Tag Archives: memoir

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.

Dramatis Personae

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From preadolescence in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, to Doha, Qatar, I have tended to gravitate toward weirdos. Even Work Rachel, though she came and left my life in a handful of months, was pretty out there. The people in my life are so off-center, and they’re so different, that I can’t help but think of them as characters.

I bring this up because I took the weekend to digitize my photo albums, and I rediscovered my past. And then, I remembered the characters in my life, and characters are meant to be drawn. I don’t plan on turning this into a thing, especially as MY LIKENESSES ARE TERRIBLE.

When I arrived at Hastings College, I didn’t exactly blend in. I was darker colors, plaids, and torn jeans, and the entirety of the Midwest was also plaids, but also a blend of earth tones and pastels. I was alone. Suddenly, someone came along, made an obscene comment about the holes in my jeans, and lured me into his den of filthy degenerates.

For a while, it was amazing. With our newfound freedom, we frolicked in innocent (yet very horny) fun, mostly involving smoking cigarettes indoors. Unfortunately, it didn’t last. We were kids, and we didn’t know better.

We started being really horrible to each other in ways I’ve compartmentalized and would refer to as “toxic,” if I didn’t feel like that word has lost all meaning. We’re not bad people. None of us were. We were young, and we got swept up in the moment.

Since running into these photos, I’ve been remembering the early days, before it got complicated, and some of the characters. From left to right:

There’s me, who seemed to be living under a bad-luck curse.

Rick was the one who befouled the reputation of my beloved grunge jeans and brought me into the group of misfits he’d been gathering. Not only was Rick a dancer with moves that could hypnotize a sultan, but he was sincere and curious, two of my favorite traits in a person.

Susan was a pretty, petite young woman who could fell a man by belching on him. She was your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, without the politics. She was never wrong, and this infuriated me. Sure, she was right most of the time, but did she have to be so belligerent about it? When I met her, she had a Canadian boyfriend, and I said, “Sure.” Then I met him.

If I were dream-casting Greg, I’d go for a young Joan Crawford, smoking a cigarette and waiting for something that piqued her interest. He moved like a marionette, broadly swinging his limbs from one pose to another, going from irritated to overjoyed in an instant. Greg taught me the value of camp and Bea Arthur, without which I would have never appreciated the one good part of the Star Wars Holiday Special.

JJ is difficult to describe. His black T-shirts, sometimes sans sleeves, heavy work boots, and unabashed mullet cast him as a redneck. And he was. He could keep up with Susan on the race to the bottom, and he thought he was the most hilarious person he knew. But sometimes, he’d get really calm, and he’d say something so profound, it would blow the back of your head off. But sometimes, he’d get really calm, and he’d say something so unbelievably stupid, it would blow the back of your head off.

These were just a few of the weirdos I got to know in my early days, far away from home, in a strange land, trapped somewhere between adult and child.

Weekend Update: a Throwback

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Once upon a time, before I had a blog, I used to send updates about my weekends to all of my friends, many of whom probably ignored it. The idea behind them was to make myself the star of some over-the-top drama with reoccurring characters, centered around some off-center detail. I didn’t do much this weekend, but plenty happened. We’ll begin on Thursday.

To fully appreciate this story, you have to know about the Loquacious One. She. Won’t. Shut. Up. Every moment of the conversation belongs to her and her alone, and she takes you on a train of thought that doesn’t have any stops. When we threw a party for my departing Work Friend, I couldn’t speak to her because the Loquacious One wouldn’t stop talking.

She hangs out at my neighbor’s desk, gossiping for long stretches of time. I have headphones and something to listen to, but her voice pierces through my shields, driving me to psychosis, like a heart buried under the floorboards.

Thursday, we have a short day at work because of the “End-of-Year Party.” I hate parties. I hate speeches. And this is both. But I hang in there, having a good time at a table with Fellow Ace, My Boss, My Boss’s Boss, and a few people I don’t know that well.

The subject comes up of hot doctors and physical therapists because they’re so young these days, and we are collectively not. I bring up hot dental hygienists because there’s no way anyone who sees the inside of your mouth will ever find you attractive. 

The Loquacious One brings up her teenage son’s swim team. She starts calling them hot. By this point, everyone is really uncomfortable. But it gets worse.

She unlocks her phone and swipes over to a picture of her son, in a Speedo. She says, “Isn’t he hot?”

*pause to let that set in*

Friday, I have an intense morning at work, but very little to do. I still skip lunch. When I run out at about one o’clock (six hours into my seven-hour work day), I announce that I’m taking the rest of the day off. My boss does not tell me to stay.

I duck outside to treat myself to a little something-something, but while I’m outside, my mouth on the pipe, the lighter hovering above it, my boss texts me asking if I’m planning on attending the one thirty meeting. Luckily, I hadn’t actually taken a hit, so I can safely take the journey back to my appointment, unlock my work laptop, and am only five minutes late.

On my way back to my little alcove with my repacked pipe, I glance into the furniture-disposal garage and behold the bookshelf of my dreams. The construction, the design, it’s everything I ever wanted. It’s undamaged, but definitely used. I don’t have enough books to put in there, and I can’t fit it into my apartment, I take it anyway.

I’ve been wondering why they would have disposed of it. I had a few ideas, and using Occam’s Razor, I narrowed it down to it being cursed. It will probably be one of the inconvenient ones, like “there’s always a pebble in your shoe,” or “everything tastes like fudge.” Oscar approves of the bookshelf, though, so I’ll hang onto it for a while.

Eventually I do smoke the marijuana.

On Saturday morning, I arrive at the cafe at seven, to discover that they open at eight. It’s a little less than freezing outside, so I can either go home and call this a bust, or I can catch the Metro, which was on the way home, and go to another cafe. What I decide to do is walk the four blocks to the mushroom store and see how much time that uses up. I end up exploring the neighborhood, and I find Georgia Avenue, a lively boulevard in this part of DC. I even find the rental car place where Nicole and I got our transportation to Hall & Oates. I can go for that.

It opens. It takes me a while to focus, but I find a reference and start drawing. I’m surprised when I looked up from my sketchbook to see someone who looks exactly like beloved British comedian, John Oliver. I return to drawing. I look up again, and I get a good look, and it really is John Oliver, beloved British comedian. He gets his coffee and leaves.

I have finally blocked out a decent torso and am refining it when a strung-out woman with a lot of perfume sees me drawing and tells me she can do it better. She tries to rip a page out of my sketchbook, then gets a napkin and a sharpie when I fight back. While she’s gone, a barista runs over and asks if I’m okay (I am not), and he tries to get the woman’s attention.

She pulls a chair in next to me, scoots me against the wall, and starts drawing. The barista has backup now, but still she won’t budge. They try taking her napkin, and she won’t let go of it. They take my laptop, which she and I had been using as a reference, and she doesn’t slow down. She’s a woman possessed. They call the police, and she still won’t leave. Before the police get there, she finishes the drawing, autographs it, and takes off.

The staff is very embarrassed, and they ask me if I’m okay, if I scared. I tell them I was more annoyed than anything. They give me a free coffee and apologize again. I assure them that it is not their fault, and I’m impressed with how they handled it. They could have escalated it, but they did not.

This may be the weirdest coffee shop I’ve ever been to.

I go into a fugue when I get home and work solidly on a piece of art. I had decided that I want to challenge myself by drawing argyle, and not on a flat surface. To pull it off, I have to perform a lot of tricks with few guidelines. I feel like I’ve pulled it off.

When I emerge from this state, I actually feel kind of hungover. I am texting with a friend, and I tell her I’m exhausted. She asks, “Big day?” I reply, “Seeing John Oliver and being interrupted by an aggressive woman in the coffee shop wasn’t enough?”

Sunday, I am planning on camping out in the Lost Sock, the easiest cafe to get to. However, if you need a table, you have to be prepared to arrive early. They open at eight. It takes twelve minutes to walk to the Metro, which runs every six minutes on the weekends. The trip is about three minutes, and the walk to the cafe is another three. I check the weather. Fifteen minutes of walking and up to six minutes on the platform in 20 degrees (-6-Celsius). I stay home and whip up a large painting, from the first scratch to the last brushstroke.

When I take a break, I turn my attention to the probably cursed bookshelf. Part of the reason I love it so much is because it will be the perfect partition between the kitchen and my bedroom, collectively known as The One Room. However, Oscar jumps from the counter to the top of the bookshelf, which sends it crashing to the floor. It’s fine, but still.

I’ve got a week off following Christmas, and I’m looking forward to trying some new things in that time. And I’ll report back to you.

Come on, Baby, Light my Cigarette

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When I first started smoking cigarettes in October, 1994, I had a cute, little, red Bic lighter, and it was magical.

At that time of my life, I mostly hung out with Greg, a drag queen in disguise; JJ, the philosopher redneck; and Susan, an old, grouchy gay man in a teenage girl’s body, in Greg’s dorm room. We smoked a lot of cigarettes because it was the nineties, and you could smoke indoors if you wanted to.

For about a month, I always had flame in my pack-pocket (currently my phone-pocket). This was something special because I tended to distribute my lighters in random places with random people, so I always depended on the other cavemen for fire.

What was even more amazing was that, if I had to leave the dorm for a chilly autumn, the lighter was there, in my jacket pocket, always. I never had an excuse not to smoke.

On a day of sadness, my Bic flicked its last. If mid-nineties culture was tipping one over for your homies, I absolutely would have. I loved that fucking lighter. I disposed of it with ceremony.

And yet, when I reached into my jacket pocket a few hours later, the cute, little, red Bic was there, and it still had juice. I thought I’d thrown it out, but it was a strong possibility, even then, my memory of the event failed to correspond with what actually happened.

I didn’t figure it out for a while. On my way to class, I lit a cigarette, returned the lighter to my jacket, and slipped my hand inside my pack-pocket to find another cute, red, little Bic.

The whole time I’d had three identical lighters, and I didn’t have a clue. Maybe something magical did happen here. But the spell was broken, and one-by-one, the remaining Bics disappeared.

I quit smoking 15 May, 2007, four days before I turned thirty-one. I have never stopped loving those triplets.

Painting You a Picture

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In Downtown Gallup, New Mexico, there lies a street that only exists for about three or four blocks. This is Coal Avenue, and it is here that I will tell you about my friend, Shane.

Picture a second-story window, and standing before it on the inside is a young man, no older than twenty. He’s not particularly tall, and he’s bulky, but not unattractively so. He wears his blond hair down to his chin, and his clothes, usually denim, were covered in paint. He sticks his head outside and yells out, “I thought I told you to leave Angelita outta this!”

On the sidewalk, a tall, skinny teenager with big glasses and a long, blond ponytail shouts back something misogynist and vulgar, despite that the two boys are not the former, but are definitely the latter.

Vinny was Shane. He was an aspiring artist who returned to Gallup after many years of homelessness, wandering through eighties and nineties alternative culture like Forrest Gump. For a time, he lived in a blue Volkswagen Beetle. He later surfed couches, and eventually got a job waiting tables at the most popular restaurant in Gallup (it was Italian) and an apartment of his own, a studio apartment that he eventually decorated with a bed, a kitchen table, and pastel smears all over the walls. He even had business cards. I will forever remember them because they read:

Shane Van Pelt

Artist/Writter

When I met him, I had already found my identity in the darker side of Alternative culture. Meeting Shane at a football game altered that course, so instead of a path of black clothes and self-destruction, I became something more bohemian.

Shane had a lot of patience for me, who grew up with undiagnosed and untreated mental illnesses. When I went away to college, he was not the best pen-pal. But he did do things like leave phone messages at the front desk of my dorm informing me that Angelita was pregnant.

After his marriage, which I heard about third-hand, he and Elizabeth moved to New York City. He visited me a handful of times in college, shuttling back and forth from there to Gallup. People, seeing us together, assumed we were brothers. We were. He made quick friends with many of my friends as well because he was so freaking charming.

I ended up in New York, with nothing but a little bit of money and my friendship with him. He showed me around Manhattan and showed me where to buy weed. In fact, my first weekend there, he took me into Harlem to pick some up, and we didn’t know at the time that Louis Farrakhan’s Million Youth March was taking place. “Try to look inconspicuous,” he told me.

Elizabeth knew people, and during one of the first weeks I was living New York Adjacent, she took us to a party. Shane and I were the only people either of us knew, and he retreated solo as soon as we walked in the door. I found a corner and suffered, and an intellectual in his thirties approached me and asked if Shane and I were a “team.” As in a band or a writing duo? Even apart, we were simpatico.

I wanted to be a comic book illustrator, but I didn’t know how to draw. Shane, despite the raw stick figures I was starting with, was the first person to call me an artist. And if someone as cool and talented as Shane Van Pelt says it, it must be true.

He, Elizabeth, and their newborn Ava retreated Upstate, and some of the best three-day weekends I ever spent were in his drafty house in Binghamton, after I shelled out sixty bucks for a bus ticket. Together, we’d sit in his studio and work on one of two screenplays, Convenience Store Maniac or The Day the West Went Dry. The former is lost to history, which is too bad because I thought it was brilliant. The latter we’ll get back to.

When I got married, there was one person I wanted at my side, and that was Shane. I have to say, though, twenty years later, I’m still disappointed in his Best Man speech. What was important, though, was that he was there.

For personal reasons I won’t go into and because Shane is a bad pen-pal, we had drifted apart during my marriage. However, we talked a lot more after my divorce (i.e. once every few months), and no time had passed between. We were still insulting each other in gross, not-Woke ways, and we could talk about anything.

In 2022, I recalled that some of the best memories I had were hanging out in Shane’s studio and doing screenplay jam sessions. I took a trip to see him that summer, and for seven days, we extended our two-hour movie into a series. He said he knew people at Netflix. I didn’t care either way. I just wanted the quality time with my best friend.

He called me more frequently than that afterward, about once a month. However earlier in 2024, he told me he was committing to talking more often, and the calls came biweekly. He told me about his plans in Wheeling, West Virginia, which would bring him a short bus ride from me. He had to deal with some property issues because somehow, the high school dropout I knew who used his tips to buy art supplies had property issues now.

The last time I talked to Shane, it was this past Monday. He had called me, scared, because he’d been without some of his medications, and he was starting to feel the withdrawal. He told me he would be getting his medications Tuesday, so I told him that this was a moment. The moment would become a memory, like all his memories, and life would go on. The last thing I said to my best friend was a lie.

Since Shane has lived several lives apart from mine, I don’t know many of his friends or relatives. I met Elissa, his mother, once, and I knew he was devoted to her. Elizabeth has been a good friend to me with the patience of Job. I haven’t seen his daughter Ava since she learned how to walk over a three-day weekend and instructed me how to move Daddy’s paintbrushes from one jar to another. I have never forgotten that lesson, even though I couldn’t understand the words coming out of her mouth.

If you go to his website and you somehow dig up his essay about grunge (Shane’s filing systems made sense to him, at least), you’ll see a storyteller chock full of story. After reading said essay, I have been constantly riding him to write his memoirs. Somehow, Shane has packed about eighty years of living into the fifty he had, and I hope the person who inherits his computer at the very least finds more of these essays. He was also working on a novel, and I was really excited to read it when it finished.

There’s so much more I want to tell you about him. I have stories, like the time we stood on the street, Shane scratching pastels onto a rogue piece of drywall and me, narrating the process in my best (okay, worst) Joe Pesci voice. Or how he stole that boombox from a house I was sitting for, and I was the one who got in trouble. Or the joy on my face the day after Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins hugged a painting he made for her.

Shane was an accomplished artist, with shows all over the world. Thirty years ago, I watched him go from painting nudes of Sherilyn Fenn to his current style, whatever that is. Is it Cubist? Surrealist? Impressionist? Outsider? It’s none of those things. Shane was, and always will be unique.

Shane Van Pelt died Saturday, November 9, at approximately 1:00 a.m. Mountain Time.

He had met me in every stage of my life, and he still liked me. He was probably the best friend I’d ever had. I don’t know what I’m going to do without him.

A Day in the Life

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I don’t know if it’s ADHD or a symptom of our society, but I hate the quiet. For most of the day, I’m listening to something. While I work on art, it’s a movie or a YouTube video. While I work at work, I put on a podcast I don’t need to listen to. On the weekends, I like to cozy up in a cafe and get swept up in the busy lives of others.

The main reason I always like to have something on is because the earworms nestle in otherwise. Sometimes they’re fun songs, but usually they’re not.

Today, I’m not plugging into noise, and I’m paying the price for it. I’m hearing my favorite Beatles song, the one I can never listen to anymore, “A Day in the Life,” from Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This is one of those rare songs ascribed to Lennon/McCartney that actually had contributions from both. If you know their style, you can pick which parts are theirs.

The numbness of the John Lennon part (“I read the news today, oh boy”) is how I feel having sacrificed passion for my sanity, and the McCartney part (“Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head”) is the result of that, i.e. going through the motions because you have to.

It’s a heavy song, and it never fails to bring me to tears. I found out when Newcastle died that it also described how I was processing my grief. Today, I found myself sitting on my bed, unmoving and unthinking, for ten minutes.

The only way I can feel anything right now is by writing about it.

 I read the news today, oh boy.

Rational Lampoon’s Vacation

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From October 25 through November 2, I was on a mandatory vacation. In September, I had run the vacation calculator, and I found out I had about sixty hours of use-or-lose vacation, so at the end of last month, I went to Colorado to see my friend Emilie. She was kind enough to show me some cool art galleries.

There were also some inspirational diners and cafes.

None captured my imagination quite like Corvus. So many colorful people came into that establishment for caffeinated refreshment.

For a couple of days, my sister and I hung out, including our hajj to Mile High Comics, one of the largest comic book stores in the country, possibly the world (not counting those perverts in Japan). It’s in a warehouse. A warehouse. The distance between me and bulbs overhead could be measured in light years. Most of the warehouse was actually a warehouse, storing and shipping comics all over the planet at marked up prices.

            They had rows upon rows of older comics, including a separate series of bins for variant covers. They had comic book toys, in their packaging, going back to the toys I collected in high school. Do any Xers remember The Power of the Force? The pre-prequel action figure line with really buff biceps? They had those. They had a bit of everything, including long out-of-print trade paperbacks.

I spent *cough, cough* dollars and started conversations with two strangers, the latter of which is a huge deal for me.

Emily and I spent Halloween together, and the first person we saw outside of each other was a waitress in bunny ears. It bode well for us, and we spent the morning in the mall, goofing off like teenagers whose joints weren’t cooperating anymore.

There were plenty of costumes on the retail workers as we went into an enormous bookstore, a comic store, game and toy stores, the Lego store, the knife store, jewelry stores, and Spencer’s gifts, the latter of which always gives me a giggle.

After retreating to our corners for naps, Emily had dressed up in a sexy medieval (sexy, not skanky) dress, and we wandered the neighborhood, looking for the coolest Halloween decorations, and we were sorely disappointed. Some people went all out, but most either ignored the holiday altogether, or just slapped a couple of pumpkins and a fake spider web and call it done. Some people had eight- or twelve-foot skeletons and expected their game would be judged based entirely on that. Oh, trust me, Alan: we’re judging you.

Emilie and I didn’t spend every waking moment together, even if I had inadvertently booked an Airbnb a block from her house. And honestly, that was for the best. She’s got her way of doing things, I have my way of doing things. She has errands, I have a muse.

When I had dinner without her, I had it shipped to me. However, since guests and hosts prefer to keep as far apart as possible, I had to intercept the drivers before they could ring the doorbell. This is despite that I specifically asked them to go out back. On one occasion, I ordered the food then went on a brief constitutional, taking a wrong turn that led me so far from home base that I had to sprint to catch the driver only moments before she reached the front door.

For our last day together, we went to Golden, the former home of my sister, which has a beautiful downtown. Unfortunately, for the second day in a row, we were disappointed. Golden has a whole lot of restaurants and cafes, but very few quaint shops to roam around in while discussing things of no real importance to anyone but us. We went to a coffee shop instead.

But Saturday, I had to go through that hellhole of airports to return home and to my life, and my Oscar, who is currently punishing me for not being Nicole.

Costume Drama

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It’s seven thirty in the evening. I’m usually in bed by eight. I took an Adderall at ten a.m., and I think it’s still going. This could be bad. Last night, I slept like Santa Claus after an exhausting Christmas Eve. The night before, I slept like a little kid waiting on Santa Claus. I’m worried I’m going to sleep like the latter tonight. I am in a state where marijuana is legal, so I’ve taken steps to ward off the tossing and the turning, but they may not be enough.

Emilie did not take the entire time I am here off from work. I would be kind of upset if she had. We have dinners together on work days, and she is a phenomenal … Doo doo, doo-doo doo! Phenomenal! Doo-doo doo-doo!

Sorry. That got out of control.

Emilie is a really good cook. We talk, I fondle her ceramic flowers, we tell stories, I confessed something, and we call it a night. It’s good to do this in person.

Today was the first workday while I was here, so I needed to entertain myself. I started by sleeping in for an hour and a half. I sleepwalked through getting up, making coffee, and getting clean, and I went to breakfast at the same diner as yesterday. I overheard some fun conversations, though everyone was quieter with a smaller crowd of customers.

“I’m not a boat fan. I been on a few boats. I don’t like ‘em.” I also heard my waitress call out, in the tone of voice of a fed-up mom, “Tell him to stop bein’ such a tree-hugger!” (Shortly after this, a guy entered, wearing a hoodie that said, “I’m voting for the prosecutor, not the convict.” My waitress and him did not have a violent confrontation over this because we, as human beings, are capable of treating each other with respect.)

The most baffling one was, “How do you want your eggs, scrambled?” In a strangely erotic voice, she continued, “You got it. You gooooootttttt it.”

After breakfast, I went back to Corvus, the coffee roaster with a remarkable grift, and I ordered an iced coffee. The barista asked, “What kind of cold brew would you like? There’s Nitro, N’awlins, and Tokyo.”

Ninety seconds passed before I said, “Huh?” She explained the differences in the way that aficionados do. (“It has just a little nitro in it, so it goes down smooth.”) I went with Tokyo because they brewed it with the machine.

I took my Adderall, and I got to work, drawing up a storm for hours, until I realized I should probably go to the bathroom, but only after I finished doing one bit, then while I was here, another bit, and I wouldn’t want to stop when I have this bit to do, and another hour passed. When I had been in there four hours, I decided to move on, and I went to the bathroom finally.

I drove around a bit. The area around my airBnB is loaded with shopping centers, and one of them had a store called Disguises. Emilie had told me about an amazing costume shop we weren’t going to visit because it was Halloween. I was going in. This is the biggest costume shop I’ve ever been in. I’d stroll along, enjoying things like the Kenny Rogers wig and beard called “Gambler Costume,” and wander into separate rooms selling more intricate costumes. I turned right into an aisle, turned right at the end of the aisle, turned right at the next aisle, then right again. But instead of walking in a circle, I stumbled into a section of the store devoted only to tutus.

The store is some kind of tesseract.

I haven’t dressed up for Halloween since 2002, when I shaved off my mustache and went as Norville Rogers, with the nom de guerre of Shaggy. That was a repeat of my 2000 costume, with which I broke a haunted house with a well-timed “Zoinks.” I thought about maybe getting something and half-assing it (“You can see by the eyepatch that I am a bohemian pirate.”), but I saw nothing that grabbed my attention.

Overwhelmed by the fact that there was always someone behind me, and exhausted by not looking at the shopgirl’s cleavage, I somehow found my way to the exit. By the time I made it to home base, the Adderall would have left my system. I had no problem sleeping for an hour. But I woke up clear-headed and focused, finishing a drawing before Emilie could invite me over for dinner.

She made butter chicken with Indian cayenne pepper. The conversation was very funny (the story of my hubris meeting a Thai ghost pepper) and very personal (a bad thing I’d done that I don’t talk about). And we called it a night.

After writing this, I can feel the crackling potential energy fade, and I think I’m going to sleep well.

Guerilla Art Fair

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Something happened to me today that has happened to me an alarming amount of times in my life. It’s difficult to explain.

But first, the context: thanks to the vacation calculator on my HR platform, I discovered that I had to use up sixty hours of vacation before the end of the year or risk losing it forever. I don’t really want to go anywhere right now, and I don’t have that much money. I do however, have some intimate friends I love to see, so I came out to Colorado to see one. Another reason I decided to come here was my sister is here, and I have presents.

For breakfast my first day, I sat down in a greasy spoon diner, the kind you have to go out west to find. The waitress called me honey when she took my order. She engaged in a loud and animated conversation with a fellow waitress about menopause. Later, the second waitress yelled into the kitchen, “Hey, Pablo! You know Men at Work? The band! Liz and I are going to see them next weekend. The band!”

I ordered chicken fried steak with two eggs over-easy, wheat toast, and hash browns. It was delicious.

Emilie and I hung out on the couch my first day, until we moved to a coffee shop called Corvus. She informed me that Corvus offered a class in pour-over coffee for sixty dollars. While I formulated an opinion on that, my mouth delivered a standard disclaimer, “Look, I don’t want to judge …” I paused because my brain hadn’t caught up yet. Emily’s latte evacuated her face through her nose, and she laughed hysterically.

This is a very relaxed vacation. This is why I came here as opposed to New York.

Today, after a walk in one of Denver’s many beautiful parks, Emilie found me an art supply store. Because it opened at noon, we stopped at the best coffee bar in Colorado, apparently, and were greeted by the world’s most eager barista. When he finished my smoothie, he turned and asked me, quivering with joy, if I wanted whipped cream on my berry smoothie. I considered it and decided no. He accepted my choice with a shrug and a grin. Our drinks were made with two pumps of sincerity, and you could really taste it.

After another stop in a park, it was noon, and we drove out to the shopping center where a large, flat building, covered in colors, waited. And this when I entered familiar territory. For some reason, I don’t know why, I tend to wander into art galleries when I’m not expecting it. There are worse Eldritch horrors than “Suddenly: art!”; but you can’t deny it’s weird.

There were five galleries, with names like “Edge” and “Core,” and they each had their own approach to art. One gallery was full of parasols. Another had tiny little pieces, another had vast, geometric canvases. There were sculptures, collages, paintings, jewelry. One place had merch, including stickers, but they were all of babies wearing dark costumes, so I passed.

I started conversations with two attendants, which is not like me at all. All of the galleries are different, but most of them were co-ops. That meant all of the attendants were artists, and they had a lot of insight in the process. One of the attendants even encouraged us to play with his sculpture.

There was another gallery/tattoo artist in the complex, but they were closed. There was also a store, called “POP Culture,” that I investigated, only to find it was a Funko Pop store. Wall-to-wall Funko Pops. I fled. Funko Pops are an invasive species, and they appear where they are not invited.

Maybe one day I’ll understand how art just kind of sneaks up on me, but until then, I might as well see what it has to say.

Jacket Off

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I apologize for the title, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Now back to our regularly scheduled essay:

In 2002, my friend Katie and I went to Andy’s Cheepees, a vintage clothier in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. I had been living tough in New York Adjacent for four years by that point, and I had acquired a new personality. I felt cool. I had cool friends, and we did cool things together. But there was something missing.

I haven’t been to New York in ten years, but when I first arrived, and through the six years I spent there, everybody had a leather blazer, black with a medium-to-narrow lapel. You were practically issued it. And the thing about those jackets was, they were pretty cool. Even though everyone had one, they were cool. It wasn’t about conforming, it was about being as awesome as your peers.

I went to Andy’s Cheepees with the sole purpose of getting one of those jackets, and I quickly found one that fit (40L at the time). However, the guy at checkout wouldn’t sell it to me. Instead, he took me to the back and found me one in a dark brown with a wide collar, looking more like a pea coat than a blazer.

Most people who know me as an adult know this jacket. It was comfortable, it was awesome, and it was vintage. It made me more confident and sexy. It was around that time that I came up with Jack Murphy: Cop on the Edge, who became my alter ego. You all know Jack, he doesn’t play by the rules. He drives his beater through fruit stands. He violates the Bill of Rights. He was married once, but not anymore, as he lives in a shitty apartment by himself. He may or may not have a dog, whom he feeds people food. He says things like, “You don’t get it, do you? You just don’t get it.”

Upon meeting Jack Murphy, Rita called me Jackass Murphy because friends don’t want your head getting too big.

I retired the jacket in 2013 because it was pretty beaten up. I never got rid of it—it’s in my closet right now—but it’s not wearable. I replaced it with a similar jacket, almost the same color. This one looks like a leather safari jacket, but it’s as cool as the original, and I’ve worn it around Germany, England, and DC. 

There’s just one problem: I’m not sure I want to wear it anymore. Why am I making such a big deal about this? That jacket has been a major part of my identity for twenty-two years, and the weather right now is perfect for it. As soon as the temperature made it to the 40s in the morning, I knew the time had come, and I slipped it on, and meh. No joy was sparked.

I don’t feel cool anymore. I’m self-conscious about my weight, I haven’t had a good haircut in years, and I’ve forgotten how to smile. I do feel cool sometimes, but it has nothing to do with my jacket. Most of the time, I wear the denim one and layer it with a hoodie when it gets chillier. I only wore the leather one twice last year.

I’m a completely different person than I was twenty years ago. I’m a different person than I was ten years ago. One year ago. Six months ago, I didn’t have a cat. Change is the only constant. I think of it as regenerations, as in Doctor Who. Twenty years ago, I was the Shenanigan. Today, I’m the Bohemian.

In a few years, who knows? I might strut around the nursing home in my vintage leather jacket and bust some skulls. In the meantime, it’s waiting for me, if I’m so inclined. It’s my history.