-manhood, and there are increasing number of small petty things that simply annoy me, dagnab it. Since I can write whatever I durn well please in this here column, I’m just going to indulge myself with a couple of rants on different topics and nothing unites them beyond the fact that I’m a cranky old fart. Yessir.
Grocery stores. The grocery stores I use have self-checkout lanes. These are new contraptions and, as such, on general principles I’m agin ‘em. However, in theory, they get me out of the store faster and that’s a boon so I use them most of the time. What I hate is that the damn things nag ya! They have this voice that keeps walking me through the process. I know how to use it. I don’t need it to keep telling me. It has the same disapproving female voice as Sister Mary Water Closet back in the third grade. I don’t need to hear that voice again, thank you very much!
It would be nice if you could refuse its help but you can’t! Screaming at it to “shut the fuck up!” only gets you stares from your fellow shoppers. Telling it that, “If I wanted to be nagged I’d dig up my mother!” is ineffective and sets small children to weeping, bringing store security. They and the IRS are not well equipped in the sense of humor department.
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ComicMix 
strikes me as an important moment in that career, then, as Pekar is settling into a more mellow existence. In the first issue of this volume (the second from Vertigo), Pekar doesn’t call a pharmacy worker a Nazi (and benefits from the lack of anger) and doesn’t blow his top at a sycophantic fan who invades his life and doesn’t totally trash a critic who didn’t like his book 
The older I get, the more there is to keep track of. I realized this some time ago; part of being a grown-up, particularly if you’re on your own, is making hard choices. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I suddenly had to consider expenditures like rent, food, cat litter… and something had to give.
I was talking to Alex Robinson recently about a new book he’s doing about teenagers, and he said it was more challenging than he expected to write scenes with teens, because he wanted them to be as real as possible – not like the Hollywood stereotype.
