Saving the world can wait five minutes
I’m not much for New Year’s resolutions, themes, Dryuary or similar initiatives. I mostly just don’t like being told what to do, and that includes telling myself what to do. But instead of a resolution, I have one small assignment for myself, and for you if you choose to accept it:
Eat some fucking ice cream. Alone.
I know, January is a time to build a new plan for how to fix ourselves, our country and the world. Against all reason, I did have a bit of hope for 2026, but this tire fire of a new year is already raging. It’s easy to feel not just despair but guilt with each new disaster that splays across the front page (yes we still get the newspaper delivered.) We feel the double injury of the thing and the feeling we should have done something to prevent it. And of course we can always do more for ourselves and each other. But that’s not the point of this post.
The point is:
Eat some fucking ice cream by yourself.
My family was lucky enough to visit Italy in the summer of 2023. In Rome, near the Piazza Navona in the late afternoon, we popped into a gelato shop, part of an ongoing disagreement Ethel and I have about when it is advisable to eat ice cream as a family. (Ethel likes 4:30 PM and says to hell with the dinner plans. I am learning to embrace this chaos.)
Jesus, he just ate the fuck out of that ice cream!
But it wasn’t our own frozen treats that was the point that day. We were tourists on vacation, we were supposed to be there. But while we waited, we watched an impeccably dressed Italian gentleman about my age, by himself, leaning against the wall with a chocolate gelato cone. Clearly just from work, clearly on his way to someplace else, and but the thing he was doing at that moment was eating that fucking ice cream. Expertly, efficiently, with practiced bites that let you know this wasn’t his first after work gelato.
Jesus, he just ate the fuck out of that ice cream!
In a few minutes he was done and gone, but that simple act sticks with me. He was alone, he didn’t look at his phone, he did nothing to imply he was more important than that moment, that he had someplace else to be, that eating chocolate gelato was beneath him. To him it was the most important thing he could do with those five minutes.
I’d wager you could sit in a similar ice cream shop in a major American city in summer and wait for hours if not days to witness this same event: the solo, afterwork, middle aged, non-multitasking ice cream eater.
This won’t help save our nation from itself. And maybe it feels like whistling past the graveyard.
But even so, It’s okay to eat fucking ice cream.
By yourself. In the shop, not to go. Before you do that other thing you have to do. Without reading the news on your phone. Just you and the ice cream. It’s okay.
And if you’re going to let yourself go and eat that afterwork ice cream, you might as well read a goddamn comic book, right? Once again, I’ve got you covered.
We’re continuing to progress: the first batch of lettered pages for By the Time I Get to Dallas #5 coming in, we’re approaching 50% completion for colors, and just a few pages away from line art being done on Trinity Project #5. If 2026 doesn’t simply explode in a massive fireball of insanity, it will at least see the completion of this comics project.
It’s a small thing. But it’s my thing.
If you want to help, the single best move is following the Kickstarter prelaunch. Hit the link and click “Notify Me.” That’s it!
Colin Devonshire
Colin is an emergency physician in Boston, Massachusetts. The seeds of his comics project were sown when he took a sabbatical from the ER for creative writing. His creative non-fiction has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.