The Lunatic Diaries

In June of 2015, a conversation took place between Mark Nelson O'Brien and Nate Fakes that would change the course of world history. Well ... maybe not the history of the whole world. But it would certainly change the lives and the histories of the two chuckleheads who participated in the conversation. Here's the entirety of that conversation, transcribed for posterity, enshrined in the Library of Congress, and buried in a time capsule in Mildew, Alabama, to be disinterred at the point (in history, of course) at which someone down there discovers (or re-invents) the shovel: Nate: "Hi, Mark. It's Nate." Mark: "Hi, Nate." Nate: "Do you know cartoons can be used for marketing?" Mark: "The thought had crossed my mind." Nate: "Why don't we create a business to use cartoons in marketing?" Mark: "You mean like BizComics?" Nate: "Like what?" Mark: "Never mind." The rest, as they say, is history ... but not necessarily world history. From that day forward, the tireless protagonists went dutifully and diligently about the business of marketing BizComics. They wrote (to date) almost 100 blog posts, every one of which was accompanied (or inspired) by an original cartoon. They sent emails to a large and growing list of people and companies every two weeks. We got a little interest from Costco (they picked up one cartoon for their Facebook page). They sent two proposals to Baker & Taylor (the book distributor), for the purpose of reviving the two cats (named Baker and Taylor) immortalized by Jan Louch in her book, The True Tails of Baker and Taylor. They created exhaustive lists of industries, identified people at companies within each of them, and called or emailed all of them. Their efforts earned them one case of carpal tunnel syndrome and two cauliflower ears - gave them the opportunity to learn some very valuable lessons. They learned to believe in their talents. They learned to believe in the creative quality and caliber of their work. They learned to believe in their aptitudes to create a supply of exceptional and differentiating ideas and content. They learned to believe in and rely on each other. They learned - and came to fully appreciate - this wisdom from Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 essay, "Self-Reliance" "To believe our own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius ... A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within ... Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his ... Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility - then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another." They don't mean to suggest they're geniuses, by any stretch. (Their spouses will vouch for that.) And they're not presumptuous enough to consider the work they produced for BizComics to be art. But because both of them tend to break out in hives when they take our own opinions from others, it seemed prudent and sensible to them to publish their work before someone else ... uh ... liberated it, so to speak. This book manifests their determination to share, as Emerson put it, what they have thought and felt. It reflects the ways in which they see the world. They hope it compels you to think in ways other than the ways in which you'd be otherwise inclined or prompted to think. And they hope it makes you smile.