Working Vacation

I have a scheme. A caper. A plan.

My friend Yancey, who owns the apartment I rent, is coming back to the area for his wife's new job which begins July 15th. I pointed out all kinds of fun facts about capital gains tax to him and suggested he move back into my apartment for two years.

This isn't because I want to move. I hate moving and I love living in a Victorian brownstone over Hamilton Park. It's because it would save him a small fortune when he sells his place and I'm his friend first and a conniving real-estate dabbler second.

But alas, he is now a family of four and I live in a one-bedroom railroad. They considered if for about three seconds before deciding to look in the South Orange/Maplewood/West Orange/Montclair/Bloomfield area.

But they still need a place to stay for a few weeks while they house-hunt, and I wouldn't mind a break on rent for that time, so we've cut a deal. They'll stay in the apartment they own (my apartment) for a while and they'll look for a house at that time. It's still bigger than a hotel room. I'll spend that time in a rented studio in San Miguel de Allende, which will cost me a lot less rent than a month in the New York area, and I can use frequent flyer miles to get there and it'll be a new, fun experience for me.

Plus, tacos.

I'll go to mother's for a few days, then fly south. I have booked a little studio on the top floor of a building in the center of town.

I am not sure yet if I'm staying the whole month or a little less. Either way, I pay for the month and book the month as it's either $300 a week or $750 a month. I have a Marvel prose novel to edit with a friend of mine writing it during that time and another ART OF book to work on. Plus, I really want to finish my book proposal.

If I have a little time at the end, I'll head to the Yucatan to dive the underwater sculpture garden near Cancun. But I have to be back for the start of SVA classes in September, and Cancun is an easy trip out of Newark. I can always hold off on that. Or even come back overland. It's easy to get a bus to Austin from Monterrey, and I have Amtrak points from there.

A Relic

I found this in a box. It surprised me—I'd been careful to transfer all my floppy data to CD back with Kraiger still had a beige Mac with a floppy drive.

What was this, I wonder. My guess is I had to buy it at EasyEverything on the Ramblas in Barcelona in 2004. I was living on the sixth floor of a walk-up in Raval and there was no internet in the apartment. Back then, you couldn't just get it on your phone either. I spent a lot of time running up and down the stairs to get a signal on a nearby square from a restaurant, but when I needed to be online for a chunk of time, I'd sit at EasyEverything.

Or maybe I bought it across from Victoria Station years earlier, when there was an EasyInternet across the road from the train.

Some helpful people have made me laugh. "Why don't you have a USB floppy drive?" Uh...for the three times in the rest of my life when I'm vaguely curious? I even ditched my USB Zip Drive a few years ago after deciding if I hadn't already saved it, too bad.

Nevertheless, I have a friend who can read this for me. I think I'll go ahead and check it out.

When Do We Want 'Em? Now.

I found this in my box of old stuff. I remember picking it up off the sidewalk after a march in DC when I was a kid, back when I'd spend weekends roaming the Smithsonian or the back halls of Capitol Hill. 

Yeah, you could do that then. No one to say "Hey, kid, you're not allowed back here." We were allowed everywhere, even places we weren't allowed weren't all that heavily guarded. 

It's hard to believe the ERA set off such a firestorm. The primary complaint at the time, as I recall, seemed to be about sharing bathrooms. 

I guess men wouldn't want that, given the line at so many women's public toilets. 

What Bubble?

Back in 1993, you could buy an apartment on Avenue B in Manhattan's East Village for ten percent down. And the total cost was $56,500. 

Which seems bizarrely crazy today. What would that place go for now? $395,000? 

And yet, at the time, this seemed like a fortune. 

Wander Woman

Just a reminder...MariesWorldTour.com is being excerpted bit-by-bit, every Sunday on the UK's Wanderlust magazine site.

The index to my "Wander Woman" (chuckle) entries is here. 

And the interview they did with me is here. 

Semi-Success As A Salesperson

I did pretty well selling trade paperbacks and graphic novels yesterday at the Hamilton Park festival flea market, but selling anything else was a disaster. This just wasn't the venue to ask for a decent price. I had one gorgeous handmade skirt from Barcelona which a smart shopper snapped up for twenty bucks, but the average conversation went something like this:

"What size are those brand-new Dansko clogs?"

"They're 8.5, but they're a little bit big for me. Do you want to try then on? I never wore them out of the house."

(Customer tries them on, they fit.)

"How much?"

"Ten dollars," I say, wincing since I probably spent $80 and thought they fit until they actually didn't and the return window was over.

"Oh," shocked look like they've touched raw sewage. Shoes go back on table fast as lightning.

You don't want to know the reaction to me asking for $20 for a bag I'd made on my kitchen table.

But I unloaded a lot of comic books, mostly because I priced them ludicrously low, low enough that some people were like HELL YEAH. I made them two for $5, five for $10. And most of them had never been read. Well, none of them had been read. I found these in the office before our last move, put them in the storage unit, then recently cleaned this out and threw them in the back of my car, not sure what to do with them.

I still have two long boxes of graphic novels, but the other two and the moldy Masterworks are gone (the Masterworks into the trash).

I'm going to re-think selling the other stuff. I might be able to get a table at a crafts fair.

Selling Fleas

I'm selling stuff at tomorrow's Hamilton Park Festival flea market. Primarily trade paperbacks and graphic novels, which seem to have taken over my garage. I want them gone and out of my life, so Michael Kraiger and I are going to sell them at bargain-basement rates just to get rid of them (we hope). 

But I'm also putting some gorgeous, perfect old "Whitegirl" label party dresses on the auction block, handmade by the finest designer in Jersey City in the early nineties, a woman named Cheryl. 

Denise and maybe Carmen are going to be at the next table, selling silkscreened scarves and leather bags, respectively. 

And I'm testing the market for these. I've sewn some little tiny handbags, just big enough for a phone, keys, and a wallet. They sling over your shoulder. And I've gotten the Square thing that plugs into your phone, so I can take credit cards if someone wants a LOT of graphic novels and handbags. 

I don't now how I own so much stuff. But I need it to stop. 

The one on the far right is the sample I was emulating.

Old Boxes

Here's some classic bits I found in a box in my garage.

From the coin-operated Church of Elvis in Portland, OR.

It's for the best I have no way to listen to these.

Some correspondence with Alex Toth, a comic book legend.

Time

I've been going through boxes of papers, shredding old tax documents, and trying to clean up my apartment and my garage.

It's daunting. I have no idea where all this stuff comes from. I live sparingly, and yet here it all is.

I've come across some really good stuff in these old boxes, including this, last night. Which is timely, as Maxwell's (the greatest independent music club on the East Coast, IMHO) is closing, and I spent my early twenties there. I have no idea how we managed to get up and go to work after staying out half the night back then, but we did.

It was jarring to hear Maxwell's is going away, but Hoboken has turned into a vile pit of frat boys and extreme gentrification, so it makes sense to either move the club to somewhere with a more receptive crowd, or to just leave it. Todd, who books the bands at Maxwell's, still books Bell House in Brooklyn and a few years back, put on a couple of great shows at Loews Journal Square. I hope we see more of those.

I hardly ever go to Maxwell's anymore anyway. But still, it's a punch in the gut. A punch of aging and lost memories and a type of scene that disappeared along with a bigger changes in society. I enjoyed the scene back then, even though people who weren't a part of it typically misunderstood what was going on over there. One hideous fellow I met a few times referred to me on a group blog as a "starf*cker," which was so absurdly not the case...and he didn't even move to town until after I'd moved to Manhattan, so he obviously got his third-hand information from people even more alienated and resentful than I. A running joke of mine used to be that I'd write the book "I'm With the Opening Band," which was more a joke on the laboring lack of success of my crowd rather than what was going on behind closed doors, which wasn't a heckuva lot.

That horrible individual has recently resurfaced in LA. Yuck. They can keep him.

I don't know which Phil this is or who wrote the note. I know three possible Phils from back then. I wish the writer had put a date on this note.

Archival Coloring

I have a nice new MacBook Air—well, not that new, I've had it for months but it took ages for me to sort through all my files on the old MacBook—and I've been looking around my apartment for one of those microfiber cleaning cloths you use to dust off the screen.

I have a pile of stuff in the back of my desk, which has shelves as legs. Here, I'll upload a photo to the right. This is from 2007, when I first bought the desk.

There was no cleaning kit in the back of my desk.

But what was this? A large envelope full of...what?

I pulled it out and opened it up.

Color guides.

Mostly Donald Duck, but also some X-Men, Captain America, Sleepwalker, and X-Force.

What am I going to do with these? The golden age of selling these on eBay was the mid-nineties. I'm not even sure people know what they are now, in the age of Photoshop.

I put them back in the envelope and slid them back into the desk.