Tag Archives: friends

The Principles of Magnetism

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In the fall of 1992, I said something mean to a very nice transfer student. Nevertheless, a year later, she invited me into her home to have a weekly lunch with her and her mother. We were nothing alike—I was an awkward outcast who thought Kurt Cobain was the height of fashion, she was a pretty, popular, academic achiever. In that time together we became very intimate, not as in romance (or attempted romance), but as in people who were incredibly comfortable being themselves together. Crushes were destructive for me, especially as my mood swung from manic to depressed, but I never developed a crush on her. I saw her for what she was, an incredibly close friend who welcomed me into her life.

Spring of my senior year, I was going to ask her out as a prom buddy, but she already had a date. I spent the evening with Shane, shoveling quarters into fighting games at the local pizza parlor, and calling it an early night. I don’t regret missing prom, since my friend was the only one I would have had fun with. That summer, I stopped by my friends’ houses with a camcorder (whatever that is) and asked them if they were evil. She was the only one who said she was not.

When we graduated, we promised to keep in touch. We didn’t.

Eight years later, after getting off the PATH train in New York City, I spied her getting off a different car. She looked exactly the same as she did when I’d last seen her, and I wasn’t going to let her escape. This was a challenge because I looked like I was in the witness protection program. I was wearing button-up shirt that wasn’t made of plaid flannel—actually buttoned up—and had cut my hair, grown a beard, and filled out. It took her a minute, but she recognized me. We had dinner on Halloween at the Tick Tock Diner on Thirty-First Street, and the magic was no longer there. She didn’t feel like the same person I knew, and I was well aware that I wasn’t tha same person she knew. We didn’t keep in touch.

The next spring, a mutual friend from high school got her number from me and set up a dinner with her. I tagged along (much to his dismay), and that evening, the magic was back. Broke and frustrated with dating, we spent weekend after weekend finding free things to do and cheap places to eat, often accompanied by her best friend who shared her name. This included Coney Island, where a walk on the beach led to a guy with a telescope showing us Mars when it was closer to Earth than it had been or would be in our lifetimes.

I was right on Halloween of 2002—she was different. When I knew her as a teenager, she was studious and reserved, but she grew into an artistic free spirit. I never saw that side of her before, but it was always there. She was also the same, having always been curious, serious, and focused, like Alice in Wonderland. I saw more of her in the coming months than I saw her best friend, who was my roommate. She met a number of my friends and got along with every one of them, who were all impressed with her.

But eventually, she left town for the Southwest, and we didn’t live near each other again.

I’ve seen her a few times since then, including her wedding, when she made a little bit of time to hang out with me (which was, I am well aware, more time than she had), and on the tenth anniversary of September 11. There were a few reunions with her, her best friend, and me, but it always ended with my old friend and me walking around New York, keeping each other company.

I haven’t seen her since October 2014, and we’re both don’t text well. When, at a deep low of depression, I took to Facebook to confess my shame of having taken a retail job, she called me on the phone (which is something you can do with phones, I guess) and made me feel better. I’ll always remember how much I needed to hear from her, and how it parted the clouds over my head.

I prematurely wrote my memoirs in May 2022, and each of the chapters was about an influential figure in my life (Kate got two). There’s an introduction about me to tell the reader who I am, but before that, like the pre-credits scene in a TV show or James Bond movie, is the history of my friend, the pom-pom girl who looked past my asshole tendencies and opened the door to her life.

Inspired by my relationship with her, I wrote an unfinished novel about two socially opposite teenage girls who find each other, lose each other, then find each other again as completely different people in New York City. This is my mockup of the cover, which will need to be redone, after I’ve had some time to work on some other drawings. The background looks great, but the figures didn’t come together like I’d hoped. Their proportions are off, and their poses and expressions are stiff. But if I can get it right on the next try, it will hopefully communicate in one image the kind of relationship my friend and I had.

I will always love her, with all of my platonic heart.

Ace up my Sleeve

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I wrote this angry. I put it down, worked for six hours, and came back to it. I was still angry (though I managed to add some clarity to some confusing bits). I feel like I was remarkably patient, even though this has happened one time too many.

There appears to be a misunderstanding. Maybe people forgot this about me. Maybe people don’t even believe this about me. Either way, I want to take the time to clear this up. Last month, I wrote a post about wanting to say hello to a woman I see every week at the café. I was anxious about it, to the point of paralysis. Enough of my friends are under the assumption I wanted to ask her out on a date.

No, goddammit. Over the past fifteen years, I have developed crippling social anxiety. I can carry on a conversation with a stranger if they start it. Ask me to start a conversation, and I get the yips really badly. All I wanted to do with this woman was say hello, tell her I’d seen her here every week, and share my name, which I didn’t think was possible without looking like a creep. I didn’t inherit the anxiety from my dad, who would pursue a person through a parking lot if they had Jersey plates.

That brings me to the larger issue. The abbreviation LGBTQ is actually an abbreviation of LGBTQIA. The I stands for (I think) intersex, and the A stands for asexual (ace to its friends). Being left out of the term that describes alternative sexuality is only one example of asexuality erasure. Mostly it’s the flat-out denial, including—from a whole lot of people in the LGBTQ community—that it exists at all. Maybe an ace hasn’t met the right person. Maybe they’re just not trying hard enough. Maybe they can’t possibly know if they like sex or not if they’ve never tried it. Maybe they’ve had sex before, so they can’t be ace.

I identify as asexual. I’m not sure anyone I know believes me because I hear a lot of doubt about it. I’ve been hearing some lately, and it’s been really getting under my skin. It’s part of my identity, and I shouldn’t have to justify it. I shouldn’t have to explain it. I should just be allowed to be. Just this once, I’m going to go over the common things that make people doubt me.

I’ve had sex before. In some cases, I’ve had sex a lot of times before. I once bought a family-sized box of condoms on a Friday with the intention of not having to buy them again for a while, only to discover that I needed a new box come Monday. A lot of people don’t fully understand their sexuality until later in life. I had an inkling that I was asexual in my early thirties, but I became sexually active briefly, so I figured that invalidated that. It turns out I’m bipolar, and I’ve only ever been horny when I’m manic, when I’m a different person altogether. In the past, mania turned me into the Incredible Hulk. Now, with the right treatment, mania turns me into the Credible Hulk.

I have crushes. Yes, I get butterflies for both men and women, but men don’t impress me as often as women. The most important thing is that I don’t want to have sex with them. Sex never even crosses my mind. I just want to follow them around like a little puppy.

I write a lot of sex in my novels, and I used to write erotica. Like Stephen King is a non-threatening dork who can write an entire novel from the perspective of a homicidal dog, I write fiction. The definition of “fiction,” from Merriam-Webster, is “fic-SHUN. n. made-up shit.” Emphasis on the made up. I don’t write a lot of sex anymore, but I write a lot of kissing, and words cannot describe how revolting I find pieholes grinding up against pieholes. Sex is even grosser because there’s a wider variety of fluids involved.

I draw a lot of sexy women. Here’s where I think most people get tripped up, but the answer is, I am attracted to sexiness. From the presence of a woman in a power suit to the muscle of a 1970 Pontiac GTO to the swagger of David Tennant in Good Omens, confidence (even feigned confidence) grabs my full attention and holds on. The word sexy trips people up because sex is in it, but I have never associated the two.

Asexuality is a spectrum, like all sexualities. There are aromantics, who want nothing to do with dating and holding hands. (I’m borderline aro. I’m extremely touch averse, but there is one person who is allowed skin-on-skin contact with me.) There are people who are revolted by sex. There are people who have sex, usually for a partner, and don’t hate it, but don’t get off on it. There are demisexuals, who are only attracted to someone once they get to know them. Most importantly for the point I’m trying to make, there are aces who tend to lean into one sexuality or another. I, for example, lean heterosexual. It doesn’t mean I want to have sex with anyone of the opposite gender, just that I find them more interesting than my own.

To be clear, despite that my eye is drawn to physical attributes, they have nothing to do with my opinion of someone. For example, the woman in the coffee shop I wanted to approach is not the kind of woman who catches my eye. Neither is my ex-wife. I hooked up with the latter because we spent an hour in a car together getting to know one another. I said hi to the former because we share a space for an hour a week, and it seemed like the polite thing to do. While I have dated women who were my physical type, I can say of the three most beautiful, two did not go well.

It’s been four years since I’ve had sex, and I don’t miss it. †here are behaviors and preferences I have that seem to indicate sexual inclinations, but I’m asexual. Please do not challenge this. Please do not call bullshit on me. This is a truth about me that you need to accept if you want to be a part of my life.

I’m ace, I’ve accepted it, and I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.

Simply the Best Man

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I met Shane in 1992, and he was a year and a half older than me. I quickly looked up to him as a mentor. My senior year of high school was full of a lot of new and old friends and adventures, but sitting in his studio apartment while he painted, and chatting and bullshitting was probably the highlight.

When I moved New York adjacent, he was there for the first several months. He showed me around, including a method of buying weed that landed us in the middle of Louis Farrakhan’s Million Youth March. While I taught myself how to draw, he was my biggest cheerleader, and the first person to call me an artist.

He and his family moved upstate, which is where I spent my three-day weekends, working on two screenplays, one of which was lost to poor archiving and a then-sixteen-pound Newcastle sitting on my laptop. The other was completed, and because it was absurdly long, he and I spent a week last summer lengthening it into a five-episode series.

Our relationship had its ups and downs, and he’s not the best at long-distance communication, but we have stayed tight. An eternity ago, he was my Best Man. My ex-wife hated him and schemed to keep us apart, and it worked. However, we’ve reconnected since then, and I’m constantly sharing with him some of the many little drawings I’ve been doing.

I’ve prematurely written my memoirs, with each chapter representing an important character in my life, and you can bet Shane got one. With his help, I was able to correct a lot of the misinformation drilled into my head by someone I was married to, and now I have an accurate chronicle of our relationship until June 2022. I should probably update that.

The reason I’m calling you all here is because Shane is an accomplished painter, with shows across the US and a distinctive style I’m proud to say I’ve watched evolve, from awkward (but still beautiful) nudes of Sherilyn Fenn to the Cubist/Outsider style that is his brand, which seem to feature the same woman. I can’t judge because I frequently draw the same woman. Long story short, nobody paints like him.

As artists, we couldn’t be anymore different. His medium is oils and large canvases. Mine is pencil, ink, and watercolors. His subjects are deserts and cityscapes and surreal costumes. My subjects are characters from my writing oeuvre. He’s a painter, I’m more of a cartoonist.

Even though we see each other as equals and have been mistaken as brothers, I still look up to him, and I thought it would be really cool if I drew one of his paintings in my style. The result isn’t nearly as good as the original, but the process was fun and engaging and exactly the reason I’m an artist. (Mine’s on the right, in case you couldn’t tell.)

Kitten Season in Albania

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In my old writing group, we had a contest too see which of us could write the most words. The winner got a sticker. If you looked at Kat’s laptop, she was covered in stickers. It’s a free-write—you can talk about how much you hate writing for ten minutes, and you’re still qualified to win. This is surprisingly coherent for a free-write, but that’s the way I roll. The prompt was the phrase, “It was kitten season in Albania.”

It was kitten season in Albania, and no matter how much you sprayed, they were everywhere. And you know what they say about kittens: if you see one, there are dozens around that you can’t actually see. I had a particular problem with the kittens during my stay in Albania as part of my top-secret diplomatic mission with the State Department, and that was this: I had a lot of knickknacks. A LOT of knickknacks. And if there’s one thing that a kitten loves, it’s destroying the knickknacks. There was an owl that my grandmother had given me—she was Albanian, which is how I scored the sweet undercover gig—and a kitten came out of nowhere, bit its head off, knocked the remains to the floor, and disappeared into a portal. Fucking kittens. I don’t know where these portals go, but I vow one day to find out.

I called the kitten exterminators the other day—don’t worry, they don’t actually kill the kittens—they just round them up and put them into a vacuum cleaner to be sent to the kitten retail outlet in Bangor, Maine. They have a portal expert whose job is specifically to figure out where the kittens go after they create their swathes of destruction and adorable, adorable mayhem. We have theories—some of us think that it is a beautiful, sunny world of fluffiness and cotton candy. Others believe—as do I—that it is a dark, hell dimension full of evil and stuff. This makes as much sense to me as anything, being that I really, really loved my Albanian grandmother’s owl statue. I wanted to kill that kitten, but it looked at me with those big kitten eyes and mewed a tiny kitten mew, and it was all over. I’d adopt the little fucker, but I have other owl statues that my Albanian grandmother gave to me. Many owl statues. There was an army of them. I think she used them to unleash dark, Albanian magic upon the world. So who knows, maybe the kittens are a force for good, destroying those talismen of evil. Or maybe they’re just tchotchkes. What kind of magic is dark, Albanian magic? I’ve heard of Dark Macedonian magic, and dark Lithunanean magic, but never dark Albanian magic. I don’t know who spread that rumor, really. I think it was my mother, who never did like her mother-in-law. But still, labeling someone as an evil Albanian magic-user seems a little harsh, don’t you think? Maybe there was a grain of truth about it? I mean, there was all the chanting and the weird lights that eminated from Grandma’s room late at night when she thought everyone was asleep. I wasn’t asleep because the prescriptions I was on for my insomnia never actually worked. The ones for psychosis, however, were magic. Just like my grandmother. And that kitten. Fucking kitten.

Man’s Best Friend

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I just got a second opinion about Newcastle’s latest health crisis. He’s nineteen years old with a congenital heart condition and now hyperthyroidism. None of the treatments are particularly savory—either for price or how difficult they’re going to make Newcastle’s life. I don’t want to buy more time with him by making him miserable and confused. (“Why is father sticking his finger down my throat?”) And I can’t imagine he’s got long anyway.

When I asked my regular vet what would happen if I chose not to treat it, she gave me a huge guilt trip. When she was listing the treatments, she mentioned a topical ointment, but when I asked about it and told her it was the most appealing, she shamed me for not caring about my cat. A little discomfort a couple of times a day is better than all the suffering he would go through if the ointment didn’t work.

When I talked to my parents, they said, “He’s just a cat.” They didn’t say it in a derogatory way, but as a statement of fact. I trust my mother’s impartiality on this issue despite Newcastle earnestly trying to kill her.

So I got a second opinion. This doctor told me about the effect untreated hyperthyroidism could have, especially on his heart. She told me that cat could possibly live five or six years untreated, but not likely. She looked at his medical records and told me Newcastle could live another three years, but a lot less if the hyperthyroidism went untreated. She said it’s in the early stages, so I could just monitor him for a few months. I basically went to a second vet looking for permission not to treat him, what I got instead was peace of mind and total honesty.

I let Newcastle into my backyard this afternoon, and I monitored him the whole time so he didn’t get into any trouble. I watched him, clumsy, slow, and arthritic, explore. His feet walked on loose soil and packed concrete, and he picked and chose which plants to sniff and which ones to snack on. He escaped into the neighbor’s yard before I could stop him, but I lured him out, using myself as bait. I had brought my phone out with me because I expected to be bored. I was not. I was transfixed.

Overwhelmed, he sat down, and I understood what I want. I want my cat to be this happy until it’s time for him to retire. Nothing will ever compete with the jungle outside the back door, but I’m giving him extra scritches, longer cuddles, some human food, and maybe a spa day or two. And if this means making each other miserable for twenty seconds a day, then I’ll do it. I’m not ready for him to go, and if I can buy another three years, then here’s my credit card. On the other hand, I will not extend the life of a suffering animal just because of my feelings.

Newcastle is not suffering, though. He got to see the backyard. Life is good. I ordered the ointment.

Convenience Store Maniac: an Ode

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It’s only natural to mourn the things you loved and are no longer with you, whether it be a person, a pet, a childhood house, etc.

Convenience Store Maniac was a semi-autobiographical portrayal of a man working at an S-Mart gas station and convenience store too seriously. who only lives for his job. One day he snaps, believing that commerce is a religion, and he is the but a humble minister. This means an inquisition of sorts with his regular customers, some of whom really piss him off. And then he starts killing people. It was clever and a little over-the-top, and that’s exactly what we were going for.

I remember when Shane first conceived of it, in depraved journals he wrote in during his overnight shift at the convenience store he’d been shipwrecked in. I read a few of the entries, and what I saw was a rambling, incoherent, violent mess, and I told him, “I don’t know what this is, I want in.” I loved what I saw, and together we breathed life into Leonard, playing to each other’s strengths, arguing over the use of a single word, as well as brainstorming our way around corners we’d painted ourselves into. We named all of the regular customers after classic country-western performers (except for the teenage assholes, who were Kurt, Chris, and Dave). Even though the names were never said aloud, they helped shape the personalities of people who got maybe one line in the whole movie. We manufactured and fine-tuned chaos. We wrote the first act, at the end of which Leonard takes his first victim, and then I got married, and my asshole cat broke my hard drive, and the first part of Convenience Store Maniac is lost forever.

What isn’t lost forever is the memory of the long weekends I spent in his house on Bear Town Road twenty years ago, getting baked and joining forces with my best friend to create something great. We haven’t talked about it in decades, and if we put our minds to it, we could bring it back to life. On the other hand, there’s nothing I could type that will live up to the first fifty pages that lives in my memory.

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.

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.