Yeah, I’m pretty happy these days. This session actually led me into drawing part of the cover for book four (which is still a ways away, sadly, but it’ll be worth the wait). I’ve done a lot of art for book four over the past few weeks.
Click to make it bigger!
As an independent bookseller whose livelihood depends on fighting for users’ continually harder-to-get attention, I can’t exactly afford to shut this site down for a day in protest, but I want to make it clear that I think SOPA is a terrible, terrible thing that needs to be stopped. Read up on it and get involved however you can, even if all you can do is spread the word. Freedom of speech is, in my opinion, America’s best feature–something we can be proud of even on our darkest days–and we would do ourselves a grave disservice if we let our leaders curtail or limit it for any reason.
Hopefully. I was trying to get back in the habit of updating more or less every week for a while there, but I’ve been down and out since mid-December after an unfortunate bout of appendicitis. Are there fortunate bouts of appendicitis? I doubt it.
I can’t tell if it’s comforting or depressing that the site still managed to amass 1,024 spam comments (all caught in the moderation queue) while I was recovering. I know I’m not as prolific as any given high-schooler on Tumblr, but I’d still appreciate some real feedback now and then…assuming I could even find it if it existed, in this sea of watch ads.
I paid my second visit to Occupy Wall Street this past Sunday–some friends of mine were playing music there. It had been just about a month since my first visit, and the park was a much denser tent city than it had been before as the protesters hunkered down for the winter. The impromptu concert I attended didn’t draw much attention, but there was some polite clapping and a rotating cast of cell-phone photographers.
I tried to stay out of the way as OWS participants and coordinators flitted around, some cleaning up accumulated garbage and bringing it out to the curb, others passing out flyers or offering trinkets. Something about the unspoken energy there reminded me of my alma mater, which is perhaps the only place I’ve ever felt completely at home. That’s how Occupy Wall Street struck me–as a community, one I felt I could fit into, at least as a visitor–and I think that’s exactly the kind of atmosphere the park’s 24/7 residents were trying to create.
This morning, I woke up to images of an empty Zuccotti Park being power-washed by cleaning crews, shown as part of continuous live coverage by NY1. The police had descended and destroyed the encampment minutes after I’d gone to bed. Without its vibrancy, its voices, its tents, the park was barely recognizable to me.
Here’s a picture of the damage in my neighborhood:
Seriously, Irene was horrible in some places (my parents wound up with a river running down their street in New Jersey), but the hysteria in my neck of the woods was greatly overstated. To be clear, my neck of the woods is well inland and on a hill. Being prepared is always a good thing, but I never believed for a second that we were going to lose power here. I was only concerned about the wind–that’s why I made sure to park well away from any trees–but even that wound up being kind of understated, at least relative to expectations. Not that I’m complaining.
On the other hand, my windows leaked all night, which made for a frustrating lack of sleep. That wasn’t really the hurricane’s fault, though: my windows have been leaking for months (though I’d hoped the latest repair job would have worked…so much for that).
The biggest problem in NYC now is the lack of mass transit–with the way the MTA dry-docked its trains, it could be days before everything gets back to normal. I spied this LIRR train, dark and silent, parked on an overpass above the BQE:
So, yeah. I don’t expect I’ll be going much of anywhere over the next few days.
Unlike the last hurricane I posted about, this one actually seems likely to pass through New York (though I don’t know if it’s going to do as much damage as everyone seems to think it will). I’m prepared, but it’s mostly a matter of staying inside at this point. I’ll probably sleep through the worst of it.
Still, I managed to get out a little bit earlier today, making one last trip to my local grocery store. Check out the bread aisle:
Good thing I bought my bread yesterday! At least there were plenty of bread crumbs if I’d happened to need them.
First things first—before you read this post, go read the article I’m talking about. I know it’s long, and that assigning homework of any sort is likely to lose me readers, but it’s very much worth your time. Thanks to Genya Shimkin, by the way, for calling it to my attention.
What we have here is the heartbreaking tale of Michael Gratze, a former gay activist who transformed into a Christian anti-gay crusader, baffling his loved ones and leaving the rest of us to wonder how we can square his old personality with his new one in a way that makes sense. Perhaps it’s not our right to do so—after all, Michael’s life, and the inner workings of his mind, are his business and his alone. It’s no one else’s place to judge. But seeing a person who once advocated for gay rights from a fairly influential pulpit (what young gay man from the 2000s didn’t look to XY Magazine as a resource?) turn around and start handing down judgments himself makes the temptation to examine, to try and understand, all but irresistible. Certainly, the article’s author, a former coworker of Michael’s, is trying to get to the heart of the matter.
For my part, I read this article and see a man governed by great, perhaps crippling need, though what exactly he needs I couldn’t tell you.
I think that Osama bin Laden post has been sitting at the top of this page quite long enough now, don’t you?
The other night, I had a bizarre and vaguely terrifying dream that may have been brought on by a sunburn on the top of my head (I don’t know if I actually have one–I can’t really see up there). Sunburns have been known to give me crazy dreams before, but anyway. In this dream, I was watching a cartoon show called Looney Tunes: Womb. Though it was never said, my brain understood that this show was a new creation that allowed the Looney Tunes animators to explore their wildest, rawest, possibly heretofore-banned ideas in a kind of sketchpad-type setting. I’d actually watch a show like that!
If I may be serious for a moment….
Nearly ten years ago, I was driving home from high school to have a late breakfast during my second period study hall. About a quarter of the way down Lafayette Avenue, with suburban houses flying by on my right and the turnoff to Mill Street coming up ahead, my old car radio (complete with tape deck), playing the news between songs, informed me that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. It was still legal to talk on one’s cell phone while driving at that point, so I called my mother, who gasped and turned on the news.
Here are some things I’ve been doing lately:
