I loved my years of living on Capital Hill in Washington, D.C. I was your typical hippie-turned-yuppie. Still thought like a sixties, guy, dressed like an eighties one. I liked my paycheck more than a bag of pot or the Beatles White Album.

The phone rang about 3 p.m one Thursday. It was my two friends Julie and Beverly, originally from Mississippi like me, and now my neighbors on The Hill. I was being invited to a Far Side exhibit at the museum. I wanted to sleep. They talked me into going.

Though I loved and The Far Side and still do, thought is hard to find, when the invitation came in mid-afternoon at work, I already had burnout, and knew i wanted go go to sleep early. I was usually dead-tired at the end of a work-day, and the though that went through my head was, “Why wait in a long line for Gary Larson when he’ll be in the paper tomorrow?”

I could tell Julie and Beverly were not listening, soI got dressed. They picked me up and we at the museum within five minutes. The lines, though long, moved quickly and the exhibit was beyond my wildest imagination. The panel cartoons had been blown up onto 5 or 6 foot poster boards and were hanging from the ceiling. Many of them were some of my most memorable from the newspaper.

The increased size added a whole new dimension to my favorite cartoon.

Then, in the middle of all this fun, my mood started to change. I started getting chills and feeling isolated and terrible. I could not pinpoint what was happening. I continued, I think, to be amused and act happy but all I wanted to do was go home and cry.

I tossed and turned most the night, still wondering why I felt so sad. Then it hit me. When I had been a college student, in Dallas, at about age nineteen, I wrote close to a thousand offbeat single panel cartoons (this was in 1974), many of them in a similar spirit to The Far Side.

Everyone has dreams. Some are more potent than others. I Continued to do my homework in business clases nd had no idea why I was even in colege. But there I sat.

For anyone who has ever had an offbeat cartoon in their heads, study Gary Larson and his work and see what he had to go through to get them syndicated.

A decade passed. I created Londons Times Cartoons with one other artist. several top illustrator and I continue writing and assigning the cartoons. to my team illustrators. The site has become the biggest of its kind on the Internet and certainly the most visited (nearly 5 million a year since 2005 when we began counting). Londons Times Carotons was founded in 1997, seven years after that Far Side exhibit.

In the movie “Field Of Dreams” Kevin Kosner says, “Build It And They Will Come.” Though I found the line a bit arrogant, it turned out to be true. No hype, no pop up ads, just a site full of good humorous free content.