John Arbuckle, The Lonely Everyman


Filed Under Various | Sep 25, MDT 12:23 pm

The Dublin based artist Dan Walsh has quite a hit on his hands. A while back, he decided to reinterpret Garfield by simply cutting Garfield out of the comic which bears his name. Garfield Minus Garfield was the result. What your left with is a revealing picture of John Arbuckle, the American everyman.

In Real Life

In real life, John Arbuckle would be a single man who spends most of his time at home speaking to his cat. With Garfield missing, you get a good taste of how lonely John’s life is.

There’s a sweet hint of the absurd to his loneliness. Arbuckle is, at heart, an eccentric. His actions range from banal to bizarre, and I think if people were to go out on a limb as John sometimes does — like when he dresses up as a gorilla for one of his dates — they would actually escape the kind of loneliness and despair that traps Arbuckle.

Be More Outrageous

The problem with many people who suffer from loneliness and depression is that they simply aren’t outrageous enough. A lot of the time, we repress who we are. We place our own desires on the back burner, where they eventually go rotten from neglect. Meanwhile, we allow others to build imaginary prisons around our actions. We invest too much in the opinions of others and this can have terrible consequences on our well-being.

Ultimately, we’re responsible for our own happiness. When we allow others to dictate what we should and shouldn’t be doing, we give up control over our lives. We commit a rather extreme folly — a suicide of sort. We fail to be truly alive, and we simply float through life, passively reacting to our environment, and never fully engaging the world.

Perhaps I’m alone in thinking this, but I believe that people should never settle for anything less than outrageous. We should do what we want to do when we want to do it. We should be willing to break the rules, to go where others fear to tread, to say the things that no one else has the courage to say. We shouldn’t bottle our feelings up inside, we shouldn’t put a cap on our desires. We should express ourselves fully and without regret. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the manners and customs of the people around us — we just shouldn’t be bound to them.

Embrace Your Eccentricities

We should embrace our eccentricities and quirks. Life is extraordinary, and as children of the universe, specs of cosmic dust brought to life, we are part of that awesomeness. We commit a grave injustice against ourselves and the world we inhabit by denying our true nature, our true passions, our true desires. In a world as bizarre as our own, it’s simply sinful to live in fear of being considered weird.

Arbuckle lives a depressing and lonely life, but that’s because his story requires him to be miserable. Yours doesn’t.

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