During Wartime
When all of this started, I remember clearly thinking to myself that I didn’t want to normalize the lockdown, the quarantine, sheltering in place, any of it. It felt strange for everything to be closed, for the outside world to be so still while the inside one was so chaotic — more people here now, all the time, and one of them is seven years old and loud — and I promised myself that I would try my best to remember that this was an aberration, a break from the norm, instead of the “new normal,” whatever that may mean.
By now, I’m having trouble remembering what life was like before plaguetimes hit.
In my defense, it’s been two months now, a figure that seems difficult to fully comprehend because, as many have pointed out, time feels elastic and meaningless in a number of ways. At some point a couple of weeks ago, I realized that I’d genuinely forgotten how long we’d been in lockdown — I was trying to count the weeks and failing, eventually coming up with a figure of “eight, maybe nine weeks, perhaps it’s seven.” The confusion felt correct in some inexplicable manner. (It was the eighth week, for those wondering.)
I can remember everything from before the shutdown in an abstract way, of course, as a series of “we used to…”s — we used to go out to dinner, we used to go to the movies, we used to go to the grocery store and it was fun and not an existential terror ride where you don’t even want to squeeze past the person blocking the aisle because they can’t decide what kind of pasta they want and why aren’t they even wearing a mask, what the hell is this…?!? That kind of thing. I can remember the shape, but not the color, the way it actually felt. That feels important, to have lost that memory.
And, again, it’s been two months. An indistinct number of weeks. Of course things are going from memory like that. This is the new normal now, just as whatever comes next, whatever unusual world will come post-lockdown, will be a new new normal; you can’t fight it, not really. But there’s something sad to me about what I’ve lost along the way, and will likely never get back.
May 18, 2020
May 15, 2020
The Heart and The Brain and The Body Give You
I guess we’re returning for another round of THR newsletter graphics, huh? It’s been two weeks already…? Time flies when you’re stuck inside all the time with nothing to differentiate the days anymore, creating a break with how we traditionally measure the passage of time…!
We start, curiously, with a number of graphics where the headline changed after the graphic was created — it’s not something that happens usually, yet somehow it happened a bunch of times in a row recently. File under “the process gets weird when everyone works from home.”
For the next two, it wasn’t that the headline changed, it’s that I literally couldn’t decide which color scheme I preferred, so I offered both. (The graphic went unused altogether, so I didn’t find out which one would have been chosen.)
May 14, 2020
The Fruits of Your Labor
Every now and then, I remember that there’s no San Diego Comic-Con this year, and I get newly sad all over again.
I mean, it only makes sense — even if organizers and the state of California had made the utterly nonsensical decision to go ahead with the show for some ridiculous reason, I don’t think I would have actually attended, because, well, global pandemic and all — but, still. I write “I don’t think” intentionally, because before the show was actually cancelled, I found myself thinking, please just properly cancel it, if you go ahead, I know that far too much of me will still want to go even though it’d be far too dangerous. I know my dumb, dumb limits.
It’s not just that I’ve been going to SDCC for more than a decade now, although that matters, somehow. It’s part of my year, every year, when I map it out in my head — there’s a week long break that’s not actually a break, but actually a stressful, enjoyable, surreal work-filled experience, in the middle of the year every single year that I look forward to. A week unlike any other, for better or worse, when it feels like things get turned up to maximum and it’s just go go go. I love that.
I love the San Diego trip every year — the weather, the break from routine, the seeing familiar faces that I only get to see once or twice a year but adore nonetheless. There’s a very specific, hectic, frenetic rhythm to the trip, the way that the boredom of the traveling transfers into a palpable anticipation and tension as the actual show nears, and then pow, it’s happening and it just stays happening for five days. I love that rhythm, as unhealthy as it is. It’s become tradition, or more, by now.
San Diego Comic-Con is also personally important in ways that are near impossible to explain; professionally, it’s easy — I’ve made connections, friends, there that are important and necessary. But there are memories and moments from multiple trips that have nothing to do with work that matter just as much, if not more so; the epiphanies I’ve had, feelings I’ve felt, during those shows that have changed and shaped my life moving forward. The show matters to me, on some strange, real level.
And so, no San Diego this year. Next year, who knows…? But until it returns, until I return, I’ll miss it and, every now and then, miss it and think about what it means to me.
May 12, 2020
The Fine Art of Not Knowing What You Want
You know what I miss? Browsing.
Way back before all this started, I was a fond browser; I likely irritated all manner of store owners because of it, but there’s a very particular joy in heading into a bookstore, a record store, a comic store, wherever, with no plan or agenda — not even, really, any real intent to actually buy something — and just wandering around to see what’s available, almost willing yourself to be surprised. I’ve found countless favorite things that way, stories or songs that nowadays feel integral to my personal history even though I found them by accident.
It started when I was in art school, I think, decades ago. I’d arrive at the weekend with only vague plans, and amongst those would be grocery shopping. For the majority of my time in Aberdeen, both studying and later teaching, I’d live some distance away from the town center with all the stores, so even just heading to pick up milk, bread and almost inevitably frozen breaded chicken breast — I was a creature of habit — would be an undertaking; I quickly resolved that, if I was going to spend an hour or so getting there, then I’d make the most of being in the center of town as I could.
In practice, that meant spending a lot of time browsing in the bookstores and the record shops. I’d spend hours in there every weekend, checking racks for new releases or looking for old favorites. I spent so much time in these places — and, to a lesser extent, the comic stores in town, but they almost aggressively pushed browsers away, preferring those who knew what they wanted and knew where to find it — that I can remember the layout of each store even now, a quarter century after I’d last visited, and likely after the stores have gone out of business.
Here in Portland now, I still like to browse Powell’s, occasionally check in on Jackpot Records or somewhere similar. The curiosity, the joy of discovery, is still very much there. Except, of course, right now, it’s not — and I feel that, more and more with each day. I miss that space, that freedom to find unexpected things; I’ve started literally dreaming about it. Some day soon, I hope, I’ll have a chance to feel it again.
