'Shortcuts' a mess of a comic from 2009

One Sunday in 2009 I was having a mid-day snooze, passing the time until I had to pick my girlfriend up from work. The previous night I had had very little sleep, and so was absolutely exhausted. As I napped, I had a really bizarre dream, which extended into a really bizarre waking-thought. I was so tired that even though I was awake, the hazy thoughts of my dream carried on as I tried to continue my day.

It seemed significant at the time, so I sat down and drew the entire dream sequence up as a comic. I did no planning or thinking or structuring. I simply drew it all straight onto paper with my felt-tip. The consequence is, the comic plain doesn't make sense.

I've attached it below, but unless you're in a very similar waking-dream delusion, you will not be able to follow it. Basically, the (indefensibly broken) dream went like this: each action you choose in life has consequences for your health, and ultimately your lifespan. If you look at a single action, its consequences in terms of the years it reduces your lifespan, and remove everything else in between, you could associate life choices with the number of years it removes. Then if you had your lifespan, in years, turned into coins, you could spend them on particular activities and skip the in-between. The themes in the comic were drinking, drugs, and whatever. The narrative features two people at wits' end. They've spent most of  their life tokens on work, receiving money but spending their existence. Not knowing what will reward them, the pair, despondent, begin spending their life tokens on any option trying to find fulfilment. They end up gambling the rest of their tokens on an unknown option in a desperate plea to find meaning. Anyway, here it is.

I did this comic when I was a teenager but it still fits in pretty neatly to most of the stuff I do now: paranoid scratchings about me wasting my time and not accomplishing enough.