2013-11-13

A tall multi-panel SMBC comic. An older bald man speaks wistfully: as a child he enjoyed simple things, but enjoyment is like a drug requiring ever larger doses for smaller gratification. He says a rocket trip to Mars now wouldn't thrill him as much as catching a fly ball in tee-ball at age five, then suggests you can simply decide that all the pleasures of being five are yours again. The comic then shows childlike joys with garbled, regressed-speech captions: a young woman gleefully pulls a man's hair ("Pulling a girl's hair! Ow!"); a figure leaps into a pile of leaves at night ("Jumping in mud!"); the man excitedly shakes a box of cookies, slurring "Kooshies!" The final panel shows a woman looking worried as a voice flatly says, "Hyperglycemic stroke. I'm sorry." The votey is a hand-lettered sign reading: "Today's final panel can seamlessly replace the last panel of any SMBC" — a meta-joke that the grim medical punchline works as a universal ending.