Category Archives: Life

Taking the Bait

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When I was employed at the self-publisher in Indiana, a number of cool women worked the front desk. There was Leah, the Leah against whom all future Leahs have been judged. She was escorted from the building by security, and she cut off communication with anyone who ever worked with her, so that ended rather abruptly.

Then there was Isabella. Every photo of her I have in my mind, of her mocha skin and espresso hair, of the flowery sundresses she wore year-round, she is grinning. I don’t know what color her eyes are because I’ve never seen them. She loved meeting everybody, and she traumatized my introverted sister by tackling her in a hug and squealing in her ear, the very first interaction they’d had.

Everything was fun to this woman. She found something to love in everything she could see, hear, feel, smell, or taste, and in every person she met. Isabella was a genuinely sweet and happy person. She was a natural receptionist.

A side-effect of her exuberance was that she dominated conversations. I’m not much of a talker, but I do like to get a word in, so I didn’t hang out with her very much. Still, I loved her presence and her vibe.

That day, in the break room. Chris from HR was examining the crime scene, his assistant Stephanie at his side, poking at a PDA. The Phantom Puker had struck again, and Chris from HR was no closer to catching them.

The pukes had been happening all over both floors of this flat structure, and Chris from HR was going to crack this case. Too bad the Puker knew where all the security cameras were. I rose from my table and stepped out of earshot, catching the last bit of dialogue from that corner: “Find out who had ramen for lunch!”

Even in context, that was pretty messed up, but I was unprepared for what came next. In fact, my deathbed confession will be this sentence fragment, leading a long search for the person who doesn’t remember ever saying it.

Isabella hugged her can of Diet Pepsi and took a quick sip, creating a dramatic pause for her audience. I came in at the middle of the sentence, and she breathlessly said the words that oozed into my ear and soaked my brain.

Sheer momentum kept me going, and I couldn’t hear anything that might put that into context. I don’t remember how I made it back to my desk. Collapsing into my chair, the gears in my head were grinding together, as if you were driving a stick and jumping from first to third.

My Work Wife, Elizabeth, appeared, concerned. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Do you need to go home? I can tell Dave.”

“What does it mean?” I moaned. “Tell me what it means!”

“What what means?” she replied.

“I can’t tell you,” I groaned. “I have a nosebleed!”

“Oh my God!” she gasped, plucking a issue from the box at her desk. “What did this to you? You know you can tell me anything, Jeremiah. What’s the point of having a work wife if you can’t?”

I hoped not to pass the madness along, but I could live alone with this no longer. “She said.” I breathed. “She said, ‘and then she went back into the fish.’”

“Who was she?”

“I don’t know!”

“What was she doing before she went back into the fish?”

“I don’t know!”

“What was outside of the fish that made returning to it so appealing?”

“I don’t know!”

“What was she doing in the fish in the first place?”

My bloodshot eyes fixated on her as I grabbed her shoulder and shook her. “I! Don’t! Know!”

She brushed my hands off of her. “We’re going to get through this. Just remain calm. Maybe we can ask Isabella what she was talking about.”

“I don’t want her thinking of me as an eavesdropper.”

“Jeremiah,” she said carefully, “this may be the only way you can go on.”

I worked my way downstairs to the front desk, my head pounding, and I waved to get her attention, just in case she was on the phone.

“What’s up, Jeremiah?” she asked, as if Jeremiah gossip was the one thing she’d been waiting for all day.

“I kind of caught part of a story you were telling,” I tried to explain without being a creep. “And you said something that I can’t quite understand.”

Her eyes were wide and eager.

“You said, ‘and then she went back into the fish,’” he told her.

She frowned a huge stage frown. “I don’t remember talking about fish at all today. Sorry!”

I returned upstairs, to my desk, and rested my face on the keyboard. I would never know why someone would return to a fish. I could only speculate. The truth had died that day, and so did a part of me I will always miss.

Spilling the Tooth

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I’ve been lucky. I’ve always had great dentists. They’ve always taken care of me, and they and their army of hygienists have always been patient with me. This is a sharp contrast to growing up, because all of my dental hygienists were Navajo moms. For those who don’t know, the only way to survive an encounter with a Navajo mom is to obey.

My dentist in Bloomington was a great guy. I hadn’t been to the dentist for years, not since my wisdom teeth were hacked out of my head. He found some cavities, and I returned to get them drilled and filled.

One of the amenities of this dentist is that he had a TV strapped to the ceiling above the dental chair. Keep in mind, this was 2005. All TVs were CRT and had roughly the mass of a granite boulder the same size. If that thing broke free of its mooring, I’m not exaggerating when I say I would have died.

If I was going to lose my life to this TV, I may as well watch it. I picked up the remote and scrolled it to Comedy Central, where the dumbest show was on. The dumbest show next to Jackass. This was called Trigger Happy TV, and it’s a hidden camera prank show, but with actual wit. I knew, as I selected the show, that I might laugh and get a drill in my cheek, but it would be worth it.

Here’s an example of one of their pranks. The marks, a cute family of four, sits down at a picnic table in the woods. A man sits down at a neighboring table and eats his sandwiches. A trio of grown men in squirrel costumes burst out and drag the man into the woods, kicking and punching him.

However, it was the one where the nun got into a fistfight with a penguin that made my dentist, the drill running, laugh his ass off.

I turned off the TV.

The Descent of Ryan

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As a Doctor Who fan, I enjoy multi-Doctor adventures, in which they bring back their former lead or leads to interact with the present star. “The Three Doctors,” in 1973, set the precedent that the Doctors squabble amongst themselves. The Doctor is played by different actors, so they were like different people, but what if they were all the same actor?

I thought about it in earnest one day, and I concluded that, if my past selves met me, they would hate me, or at least see me as a big disappointment. If there’s one thing I do with gusto is reinvent myself every few years. I change hairstyles, I change wardrobes, I change shape. Sometimes I have a beard. Sometimes I’m wearing glasses.

In parts of college, I was a condescending intellectual. In my mid-twenties, I was a miserable

dude who partied somewhat hard. When I was a kid, I could be downright feral. And then there was the polyamorous fitness buff.

I wrote a screenplay about it. I started working on it in Atlanta during my society’s ostentatious 2021 annual meeting. I remember this because I was thumbing through the program for names. I had no idea what I was doing, and it shows. It was proof that an idea is not enough.

I haven’t really been writing anything new lately, but I’m still being productive by finishing unfinished books or completely rewriting garbage drafts. I’m adapting the screenplay into a novel, which means adding a coherent plot and ton of new material.

It’s a sci-fi comedy about a middle-aged loser who is temping at an evil genius’s secret headquarters. A cute scientist flirts with him for a few days, then she lures him into a dangerous experiment. The result is that his past selves have materialized with him in the lab.

The polar opposites that were Ryan, at forty-five, thirty-six, twenty-seven, eighteen, and nine, must all work together, with the help of the cute scientist, to escape before they are disposed of.

Anyway, this is my movie poster.

Art Failure

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It’s been really cold here lately (Colorado people, shut up), and I’ve been working from home so I don’t have to walk a mile to my Metro stop through some Jack London nightmarescape with tundra temperatures (I said shut up, Colorado people).

Just as an aside, my job is awesome.

The temperature Saturday got as high as 42, which is the answer to life, the universe, and getting the hell out of the house. It’s a three-day weekend, and I thought it would be nice to go to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Chinatown.

I forgot what was happening Monday.

My train pulled into the Chinatown station, and quite a few people exited, which was unusual for this time of day on a Sunday. I listened to my podcast and kept moving. One of the exits takes you right to the steps of the gallery, but it was gated off. The other exit was two blocks away, which meant I had to walk two blocks to get to it and two blocks back to the museum. However, those exits were gated off too, and transit workers were yelling at us to go away.

A worker stood near the stairs and told us we needed to get on a train and take it to the next stop to get out. Emboldened by the injustice of it all, I asked her why they didn’t just shut the station down. She said, “I don’t make the rules, I just tell you what to do.”

I took a train to the closest stop and realized I didn’t know which way to get to Chinatown. The National Mall was straight ahead, so I went in the other direction. I wasn’t 100 percent, though, so I stopped at a corner to get my bearings.

A smug, condescending douchebag walked by me, smirked, and said, “I’m from here, and we don’t pay attention to those things.”

I looked up from my phone and said, “I’m from here, and I don’t either. I’m just a little disoriented.”

“Sure.” He strode off.

With surer footing, I headed for Chinatown, weaving between National Guardsmen and their rifles, emergency fencing, and a thick crowd of white people. I saw a long line of red hats, and I couldn’t imagine where they might be going. As I walked past, I searched for the destination, but I couldn’t see one, nor could I see the end. It wrapped around a whole block, then crossed the street, then turned a corner, and disappeared.

Two blocks later, the museum was surrounded by guardsmen who weren’t going to let me in. I normally don’t eat lunch, but there was a Nando’s here, so I stopped in. The host asked me how many. I said one. He looked me up and down and narrowed his eyes, “I see.”

It was about noon that the MAGAs started coming in. I knew they were MAGAs for two reasons. One, there was nobody else in this part of town today; the locals know to stay clear. Two, they were wearing red hats, even the toddler, which I consider to be child abuse. Next, several tables of really hot people showed up. I was hit with the dilemma of admiring them while finding their entire worldview to be nauseating.

The worst part about the entire situation was that people thought I was one of them, especially because I was wearing my lumberjack shirt. On the other hand, blending in allowed me to enjoy my chicken in peace, live blogging the entire experience to my friend Emilie, who I picture reading it in a luxurious bath, sipping cava and shaking her head at my antics.

The only time I felt nervous were when the wannabes moseyed in and took a seat. If you’ve ever been in a Nandos before, you’d know to let the host seat you. If you could read, there is a large sign that says, “Please wait for the host to seat you.”

They wore black T-shirts, black sweats, black boots, black gloves, and black trench coats. Their glasses matched, and they both wore their thinning hair tightly clipped. I checked them for weapons when they pulled off their jackets because I didn’t want to be in the middle of a shooting when I was right across from them.

Most of the patrons got up and left when they realized Nandos was foreign food. I’m just relieved they didn’t stick around long enough to find this:

Reel Talk

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(Trigger Warning: It took a lot of work to keep this PG-13. I had to take a shower after the events of this brief adventure, and not in a fun way.)

I hate it when Facebook recommends stuff to me, based on my “interests,” including the reels. At one point, I was only getting clips from 2 Broke Girls, even though I am not remotely interested in that show.

The algorithm decided that, if Kat Dennings wasn’t enough, it would send me all the big boobs they had. Even though I didn’t click on them, the algorithm decided I needed to see more uncomfortable-looking breasts. It sent me reel upon reel of buxom women, mostly dancing.

When that phase passed, it switched to end-to-end Taylor Tomlinson clips, which finally got me clicking on them. (Her comedy connects with me.) However, the batch I actually engaged with didn’t last long.

Now it’s kind of crazy. Mostly, it’s gone back to big boobs, but they’re uncomfortably huge now, and I’m not turned on. I feel bad for the girls. Also there are the occasional clips from 2 Broke Girls and Taylor Tomlinson.

Today, I made a huge mistake. I saw a preview for a reel that featured an inhumanly pretty ginger in a corset. Her boobs were average-sized, so I don’t know what she was doing here.

I’m making huge strides in my artwork, and I’m trying to spend more time on faces. She was a beautiful model. And not because she was in a corset. Honest. In that two-second preview, she became a muse to me, and I needed to see more. I knew not to click on it, but I did anyway.

The video lasted about thirty seconds, and it was on a loop. The entire show featured this beautiful woman digitally stimulating the camera, as if it had male parts.

She could have been playing with a cat. She could have been banging on a silent bongo. She could have been painting. She could have been using a shake weight. But she wasn’t. She had the smug look and rhythm people have when they’re engaged in this kind of activity. Or so I’ve heard.

I closed my laptop and thought about my choices. I feel really gross now. I know I’m a vulgar person. I own this about myself. However, there’s a time and a place, and I don’t think Facebook is it. It’s not even sexy, it’s icky. Never again will I click on—ooh! Taylor Tomlinson video!

Paint No Rest for the Wicked

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A couple of months ago, I volunteered to be an usher at a community theater production that in no way needed an usher. They told me they’d be in touch if they thought I could help out on their next production. Right before the holidays, a group email went out, rife with reply-alls, soliciting volunteers for set painting.

I like my life. But I need to get out. I need to have conversations with people who can answer me and don’t bite me at random. I’ll take one or the other.

There was a Saturday and Sunday slot. Because I greet the world like a vampire if you wake him up in the afternoon, I volunteered for the two hours Saturday, and not the four hours Sunday. My contact was Ruth, which is one of those wholesome old-person names that you rarely hear anymore. I had a picture of her in my head.

I arrived a quarter after because I timed everything badly. And most of the work had been done because the rehearsal ended early, and the cast had decided to attack the primered foam trees with rollers. They were baffled by me, I was baffled by them, until Ruth showed up.

Ruth was not an old person. Ruth was a perky, bouncy, thirtysomething, cute as a button, who threw herself into the work. She had no idea what was going on, but she was going to take point because someone had to. The woman with the plan was Kathryn, who was a hippie from the sixties and fussed like Piglet. She was what I thought Ruth was going to be like.

One of the volunteers was a house-painter, so he was available to coach, which he was more than happy to do. He didn’t even need prompting. He would just show up behind you and point out an uneven patch, then stroll away for the next tree trunk where they awaited his wisdom. He was a silver fox with no neck, a fitted T-shirt, and wranglers he kept pulling up.

He and I bonded over the Doors. One of their songs started playing on the radio station (I didn’t know they still had those), and he couldn’t identify it. I asked, “Want me to tell you?” It was “LA Woman.” He explained to his companion that the Doors were from the sixties more than the seventies because Jim Morrison died in the early part of the seventies. Was it ’71? ’72? ’73? He then rattled off a bunch of the Dead at 27 Club.

I spent most of my time in the storage closet with Ruth because it looked like someone emptied a giant junk drawer into it. The storage closet is about the same size as the one Kate dumped my stuff in after the divorce, which is to say it’s very small. The theater troop were there by the grace of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, with a Sunday school in the room the next day, so all the trees were going to have to be put away. Apparently, the stage had to be broken down and stashed every Saturday night for mass.

I have no spatial reasoning, so I don’t know how to make things fit, until Saturday night, when I was directing Ruth to move things into the best space. She laughed a lot, which was good because I was supposed to be funny.

When everyone went home, Ruth hung out with me while I waited for my Uber. She asked me my favorite part of community theater thirty-five years ago, and I told her working in the wings. I’m the first person who didn’t say acting, so she is going to talk to the stage manager, who might need an assistant, as the play is a farce.

I made it to bed and woke up the next morning to continue the project I was working on Saturday. I asked myself if I wanted to stay home all day like I’ve done for the past bunch of Sundays. I did not, so that afternoon, I headed out to St. Mark’s Church and met more people.

I arrived early because I overcompensated, so Ruth and I cleared up the chairs from Sunday school and learned stuff about each other. She told me her husband was a novelist, with one book self-published, and he was interested in trying out his hand with traditional publishers. I offered some tips.

She was very excited to introduce me to Jess. Jess is on “The Board” with her husband, and she’s an artist. When she was showing off the samples she wanted to do, she turned to me for my expertise, even though I explained I am not an expert. When I asked what kind of art she did, she sheepishly told me crafts stuff, as well as a large bus for a karaoke competition. She was way more of an expert here than I was. In fact, I did two things all afternoon. First, I attempted to sponge over the base layer in a way that looked like leaves. It did not work. I attempted to add highlights. It looked like Jackson Pollack had rolled around on one of his canvasses. The second thing I did was paint over it with the base color and left it to Jess, whose trees looked magnificent.

Meanwhile, Kathryn, who assured us she was no artist, singlehandedly added a level of depth to the tree trunks that was uncanny. Ruth painted the moon, using a video on TikTok for a reference, and Kathryn was there to help. But she was not an artist. No, sir.

When I showed up, I told them I could only stay for two of the four scheduled hours because I would need to return to my cave with my cat and shun the outside world. We were done within two hours.

Now, all I have to do is wait for Ruth’s email, and maybe I’ll be able to hang out backstage and juggle, while surrounded by weird people.

It’ll be fun.

All-American Gallery

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My favorite artist is John Singer Sargent, and I think that, ultimately, Impressionism is my favorite movement. The classical, non-portrait art galleries in Washington, D.C. have plenty of Impressionist pieces, but it’s the National Gallery West Wing that has the most massive collection.

I hadn’t been there since the pandemic, when I went to see my favorite painting. (Nonchaloir (Repose), by Sargent.) I think it’s with this painting that the impression Impressionism has left on me is apparent. It’s a picture of a woman with a floofy dress relaxing on a couch, and it looks like it was thrown together in twenty minutes. But that’s not true at all. If you look at her hands, you can see sharp detail and precision that only looks sloppy. It’s an amazing piece of art.

And on that day, four years ago, the entire that whole section of the museum was closed off. No Sargent. No Whistler. No Monet. No girl in yellow reading a book. And I hadn’t been back since.

Because I’ve hit a steady routine of drawing in cafes on Saturdays and/or Sundays, and because you can’t spell routine without rut, I gave the museum another shot. And it hit the target. I got to see my favorites, I got to see new, exciting pieces, and I got to see the same people over again.

This is normal. Depending on which entrance they use, the gallery herds you through the maze of rooms, and certain pieces demand a certain amount of attention from different people, which averages out, and boom, there they are.

Usually, I’d only see them in a couple of rooms, especially when I would sit down and draw a painting that grabbed my attention. I divided my attention between the canvas and the eyes surreptitiously peeking over my shoulder to watch what I was doing. My rough sketches, as you can see, put the rough in rough. There’s a reason I color and ink these pieces as fast as I can.

Normally, most the fun of coming to a museum is people-watching, but I didn’t do that this time because I was so focused on capturing the figures in my style, and quickly. Also, the crowd was really dull. Hair was dark brown, black, and white. Parkas were black or navy blue. There weren’t patrons there I’d describe as bright or notable.

Then there was the woman who interrupted my work by being really striking. Her hair was a very red shade of auburn, and her sweater was white with blue stripes. She was petite and middle-aged, and I watched her do a bored circuit of the room and leave. When she wasn’t distracting me anymore, I finished my drawing.

Later, I was looking for another painting to sketch out, and there she was again, sprawled out on a bench, playing with her phone like a teenager. I just kept seeing her. It took fifteen-to-twenty minutes to finish a sketch, and I did five of them, so she was going through these rooms incredibly slowly. And she wasn’t looking at the art.

Between the first and second time I saw the striking woman, I zeroed in on a great painting of a clown at exactly the same time as an old woman. She was bell-shaped, with a shawl draped over her round, hunched shoulders. She wore a fishing hat and glasses that are so thick, if you rub them you can see the future.

She started talking to me, and I responded, and she gasped and staggered back in shock, as if I’d forgotten to tuck after using a urinal. (I hadn’t forgotten.) What followed was incoherent jabbering, until she said slowly and deliberately, “I thought you were my husband. But you look nothing like him.”

We chatted about the painting for a minute, and she laughed at her antics and left the room. A few minutes later, I too exited the room, and there she was, pointing at me gleefully and whispering to a man who did not look a thing like me, in the slightest. Our clothes were completely different. We were different heights. I had a beard. I was wearing an orange beanie, and he was not.

The man chuckled. “You must be my doppelganger.”

“I’m the World’s Worst Doppelganger,” I said and got the hell out of there, where I ran into a guard.

“Excuse me, sir,” he asked, “is that a sketchbook?”

The guard is an artist, but he’s hit a low point with his art. He’s second-guessing himself, his output has been low and crappy. I’ve been there. I stopped drawing for five years because of it. He wondered if I had any advice about getting back on the horse.

I couldn’t give any advice because I don’t know what I’m doing, but I told him what broke my empty streak: go back to basics. Get rid of everything and start with a pencil and an eraser. Use a sketchpad you don’t care about and go and make mistakes. Draw often. And remember, your art is better than you think it is.

Wisdom. I got it.

That was my outing. People being weird, and some beautiful art. And some sketches. I hope you had a good weekend.

Are You Ready to Box?

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My job is amazing. It fell into my lap, when I received a call from a recruiter who wanted to hook me up with a six-month temp gig with an option for full time, based on my LinkedIn profile. Think about that for a minute. I was recruited from LinkedIn. I can go to my grave knowing I’m the only one who can say that.

After a confusing interview, I got a job that was excessively boring. I had a couple of hours’ worth of work to do every day. However, at an even pace, I was introduced to new work and given a month or so to get used to it before another task was given to me. This is the best way to teach me, and I became an expert on everything that didn’t have lawyers.

I make mistakes a lot, and no one ever gets mad at me about it—they just explain what I did wrong and ask me to fix it.

It was the editorial inbox where I found my footing, answering panicked questions for authors, helping the editors through the process, and extending deadlines. Lately, I’ve been volunteering to train in some of the tasks I don’t know how to do and volunteering for anything or any backup I can do. I did this, not for career advancement, but to keep myself busy. Even so, when I realized no one was going to think about it if I didn’t bring it up, I asked about a promotion and got it.

I feel appreciated, and I’m never stressed out, though there are situations that make me want to flip my desk, but I can’t because it’s anchored to the cubicle. One of these situations is the all-employee meetings, which takes an hour to tell you about the DEI initiative, and sometimes the HR Boss gets roasted by a Zoom guest for eleven minutes.

Before the last meeting, everyone headed for the 10th floor, asking me if I was coming. I said I’d catch up, and I just didn’t go. I wasn’t being paid to be bored. Nobody missed me, and I didn’t miss anything. I had to go to this one because they’re shaking our office like a snow globe, and everybody is moving.

Because the office is closed from Christmas to New Year’s, the move would be then, and we needed to pack up our desks into these large moving crates. The movers would put them into your cubicle, and you just had to unpack and return the crates. HR Mom asked if there were any questions.

KAREN #1: What if we have too much stuff?

HR MOM: We have cardboard boxes in the work rooms. Just make sure you use labels.

The next Karen came to the microphone, and she looked ready to storm the place. “Are the boxes assembled? No? How are we supposed to know how to tape up the boxes?” She looked around at the rest of the audience who wanted her to stop talking so they could get back to work. Karen took it as support.

HR Mom said, “The boxes don’t require tape. Next question.” She eventually decided to give a demonstration on the assembly of the boxes, and the result was the same as if you rode a bull side-saddle.

This is when the Expert came in. Amused, he plucked the box out of HR Mom’s hands, and he couldn’t get it to work. HR Giant stepped in, and he came dangerously close to hitting the front row in the face.

They were banker’s boxes. I know they’re tricky, but they’re not that tricky. You’d think the Expert could navigate a banker’s box. If they started slapping each other, it would have been a Three Stooges short.

This is when I left.

Anyway, here’s the portrait I drew of the Expert when he was just hanging back and letting HR Mom run the show.

The Power of the Dork Side

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When going through my photo albums, I seemed to hit the sweet spot for nostalgia. Most of my friends throughout my history have been larger-than-life, to the point where I sometimes think of them as characters. When it comes to thinking human beings with their own lives separate from me as characters, the one who demands it the most is Jeff.

If I had to sum Jeff up in two words, they would be “Sassy Nerd.” He was the first Hastings College student I met, and I immediately wrote him off. When it came to being geeky, he was only missing tape on his glasses. It didn’t help that his roommate and my first friend, Rick, declared war on him. On the former’s side were an army of Madonna posters. On the latter’s, Reba McIntyre, all fighting for supremacy.

I didn’t think much of Jeff until my family experienced a loss, and Jeff stepped up to help me out. He volunteered to meet me at the airport and drive me back to school, even though said airport was three hours away. Oh, and it turned out that he was hilarious. And really clever. And sincere. And dangerously unhinged.

His brand was Evil Genius. He literally carried around a checklist for conquering the world, and one of the items was, “Befriend Jeremiah Murphy.” He steepled his fingers with even more menace than Mr. Burns, and when he laughed maniacally, he committed to it.

He said things like, “When life hands you dilemmas, make dilemonade.” For a teenager, he had a lot of wisdom, but he usually delivered it in the snarkiest way imaginable.

He would pathologically not swear. This was part of his identity. As part of out schtick, he and I left movies together behaving like the characters, but after Pulp Fiction, he said nothing. No amount of anything could get him to say something profane.

Except once. Late at night, while I was sitting captive behind the Altman front desk, he approached without emotion, and he whispered into my ear, “Don’t fuck with me.” I fell out of my chair. He denied it for all of college, and if I’m guessing, he’d deny it today.

Though he swears now. I have receipts.

For a while, we were a matched set, despite that the two of us couldn’t be more different. We moved in together sophomore year when Rick fled and there was no way Hastings College was going to let me keep my single without paying for it.

It was not smooth sailing, especially because he could make himself even more irritating if he was mad at you, and I was an unmedicated bipolar, but we came out on top. When we went our separate ways, him still in the dorm, me to a college-owned apartment, we parted as good friends. I even called him at random after I’d had a very weird Halloween.

He’s bald now. He didn’t used to be.

Anyway, I’m not good at likenesses, but this catches the vibe.

Down We Count

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Every single year, it’s the same. The end of December approaches, and with it, the memes, the posts, the general hostility about the previous twelve months. The one we just survived is the worst year ever. Over and over again.

How can you live like that?

When I inconsistently do these years in review, I try to be positive. You can choose which memories you want to have, and I always focus on the ones that are uplifting. I admit to the bad stuff (I mean, I was miserable for 50 percent of my early life), but it’s the least important part of my memoirs.

But 2024 is really fucking pushing it.

First, at the beginning of the year, the relationship between my roommate and I had gotten so toxic that I moved out. I had been kind of poking around in the fall, but I wasn’t ready to move out just yet. I’d found a studio I liked, but I also looked at a two-bedroom because I had never lived on my own before.

The first week of the year, we got into a fight so bad that I sat down at my laptop and applied for the studio. I was approved within a day, and I would have full possession of the keys by the time I finished signing the lease. I paid an extra month’s rent to my former roommate because I was leaving so quickly. We were awful to each other as I made arrangements, until I said, over text, that we weren’t friends anymore.

She panicked and apologized, and we took back our mutual shittiness. That evening, I ordered myself a pizza, and when she got home, I offered her some. She wanted to exercise first, so I had a couple of slices and went to bed. She woke me up and asked if I wanted to watch The Nanny while she ate. Watching TV with dinner had been kind of a sacred ritual for us, but it had fallen off as we fought more and more. This was the last time we’d do it, so it meant a lot.

Our relationship hasn’t fully recovered, but we still text memes and check in. I had cake and ice cream with her the day before her birthday, and she invited me to her friends’ house for board games.

Next: As I was packing up to move across town, I worried about Newcastle. He and Henry had been close friends (Kentucky cousins, as Henry’s mom would say), and neither cat ever recovered from being separated.

Newcastle was depressed in the new place, and he spent most of his time under the bed. I was a coiled spring for the entire time we lived there together. What if he was ready, and I was cruelly forcing him to live? Yet he still wanted to hang with me in bed or at my desk. He ate, he drank water, he befouled the litter box. He couldn’t jump up to my lap anymore, so I had to be ready with a lift at a moment’s notice.

At the end of January, I didn’t see Newcastle for an entire day, so I called the vet and arranged a checkup. He seemed fine, but they wanted to wait for the lab results to know for sure. A week later, the doctor called to tell me he had kidney failure. This was it. There was a treatment that might buy him some time, but I’d have to check him to a facility—

No. I wasn’t going to submit my cat, my world, to that kind of treatment for just a few more months. He was twenty. When I said no, I thought I had six-to-eight weeks. I had two. One day, he didn’t come out from under the bed at all. I knew it was time with the rigid certainty of a diamond. It was too soon. Twenty years wasn’t enough. He was my best friend, the love of my life, the longest I’ve ever lived with someone. And suddenly, he was a box full of ashes.

I didn’t want to replace Newcastle, so I decided that I would give myself a year to grieve. Two months later, my one-time roommate called and asked me if I was willing to hold onto a cat for a week or two. It would be nice to have something to pet around here, so I said sure, and I named him Potato, short for Hot Potato. He looked disheveled and the product of a union between a cat and a dachshund. When she had found him, he was eating a Reese’s wrapper.

The roommate’s  boyfriend took Potato and me to the vet, where the former got checked out. He was in perfect health, aside from the starvation. Because of that, it was hard to estimate his age, but it was around a year. His coat was clean, and he was friendly. This was someone’s cat.

After the two weeks were up, I adopted Potato. After a brainstorming session with former roomie, I decided on Oscar because he looks like an Oscar.

It took me a long time to get used to him. I hadn’t intended to bring another cat into my life so soon. I felt like I was betraying Newcastle, who looked exactly like Oscar when he was a year old. I’m still grieving, ten months later, but it helps that he’s here.

Oscar is a shoulder cat. He’s most comfortable draped around my neck. Oscar a jumper, and he’s really smart, meaning there’s no place in this apartment he can’t get into, except for my refrigerator. He started claiming the shelves I’d used for toys, so I had to relocate Newcastle’s memorial into a box and inside a cupboard over the fridge because he wanted the shelf. He can still get into that cupboard, and I’m waiting for him to push it to the floor.

Also, he’s a biter. Occasionally, he’ll rub affectionately against my arm or my hand and bite them. Not enough to hurt, but enough to get my attention. Once, on my shoulder, he opened his jaws wide and tried to bite off my head. I don’t know how to interpret this.

He’s a wonderful addition to my life, and I’m glad he’s here. I still miss Newcastle, and I have this inkling of a thought about a comic starring Oscar in full weasel mode getting coached by the ghost of Newcastle on how to be a cat. I have no ideas what the stories would be about. Same with the Black Cat Brigade, starring Oscar, Henry, and our friends’ cat Inkling, and the ghost of Newcastle. Again, I’d need a writer.

Third, I lost my best human friend. I’ve written volumes about how much Shane has meant to me since I first met him as a teenager. He was making it a point to call me more often, and he was moving to West Virginia; a small part of the reason was that it put him in a few hours’ bus ride from me. He called me on a Monday, concerned about his health. I assured him everything was going to be okay. That Saturday, he died at forty-nine years old.

I had dedicated my novel to him, and I wanted it to be a surprise. Now he’ll never know. I didn’t go to his memorial service because I wouldn’t be able to afford it, but I wrote a brief letter to share with everyone. Apparently, I dodged a bullet, as there was drama. I’ve been texting with his mother, and I reconnected with some old friends, however briefly. I miss him. Every day I think of something I want to tell him, and I remember I can’t, and he dies again.

He was my mentor when I was a confused, often angry teen. (Even Anakin Skywalker cringed at my antics.) His patience led me to lean in on my creative side and opened up the world of Art. (I sat in on him filming a music video even though he could play neither the guitar and the keyboards. This really doesn’t fit into the flow of the paragraph, but I thought I’d mention it.) When I struggled with ideas, he pushed me along. He talked me through the early days of my visual art. Together, we wrote two screenplays, a TV miniseries, and endless ideas bounced off of each other. We were a team.

When I thought I was through with him, he was always waiting for me. Some people never get to have a friend as loyal and full of life and style as Shane, and that’s really sad. I miss him, but I was lucky to have him in the first place, even if only for thirty-two years.

Two summers ago, I needed to take care of my use-or-lose vacation time, so I flew to New Mexico to spend the next nine days writing a TV series. Some of my favorite memories are of the days in Shane’s studio, smoking weed and collaborating, sometimes struggling over a single word until we find the perfect one. We were able to duplicate that magic in 2022.

As a bonus, my work friend ghosted me when she left the company. It’s better than the way things had been going. When she first started fall of 2023, we bonded instantly. Some of that was because she sat next to me. She was twenty years younger than I, and she came from a completely different life than I. For example, she and her fiancé owned a house in Foggy Bottom, which he bought in cash. We went out for coffee every Thursday, and we filled each other in on every detail of our lives.

When she got married in the spring, our dynamic changed, as the people her own age showed interest in her. We went from texting and messaging all day and night to not interacting for days. She quit, and we threw a farewell party on her last day. I tried to talk to her, but the Loquacious One dominated the conversation.

Where I have great management, hers was a nightmare, and she ended up doing all the work for her publication. When her manager was fired, she continued to get stuck with the work, and while her manager was training, she still got all the work. So when she left, for her vacation and then for good a few months later, I poked and prodded my managers into arranging coverage for her.

After her first manager was fired, she applied for his job, despite only being there for six months by that point. She didn’t get the job, and she was embittered by that. That put it in my head that I’d like a promotion.

I had gotten one in 2021, and I have vastly expanded my expertise since then. I could have waited until they came around to it, but instead I brought it up at a check-in meeting with my manager. There’s a tier system in Editorial, and I was on the second one. No one knew if there was a third, so it took a while to arrange.

It took a couple of months, but advocating for myself ultimately paid off. An announcement was made, and the general consensus was that it was a long time coming. My new roles including training and absorbing as much of the process as necessary.

I gave up MortalMan for the time being. I finished page seven and sketched out page eight. I had originally put it on hold when I knew that Newcastle was almost gone because I wanted to be there to pay attention to him. After he left, I tried again. I finished page seven and started on page eight before I just put everything away. I’ll try to get back to it.

Yes, 2024 was a bad year. If you know anything about the tarot, it was a Tower year. Or Death, at the very least. The bad that happened to me outweighed the good. But look at the good.

I’ve drawn and colored millions of pictures. I polished off two half-finished novels—one that needed a complete rewrite and one that needed a bit of padding. I tried mushrooms for the first time since the nineties, and I do not recommend it. I didn’t have a bad trip or anything, but I spent most of the time wishing it would just wear off. I went on the most perfect vacation (for me).

I found a coffee shop in my neighborhood, then it closed down. I found two coffee shops over the Maryland state line that I have to either walk or take the Metro to. I found a third coffee shop a little further over the Maryland state line. I found first coffee shop again, not closed down, but rather relocated a short walk from my apartment. It was here that I saw beloved British Comedian, John Oliver at the first coffee shop, while a little later that day, a strung-out woman tried to outdraw me by taking over my table.

These are the things I value. My job appreciates me, and it doesn’t cause me stress. I have Oscar currently draped over my legs, which are kicked up on my desk. It’s chilly, but not cold, which is how I like it. I love my postage-stamp-sized apartment. I have friends (no, really). I have two healthy parents. Life is good.