So this is a sketchbook story that I did for no particular reason, arising from of a conversation I had with Jeanne Thornton and Nate Bliss.
After drawing the comic I read the actual story of Roy Sullivan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Sullivan
and found the truth was much, much stranger than my surmise.
I’m fascinated by the phrase “That’s how I feel,” because it seems to imply, “This is what I use to have emotions. This is the implement that I am accustomed to.” It suggests to me that we want to feel the emotion, so we use various tools to accomplish it, each of us the tools that we are used to, that we have been shown. He uses standing under a tree in a storm as a cultural artifact that invokes an emotional response, in others and himself.
This has little to do with the life of Roy Sullivan, though, who was apparently cursed by Zeus.