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Life During Sicktime

I’m  unsure if I ever shared the story about being told that I had cancer here before — I didn’t, it was a pretty severe misdiagnosis — but it’s something I thought about a bunch back when I was sick a couple of weeks ago, which prosays something about where my head was at during that plague week.

It wasn’t just that I was sick, again, after having been similarly sick a month earlier, although that was as exhausting and, honestly, as depressing as it sounds. (There was a feeling of, is that just what this year is going to be, with me in bed for a few days with a spiking fever every month?, I have to admit; can you blame me? And that was before my back went.) It’s that I was struggling against the sickness at the same time that news of the coronavirus was spreading, and my latent hypochondriac tendencies had a thing or two to say.

I didn’t think I had the coronavirus, I should say that right now. The closest I’ve ever come to that was the sickness in January, when news of the virus was first breaking and I asked the doctor what the odds were and she basically made fun of me in response. That reply, it seems, was basically enough to put that idea to bed, even in this more recent go-around as people were being diagnosed with it closeby. It didn’t seem like an option.

Nonetheless, I became very aware of how dangerous viruses were, how inexplicable, and as the sickness steadfastly refused to leave my body, I kept thinking about, imagine just suddenly finding out that this was what it was going to be like from now on. I didn’t think that I was going to die, but I did think, what if I never actually get better and this is it?

I knew that wasn’t really the case, of course; as quickly as I got sick, the recovery came: By day three, every morning I woke up and felt appreciably better. But I couldn’t help myself but think back decades to that bad diagnosis and wonder, what if a doctor just told me, “you’ll live, but you’ll live like this, weak and short of breath and every now and then you’ll have a coughing fit that will end with you on your knees, crying.” What would that be like, knowing that?

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Not A Creature Is Stirring

There’s something about the quiet of a house at night.

I live in an old house, an oddly-shaped thing with corners that don’t make sense and appear when you least expect it; a house that, when you look from outside, doesn’t make sense. I’m oddly happy about that last part, in particular, as if it proves how old the house is — they don’t build them like that anymore, after all — but there’s one thing to remember about an old house: they’re filled with creaky floorboards.

When I walk from the bedroom to the bathroom in the dead of night, I tread as carefully as I can, and I still make noises that sound loud to an unlikely degree, as if I’m setting off alarms to wake everybody up. Before that, everything is so still, so quiet, that it feels almost holy, and then my foot touches the wrong part of the floor and it’s… not.

As I said, there’s something about the quiet of a house at night.

It feels impossible, almost; how complete and still it is, how enveloping. Perhaps that’s simply in comparison to the day, when everyone and everything is awake, the people, the animals, the outside world, and there’s always some kind of noise from somewhere. That’s not the case at night, it’s literally the opposite. It’s a void, but one that somehow echoes, or finds a tone that can still be felt — something that makes it comforting instead of disturbing.

As is clear, it’s hard to describe. I end up going to strange metaphors: it’s a dark red tone, a blanket that’s warm, it’s how water feels in that space between the first shock of getting in and the feel that you should probably get out. It’s all of these for me, as much as these descriptions likely seem nonsensical to anybody else. It’s something that feels right, in a clearly indescribable way.

Perhaps what I’m trying to say is, I find comfort and security in that silence, that stillness. The knowledge that those I care about are asleep, comfortable, safe. That everything is done, for a short while, and we can enjoy that still space no matter how brief it is.

And then I step on that wrong floorboard.

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If Happy Times Are Too Few And Far Between

Once again, it’s time for the joy that is the THR newsletter graphics. It genuinely is still one of the highlights of my work week to get to do these, as freeform and inexplicable as they may be.

 

And then, I had a change of heart and decided to use a logo treatment from the actual Strange Tales comic itself; it worked much better:

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Trying To Find A Radio

Every now and then, I remember that I co-wrote a successful column for my university newspaper for two years, and think to myself, “how did that happen?”

The answer, realistically, came from the fact that they had open submissions and were desperate for new material, but more than two decades later, it still seems unlike me to have submitted anything in the first place, and I genuinely can’t remember how I managed to convince Andy, my best friend at the time, to do it, either. Maybe we should just chalk it up to the confidence of youth.

I was underselling it before; it wasn’t just a column — we had that, sure (“Gubbins,” it was called, which was either Andy’s suggestion or the editor’s), but we also had a comic strip wholeheartedly ripped off of the Kyle Baker and Evan Dorkin collaboration from the early 90s where they reviewed shows together, a series of fake horoscopes, and a regular How-To guide to dancing like your favorite Britpop icons. We were astonishingly productive on a biweekly basis for two 20-year-old art students.

And, perhaps most surprising of all, it was a success, to the point of people recognizing us when we were out, which was an entirely surreal experience, and the byproduct of putting our likenesses in the comic strip in the first place. (Suffice to say, it was a small enough city we were all in for this to happen.) It was an odd brush with almost-fame that flattered our egos enough to be enjoyable, but was small enough to keep from being unpleasant.

We did all of this for two years, our second and third years in art school. By the end of the second year, we were pretty burned out and devoid of material, as well as all too aware that we should probably buckle down and be serious about course work in our final year, so stopping seemed like a good idea. I’m pretty sure our shtick was getting old by that point for other people, too.

I wonder, sometimes, how this all set me up for what I do for a living now; it was the first time I wrote about pop culture publicly, and in what I considered my own voice at the time. It was the first time I dealt with deadlines and audience response and… well, everything that my job is now, it feels like. Perhaps it was my secret origin.