Everybody has a 'gripping stranger' in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it's the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library-a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying 'Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,' you'd follow them.

A person shows signs of clutching on too fast, of being needy, of not hearing the word "no," of jealousy, of guarding you and your freedom. But the signs can be so small they skitter right past you. Sometimes they dance past, looking satiny, something you should applaud. Someone's jealousy can make you feel good. Special. But it's not even about you. It's about a hand that is already gripping. It's about their need, circling around your throat

We wait and think and doubt and hate. How does it make you feel? The overwhelming feeling is rage. We hate ourself for being unable to be other than what we are. Unable to be better. We feel rage. The feelings must be followed. It doesn't matter whether you're an ideologue or a sensualist, you follow the stimuli thinking that they're your signposts to the promised land. But they are nothing of the kind. What they are is rocks to navigate the past, each on your brush against, ripping you a little more open and they are always more on the horizon. But you can't face up to the that, so you force yourself to believe the bullshit of those you instinctively know are liars and you repeat those lies to yourself and to others, hoping that by repeating them often and fervently enough you'll attain the Godlike status we accord those who tell the lies most frequently and most passionately. But you never do, and even if you could, you wouldn't value it, you'd realise that nobody believes in heroes any more. We know that they only want to sell us something we don't really want and keep from us what we really do need. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe we're getting in touch with our condition at last. It's horrible how we always die alone, but no worse than living alone.

I love you," he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces.

You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.

Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.

But for the children of the poorest people we're stripping the curriculum removing the arts and music and drilling the children into useful labor. We're not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child.

Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

In these dangerous times where it seems the world is ripping apart at the seams we can all learn how to survive from those who stare death squarely in the face every day and we should reach out to each other and bond as a community rather than hide from the terrors of life at the end of the millennium.

That's the conundrum of cartoon stripping as opposed to political cartoons. When your anger is the driving force of your drawing hand failure follows. The anger is OK but it has to serve the interests of the heart frankly.