Good Ol' Charlie Brown
He deserved a good love story
Hello!
November 26th would have been Charles Shultz’s 100th birthday. He not only created the Peanuts comic strip, he also never took a day off in over 50 years from creating the strip. In my homage to Shultz, I tried to imagine Charlie Brown and the Little Red-Headed Girl living their happily ever after.
Apple TV+ has a fun documentary about Sparky (that’s what Shultz went by) called Who Are You, Charlie Brown.
Below the haiku comic, you will find another poem of mine. One of my art obsessions is celebrating middle age and old age, a revolutionary act in our youth-crazed culture.
Two Old, Twisted Trees
Give me middle-aged love,
not young lust. Love like two trees
planted too close together
by fate, or god, or an ignorant
arborist. Two trees who grow intertwined
after the fierce winds of their youth have wrapped
their once supple bodies around each other. Trees
who grow tall and crooked together
forming an immovable wall while each still strives
for the stars. A beautiful paradox of independence and
dependence. Give me a love like the roots
of those trees. A network of support and
mutual aid, hand-holding hidden from the world. Pop stars
have never sung of the glories of middle-age
love because they’ve long burnt out
before arriving. But let me tell you
no love is sweeter than the clinging of bodies that are
hard and soft in all the wrong places. Nothing is more erotic
than the touch of comfort and safety. Keep your
spring flings, summer dalliances, autumn romances,
and winter one-more-times. Give me a
lover who has faced the storms and shouted
down god’s own thunder with me. I want the scarred
bark of a wild forest tree
not the skittish softness of a greenhouse sapling.
Be the weird you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
Jason
P.S. Writer Nathan Davila and I are trying out the new Substack Letter feature. We are writing a six-part discussion of consciousness. Nathan started things off on Monday. You can read his letter here. I’ll be responding this Thursday. I will also be sending out my normal haiku comic Thursday.
Also, be sure to check out Nathan’s newsletter,
Charles Shultz was a genius.
Loved it Jason! It's wild. I sat down with my computer to type up an entry for a nature magazine - the prompt is to write about being way off trail surrounded by wildlife. And your page was here on my browser, writing about trees lol. New word of the day: Dalliances.