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I am curiously protective of my sleep cycle, I think to myself occasionally, although it strikes me that perhaps two different ends of that sentence are wrong.

What I actually mean is that I find myself particularly thrown off when I don’t keep to the traditional rhythms of sleep that I’ve built across the past few years: in bed somewhere between 10 and 11, asleep somewhere around 11, and waking up somewhere between 5 and 6. Sure, there are occasional mild variations to that — sometimes I’ll be tired and asleep earlier, there are times I wake up closer to 4:30 or 6:30, depending — but, for the most part, that’s how I sleep. It’s what works for me.

Somehow, this past month has broken that a little. I’m not entirely sure how, or why. I’ve been sleeping later multiple times, sleeping late, even, on a couple of occasions. (By which I mean, I have to get up around 7 in order to eat and take care of the animals before work; a couple times, I’ve woken up closer to 7:30, panicked.) And then, there was the odd night of insomnia.

I use the term insomnia too easily; it’s my go-to if I just have a bad night of sleep, as in, “I woke up at 1 and couldn’t sleep for 30 minutes, it was just insomnia.” I know it’s not really the case, but I love a bit of shorthand. What happened at the start of the month, though, felt like actual insomnia, summoned Beetlejuice-style by accident: a night where I just… couldn’t fall asleep.

My mind wasn’t racing, or filled with intrusive or looping thoughts; I was, if anything, very calm and clear-headed. My body was heavy with actual exhaustion, and I felt “sleepy,” as it usually goes… but I just laid there, unable to actually sleep, until almost 5am. I have no idea what happened, but I’m in no rush to go through anything like that again.

The experience has stuck with me ever since, unnerving me. It’s as if it was foreshadowing something that I can’t see waiting just around the corner: What if I’m just going to have a year of not sleeping? What if 2024 is going to be a year of it feeling like 3:15 in the morning, all the time? What then?

As I type this, I have just realized that the tingling I’ve had in my fingers since this morning, when I ventured out into a blizzard to get weekend snacks — don’t ask, it wasn’t my idea — is, in fact, more than likely frostbite.

It’s an odd realization, not least of all because there’s a significant portion of my brain that’s arguing against the idea for all manner of reasons: I wasn’t outside for that long and It wasn’t really that cold, surely and As soon as I got home, even though I’d lost the feeling in my fingers, I ran them under hot water, so why shouldn’t they be okay, or even But my right hand is fine, why is my left hand still feeling a little numb and tingly, that’s ridiculous that it’s only one hand?

The real reason I think part of my brain refuses to accept it is far less logical than even those (admittedly, very illogical) thoughts: simply, part of my brain refuses to believe that frostbite is real, in some very basic way. It’s like scurvy, something else that I know objectively is real, but somehow still feel as if it’s an entirely fictional thing, made up by people who wanted to make both history and pirates seem more interesting by implication.

As a result, me having frostbite just feels… almost impossible? Or, at least, severely unlikely; it’s as if I’d have caught the Black Plague or some science-fiction ailment that the real world has yet to encounter. Never mind the tingling in the fingers, or the idea that I should probably put my hand in warm water for 15 minutes every now and then to try and raise the temperature periodically for the next day or so. Simply the very idea that I could have frostbite at all feels so ridiculous as to be unworthy of further consideration.

If and when I lose my fingers to this, I’ll keep you posted on how extensive my disbelief continues to be.

I was thinking, recently, about how voracious my sketchbook-keeping was when I was younger. There were multiple reasons why that would have been the case — the primary being that I was in art school and, you know, sketchbooks are kind of important for that whole kind of thing — but nonetheless, I would eagerly, happily, endlessly work in my sketchbooks, keeping multiple at any one time and having different purposes for each of them: one was a mark-making sketchbook, one was a diary of sorts (one that turned into a diary comic, once the influence of Eddie Campbell had settled in fully), and so on. This was my primary way of passing the time, for a number of years: just… recording the world in some inexplicable, unconscious manner.

(It helped that, very early in my art school career, I came across books in the library that explored in detail the sketchbooks of Paul Klee, Egon Schiele, and Gustav Klimt, who in a very real way were as influential to me because of their sketchbook approach than for the “finished art” they produced that is more familiar and celebrated.)

When I was having this train of thought, I marveled at my productivity of the era with no small amount of jealousy: where did this energy come from, I asked myself, and where did it go? Is it really just that I’m three decades older? And then I realized: all of this was in the pre-Internet era, a thought that made me impossibly glad that I’d gone to school when I had. I know myself too well to pretend that I wouldn’t have found excuses to spend far too much time fucking around online if I’d had the chance back in the day. If I’d had the internet available to me when I was a student — with all its rabbit holes and dark alleys and all of its everything right there at the touch of a button — I can’t imagine I would have gotten anything of any note done at all.

It’s a strange thought to think of so much of my life being, essentially, “pre-internet,” given how ubiquitous it is today, but… half of my life was spent that way, and it might have been so much better because of that. What a weird, sobering thought to start the year I turn 50 with.

Like, I suspect, many people of my generation, I’ve had many email addresses in my time; I’ve gone from Hotmail to Yahoo to Gmail, with stops at other destinations in between for any number of reasons. (Not least of which being different jobs asking me to use their domain-centric addresses; I’m pretty sure all but my current one is defunct by now, which is something that I think about from time to time: addresses that just cease to exist, routes to communicate that are just destroyed entirely.)

I was thinking about these past email addresses the other day, and specifically the fact that I purposefully didn’t use my actual name in any of the addresses for a number of years; I used nicknames, or arcane alternate identifiers that seemed witty in the short term. “LegionOfGrim” went one, which sounds all so goth when looking back but was, originally, intended as a reference to the Legion of Super-Heroes and the fact that I had the nickname “Grim,” because of a friend’s girlfriend and her inability to pronounce my name any other way. “FanboyRampage” went another, named after my blog of the period.

Is this an artifact of a bygone age, when we were all exploring the internet for the first time and trying to figure out what the rules were? It feels like that, but maybe I’m misremembering, or being too kind to myself to spare the blushes of a pretentious former art student who knew no better. Was there really an era when we didn’t want to put our true selves out there so nakedly, in case we revealed too much by accident?

Almost all of those early email accounts are, I suspect, all lost to the ages now; I haven’t checked them in years (decades!) and I’m not sure I could even access them if I wanted to. I like the idea that some still exist, though; time capsules of the me that I was at that point, and all the friends and relationships I had at the time.

Every year, it surprises me how quickly the holidays end. It’s an American thing, really; the idea that you do New Year’s Day and then, bam, you’re back to work immediately afterwards. I grew up in a country where we had the good manners and laziness to agree that you need at least a day after that to get used to the idea of getting back to normal, and preferably even more time if the New Year falls anywhere close to a weekend. “The holidays” when I was a wee kid were a two week period surrounding Christmas and New Year, and that’s just stuck in my brain as the accepted period ever since. Of course it’s two weeks: one for each of the holidays. Obviously.

It was, I think, my… first US holiday season that I realized things worked differently here. Either the first or second year after I got married, I remember we spent Christmas with her family and New Year back at home. I was back in the office on January 2, and I thought it was an unusual thing, something I commented on to other people in the office: can you believe that we have to work on the second day of the year I asked, and every single person said, “Yes, I can, that’s what we do here, what is wrong with you?” or some variation.

It was maybe the year after that when I had to work the day after Christmas and that just felt wrong on a molecular level. That’s still a holiday! It’s Boxing Day! It’s a thing, I believed (and still believe). Again, the rest of the United States didn’t share my outrage.

Maybe this is best; maybe it’s good that we move on so quickly, and don’t dwell on the fact that we’re still in the official 12 Days of Christmas. (They last until January 4, because they start on Christmas Eve, in case you didn’t know.) It’s a new year, after all, and a new beginning for those who like to think that way. Let the holidays fade into the background quickly while we all turn our attentions to what’s next. Well, except for those of us who’re grumbling about the fact that we’ve not even taken the tree down yet and what the fuck.

I had a plan, at the very very start of this year, that this would be a year when I’d start drawing again. It was very much a “plan” that I liked in theory more than practice, given that it lasted just one day before I abandoned it — I meant well, what can I say? — but it was something born of a real desire to do something creative for myself throughout the year.

This is, of course, also the year when this website kept failing, for reasons that were technical and beyond my understanding, never. Ind my control; as a result, the site was down for a few weeks a couple of times, and then the entire month of October. That last one was the one that really mattered to me, because it was the one that lasted and the one where I stopped writing here for an appreciable amount of time… and when I realized that this was the “something creative for myself” all along.

I’ve been thinking about my history with writing over the past few months; the loose-leaf sheets when I was a student that were versions of what I’d do here decades later, the zines I made when I was doing my Master’s degree, the reports and newsletters I wrote for various jobs and purposes in the years after that. I’ve been writing pretty continuously for more than a quarter century at this point, shifting (while in art school, ironically) from visual communication to written and training my brain to get better at that even when I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing at the time. Writing is my process now. It’s what I do.

With that in mind, I thought that perhaps my 2024 plan should be to get a notebook for writing in. That doesn’t feel right, though; now, if I’m writing for myself, I want to do it here. When I didn’t have that option for a month, I felt the loss. Now that everything is back to normal, I want to take advantage as best I can… at least until my next personal retrospective changes my mind all over again, I guess.

…I really should draw more, nonetheless.

I’m not the best at packing for a trip, and that was especially true for the UK trip; at three weeks — well, just under — it was the longest trip I’d taken since, maybe, I was traveling to the States for months at a time before I moved here more than 20 years ago. I was out of practice, clearly, and I basically threw a bunch of stuff in the suitcase and hoped for the best.

What this meant in practice was that I ended up realizing halfway through the trip that I’d never noticed the number of holes in my jeans. And really, it was the holes in the crotch that were the problem; it’s not that I was wearing assless chaps, per se, but I was closer than anyone who’d feel comfortable with. They were so bad, in fact, that as soon as I realized their state, I decided to get rid of them. Why bring trash with me, after all?

The thing is, that wasn’t how it felt when I left the jeans behind. Perhaps it was the state of mind I was in at the time — tired, lonely, homesick — or maybe something else, but I remember very clearly the sense of sacrifice. Not in the way of, “I’m sacrificing something by leaving these behind,” but the idea of the jeans being a sacrifice to some unknown force that the rest of the trip would go quickly, and well, and that I’d be home again before too long.

I’m tempted to say it worked, but who can say? For all we know, the rest would have gone entirely the same had I carried the holey jeans with me. I prefer to think that wouldn’t have been the case, though; I like to believe in a world where magic like this exists, and it’s as simple as giving up a pair of jeans for the greater good. Magic that everyone can do.

Longtime readers of this site will remember that, back when I freelanced for THR, I made graphics for their newsletter every Friday; I used to post them here after a couple weeks, both for safekeeping/posterity, and also because there were often some that I liked, despite the speed at which they were produced.

Now that I’m at Popverse, I don’t really have the same need or opportunity to create images, although very occasionally, I’ve made edits to header images when necessary. It’s uncommon, but every now and then, when we need to have a “new” image for a story but there aren’t that many source images to choose from… so we have to come up with something new. They’re pretty understated, nothing that would really draw too much attention to themselves, but still be relatively aesthetically pleasing.

I mention all of this, because I’m a subscriber to Chip Zdarsky’s newsletter. You know, former Daredevil writer Chip Zdarsky. And in a recent newsletter, he clearly grabbed an image of the TV Daredevil from Google without thinking about it — and it was something I’d done for Popverse a few months back.

I take this as an unexpected compliment for my work, and a nice surprise to see first thing in the morning one day. Hey, if Chip Zdarsky thought it was good enough to use…!

It feels as if winter arrived overnight, when I wasn’t paying attention. I remember arriving back in the US in mid-November and feeling, as much as anything, surprised that it wasn’t colder and darker. Certainly, the days immediately following my return seemed surprisingly sunny, even with a crispness in the air. It added to my sense of disorientation, every time I stepped outside the house.

And then, unexpectedly suddenly, I was waking up to see frost on the roofs of the houses across the street, and freezing fog hiding everything past the end of the block. The air outside the bedclothes felt sharp and uninviting, and I started making the traditional winter deals with myself after waking up in the morning: I know I probably need to get up to piss, but if I get to stay under the warm covers, then I’ll do anything, I promise…

As much as it felt like the weather was cycling through the same catch-up routine I was moving through — shit, it’s almost December already, we’re supposed to have done stuff by now— there was a distinct sense of comfort in the change, as if everything was finally settling into some kind of place, some semblance of order, after literal months of upheaval and quiet chaos. I’d gone weeks (months!) of exploring new things and moving through new places, and finally I’d arrived somewhere where I knew the emotional landmarks and furniture.

This might just be me, of course, this happiness and cozy affection for the start of winter, with the shorter days and the colder weather. I’ve often claimed it’s because I’m an October baby and therefore it’s my time, but that’s as likely superstition and nothing more. Whatever the reason, as the weather collapses down into freezing temperatures and the need for sweaters, hats, and heavy jackets, I’m feeling grateful and comfortable to feel at home for the first time in too long.

I remember very clearly a point when I was a kid — a teenager really, probably 14 or 15 — and impatiently ready for Christmas; I kept a diary at the time, because of course I did, and it was full of exactly the kind of dull things that you’d expect me at that age to be writing about, even if I (of course) felt very passionately about it all at the time. The reason I’m telling you this, though, was that I have a shockingly clear memory of it turning December and my starting to count down to Christmas Day, feeling that it was impossibly far away at 24 days, 23, 22, and so on. How could it ever arrive, when it was still 20 days away.?

Compare that with this year, when someone pointed out at the end of last month that Christmas was just four weeks away, and I broke out in the emotional equivalent of a cold sweat, wondering how it could be so close already. I hadn’t even planned out what gifts I was going to get everybody just yet…!

I don’t know if this is purely an aging thing, or if this year in particular has made me curiously aware of how quickly time passes. Certainly, the anxiety over not having planned everyone’s presents feels entirely new; I can remember going shopping the weekend before Christmas last year with some gifts still to get and feeling utterly fine about it, for example. Now, though, I feel as if I’m playing with fire and convinced that something will happen to distract me and leave me on Christmas Eve realizing that I’ve forgotten something important.

If there’s an upside to this, it’s that my Season of Caution might result in me finishing all my yuletide chores early enough to allow me to enjoy the rest of December in a holiday haze. Alternately, I might end up just being far too conscious of the rushed passing of time to enjoy anything. It’s beginning to look a lot like… middle age, I guess.