Monthly Archives: August 2024

Crock Plot

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I turned on a movie while I was working, as I always do. It took a few minutes to realize this was a Lifetime movie. The thing about Lifetime movies is that they’re engaging, but they’re really goofy. My favorite part about Lifetime movies is describing them.

This one is about a woman who wakes up in a strange bed with no memory of the night before, and the other person is dead. He is Elon Musk, only he doesn’t look like he ate a statue of John Barrowman made of butter.

Her best friend is a lawyer, who is going to represent her, and her other friend is a good-looking guy who looks exactly like the dead billionaire. I’d say this was by design, but every male in this movie looks like the dead billionaire, including the grizzled cop who’s tracking her down.

She stays with her male friend, but they get attacked by people in hoodies. The cop figures out she’s their suspect, but when she calls the station from a burner phone, he believes she’s innocent. Later, the good-looking friend takes an axe to the face.

Spoiler alert! The lawyer and the dead billionaire’s ex-wife framed the main character. The lawyer because the main character once slept with the lawyer’s ex-boyfriend, the recently axed friend. The ex-wife did it because the main character slept with the billionaire. The cop shows up, there is a scuffle, and everybody believes the main character, even though all the (fake) evidence points at her.

Lifetime!

Jeremiah Murphy and the Journey into Darkness

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9:57

The decision is made, after I have educated myself on the finer points of crochet, to enter that vast, unforgiving hellscape on my quest for that sacred nectar, which is Half & Half. Maybe some of that Creamed Ice.

10:01

After crossing vast, unforgiving swaths of the Apartment Complex of Totten, during which I crossed the threshold of the Door of Fire, I was forced to endure an Endless Staircase to the ground floor, to the Sidewalk of Riggs Road, next to the entrance of that wretched pit where the reasonable dare not tread. The sign over the door was in a language that is not my native tongue. The English translation is “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.” In Elvish, it reads “Walmart.”

10:02

I encounter my first obstacle before stepping foot into this dark place. It is a vast, unforgiving sea of shopping carts, clustered in the entrance. Had they only queued properly, there would not be this barricade, but they all insisted rolling into the terrifying visage of Capitalism before all others, and even the extra-wide doors could not accommodate them. Madness has me in its grip, and I’m not even inside yet.

10:08

I have found freedom from the crush of acolytes to this terrible shrine, and now I will cross this vast, unforgiving wilderness retrieve the elixir. The dilemma weighs mightily on my heart: the Creamed Ice is located in a Frost Machine near the front door, but if I put it in my grasp first, it runs the risk of melting. I determine the time it takes to walk quickly to the Aisle of the Dairy and walk back to the Frost Machines would be negligible.

10:12

I have been anticipating an eternal wait in the vast, unforgiving wilderness of the line for the Checkout of Personal Agency, but I could not see the length of it until I was in that place. I feared those ahead of me in the aisle were also going to be waiting in line, and yes, my prophecy was fulfilled when the gentleman with the cart steered for the blind area which prevented the line from spilling all over the store. I stood behind him and waited.

10:17

I have been deceived. My worst fears have been realized. I have been smitten by the Sword of Irony as I discover that the line holding me prisoner did not exist. Indeed the real line was a vast, unforgiving wilderness, twice as long as the one I’d deluded myself into standing in. I resigned myself to my fate and took my place behind the Monk of Small Stature, who crippled me with his Gaze of Stink-Eye.

10:26

When I finally emerge from the meandering queue, weaving in and out of clothing departments, I see the Checkout of Personal Agency. Of the seven machines displaying banners with the Checkout of Personal Agency’s motto, “15 Items or Less,” three of the machines have been struck dead, and the life of a fourth drained from it as I watched. The Monk of Small Stature needed to apprentice himself with an employee until he could operate the machine. He is half my age. There is a vast, unforgiving wilderness ahead of me. Morale is low.

10:29

I swipe my two items through the red light, and one of them freezes the machine. A denizen must unlock it, and one does, after a fashion. It happens again. Finally, I allow the machine to suck upon my credit card. The exit is blocked by lost souls who needed their receipts checked, so I wait. When I am free, I ride the elevator to my floor and walk across the vast, unforgiving wilderness to my home.

10:35

I am greeted by my faithful ward, who tells me, “Mew!” He has been alone for the past thirty-eight minutes, the poor wretch. Was this dark, harrowing journey into the vast, unforgiving wilderness of the underworld worth it? I think of the sweet nectar as I put it in my Device of Refrigeration. Yes, it is worth it.

With a Single Step

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I have a lot of vestigial dates on my calendar. For example, September 13 will always be the birthday of my ex, Andrea. I make a note of it every year, despite that she will never speak to me again. May 7, the day after my dad’s birthday, belongs to a high school best friend who grew up to be odious. These are people I no longer have a relationship with. But that’s the past. On the rare occasion I make a new friend, I can’t remember when they were born.

Other dates that have no relevance for me are April 30, which is my wedding anniversary. December 13 is when she served me divorce papers. Her birthday is March 23, but I can safely say that I haven’t noticed it the last five times that day has passed. August 22 (today!) is the twentieth anniversary of when I left New York.

In 2004, I was miserable a good half-to-two-thirds of the time. This was mostly because of my untreated, undiagnosed mental illness, and also, I was really lonely. Kate was the solution to this because she was, at the time, my soul mate, and she was opening her home to me. The resulting adventure was epic.

Was it a good decision? Well, Kate treated me like her property. She convinced me that all my friends were insane and that the only ones I could trust were hers, all of whom turned their backs on me following the split. (Some of them pretended to be “neutral” while actually being Team Kate. These are the people I think the least of.). She convinced my doctors and me that I was incompetent and couldn’t take care of myself. She tried to create a rift between myself and my family.

On the other hand, she was the biggest cheerleader of my art. She bought me supplies I still use and encouraged me to start my own art business. (She wanted to make greeting cards, which I did not enjoy.) She hired me a personal trainer, and for five years, I was in great shape. (You can’t tell by looking at me now that I used to run 5Ks for fun.) Most importantly, she was a champion of my mental health, and the only reason I can function at all is because of her.

In addition, she turned me into a Mac person, she expanded my flavor palette, she took me around the world, she taught me to be more financially responsible. She brought Newcastle and me together. I dressed better when I was married. I feel like I was more of an adult back then, even compared to now.

I honestly think that leaving New York twenty years ago was the best decision I could have made at that point of my life. It was when I took the first step to being an adult. It was when I packed up and chased true love. It was when I was brave. That’s why I remember August 22 every year.

Subedit

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My novel was accepted by the publisher almost two years ago. I read the contract very carefully, looking for tricks and traps, but it was straightforward and very generous. The cover looks great, and they were very responsive to my concerns about fonts. Because the title is a Navajo word, they were able to accommodate the unique accenting of the language. The layouts went well. Everyone has been extraordinarily professional. But that’s not why this is taking so long.

I received the first edits fifteen months ago, and they were really bad. When I realized the editor had caused a lot of problems, I asked Production to fix it. They rejected all the changes and brought in a new team. They were just as bad. So was the third edit. The fourth edit was a vast improvement, though it wasn’t until a later round that they stopped changing “Oxen’s Razor,” which was the term used by a teenager trying to sound smart, to “Occam’s Razor,” not getting the joke.

I’ve been going back and forth with them for fifteen months, during which I’ve reread my novel nine times. I’m getting kind of sick of it.

(To be clear, I’m really proud of this book, and I think it’s some of my best writing.)

Now that they’re only sending me the final proofs, I have to edit my own book. Because of my attention span, I can’t catch all of the errors on a pass, so I have to go through it again and again, stripping out the errors. On the ninth pass, I saw that I had misspelled Jennifer once, and I didn’t notice the other eight times I read it. Also, I’m catching some continuity mistakes, like who gave the main character his pickup. These things should have been spotted by an editor.

To be clear, I’ve liked working with them so far. I just can’t figure out how this one department can be so unskilled and unprofessional. And I can’t figure out why the publisher isn’t taking this more seriously. When I self-published three years ago, my novels went up covered in typos. I reread them at least three times, and I still missed a lot. And that’s embarrassing. How am I able to hold up a book proudly and brag about it if it looks self-published? This looks bad for the publisher too. So I just returned the latest round of proofs. I will spend another fifteen months doing this if it’s what it takes to make this perfect. I painted this picture of Aaron and Jen, the main characters of the novel, Hanììbààz Rising because it was on my mind again.

The Giving Tree

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Prior to Sunday, Oscar and I were living in Nicole’s apartment, formerly our apartment. I stayed there for two weeks, and Oscar stayed a week longer than that. The problem is, Henry has been really depressed and crying all night since Newcastle and I moved out, so she was thinking of getting him a kitten. But she wanted to practice with someone old enough to defend himself.

Oscar and Henry did not get along. When the former first showed up at the latter’s, there were some really bad fights, so Nicole’s boyfriend cobbled together a gate to keep them apart, but they could get used to each other. They called it the DMZ. Oscar could jump on top of it without much effort. They could be in the same room together, and on my first night, they snuggled up on opposite sides of my lower legs and we all slept together.

His last week there, Oscar finally had the Surgery That Dare Not Speak Its Name, and I walked him to the vet in a backpack. I couldn’t watch his reaction, but he was quiet, and I think that’s a good sign.

But now we’re home. Nicole’s apartment is 850 square feet, mine is 435. I’d love to take him for a walk, but on the rare occasions I don’t pass out from blood loss and get him into the harness, his feet stop working. His motto is “Death from above!”; but he doesn’t have a lot of heights to aspire to.

I don’t want Oscar to get bored. I play with him a few minutes periodically. I talk to him, I let him sniff whatever’s in my hand, I scratch him behind the ears whenever I see him, I open my window in the middle of a heat wave. I don’t want him to get bored. I bought him a new cat tree and backpack. The tree arrived today, it took me over an hour to assemble it. It’s the perfect height to loaf out in front of the window. On the lower tier, there’s a ledge that’s perfect for hanging out with Dyad while he’s working.

Unfortunately, I have to get rid of the old one. Until January, I’ve never lived alone in my life, especially when it came to Newcastle. I’d never made a big purchase for my cat, the love of my life. It came from our joint account when I was married, and Nicole and I split expenses for the cat. So the first thing I bought was a tree for Newcastle. It was not a tall one, for an old man, but he never used it anyway.

Newcastle only lived alone with me for six weeks, and he never used it. Sometimes he’d get into the hammock that was the same height as my desk. Even if I wasn’t looking, I knew he was there. He was my anchor. Since then, Oscar enjoyed the hammock a lot whenever I was working.

I hated throwing the tree away because it’s the last monument I had to him. But I got a new kid, and I’m buying presents for him now.

* Oscar is in this picture.

Frisky Business

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As you may know, I’m ace, or asexual. Some may find this hard to believe because I’ve had my fair share of sex in my life, but there is a pattern. I tend to be more randy when I’m manic, and when I’m baseline or depressed, I’m not interested. I’m still drawn to sexiness, but I don’t want to have sex. Asexuality is a scale, and I fit on it somewhere.

Anyway, that’s my way of saying that I’m apparently going through a manic period. This means delusions of grandeur, snap decision-making, irresponsible spending, a really short, hot temper, and I start remembering sex fondly again. As a result, I started getting a little frisky with some of my drawings. I’m still seeing all the errors, but I’m happy with most of these.

Art to Art

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I’ve been feeling really self-conscious about my art lately`. I’m continuing to draw, almost compulsively, and paint or color, because I like the act of doing it. Unfortunately, I am not that crazy with the results.

I obsessively catalog and curate my art, going back almost as far as I’ve been drawing, which was 1998. I started out sketching in lined notebooks or whatever I could get my hands on, and I was so proud. I was drawing stick figures and bodies with no faces, and to me, they were as classic as a John Singer Sargent. Unfortunately, those notebooks are all lost to history. The first sketchbook where I started drawing faces was given away as a wedding gift to someone who would appreciate the symbolism of it. That’s the first six months of me making art.

The earliest drawings I have digitized are from 1999. They’re of Sean, Lisa, and Eugene, characters from a short story I wrote in college and the sequel I was working while I was figuring this out. I still write and illustrate these characters constantly.

Twenty-five years later, I continue to feel pride in these sketches. I can’t always say the same.

Recently, I skimmed through thousands of digitized drawings and picked only the ones that sparked joy, which turned out to be about six hundred. As I was paging through, I saw countless bad drawings that are making me ask myself who I’m fooling.

I’ve drawn pictures as recently as last week I would be mortified by if someone else saw it. Even as I’m getting better with basics like hands and anatomy (I’m still trying to get the hang of hips), I draw mostly stinkers. There are dozens of pictures of Lisa crosshatched with red, blue, green, and black pens, and only four of them are worth looking at. (Almost) everything I drew between 2015 and 2020 was so bad, I quit drawing altogether.

I didn’t start drawing again until the end of 2022, when my coworker saw a self-portrait I did in 2020 (one of the few good ones I did) and would not let me say no to her request for a portrait of her own. This time, I bought a cheap sketchbook and a mechanical pencil and started from scratch.

Look, I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. I have no training. I have two anatomy books that are useless to me because that is not how I learn. I read How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. Every breakthrough I’ve made is met with a backslide, and I can’t seem to stop that from happening. I’m self-taught, and it shows.

I look at the comic book artists I take inspiration from, and they don’t make mistakes. The penciller doesn’t make one hand bigger than the other. The inker doesn’t lean too hard on their brush and make one line really thick. The exception to this is my idol, Matt Wagner. In his 1983 series, Mage, you can witness his evolution, issue by issue, as he gets better by doing it.

This inspired me to start drawing comics in 2002. I figured out how to do it by doing it. It’s how I learned to draw in the first place, and it’s the most satisfying way for me.  

I’m not going to share as much art as before. A lot of what I’ve already shared is a huge mess, and I’m really embarrassed about it. I’m also not getting as much engagement over social media, so I’m seeing that as a less and less productive way to spend my time. If there’s one that really knocks me out, I’ll share it. Otherwise, I’ll turn the page and try again.