Category: Uncategorized

The cat had entirely, utterly disappeared. There were three of us looking for him, running through the three-level house and checking all the rooms as quickly as we could, and he was nowhere to be found.

We were preparing for an inspection of the house by the landlords, and already relatively excited, by which I mean stressed and exhausted; although we were pretty confident that everything would be fine — we take really good care of this house! We make small repairs ourselves, without complaint! —there was just a feeling of, listen, you never know when things can go south unexpectedly, that made us nervous. Both Chloe and I have become suspicious of relying on good feelings and good fortune over the past year or so.

With the landlords due in thirty minutes or so, the plan was for her mom, visiting from out of town, to take the cats during the inspection to ensure an orderliness and calm that wouldn’t otherwise happen; but one of the cats had utterly vanished. He’d been around for a first attempt to go in a crate to be carried out, but he’d resisted and run upstairs; we watched him go… but he was nowhere to be found upstairs. Nor, it turned out, was he downstairs, either.

We searched the house maybe four, five times with no luck. He was simply gone, but that was impossible, too — he couldn’t get outside because doors and windows were shut. Things had reached the point where we were starting to find it simultaneously funny and genuinely insane-making; how can a cat disappear so completely? Did he even exist in the first place, or have we been hallucinating him all these years? Was this the end of a cat version of Fight Club? All the while, the clock is ticking down and the landlords’ arrival is getting closer.

Reality was restored when he was discovered inside a box spring, having burrowed himself in there at some point without anyone noticing. The inspection went well, and all was good in the world, but for the rest of the day, I kept remembering what it felt like when he was simply nowhere, as impossible as it was.

As has become de rigueur in recent years, there’s been no shortage of shitty reality television being used as decompression material for our overworked brains in the last few weeks. After the thinking-too-hard workday, I’ve developed an almost-need for a certain level of schlock to marinate in before sleep, before returning to the grind the next day. All of which is to say, I’ve very much been appreciating the current Golden Age of Camp Reality I think television has entered in the last couple of years.

The joy of streaming means that, currently, Chloe and I can enjoy episodes of Love Island Australia, RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars, Legendary, or Below Deck shows — that’s shows plural, not episodes, I point out, because as I write, both Below Deck: Down Under and Below Deck: Sailing Yacht are running new episodes simultaneously, which is crazy to me — in addition to any new discovery that we might make. It’s a joy, and a necessary mental balm, to have these pieces of trash to marinate in while trying to slow our brains down from that day’s work. It’s the most restorative viewing I could imagine at this point.

This sounds like sarcasm, but it’s not, I promise; there really is something impossibly relaxing about enjoying the histrionics and cliches that you can almost guarantee from any one of these shows, not to mention the schadenfreude of being able to look at almost any single one of the people onscreen and go, well, at least I’m not as bad as all that.

(If there is one thing in reality shows that I genuinely love more than anything else, it’s reality shows where everyone is over the top and overly emotional with the exception of one person, who gets to basically watch everything unfold and then make snarky commentary to the camera after the fact; it’s the ultimate audience stand-in, and when done well, it’s irresistible.)

Occasionally, I stop and think to myself that I should, perhaps, be reading more books, watching more highbrow cinema, and spending my decompressing time in more productive ways. And then I hear the low energy techno throb of the Love Island theme and such thoughts get pushed to the back of my head as I wonder whether Mitch and Tina will get it together tonight after all.

It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?

I knew in advance that May was going to be a crunch time, in terms of workload; it was the month when my new weekly contract with Wired kicked in — I’m back at Wired on a regular basis! Who saw that coming? — as well as the launch month for ReedPop’s new Popverse site, which I’m contributing pretty heavily to, and I also had deadlines elsewhere on top of that. As the month approached, I was well aware that it would be one where I’d be juggling more than usual at least in the early days, and so would have to keep my head down until I felt confident that I could handle and schedule everything appropriately.

It basically took me the month to feel confident and comfortable about that. Even now, I’m not sure that I’m necessarily doing it right.

This site, sadly, was the one that suffered; what was originally meant to be just a few days of posting images instead of writing became a full month out of necessity, as my head was full of other things that needed done instead. There were even times when I wondered if I should drop my twice-weekly comics newsletter, just because I wasn’t sure if I had time to do it properly. (I’m not going to, upon reflection; I feel like it’s something I need for myself, especially in the midst of all this other freelance work.)

So: it’s been a long time, I shouldn’t have left you without, uh, some blog posts to step to, I guess…?

I’m actually writing this in advance, at the end of May, to try and build a buffer of posts so that I don’t run aground here again anytime soon. It might seem otherwise at times, but this space is important to me, and I don’t want to lose it. Especially as I ramp up the writing I get paid for again, this free form meandering room feels even more important than ever. Sorry for my silence; I’ll try to be better moving forward, I promise.

I’ve been thinking a lot about comic book conventions recently. Thanks to COVID and lockdown and, I admit, my work situation, it’s been a few years since I’ve been able to participate in the madness and anxiety that is a big convention, and I’ve found that I am increasingly missing it… and yet, at the same time, the idea of returning to one also fills me with its own sense of anxiety and nervousness.

Prior to the world closing down, conventions were part of my annual rhythm. I’d make it to at least two a year, covering both San Diego Comic-Con and New York Comic Con for work. (In 2019, I also did Star Wars Celebration in Chicago and CCXP in São Paulo, Brazil; even just thinking about doing four in one year feels alien to me, now.) The summer wouldn’t feel complete without the visit to Southern California and the compressed socializing that came with the show, and the fall wouldn’t begin without the cross country trip to the East Coast and the overstuffed city that wouldn’t sleep.

I have wonderful memories associated with both shows, and important ones, too; in both cases, I feel like those shows — as packed as they inevitably were, as filled with work and socializing in such a compressed timeframe — gave me space to emotionally process necessary things in a way that was otherwise unavailable to me.

And they’ve been gone for the last few years.

This year, I’m assuming, they’ll be back and it’s more than likely that I’ll be attending at least one again. (None of my current employers have asked directly, but still.) I’m somewhere between being excited at returning, but nervous, too; I’m older now, and out of practice, after all, never mind the pandemic and the masks of it all. It’s a different world, and a different me. Will I still fit in, in that new convention reality?

I’m reading prose again, which is nice. After an impressive January — a prose book a week! I felt very accomplished! — my prose reading trailed off again as evening exhaustion and the demands of a job that requires a lot of comic reading took ahold once again. It wasn’t quite as overwhelming as the past couple of years when my prose reading fell through the floor, but it wasn’t something that I felt particularly proud of, either. After all, as the song goes: here’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more.

(I feel bad for quoting the Smiths, but it’s a fun line, dammit.)

I fell out of the habit of prose reading, I realize, because of COVID and lockdown; it closed the libraries for anything other than pre-scheduled pick-ups of online orders that took weeks, if not months, to arrive, and eventually I just gave up in response. Not only wasn’t I really into the idea of planning out my reading habits so far in advance, the lack of in-library browsing made it difficult for me to know what I’d want to be reading anyway. This is another reason why I love bookstore browsing, which I’m pretty sure I’ve written about before.

Libraries are open again now, thankfully, and with it the ability to browse new releases and see what’s worth reading again. Of course, the book I flew through this weekend — reading the whole thing in one day, practically — wasn’t a browsed discovery, but something I’ve been looking forward to since learning about it: Blood Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s not that Fury Road is even one of my favorite movies as much as it’s one with a ridiculous behind-the-scenes story, and I’m a sucker for a well-done oral history of anything interesting. No wonder I finished it so quickly.

Flushed with this success, I find myself excited to keep going: what else can I read, where am I going to go next? I’m only a couple of library visits away from my next great adventure.

I’ve been revisiting comics from my youth, again. This time, it’s a significant chunk of writer John Smith’s 2000 AD work, which I eagerly and impatiently followed through the late 1980s and early 1990s; he wrote a number of different things for the anthology during that time, both of his own creation — Tyranny Rex, Indigo Prime, Revere, Firekind, Devlin Waugh — and picking up part-time work on other people’s characters and strips. He did some Judge Dredd, a little bit of Rogue Trooper, and even a Robo Hunter at some point, if I remember correctly.

I’m telling you this not to be a fanboy — I think I’ve already established those bona fides simply by being able to list all those strips without having to reference anything in advance, let’s be honest — but to point out that Smith was someone who made a point to keep busy on a number of different projects during this time, with a number of different attitudes on display in each of them. There wasn’t just one “John Smith” flavor, if that makes sense.

And yet, I always knew when Smith was writing something, even as a teen who wasn’t the most adept at understanding the nuances of author’s tics or how to identify recurring themes and obsessions to identify a creator. Revisiting his work en masse as I have been, I realize what clued me in was, of all things, Smith’s language, and the ways in which he’d write things in such a way to be… emotionally centered, rather than practically so, if that makes sense…?

Looking at it today, I can recognize that Smith was using techniques he’d lifted from contemporary poets and literary prose in how he approached language; there would be blocks of purple prose, or sentences in fragments to establish a mood or a feeling, all of which felt brand new and exciting to the me I was back then. I feel as if, in his way, Smith opened up a space in my brain for an appreciation of non-linear writing, and more experimental writing, just by being in that Judge Dredd comic when I was at the right age to learn. I’m forever grateful for that.

Despite the weather shitshow that Portland has seemed intent on delivering lately — it’s April, why are we having to deal with snow showers and the temperature dropping below freezing seemingly every night? — it is, nonetheless, still edging towards summer, and my body is clearly preparing for this eventuality by refusing to keep me asleep past 5:45am.

This isn’t the worst thing in the world, I know; at the very least, I’ve been able to see some genuinely beautiful sunrises, as the sky shifts through colors in order to find the right setting for the day, all soundtracked by insistent and excited birdsong. There’s something about that being the start to your day that feels refreshing and invigorating, as if the world is waking up with you and you’re connected with something larger than yourself. I’m not complaining about that part of it.

I’m also not complaining about the opportunity waking up early has afforded me to both catch up on reading and, in a couple of cases, catch up on or get ahead of writing deadlines. There’s been a lot going on in the last few weeks, and even just that extra hour or so has proven to be a welcome godsend of quiet and brain space that’s been impossibly useful.

No, what I’m complaining about is the price my early wake-ups have taken from me. Now, no matter what, I am entirely done with the day by 10 o’clock at night; 10:30 at the latest. I don’t just mean that I’m sleepy, although I am; I mean that my body just basically makes the choice for me that the day is over, and I realize that I have maybe half an hour to get into bed before I’m out like a light.

It’s not as if I’ve ever really been a night owl, but this feels like next level tiredness, and a reminder that I’m that little bit closer to 50 every single day. Only old people are this tired at night, I think to myself as I start wrapping things up at 9:30 in the evening, and that’s just what I am, now.

Every single year without exception, tax time stresses me out. It’s something I struggle through from the moment I start thinking about taxes — usually somewhere in mid-December, because the year’s ending and oh boy I should start putting together that expenses list again — to the moment everything is filed and I’ve put the checks in the mail. (Yes, I pay the majority of things online; for some reason, though, I always pay Portland’s Arts Tax with a check. It’s the one thing I use my checks for, still. That’s not a joke; literally the last time I used my checkbook was this time last year, to write a check for Arts Tax.)

The stress surrounding taxes comes in waves, in different flavors. Gathering together all the information I need in the first place, and stressing simultaneously about how little money I made in any year and how much of it I spent on things that are literally unavoidable, like rent and groceries. (Honestly, my discretionary spending is shockingly low; I just can’t afford it.) Wondering if I’ve missed some expense, some information that would change all the math. Checking where all my 10-99 forms have gone. (One year, I’ll remember to store them all in one place as they arrive, I promise.)

And then there’s the anxious wait for my CPA to tell me how bad things are, and the feeling of, welp, I guess I didn’t want to save any money after all when I actually get the information back. I didn’t use an accountant for many years, and then the first year that I did, he told me that I’d been missing out on a lot of possible benefits I could have claimed, but also that I’d been failing to pay a freelance tax for years; after that, having a tax guy became a must.

I’ve mailed everything off for the year as I write. But even now, the stress isn’t entirely over: what if this is the year I get audited? What if there’s a mistake in there I didn’t catch? Surely there’s some way I could do this better? Maybe a month from now, I’ll be able to think of something else again.

In our search for appropriately mindless, entertaining post-work, post-getting kid in bed nighttime viewing, we’ve arrived at binging seasons of the dearly-departed America’s Next Top Model, and, man. Let me tell you.

How we ended up here was, admittedly, somewhat skewed. A couple of weeks ago, there was an article somewhere on the internet — I saw it excerpted at length on Twitter, and unfortunately can’t remember where it actually came from; Insider, maybe? — that purported to be an expose of just how shittily the show had been run, how poorly it treated everyone involved aside from the show’s host and creator Tyra Banks, and just generally the way in which ANTM was, in fact, the worst of reality television. Chloe and I saw that and thought, as you do, we should watch old seasons.

(I’d say, don’t judge, but it’s fine; you probably should.)

Here’s the thing: I remember, vaguely, watching some of the show when it was airing — I love reality TV, after all — but I was never really a fan, for whatever reason. It seemed over the top, but fine if you liked that kind of thing, if that doesn’t seem too dismissive. Dear reader, I was so, so wrong. America’s Next Top Model is a whole special level of trash television.

It’s not that it’s tacky, although it is, nor that it’s geared towards generating the most amount of interpersonal drama possible between its contestants, even though that’s also the case. (There’s definitely a line to be drawn between the editing manipulation here and the far more successful evolution of the same ideas on something like Below Deck.) It’s not even the shocking ego on display from Tyra Banks, and the way in which everyone else on the show seeks to stroke that ego, shamelessly, for attention and approval, even though, wooooooooooo, that is shocking and hilarious at the same time.

More than anything for me, it’s how cheap the show feels, on every level. Even in the latter seasons when it’s been a hit for more than a decade and produced international spin-offs, Top Model has the air of a show being produced on a shoestring by people promising that, as soon as the check clears, everyone will get paid, really. The tension between the self-declared glamor of the show and the clearly limited budget and effort spent on bringing said show to the screen is, repeatedly, breathtaking and hilarious. It’s impossible to look away from.

I couldn’t not tell you why this happens to be the case, but in the last few days I’ve found myself wanting to write something entirely different from what I normally do; I don’t know if it’s simply needing to take a mental break, or wanting to stretch new muscles or some combination of the two, but it’s been a running theme in my head recently.

Specifically, I’ve wondered what it would be like to write guides to everyday tasks. You know the kinds of things: step-by-step methodologies to things that we all do every day without even really thinking about it, to help someone less skilled in whatever task get better at it. Every morning, as I make tea for myself and Chloe, I think to myself, I wonder what it would be like to write a guide to making a good cup of tea.

Of course, it’s the kind of idea doomed to failure; I couldn’t write something entirely dryly without breaking character, I’m pretty sure — nor, to be honest, something that I’d want to not break character at least once — but also, it’s something that I suspect I’d lose interest in quickly because there are inevitably going to be other things demanding my attention that, you know, pay my bills, and that’s something that tends to win out in the competition for my affections. (I’m so mercenary.)

And yet. And yet.

I want to write something like, if only there were more hours in the day, but the honest fact is, if there were more hours in the day, it would be great to use them on things that don’t involve me sitting in front of a computer or an iPad. What I really mean, I think, is that I occasionally (more than occasionally) wish there was more space in my brain to do things that remind me that writing was a hobby and one I loved, before writing became my job. Even if it means writing instructions for someone to make a cup of tea.