Category: Uncategorized

There’s a little thing in the CMS of this blog that grades me after I’ve written each post, telling me how well each one does on an SEO level; it grades things out of 100, and the color of the number is a sign of how well I’ve done — if it’s green, then I’ve done a good job and it’s more than 80 out of 100; if it’s orange, then it’s somewhere less than 80. I’m sure the colors keep changing the lower you get, but I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten less than 60-something.

SEO is very purposefully not something I think about in this space. I think about it enough for work, the same way I have to think about the potential reach of any given story and making sure they’re as commercial and popular as possible. It’s part of being an editor on the internet these days, and from a certain angle, it’s fascinating and frustrating in its own right. You can get lost in it, and I have, more than once; that said, this site isn’t any of that. It’s me just writing and putting up silly images and being self-indulgent with no purpose beyond putting a signal out there without imagining who if anyone is reading.

All of which makes the number of emails I get from the company hosting this site all the more amusing, and somewhat confusing: I get a number of emails about how I can increase the reach of the site, how to make it more commercially viable, and how to improve the SEO functionality of it. (I also get a lot of emails about the fact that I’ve apparently overstepped in terms of image capability, which… I should probably research, really.) The idea of making this intentionally internet-liminal space commercial not only feels like it’s missing the point, but also oddly disturbing: this is my hole it was made for me as the meme has it. I don’t want it to be commercial!

Once upon a time, in a different internet, there was probably a thought somewhere about this being good personal branding, back when we all thought about things like personal branding. But now…? It almost feels like the very opposite of that: one of the few places on the internet where I don’t have to think about a brand at all. For better or for worse. All of which is to say: the SEO on this post will be under 80, and I’m almost hoping before I save that it could somehow be even lower.

I had this realization the other day: I love a first draft, but any- and everything beyond that feels a little too permanent. I was showing off a drawing I’d done and was repeating, “It’s just a sketch” as a way of pushing off my own unhappiness with the drawing — and, to be fair, it was just a sketch, deliberately unfinished and just a few minutes’ worth of work — when I had the thought that, for the most part, I stick in the realm of “just a sketch” quite a lot. I’m not entirely sure what not a sketch would even look like, at this point.

After all, it’s not as if I produce canvases or any kind of finished artwork at any point; everything I come up with is purposefully a work in progress abandoned midway through, intentionally. When I was in art school, decades ago, I eagerly worked away inside my sketchbooks but when required to take things the next step, I found myself fighting indecision and discomfort. I remember having to work on the final show for my BA degree and being unhappy with almost everything I displayed, and then — after grading but before the show actually opened — being counseled by the teachers that I should re-arrange my show because everything in my sketchbooks was better than the work on the walls. (They were right, and I agreed, but having someone else say it was this odd, sobering moment.)

It’s not just visual art that this attitude impacts; writing for the internet is faster and, in many ways, more temporary than writing for print. I was watching one of those movies about Big Moments In American Journalism that was made a decade or so ago — before the second Trump era demonstrated how little journalism is actually valued by those in power — and someone said that old line about journalism being the first draft of history; online writing and online journalism is the first draft of that first draft, another work-in-progress and that’s a comfortable space for me. Every time I’ve written for print feels more daunting somehow.

Maybe at some point, I’ll work up the nerve to create something — written, drawn, whatever — that feels worthwhile to be a “finished” work, or at least a second draft. For now, everything has become a sketchbook, filled with unclaimed, unclear potential that I might be able to figure out, if I wait long enough and look at it right.

“Days Left in Year.”

There’s a ticking clock that I face every day I’m working. It’s not that it’s necessarily counting down to anything important, but it’s right there, everytime I check in on the status of the day’s publishing schedule. We have this shared document that we all use to track where we are in terms of publishing, what stories need editing, and so on, you see, and at the top of that document is this traffic tracker that doesn’t just tell us how well we’re doing at that particular point, but projects out how well we’re performing versus the month’s goal, and offers up other little bits of information — including, for reasons too complicated to explain here, how many days into the calendar year we are at any given point, and how many days are left in the year.

I cannot explain why this “Days Left in Year” counter in particular catches my attention each and every time I’m on the page. It’s not as if I’m looking for that information at… well, almost any point of the day, really. For that matter, it’s not as if I even hold any special meaning in the end of the year beyond “I get some time off” and whatever level of superstition and sentimentality kicks in at that time each and every twelve months; nothing really changes, beyond we think about the new calendars that we should probably pick up. And yet, each and every time my eyes glance across that particular counter, I involuntarily pause. How many days are left in the year? my brain asks itself. Should I be more aware of this?

Even as I’m typing this, I’m aware that I do impart some odd meaning to the whole thing, and that I have been, subconsciously, counting down to something: the middle of the year. I don’t know why — literally nothing will happen when we hit day 183! — but somewhere in my brain, I have assigned it some kind of meaning, as if it’s a milestone that I can feel, even if I don’t actually understand it.

As I’m typing this, there’s still a few weeks left before we hit the halfway mark. Maybe I’m unintentionally imagining there’s going to be a point where it’ll be downhill from that point on, and the momentum will carry us all through. Check with me again when there’s only one day left in the year, perhaps.

Re-reading old Eddie Campbell and Ilya and Phil Elliott and Glenn Dakin comics recently has me thinking about zine culture as-was and the ways in which I’m missing an entire series of cultural touchstones from decades past that the internet replaced, before the internet itself became dominated by singular powerful forces that restricted the all-access nature it once had.

For example, the odd thrill of getting a zine or a small press comic in the mail, and holding it in your hands. (And seeing what, if anything, had also been snuck into the envelope as a thanks for buying.) Or the record marts, which happened every couple of months in some communal space or another and would just be filled with tables of crates, each one with albums and CDs and tapes of things you didn’t quite know about or know if you wanted but looked cool enough that you were willing to spend money on it. Or the weekly music papers that you bought for the reviews and maybe an interview or two but ended up finding new favorite writers in when they’d end up ranting about something you didn’t really care about but read, over and over, transfixed.

I feel oddly contrarian about what the internet did to everything, considering, you know, it’s how I got the career I have now and also why I moved across the world; the internet of the 2000s changed my life in practically every conceivable manner. But that’s not the internet that we have anymore, and what happened in the process between, say, 1990 and 2020 was that the alternate spaces that allowed non-mainstream culture to flourish and find an audience were wiped out and replaced by an online dream that itself got wiped away as the internet became more obsessed with control and profit. There are entire eco-systems and cultural streams that just aren’t there anymore, with nothing replacing them.

I read stories of how favorite creators got started and get sad that paths like theirs literally don’t exist today; I feel sad for today’s newcomers and outsiders who don’t have anywhere to make a name for themselves and find their people. Every now and then, I read a story (online, of course) about how Gen Z and Gen Alpha is abandoning the digital for the physical and all I can think is, it can’t happen quickly enough.

It never fails. Each year, when the weather starts getting just a little bit nicer, the thought occurs to me: I need to get out in the yard and clean it up; it’ll be good for the yard, and it’ll be good for me, to not be sitting at my desk the entire day, every day. The very idea of yard work — or even, basically, the idea of moving and lifting things and being active feels both exciting and necessary.

And then, after my first attempt every single year, I remember: I am a weakling who sits at his desk the entire day, every day, and I can manage maybe an hour, two tops, of active yard work before I want to take a break for the rest of the day. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, almost; I could be uprooting trees, weeding, or waving the weed wacker around like there’s no tomorrow; after an hour or two, I feel like I need a sitdown and preferably one that’ll last quite some time, if given the opportunity.

It’s a reminder of how inactive I am for the majority of my time, and underscores the mild guilt I feel that I don’t follow through on my multiple promises to myself to head back to the gym, or even just go outside on more walks. (To be fair; that’s far easier in the summer, when the weather is less determined to make you close the windows and not even look outside without shivering.) For all that I might think that I’m in relatively good condition, considering, that’s a thought that comes from the same place that believes that I still have the same body that I did 10 years ago, which is also the same place that suggests that maybe a doughnut isn’t the worst idea because I probably deserve a treat.

Despite this, despite the experience every year, I still try when the weather gets better. I still think for a brief moment, maybe this is my time to properly get active, this will be a good start, and I still put in the effort for those one or two hours before I collapse in sweat and regret. While the best ending to this story would be remembering to actually rejoin the gym and start working out again, I think that the fact that I try every single year is a decent runner-up, at least in the short term. When I get too jaded and achey to even think I’m capable, that’s when I should really start worrying.

One of the surreal things about being sick for three days and, more importantly, letting myself be sick for those three days — by which I mean, not trying to just keep my head down and pretend that everything is normal even though it’s clearly untrue, as I have developed the unfortunate tendency to do, because being a workaholic is a bad thing — was coming back to everything afterwards and seeing just how many fucking emails had accumulated in my absence. We’re talking hundreds, easily.

It goes without saying, I suspect, that the vast majority of them weren’t something I necessarily needed nor wanted to read. It’s a weird fluke of my job that I get added to so many mailing lists and promotional mailings in addition to things that I might, at some point, have intentionally signed on for only to forget doing so, that I get upwards of 10 emails per hour during daylight hours as a baseline; that I’ve got work email and personal email addresses also means that I get a lot of these mailings and promo emails multiple times even before they get sent to the same address multiple times — occasionally, with “FWD” or “RE” added to the subject line, in case either tricks me into opening them — just to complicate matters.

I think, sometimes, about the first time I got internet access, back when I was in art school and they set one up for each of the students. It was a nearly-impossible-to-remember address, based around our student metriculation numbers, so it’s not like we’d have been able to easily share it with anyone even if we knew anyone else besides friends we saw everyday anyway with emails of their own. Nonetheless, we’d check our email inboxes every day, once a day or so, sitting there through the soundtrack of dial-up internet — we had to log-in and dial-up each session as individual students — and then the slow load of Outlook or whatever we were using at the time.

Each time, we’d wait however long it took, excited and expectant that something would have happened, that some message would be waiting there. And each time, we’d be wrong. What a world, to go from that to a day where I delete more than three hundred messages without a thought, confident that none of them were written by people who are even fully aware of who I actually am.

I have a bag of old family photos, and I genuinely don’t remember where they came from. When I say “a bag,” I mean it — it’s a plastic bag that looks like it’s seen better days, and everything in it is loose and looking as if it was just stuffed in there with no rhyme or reason. The contents are a mix of photos from around 90 years ago through, maybe, the turn of the century…? No, wait, a few just after I moved to the United States, so that would be the early 2000s. It’s a heady, quietly awe-inspiring thing to thumb through, seeing the sweep of time go back and forth as I pick through each picture: here’s my grandmother when she was younger than me, getting married; there’s my dad as a baby, so it must be 1941; now my dad is getting married and he looks like a teenager; there’s my sister as a baby; there’s me; and so on.

I don’t often leaf through the bag, because… well, who has time to do that, usually? But an upcoming family occasion had people asking if I had particular photos, so I found the bag and looked through it and realized that I’d utterly forgotten that it isn’t just filled with photos, but all kinds of correspondence and paperwork that clearly belonged to my grandmother at some point. There are telegrams from her husband when he was in the service for World War II, as well as a letter from the government that he’d been killed in action, and a letter from Buckingham Palace sending condolences. Birth certificates from multiple generations of my family on my dad’s side. A whole history of paperwork that I’d entirely forgotten existed, all in this shitty old plastic bag.

It struck me, after going through the bag, that I suddenly wanted to print everything in the world out and put it in bags and boxes and leave it there for people to find years later. I have files and PDFs and JPGs and everything on laptops and devices and CDRs and in the cloud and and and, sure, but it feels like all of those things have a barrier to entry that this bag just doesn’t. Like these days, we’re hiding everything away, but history is just right there in that bag to be discovered.

The point where I realized I was properly sick was early on Saturday morning when it dawned on me that I didn’t have a headache, as such — instead, it was that I could specifically feel an ache in different parts of my skull: my cheekbones were sore, for example, as were my teeth. The back of my skull, where it met my spine.

The thing is, that wasn’t a particularly new sensation for me; as soon as I realized that’s what it felt like, I also realized that the odd specificity of pain actually wasn’t that odd for me — or, perhaps, not that unusual. That’s what it feels like for me when I get really sick, and it’s the sign that I’m not just feeling rundown or a little “under the weather,” or anything similar. It’s when I can separate a dull general ache into multiple simultaneous pains (that are usually accompanied by something else happening elsewhere in my body; this past weekend, a dizziness and general foggy-headedness that wouldn’t shift, and a scratchy throat) that I know that I’m in trouble.

And, sure enough, this past weekend, I was in trouble. I ended up laid out in bed entirely on Saturday and most of Sunday, and then taking Monday off as well because I wasn’t back up to fighting speed just yet. I felt betrayed by my body, or whatever sickness was invading it: it’s not uncommon, sadly, for me to keep it together when I’m not feeling great during the workweek, only to fall sick on the weekend, but to so entirely lose track of my entire time off to the point where I couldn’t get out of bed at all? That just felt unnecessary.

To make matters worse, there had been things I had wanted to do — not even fully-considered-plans, but just vague, seemingly-simple things like it was going to be sunny and warm and because of work, I hadn’t really left the house in a few days and I just wanted to walk around outside thank you very much. But, instead, I was left not thinking clearly, watching the fourth season of The West Wing on HBO Max, because that was all I felt like I could handle at that moment.

And throughout the whole thing, I could feel individual teeth ache, throbbing in time with my fucking cheekbones.

On the one hand, I love the fact that we are all — to use the terminology of both modfather Paul Weller and comics icon Steve Ditko — Changing Men (and Women, and Non-Binary Folk). There’s something comforting to me about the fact that we’re not tied to one particular definition or even identity if we don’t want to be, and the self-actualization implicit in that reality is also a comfort, in its own way; we get to make our own realities to a certain degree, and the change implicit in that is evidence of a particularly good thing.

On the other, I am more than slightly unnerved about my recent discovery that my bellybutton has, at some point in my life, changed from being an innie to an outtie, and I didn’t even realize when it happened.

Look, I’m all too aware that my body is becoming that of not just any middle aged man, but my fact when he was in his mid-to-late 40s; my stomach is swelling, and I’m not doing anywhere near the right amount of exercise to take care of that. (I will, I promise, just not right now; I have a blog post to finish, after all.) And it’s possible that my increasing width around the midriff is what’s changed the polarity of my bellybutton. Still, there’s something… unexpected about it.

It’s not as if I’ve ever placed too much value on the innie or the outtie as a meaningful thing in any manner; it’s not something that defines you as an introvert or an extrovert, or any similar thing as much as that would be a fun connection. Nonetheless, catching sight of my belly the other day and going, that doesn’t look right was one of those moments where your brain just takes a brief moment to click and your thoughts start to veer off into another direction, entirely unexpectedly. I thought I knew what I looked like; turns out, I didn’t, not entirely.

So: I’m not who I thought I was. Part of me is different, and I’m just sitting here thinking, I’m okay with that, really while being just a little unsettled as well. In the strangest way, that in itself feels somewhat fitting. After all, what is change, if not an inability to stick in one fixed form? It’s ambiguity itself made into action, so perhaps I can have some ambiguity in how I feel about it, as well.

And then I realized that I’d entirely fucked my sleep cycle.

To be fair, I was aware in the back of my head it was a possibility. During the last weekend of March, I was working a genuinely insane schedule, overseeing and editing livestreams and written posts from two different conventions in two different time zones, both of which were — because of the way the U.S. works and where I live — starting early in the morning. As a result, I was waking up somewhere between 5 and 5:30 every morning and then having to get up pretty immediately because I needed to be at work around 6am. This, after working two other conventions earlier in the month, both of which also had me up earlier than usual. And, it turns out, after all of that, your body just decides that’s the new norm.

Or, at least, my body did.

The last night of the four-day-stretch, my mind was racing through a combination of extended exhaustion and over-exertion; it’s a relatively common state for me when I attend comic conventions, but this was a little different because I hadn’t actually traveled anywhere despite working two shows at once — I was still at home, dealing with all the regular home stuff in addition to the shows. (For example, I stepped away from work in the early evening on the last day, but not to rest: I had to do a grocery run, and then make sure the trash was on the curb for the next morning.) I was lying in bed, thinking to myself, at least I get to sleep in tomorrow. And then it was 4:57am and I was just entirely awake. The day after, I did manage to sleep in… until 5:20-something.

Worst, my first impulse was still to get up and start working. I didn’t, as much as I tried to justify it to myself. (Well, you’re already awake, and you do have a lot to do…) But as I laid in bed, trying and failing to simply wish myself asleep again, I thought to myself that things were, if not easier, then at least more restful when I was younger and my body more elastic as to be able to shrug this kind of thing off more easily.