Category Archives: Life

Can You Hear the People Sing? 

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In an unexpected plot twist, I spent yesterday afternoon in the Kennedy Center, watching Les Miserables. The plot twist is because I don’t particularly like musicals, and I can’t spell Les Miserables without miserable. I had just started working on page one of my new comic, and I wasn’t ready to call it quits for the day when my friend used the telephone function on her cell and told me she had an extra ticket for that afternoon.  

I have never seen Les Miserables all the way through before. It had never popped into Popejoy Hall in Albuquerque during one of my GATE trips, and Broadway was prohibitively expensive when I was there. (I’ve seen Rent on Broadway, but that was via shenanigans.) I saw the movie with my ex-wife, and we got an hour into it when we had to give up. However, I’m trying to accept invitations now (despite my art) because I’m thrilled someone thought of me.  

I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. The set was dumbfounding, and damn, these people could sing. And I knew that kid was dead the instant he climbed the barricade. Sure Marius and Cosette had the personalities of wet cardboard, Marius’s bestie (whose name I forgot because I can’t remember anything) was fun and memorable and dead early into the second act. It was nice to be able to hear what Javert was singing about.  

But what really made my brain jump out of the top of my head and jump off a bridge was the aforementioned sets. Les Mis (as all those in the know call it) is epic. It takes place in France as revolution after revolution happens, in the streets, in the slums, in gated residences, etc., and through a miracle of engineering, they made it happen, from the docks at night to a wedding in a palace. There were no people in black moving scenery around—the scenery moved itself. And it did it so smoothly, the lights didn’t have to go down.  

One day in the office a while ago, when there were more people willing to stand around and chat for a half-hour, one of them, who is only a couple of years younger than I said, “You have to watch A New Hope. Just try to ignore the bad effects.” I almost broke my keyboard. The original Star Wars did not have CGI. It had dozens of craftsmen making the rantings of a filmmaking lunatic look like something you’d see in real life. They were sculptors, metalworkers, electricians. Like the lighting tech and the people ultimately running the sets, they were engineers. They were artists. Tom Savini, Stan Winston, they were artists.  

What disappoints me is that with CGI, you can make literally anything happen. There is no limit to the scope of your movie. As a practical effects artist, you are limited by what you have. Sometimes, while accommodating your limitations, you create something even better (i.e. hiding the shitty-looking shark in Jaws). You can’t freestyle with digital effects. The sound of the TARDIS in Doctor Who is a planer running over a piano. How did that guy figure out to do that? 

Something else I don’t like about digital art is that you don’t have to make mistakes anymore. If the brushstroke you just made bleeds into the background, hit control-Z. I have correction fluid, which doesn’t take paint or most inks. It’s my responsibility to leave my error on the page or make it a part of the picture. And I love it. I have hardly any experience with photo-editing software, but I have enough that I could erase every mistake I’d made in any painting or sketch. I won’t do it. I scripted, laid out, penciled, painted, inked, and lettered a whole comic, paint and ink on paper, because I love limitations. Limitations inspire me. The woman who designed the first Cyberman on Doctor Who had some tights and a vacuum cleaner (true story). That’s part of the reason I love Classic Who so much. What they created was cheesy, but it was genius. 

Digital artists are artists. I could never get into it because it required a completely different set of skills that I had been honing in my adulthood, but I recognize how hard these artists work. Sam Yang is a digital artist I admire, for example. I try to discuss it as easier than what I do, but it’s not. It’s just different. 

Going back to Les Miserables and the various Cirque du Soliel performances I’ve seen**, and Rent, they have a budget, but everything they create must be seen from as close as a hundred feet away, and it has to be convincing. Everyone who’s ever done theater knows this, and it takes a particular kind of maestro to pull it off, performance after performance, play after play.  

Bravo, set designers!  

*My ex-father-in-law, a stoic, strong, soft-spoken, masculine man, lived near Vegas, and he had a thing for shows, especially showtunes, and he was a millionaire. I saw a lot of shows. 

Snippets from Romania

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When I came to Romania, I was unprepared for how many leather pants I would see.

Nobody wears plaid in this country. Usually, the service industry will start talking to me in English when I say hello, but when I wear plaid, I don’t have to say a damned word.

In addition, they don’t put lids on anything. You are required to do that yourself.

Everyone in Bucharest dresses like circa 2000s hipsters.

Of all the countries in the world, it is least surprising that Romania has a Goth shop.

Prompt customer service is not really a thing in. They only use beverage lids when you ask.

Pop Cola tastes like cloves and redundancy with a subtle hint of redundancy.

The Romanian toy museum is really fun. They have them organized by type, and I swear I’ve never seen so many abacuses in one place. During communism, they had a ripoff of Monopoly called “Capitaly.” But what got under my skin was the Game Boy. In a museum. And before you Millennials start to get all uppity about how old Gen-X is, they had Pokemon Gold in there too.

White Trash Cola tastes like ginger, with a splash of mullets and trucks on blocks.

I was ready to praise Bucharest for not having hostile architecture, but clearly they’ve perfected it.

As we visited Dracula’s (alleged) castle, the weather, cold and rainy, would have been better with lightning. There was a torture room.

Most Romanians look like they’re middle-aged. The reason for this is that everyone smokes, even (no exaggeration) children.

Spite of the Lepus 

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I’m sure you might remember how I once expressed my mourning for the lost art of making a tape, especially when putting together a playlist is what people do now, and it sounds unsatisfying. When you made a tape, you had to listen to each song, calculate how long each song was so you didn’t have too much blank space at the end. (Or, as many chose to do it, just play as much of the next song as you can before the tape runs out.) You put stickers on the tape, you decorated the case. You only made tapes for someone you’re trying to impress. A mix tape was a goddamned work of art, and you couldn’t do that with any other music medium.  

Another work of art I miss is letter-writing. I have had several pen-pals, and they were my closest friends at the time. One of my correspondents told me she said to her doctor that she did go to therapy—she wrote me every week. I would illustrate the margins when I was feeling whimsical, and if I was feeling ambitious, I’d do something fun with the envelope. The paper smelled like paper and felt crisp in your hands, while you reread what the final line was on a page so you could make sure it matched up with the next one. I’ve tried to revive letter-writing as an adult (I’ve got all these blank cards I never sold), but it never caught on with anybody. Writing a letter is a commitment, one most people don’t seem have the time or the will to make anymore. But when you take the time to write someone a letter on paper, you are spending every minute you work on it with them, and that is an act of intimacy that you will never find when someone slides into your DMs.   

For our evolution, we next got email, which was about 75 percent less commitment. You could say whatever you want, but not how you would say it. It’s not like your typing changes size or sprawls when you’re agitated. In email, you can capitalize words for emphasis, like some people still do in their comments and IMs, but that just gives people headaches. From there society moved onto comment threads, and the less said about that, the better (though that is how I met my ex-girlfriend and one of my best friends, so it’s not all bad). From there, we moved to IM, which had been around since the beginning, but went mainstream with social media (which is not at all bad, in that I met my eyes and ears in Finland, Wippa, the Norse Goddess of Punishment, through Myspace).  

But going back to email, I called myself a writer, but I hardly wrote because I was I was putting so much energy into emails. I just wanted to entertain my friends, so I wrote little plays, limericks, newscasts, an Oscar speech, the screenplay for a Kung Fu movie starring my coworkers, an ode to my missing button, and song lyrics that I made up. 

I only wrote two songs, one being a blues song about being dumped completely out of the blue that did not obey the laws of music. The other one sounded suspiciously like “A Boy Named Sue,” by Johnny Cash. The subject matter is a little difficult to describe. 

When I moved into my apartment in Jersey City, New Jersey, after the last tenant was removed on a stretcher, which I witnessed, I discovered what I considered to be a design flaw. There was a single pink strip of wallpaper that ran the circumference of my room, and it was decorated by bunnies, rolling around on their backs, sniffing flowers, wrestling, chasing butterflies.  

I looked around and decided that I was never going to get laid in this room (I was wrong), so I got the landlord’s permission and tried everything I could think of to get rid of the accursed bunnies. I even went to an Internet café and looked up how to get rid of wallpaper. I left the one wall for the bunnies that talked to me, but I covered the other walls with magazine clippings, art, and posters. If anything on my walls was going to cock-block me, it would be that. 

One day, while lying in bed and listening to the bunnies, I thought of a song. I emailed it to my friend Barry, and I thought it lost on the median of the Information Superhighway. Today, while poking around on my laptop, I found it: the song. And now I bring it to you. 

“Ballad of the Bunnies” 

When I was young, just twenty-two, 
I sought a place that had a view
, 
And one that didn’t cost a lot of money. 

I found a home, in Jersey City;  
It was cheap, and not real pretty,  
But still the deal was looking kind of sunny. 

So I unpacked my little room 
And saw what would now be my doom:  
A ring around the wall—and it was bunnies. 

Their background: pink. Their pelts were gray.  
Their poses were prepared for play.  
Their coal black eyes were looking at me funny. 

Their origin: I did not know,  
I didn’t care—they had to go, 
Or never would I find myself a honey. 

I scrubbed and washed and scraped that wall.  
I steamed and peeled; I tried it all!  
It only made my paint look kind of runny. 

Those rabbits cut me down to size,  
I had to reach a compromise; 
And now I’m left with just one wall of bunny. 

“This,” He said quietly as he got onto the bus, “is cool.”

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Every couple of years this comes up.

In 1991, I was sitting in drama class with the person I most looked up to in early high school, and we came up with some truly bizarre, baffling, high-energy situations to share with our friends. It was a tale that couldn’t be told by one story. It needed three stories. It needed “Three Stories in One.” Since I made a noble effort of illustrating the whole thing, getting distracted at fifty-six pages, I have a clear idea what they look like, and I like to revisit them. I can’t just pick up the last 10-15 pages because comparing my style to the style I had seventeen years ago is like asking Michelangelo to fill in some of the gaps on a cave painting. I’m proud of the work I did, but I’ve made some improvements.

This time, I thought hard about these faces as I worked on them. Since everybody’s based on a real person, I concentrated on features I remember most and spent a lot of time erasing. Luke didn’t look like that. Amber didn’t look like that, and Wendy didn’t look like that, except for the parts that totally did. Amber smiles with her eyes (still does), Wendy always looked annoyed at me—but with affection. Luke was robbed for the Best Dressed in the Class of ’93 (I mean that sincerely). Naturally, Jeremiah looked exactly like that in 1991. Boone really did have that playful smirk when she was up.

And now we need to have a quick word about Boone. A few years ago, Boone transitioned into Severian, a woman. I have not spoken to her as a woman, I have not even seen photos. I’m not even sure I got her name right. The only conception I have in my mind of Severian is when she was presenting as Boone, and the only reason I know about the transition at all is because one of our mutual friends chewed me out for dead-naming her in my last “Three Stories in One” post. Once I knew, I don’t refer to her as Boone anymore.

Last summer, I presumptively wrote my memoirs, each chapter representing the most influential figures in my life. And she was, without a doubt, going to be a very important. I did not dead-name her once, not even in my first draft. I believe that you should be who you need to be. A trans woman is a woman, period.

That said, I’ve spent a lot of time debating this in my head, and I’m not going to change Boone’s name or gender in “Three Stories in One.” The reason I won’t is because Boone is not Severian. Boone is a character based loosely on Severian when she was sixteen. While Severian was throwing bullets at elaborate Lego constructions with her buddy, Matt, Boone was picking up cheerleaders and playing meaningless board games with them.

On the same token, Luke is not a complete bastard, only kind of a bastard. Wendy was not a good driver back then, but at least she wasn’t driving her sweet Karmenn Ghia like it was the Batmobile. Amber was perky, but she was more than just a smile and the attention span of a hamster. (What I remember most about Amber was how kind she was to me. The popular girl treated me as just another student she was on a first-name basis with, not a nerd on the lowest rung.) And if I suddenly found myself, on my bike, in the middle of the Indy 500, I’d be a smear. At the risk of grandiosity, “Three Stories in One” is a historical document.

To be clear, if Severian tells me that “Three Stories in One,” particularly my decision to leave Boone as is, is offensive to her, then I’ll stop making these posts. I hope she doesn’t. I hope she appreciates it for the playful, teasing nostalgic spirit that went into these illustrations.

I’m not George Lucas. I tend to let things go when I’m done with them, but sometimes present circumstances demand that you change the past. Once again, I’m not going to. They were a product of their time.

Calling my Shot 

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My five-year dry spell making art came to an end a few months ago, as you’d know by the sketches choking your feed. Part of the reason is that I am going to illustrate another comic. I did four of them twenty years ago, and they look terrible, but I’m endlessly proud of them. I’ve learned a lot since then, much of it this winter, like (some) basic anatomy, a little more control with the brush, the usefulness of references, et cetera. I’ve been experimenting with lettering, poses, and panels, I’ve been honing characters’ faces, I’ve been buying the necessary supplies, I’m finding pictures of my old college for backgrounds (which are going to look rough, but that’s what I’m going for). I took a couple of weeks to visualize some of my unrelated characters, and now I’m back to work on the comic prerequisites.  

I’m running out of things to do to prep for doing the comic, so I’ve decided to give it a month. The last week in February, I’m going to sit down and lay out my panels. When that’s done, I break ground on this awesome new paper I bought and see this through. It won’t be great at first, and one day in the future, after I’ve really had the opportunity to hone my craft, I may dig up the old layouts and illustrate issue one and redo it. Or I’ll leave it. The comic series Mage was Matt Wagner’s second book, and it did not start out well. By issue fifteen, his style evolved into the graceful curves of what would be his storytelling through the eighties and nineties.  

As much as I love the scripts I have pounded out, I have entry-level skill, and unless I redraw it every time I have a breakthrough, it will stay that way. My friend in San Francisco shared a video with me about an art class where half the students had to make as many vases as they could in one week, and the other half had to make one perfect vase. The result was that the first half produced the perfect vase first because they were practicing by doing. That’s why I illustrated MortalMan twenty years ago, even though I wasn’t ready. Even though I illustrated two horrible issues of The Book of Jesse, and I still wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready when I decided to illustrate Three Stories in One and made it most of the way through the book before I got distracted. But I drew a lot of pictures, and they got better. I have a few Three Stories in One illustrations hanging on my wall because I think they’re so cool, including the one where Jeremiah rebounds off of a commercial airliner. 

If I had kept making comics after I moved in with Kate, who knows where I’d be right now with my pen and ink. (Correlation is not causation: My next big project after quitting comics was Three Stories in One, which I started after Kate went to Namibia for a year.) Like having an entry-level-adjacent job at forty-six, I feel like I’m going to be starting out with the skill level of an ambitious college student, whose father I could possibly be. But I’m middle-aged, not dead. 

I start February 26. Cheer me on.  

Trigger Warning

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This post has a pretty big trigger warning on it, for reasons that will become apparent very quickly in the next paragraph.

This past Thursday, during my commute home, so about four o’clock, I was sexually assaulted on the DC Metro. I won’t tell you exactly what happened because I’ve been reliving it pretty steadily for the past week, and I don’t feel like immortalizing it. I can tell you what happened after. I was in a crowded train, and I screamed at the guy, and nobody saw or heard a thing. They didn’t mind looking at me until I looked back, then it was the floor or the person next to me. I was sexually assaulted in front of dozens of people, and no one saw anything. 

My attacker sat down in the closest available seat and stared at me, who was standing by the door. When a couple got between us, he changed seats, moving through the crowd like he wasn’t even there, his eyes always following me. I knew right then that this guy was going to follow me home. Sure, I picked this place because it was right by the stairs to the mezzanine at my stop, but there was only one exit, a long escalator ride, and no Metro personnel in the station at all. This guy could assault me again or worse, and no one was coming to help me. When we reached my station, I waited until the door was closing, then I slipped out and went home.

I still spent most of the evening with the blinds closed, hoping that he didn’t backtrack to my stop to find me. When I woke up the next day, I wondered if he wouldn’t be waiting at my station for me when I would have to go back to work on Tuesday. Maybe he remembered which train I was on and which car I’d chosen, and he’ll be waiting for me when I get out of work. 

I feel like I should underscore how utterly alone I felt when I got home Thursday. I was the only other person in a crowded train car, and when I thought about who to talk to about this, I was reminded that I had no one to talk to. I have texting friends, and I reached out to a few of them, and they got back to me after an hour or so. Nicole was in bed in Romania. I called my mom, which I’d rather have avoided, but I had to speak to someone with a voice. One of my friends did call me several hours later, and she was a godsend, but for the first hour or so after the incident, I was on my own, and I wasn’t sure that was a bad thing. 

With the exception of the few of the friends I’d reached out to on Thursday, as well as an HR rep I spoke to on Friday, I hadn’t told anyone about this. I’m not ashamed—violated, but not ashamed. This wasn’t my fault. The reason I’m avoiding it is because I hate how everybody looks at me. I hate the catch in their voice when they process it. They’re not doing anything wrong—it’s a natural reaction to hearing something awful like this. But I still hate it. 

I felt alone on the Metro. I felt alone at home. And I felt alone because I’m a man. This is not someone who believes that men have it worse than women, but they don’t warn a guy this could happen, do they? No, they don’t. In fact, unless it happens to you, the only thing you are likely to hear about male sexual assault is how goddamned funny it is. From “Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison” in Office Space to Ving Rhames getting hilariously raped in Pulp Fiction, to little kids make dropping-the-soap jokes, male sexual assault is fun for the whole family.

Victims are made to be overly feminine, like the “bitch” trope in prison (Ben Kingsley had a bitch in a Marvel short that can be seen on Disney+)    . The reason why is that a real man would never let that happen to them. Fuck that, I don’t want to be a real man. Real men are assholes. Besides, what was I going to do? Was I going to punch or kick the guy into unconsciousness? Wrestle him down and present him to the non-existent Metro cops? What if he had a knife? What if he kicked my ass back even harder? I couldn’t count on concerned citizens coming to the rescue, that’s for sure. 

I’ve chosen not to go to the police with this. It will accomplish nothing. I left him on a Maryland-bound train. I don’t have any details on the train itself that would lead them to the guy. The suspect was wearing a Covid mask, a hat, and a black parka. In this city, he’s invisible. They will never catch him, there will be no justice, and he’ll do it again. But I will not spend hours in the station telling and retelling my story to be the thing they joke about in the break room. My HR rep is kind of angry with me for this decision, and she spent most of Friday trying to talk me out of it.

I don’t spend a lot of time wondering what I did wrong because I didn’t do anything wrong. He came from blind corner behind me. He didn’t make a sound. There was nothing I could have done to prevent it, which is both a relief and a reason to be terrified. (On Friday morning, when I was still paranoid, I asked myself aloud, “Is this what it feels like to be a woman every day?”) I’m an overweight, forty-six-year-old, pale dude. This could happen to anybody.

But what makes me really sad is that I don’t really put a lot of thought into my appearance anymore, but on Thursday, I put in the effort. I wore a dress shirt that matched my beloved sweater vest and my business casual shoes, and I braved the frigid air walking from the train to my office because I knew that, when work was over, it was going to be the perfect weather for my corduroy blazer, and I looked good and I felt good, and I never want to wear those clothes again. There’s the part of me that notes it was the one thing I did differently that day. No, I don’t think the person who attacked me was attracted to me. This kind of thing isn’t about sex. It was about scaring me, and well done, sir. 

It’s not the physical act of what he did that has kept me trapped in my apartment for the past week, it’s the helplessness. The things I thought I could count on to stay safe—bright lights, public spaces, crowds, back to the wall, all failed me. And the recent break-in showed us that you can lock the house all you want, but if the locking mechanism fails in one of your windows, they’re coming in.

I’m grounding myself by writing a novel about the oldest characters I’ve created and reteaching myself how to ink and preparing for my inevitable comic book, but this weekend, I couldn’t. A lot of the initial horror of what happened has faded, and I was able to go out and buy a latte (I was concerned that the barista was my attacker because he was the same size and skin tone to my attacker) Mostly what I have is mild agoraphobia, and I don’t know if I could do that again. 

I’ll be fine. I’ll work from home this week and see if I can use the Metro again soon. There was a bit of a tug of war between my supervisor and HR about this, including the question, “Can you Uber into work?”; which stunned me in its tone-deafness, but HR won. My supervisor was demanding more information, and I think she was looking forward to having something to gossip about. I’ve discovered that I’m less willing to let things in my apartment slide. If my socks don’t both make it into my laundry basket, I now pick up the stray immediately, as opposed to letting it enjoy its freedom for a couple of days. There’s been little housekeeping projects I’ve been putting off that are now getting done.

Don’t worry, I’ll leave the apartment again. I’ll ride the Metro again. I won’t be watching out over my shoulder anymore. It might take a while, but I’ll be fine again. I got two cats counting on me.

Don’t You Know That You’re Toxic?

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I smoked an average of twenty cigarettes a day from October 1994 to May 2007. I was not a person who smoked, I was a smoker. And I was all in. I’d had a total of three Zippos in my life, and I had a hip pocket devoted to pack and lighter (currently for the cell phone). I followed the lead of top intellectuals like Denis Leary and sang the praises of smoking. And while I became much less of an evangelical about tobacco after cancer took a beloved aunt, I still enjoyed it.

I tried quitting, but I never wanted to, so every attempt was a failure. Sure, they made you cough, and sure, if enough time passes without having one, you turn into the Incredible Hulk. Sure they turned my fingers and teeth yellow, and sure they were just pumping carcinogens into my lungs, I wanted to keep doing this. I was young. I was immortal.

I enjoyed the taste of the filter on my lips. I enjoyed the pageantry of lighting a cigarette. When I was in college, anybody I knew who had a Zippo pulled elaborate stunts with them to light a cigarette. Not me—I flicked open the lighter, ignited it, lit the cigarette, and flicked the lighter closed. It was out and back into my pocket in less than five seconds. According to some, my technique wasn’t necessarily the coolest, but it was up there. I enjoyed a cigarette in my hand. I wasn’t so much holding a cigarette, as much as the cigarette was an extension of my fingers.

I was the kind of person who would say things like, “You want a cautionary tale about smoking? I bring you George Burns.” (To my Hastings College contemporaries, substitute “Darryl Lloyd” for “George Burns.”) At the time of my being the most militant about smoking, I was no better than any Trump fan. Give me irrefutable proof that the tobacco corporations were breeding and cultivating the perfect piece of toxic waste to make you keep sticking toxic waste in your mouth until you died, and I’d make up excuses. I can’t remember any of the excuses because when I had my epiphany about them (several years after I quit), I purged every single positive thing I could say about big tobacco.

I didn’t quit smoking because of the horrible things it did to me. I found out about the horrible things it did to me because I quit. For example, I’ve never had a masculine musk, and I do sweat a lot, but in the middle of August with the A/C broken was Drakkar Noir compared to how I smelled as a smoker. You can’t smell yourself when you’ve caused permanent damage to the inside of your nose. When it grows back, and a smoker is nearby, you know it. You know it before the get within ten feet. It was a Doppler effect with smell. I smelled like that. All. The. Time. How could anyone stand to be around me? How were women ever attracted to me?

I have been a non-smoker for fifteen years. I can’t say I haven’t smoked in fifteen years because I’d had two cigarettes since, a little over ten years ago. They were both really horrible, and I have not wanted to go near one in the past twelve years. One of the cigarettes was a blatant attempt to start a conversation. It worked. Cigarettes used to be really good for that. I had a lot of friends whose relationship with me could withstand five-to-ten-minute bursts every hour, and that was about it. Smoking was a solitary or a social activity, depending on how you were feeling that day. There was something magical about that. I wanted to capture that.

I was full-on smoker when I created a number of my enduring characters, and as a result, many of them were full-on smokers—in the stories I wrote during that thirteen-year period of my life. In stories I’ve written about them since, they’d either quit, or I’d completely forgotten about the smoking thing. I wrote one story last year where I paid lip service to tobacco for continuity’s sake, but otherwise ignored it.

Smoking is intertwined through much of my early oeuvre, but it’s not crucial to the story. I only call attention to it as a set piece of something cool happening. (Girl puts a cigarette out in boy’s coffee. Boy, eyes on the girl, drinks the coffee.) I’ve started writing scripts set in the time period where most of these characters would have been smokers, and I’m choosing not to write the smoking. The way I see it, I have three choices.

One: I can add tobacco to the contemporary stories. It wouldn’t be hard because I’m still in the draft phase, and I’ll be going over them several more times.

Two: I can go back into the classic stories, some of which have been quasi-published, and strip the smoking out. That would mean removing non-essential but still fun scenes and exchanges. The boy meets the girl when he creeps out while bumming a cigarette from her. This is the most important relationship in this series of stories. So I’d have to completely rewrite it.

Three: Or, I could leave the smoking in the classic stories and not include it in the contemporaries. I don’t have to explain it. Let the smoking and non-smoking characters be alternate universes. Whatever. The important thing is, this requires the least effort. Why do I want to be giving this vile habit anymore thought than I’d already put into it?

The world is evolving, and I am there for it. Popular opinion has turned against tobacco, Homosexuals have the same marriage rights as the rest of us. You cannot function without a cell phone now. The creator of the most beloved contemporary series of children’s novels is currently on blast for being anti-trans. Dr. Oz is not Senator Oz. The legalization of cannabis in New Mexico kind of ruined the screenplay Shane and I wrote about the hunt for a vicious pot dealer on the Navajo Reservation. It took us days to figure out how to fix that.

There was a time, not that long ago, when public opinion was generally cool with cigarettes. I used to smoke in my dorm room. You could smoke while you were eating at restaurants. There were ashtrays in hospital waiting rooms. Can you imagine? That’s when these characters were born. And while some of these stories have been rewritten from the ground up (one twice), they are still a product of their time.

I am definitely going with option three, for nostalgia’s sake.

B and E in DC

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There’s really no way to build up to this (he said, building up to it), but my apartment was burgled yesterday. I first noticed something was amiss when I approached my building and saw my blinds were drawn. Next, I noted that the food closet was open, and the cats were happily eating the spilled kibble.

My room is right by the door, and a quick glance revealed that someone or someones had emptied out all of my drawers onto the floor. They opened my comic book boxes and threw my Lego boxes around, thankfully not opening any of them. They did not move any of my action figures. Also, they had emptied out the drawer where I keep my medications, and they did not touch the Adderall. They did not touch the bottle of Adderall on my desk so I don’t forget to take my ten o’clock pill (I forget, like, every other day). They didn’t take either of my laptops, they didn’t take my iPad, they didn’t take any of the obsolete iPhones in my room. The only thing missing is a $260 suit from Men’s Wearhouse.

That was my room. They left every other room in the apartment untouched except for Nicole’s room, which they spared most of the destruction of mine. All of her drawers were open and rummaged through, and they tripped over a stack of books when they were breaking in through her window. She has all of her jewelry with her in Romania except for some costume pieces, so those are going to be some very disappointed burglars.

They did do one thing, though, that’s left me baffled. I stared at it for a long time and got a real close look to see if I saw what I thought I was seeing (I was). Our thief removed the large plastic container of cat treats from the refrigerator, spilled half of it into our laundry machine, AND PUT IT BACK IN THE REFRIGERATOR. This is the very thing that the acronym WTF was invented for.

What had me concerned when I first got in and discovered the mess, it was that I was responsible. Maybe I left the door unlocked. See my post a few days ago about ADHD. And if it was my fault, Nicole would be justified in throwing me out, though that might be awkward with her in Romania for the next nine months. Thankfully, my neighbor discovered that Nicole’s blinds had been opened, and her screen was on the ground, and the window looked jostled.

It didn’t even occur to me to call the police for two hours. Instead, I had gone upstairs and knocked on my neighbor’s door. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you about Cleo, but I adore her. She’s a flamboyant bombshell in the apartment above me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen casual Cleo, even when she’s in our backyard, working in her kimono, she’s got on a full face of makeup and fully blown-out hair. She’s intelligent, funny, empathetic, boisterous, and she laughs at everything. I rarely bump into her when she’s hanging out outside, but when I do, our conversations are such a delight. I didn’t have anyone local to call, and even though we’re just acquaintances, she’s the closest thing I have to a friend nearby.

Cleo was amazing. She talked me through it. She acquitted me of having left the place vulnerable. She helped me clean up my room. (It still hadn’t occurred to me to call the police.) She canvassed the building, which was only one more apartment. She talked me out of panicking. I don’t know what I would have done without her.

When Cleo left, I thought about filing my renter’s insurance claim, and I realized I’d need a police report. They sent over an officer with blue gloves, and he chatted with me about everything. He didn’t scold me for half-cleaning my room. He called his sergeant, who showed up, asked the officer all the questions he asked me, asked me a few more questions, and called the CSU. Guys, the CSU was in my bedroom! How cool is that!

CSU TECH: The perp left no fingerprints. He’s a ghost, Lieutenant.

LIEUTENANT: A professional. He must have stolen something incredibly valuable.

CSU TECH: (removes glasses) He stole a Men’s Wearhouse suit.

LIEUTENANT (thousand-yard stare) My God.

DAVID CARUSO: Looks like this case … (puts on sunglasses) … is clothes.

SOUNDTRACK: BWAAAAAAAAAA!

He dusted for fingerprints, and he couldn’t find any, not even on the jewelry box I had picked up from the floor when I got home in shock. They really have nothing to go on, but they’re assigning me a detective anyway, and I’ll get to meet them after Nicole and I figure out a way to find what’s missing. I’m hoping they slam their hands on the table and shout, “Answer the question!”

I’m fine. The cats are fine—the burglar(s) were kind enough to close the window and door behind them, and after that stunt with the food, they want me to invite them over again. Nicole took it well when we FaceTimed today. I think she was relieved that it wasn’t my fault. I can’t fill out my claim until Nicole and I assess the damages together, then the officer will pass his report to the detective, who will talk to me and make their own report. I took the day off from work to deal with everything. My room was two-thirds clean by the time Cleo left, though, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my time today.

One of my girlfriends a little over twenty years ago had her apartment robbed. I had picked her up from the airport after she’d been in Ireland for a month (we’d only started dating two weeks before she left). I wore my best suit for her. We were holding hands and looking each other’s eyes and giggling on the cab ride home, and then we found out her apartment had been burgled, some heirloom jewelry stolen. She felt violated, and I spent the rest of the night comforting her.

I don’t really feel violated because I don’t have any secrets except for my thoughts. I think I learned this being married to someone who worked for the CIA—there was no privacy. On the other hand, I have a stack of long-distance love letters from a very precious time in my life, and I can’t find them. I don’t think for a minute they were stolen, so they must be someplace in my apartment. Still, their loss, however temporary, is a hole in my heart. The entirety of our relationship is contained in those letters, except for the part in the beginning when we met in person, of course.

My home was violated. They turned my bedroom, my sanctum sanctorum, into a landfill. My cat treats are in the washing machine. I had three police officers rifling through my home, leaving the doors open so I have to catch the cats. There’s fingerprint dust everywhere. When Cleo put my clothes away, she didn’t know where anything went, so now I can’t find anything. They closed the door and window, so my cats were safe at home. They didn’t steal any of my electronics. They didn’t steal my vital prescription that has a great street value. They didn’t break my action figures. They didn’t really steal anything. Honestly, if I’m going to get burgled, this is the way to do it.

And in case I’m not clear, I’m fine. Mostly, I’m put out by how inconvenient this is.

Walking Against the Wind

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I feel like celebrating, but most people I know will hear about my accomplishment and not see what the big deal is. However, my friends with ADHD or are ADHD-adjacent will give me high-fives and pour Gatorade all over me. What did I do? I remembered to turn my roommate’s plant lights on when I wake up in the morning and turn them off before I go to bed for seven days in a row.

Odds are, you’re reading this and wondering why this is the highlight of my week. How hard is it to remember to do that? And you certainly don’t understand why I have to leave myself notes and se alarms on my phone to pull this feat off. It’s because I have to work myself to exhaustion just to function normally, and I still screw up. Note that my roommate has been gone for three weeks, and I’ve only done seven days in a row.

I come into work early because I like the quiet, and I can get through some of the ten inboxes I monitor without people throwing in more email. Today, I saw an email about licensing that I should have been CCed on, so I forwarded it to my primary account. Less than a second passed before I received a notification that I had a new email, with my name on it, and my first thought was, “Who could that possibly be this early in the morning?” This is normal for me.

I had a discussion about face blindness with a friend before work, and neither of us has object permeance when it comes to characters in TV or movies. I’ll be watching something with someone, and the actor will make a triumphant entrance, and I’ll be all, “Who the hell is that?” And my companion would be all, “That’s the main character’s brother. He’s been in every episode.”

Some people think that having ADHD is just an excuse for being a flake. My supervisor hasn’t said as much, but it’s pretty clear she believes this. She doesn’t seem to take my disability seriously. She chews me out if I forget something, which doesn’t happen an excessive amount, but it happens enough. How am I supposed to function in an office where everything feels uphill, and no one wants to give me a hand, and on top of it, I’m getting scolded every couple of days. (Note: I’m going through official channels to deal with this because I can’t deal with this.)

To be clear, I’m not one of those people who uses his disability as a crutch, and I don’t blame everything on it. It took me three years to tell anyone at work about it, and that was only after someone backed me into a corner. Also to be clear, despite this person, this place is not a hellhole. The benefits are amazing, the people are nice, and with the exception of my supervisor, nobody has scolded me for one of my innumerable errors.  

I get why people don’t really believe having ADHD is no big deal. I’m sure there’s not one among you who wouldn’t forget to turn on or off the lamp once. People who are trying to be help have told me this—everybody forgets stuff. But there’s a difference between “I lost my keys, I’m so ADHD!” and the fact that I have to set an alarm on my phone to remember to shower. I need assistance to perform basic hygiene, that’s how bad I am. I have alarms for feeding the cats, turning the lights on and off, taking my Adderall, cleaning the litterbox, taking my medication, and watering the plants. I have so many Post-Its everywhere, I look like that Charlie Day conspiracy meme. I take two medications for it, and I’m still a mess, and it gets worse the older I get. I’ve been told by people I consider family that I’m just not trying hard enough. Reminds me of people who tell you not to be sad when you have depression.

I don’t talk about it much, mostly because the skepticism is a personal insult to how hard I work. Also, I have it under control, so I don’t need accommodation. However, if you’re going back to the seventh paragraph to remind yourself that I don’t take showers without prompting or anything else in this essay and ask, “That’s under control?” That is under control for me. It could be whole lot worse, which is why I try not to miss a dose, but even with the alarm and the threat to my mental health, I miss an average of one-to-two doses a week.

I am tired. Part of the reason I don’t like to socialize anymore is that it’s too complicated. I could go to meetups or schedule coffee with a friend in the district, but I’ve been working and dealing with the escalating scolding from my supervisor. About the only things I can concentrate on are writing and work (and the drawing, it turns out).

In conclusion, I needed to get that off of my chest. It’s been a tough week.

Totally Sketch

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When I was 22, I decided to learn how to draw. I started with stick figures, then I started fleshing them out. I learned to ink, and eventually I even learned to color, first with markers, then with watercolors (with pastels when I was feeling it. It took years for me to draw a decent person, but at the time, I was so excited with every breakthrough I made. I illustrated two comics of my own and two comics for a pair of untalented writers. I gave up on drawing comics, but I illustrated 56 pages of Three Stories in One.

But in 2015, a few months after we got back from Doha, after all the excitement of finally being home after so long, I crashed, and I stopped writing and drawing. When I got my mojo back, I tried drawing again, and I got frustrated. I went through looking at the stick blobs I would get so excited about to every imperfection completely ruining the art.

The joy I found in the act of drawing and painting was gone. I created for the destination, not the journey. I also ran into the problem of what I want to draw. I had no inspiration. I still did my yearly self-portrait, and maybe for about a week or so, I’d get a wild hair and make some stuff. It’s been 2 years since I’ve drawn for fun.

I just treated it as a thing I don’t do anymore,’like drinking too much or watching rock concerts at crowded bars. I’ve been encouraged to pick it up again—my parents ask after the art nearly every time we chat.

Slowly, over the course of weeks, I thought about what I could do to jumpstart that again. I found references, I bought a sketchbook that I could live with if the paper was being torn by an eraser.

I thought, if I learned how to draw with a pencil and eraser, then by God, that’s what I was going to use. I had sacrificed precision for speed, and I was going to use that. If I wanted to skip to the completed drawing, then I was going to take my time, erase some things.

Saturday, I said, “It’s time.” I sat with my sketchbook for an hour, learning to draw faces and figures from the ground up. I repeated it on Sunday, same thing with the eraser.

I feel like the old prizefighter training to get back into the ring.