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“Nice” gets a bad rap. Perhaps the harshest thing I’ve heard said about it is “If you can’t be interesting, be nice.”

But that’s a false dichotomy — a close neighbour to the awful, awful notion that you need to be a tortured soul to be creative.

I saw the best refutation of that the other night when Craig and I watched the brilliant Hannah Gadsby: Nanette — a stand-up comedy routine that suddenly transforms mid-way into a transformative, game-changing piece of non-fiction theatre.

Back to nice: Is there any quality the world is missing right now more than nice? Niceness doesn’t even require empathy; it just demands that you get over yourself enough to think for a second about the person in front of you.

Why? Just because! Because that’s the right thing to do — and if we all made the effort to do it, the world would be a much better, more functional place.

So thank you, Mom, for the gift of nice that you embedded into my personality — even if there are lapses in my considerateness like this one. I think so many of the advantages I’ve enjoyed in life are simply because I have a conscience about other people.

There are also many things I like about you that are just intrinsically you, and aren’t about me!

I decided that, for the month of August as a trial/sprint, I’m going to use my dad’s phone, to try to break that twitchy habit of filling every spare moment with a glance at the iPhone.

Yes, it’s nice to have access to all that inspiration and input, but it’s coming now at the complete cost of my inner life — I just don’t have one anymore, and for me as a creative person that’s not acceptable.

Gosh, it was a month ago today that Dad died.

It seems remiss to not mention that cartoonists whose diary comics inspired me to get back into drawing:

• Dan Berry
• Lucy Kniseley
• Dustin Harbin
• Boulet

I’m so grateful to these artists who showed me that life is enough and normal is fascinating.

I can’t pretend that I invented the genre of diary comics. In fact, discovering those is what lured me back into drawing again. There are two Canadians I particularly adore.

One is Guy Delisle, whose wife works with Medecins sans Frontières, so he’s written about being a house-husband and father while in these remote, usually oppressive places. His style is cute and simple, but he conveys so much information and feeling in those lines.

The other is Michel Rabagliati, whose “Paul à Québec” series is beautiful, particularly The Song of Roland, which is about his large French-Canadian family going through the process of losing his father-in-law.

They also made a lovely film of it called Paul of Quebec. (A good Canadian film!!)

Nearly all my favourite comics are in French; shame I can’t read them in the original language (despite growing up in Canada).

The guy who runs my comics club is awesome, and I really respect his talent and views on the art, but he’s not into “cute” stuff. I, on the other hand, think cute is my secret weapon: People will go much deeper with you when you’ve won them over, I feel, than if you’re being all ugly and angsty.

It’s theatre, really. Whenever I start to beat myself about all the years I tried to avoid drawing and do other things — and all the skill I might have gained in those years — I remember that I’ve learned a lot about human nature through theatre and writing, and those things make me a sane person and someone who’s able to connect with the reader (though the diary comics are completely self-absorbed).

If I’d just done comics, I might think that people were obliged to look at my edgy work just because I care about it (they’re not), and if I’d stayed in theatre, I’d be a crazy person for sure.

Anyway, I must go do some work-drawing. Tonight is Comics Club, and I’m thinking about the old Natalie Goldberg rule that “for every cosmic statement you have to provide ten concrete details”; I think this will serve me as I continue writing about all this heavy Dad-stuff.

I read a really good article by Robin Williams’s wife today about why he died:
The Terrorist Inside My Husband’s Brain

A post-mortem showed that Williams had Lewy Body Dementia, which is sometimes associated with Parkinson’s. (Williams had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.) He couldn’t not be depressed, and he was losing his memory, his focus… everything, really.

This article gave me another context for thinking about what my dad experienced — like he wasn’t just being a cranky old git, he was at the mercy of what was happening inside his brain. It’s not that he just wasn’t trying… he just couldn’t.

So while this is a helpful meme:

…Williams’s story is instructive on a more nuanced level: The effects of brain chemistry are indistinguishable from personality. If I’d been more conscious of why Dad was the way he was the past few years, maybe I would have cut him more slack.

But then, maybe it’s wrong to medicalize away who someone has become — particularly when there isn’t some other them you’re ever going to be able to access again. Who we demonstrate ourselves as — is that not who we really are, at least at that time?

It’s all theoretical at this point.

In somewhat-related news, I felt compelled to scan and post my sketchbooks from the past five years. They’re available from the Comics page.

It’s raw, unfiltered personal memory stuff, so I don’t know how palatable it is for others. But I’m happy to have all those memories trapped in ink.