2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 20: The biggest traffic ticket I ever got

"I hope nobody notices my missing door!" is a weird thing to say out loud.

Let me tell you about the most expensive traffic ticket I ever received. 

It was the early 2000s and my sister Catherine had just moved to a small town outside Ft. Wayne, Indiana. I live a few hours away in Illinois, and I decided to make the journey to her house for Christmas by car even though I hate to drive and have zero sense of direction. Sure enough, I got badly lost several times on the way but finally arrived in Indiana, shaken but intact. I stayed (in a motel) for a couple days and tried to enjoy the holiday festivities, but I was dreading the trip back.

My fears were justified. When I got back on the highway and had been driving for maybe 30 or 40 minutes, I suddenly realized that it had been a while since I'd seen a posted speed limit sign. I had no idea what the speed limit was, so I just tried to keep pace with traffic. Well, around that time, I noticed a police car nearby and decided to slow down to 55 just to be on the safe side. The officer who ticketed me later said this was my big mistake, the thing that told him I was up to no good. He tailed me for several miles but then pulled off to the side of the highway. I thought he'd given up on me and was relieved. I should not have been.

I kept driving, still going about 55. A few minutes later, this cop came roaring back into traffic with his lights flashing and (to my memory) siren wailing. In my rearview mirror, I could see he was weaving through the cars trying to catch up to somebody. I assumed there was an emergency somewhere. Turns out, the emergency was me. When I pulled over, the police officer stepped out of his vehicle and approached my car, citation book in hand. He seemed to be in a bad mood. I knew I couldn't have been speeding, so what was my big crime? Expired tags.

Now, here is where my version of the story diverges from the cop's version of the story. According to the cop, I knew perfectly well that my tags were expired, and I had sneakily tried to avoid him so he wouldn't notice. He'd known from the start that I was doing something underhanded, but it had taken him a few minutes to figure out exactly what. That's why he'd pulled over the first time. Eventually, he cracked the case: I was a fiendish criminal mastermind who had knowingly tried to drive though the great state of Indiana with Illinois tags that had expired a few weeks previously.

My version of the story was that I'd recently changed apartments and had forgotten to forward my mail to my new place. Therefore, I hadn't gotten a reminder from the state of Illinois that my tags had expired at the end of November. Besides, it's not like I was hurting the state of Indiana. The officer did not believe my story at all and wrote me a substantial ticket, the largest I'd ever received. I was really strapped for cash in those days, so it stung. For the next decade and a half, I vowed never to drive in the state of Indiana again. When I wanted to visit my sister, I did so by Amtrak.

But that's a whole other story.

Thought I'd erase Garfield from this 'Garfield' before 'Garfield Minus Garfield' does it.

A homemade Garfield Minus Garfield.

Just got home yesterday from Indiana, o my brothers and only friends. I was there visiting my sister and her family for the Memorial Day weekend. My dad came down from Michigan, so I got to see him, too. There's not much to do in this portion of Indiana, so we watched many hours of television and consumed mass quantities of starches, sugars, and fats. That helped pass the time. 

We also got out to the movies a couple of times. Finally caught up with The Avengers: Age of Ultron (a solid, if by-the-book superhero flick; a little more self-serious and hence maybe not as fun as the first one) and Mad Max: Fury Road (an expectation-shattering revelation; I may have to see it again before it leaves theaters). 

One of my favorite rituals of these family get-togethers is reading the comics with my niece and nephews. This time, I was able to introduce them to the pleasures of Garfield Minus Garfield, the Dadaist experimental comic which takes normal Garfield dailies and simply removes the title character, thus revealing the fat orange cat's pitiful owner, Jon Arbuckle, as the sad, twitchy lunatic he's always been. We read the original Garfield, too, and I found one that would make a perfect candidate for Garfield Minus Garfield. So before those guys could get their paws on it, I did my own version. You can see it above. Enjoy, and I'll catch you further along down the trail.

UPDATE: Garfield Minus Garfield did, in fact, publish its own version of this strip, several days after I posted mine. But they dropped Jon's third-panel word balloon, which to me makes it less funny. Better that he desperately plead to nobody. Advantage: Joe.