Wednesday, October 17 -

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1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

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It really is pretty much impossible to anticipate what's going to happen after I'm dead (I never guess right as to what's going to happen after I wake up in the morning which is, at least theoretically, a good deal easier) and even more impossible to try to figure out a way around the various scenarios that I can imagine unfolding.

Ideally, I would need someone like Margaret to move in after I was dead and just make sure that everything was documented. I say "someone like Margaret" because she has the instinct of an archivist. Most other people I could picture would probably start documenting everything and end up reading comic books most of the day. Or talking on the phone all day just to show off that they're the one in the driver's seat, especially if they were pulling a salary on my life insurance. "Hey, let's go do a three-hour lunch. The Archive will keep." Unless I miss my guess, if Margaret started reading anything it would only be to figure out where it belongs and as soon as she figured out where it belonged and put it there, she'd be on to the next thing. I could be wrong, but you've got to have that instinct to archive material. I've got it myself, or I'd still be sitting in the other room on the floor reading fanzines from 1978 with all of my piles of paper still in vague shapeless piles marked "early 70s" or "pre-Cerebus".

My impression, and I might be wrong, is that I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. The fact of CEREBUS coming to an end led me to anticipate that I was probably coming to an end as well. Particularly since the whole enterprise just sort of petered out without anyone saying much of anything. Seemed like a good way to go, personally: just sort of…peter out. That was the reason behind the Hail Mary passes, like getting people to write recommendations for the Archive and having a will drawn up. It seemed like all I had left to do was to tie up loose ends.

But now there always seems to be more things to do and sales on the trades are finally going up instead of always going down so I have more of a sense that I have things that I'm still supposed to do. Getting caught up on the mail after the three-year backlog changed everything. Assembling and preserving the 30 years of paperwork changed everything. It's very likely that once Margaret has scanned that 30 years worth of paperwork that, too, will change everything. The fact that mere days after getting my last Last Will nailed down Gerhard announced he was leaving seemed to indicate the futility of trying to plan for every eventuality. I suspect that if I did designate Margaret as the future custodian of the house, that would be the day that she fell in love and bought a house with someone or moved to Puerto Rico or something. And Margaret and I are, relatively speaking, contemporaries. It's the Fidel Castro syndrome. You can designate Raul Castro as your successor, but that becomes a bit of a non-starter when you're both in your eighties. For all I know the custodian was born a week ago Thursday and I won't actually meet him (or her) until 2030 when he or she turns 23 and I'm 74.

One way or the other, it seems like I've still got the football, and there's a lot of pitch between me and the net and right now, no one to pass the ball to. So. To the net!

Oh, you're quite welcome. Thank you for helping finance it. So far, so good, eh?

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This may also be viewed at http://davesim.blogspot.com/

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http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=25ED8C60667D0A95

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If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

http://spectrummagazines.bizland.com/cerebusgn.chtml

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

http://www.marsimport.com/display_series.php?ID=142

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors. Here are the Diamond Star System codes:

Cerebus #1-25 $30.00 STAR00070

High Society #26-50 $30.00 STAR00071

Church and State I #52-80 $35.00 STAR00271

Church and State II #81-111 $35.00 STAR00321

Jaka's Story #114-136 $30.00 STAR00359

Melmoth #139-150 $20.00 STAR00431

Flight #151-162 $20.00 STAR00543

Women #163-174 $20.00 STAR00849

Reads #175-186 $20.00 STAR01063

Minds #187-200 $20.00 STAR01916

Guys #201-219 $25.00 STAR06972

Rick's Story #220-231 $20.00 STAR08468

Going Home I #232-250 $30.00 STAR10981

Form and Void #251-265 $30.00 STAR13500

Latter Days #266 - 288 $35.00 AUG031920

The Last Day #289 - 300 $25.00 APR042189

Collected Letters - $30 FEB052434

Collected Letters 2 - $22 MAR073054