Date of Note

January 4th, 1988. 

I walked off the elevator on the tenth floor of 387 Park Avenue South to my first day as the Antioch intern at the Epic division of Marvel Entertainment. I'd driven my 1974 (or was is 72?) mustard-colored Volvo station wagon through a blizzard from Ohio to New London, CT for New Year's. I had no windshield wipers, a manual choke, and only one headlight from when I'd hit a deer, but I made it, and then went down to Manhattan for my new job.

January 4th is thirty years ago today.

That’s a lotta years, for anyone still counting. There’s a lot of water under that bridge, a lot of people in and out of the door of the Big Two in comics. I don’t think anyone I met on Day One at Marvel is still there, though at least five of my colleagues (Harras, Chase, Chiarello, Gill, Lopez) are with me at DC. Heck, I can only think of six or seven people still at Marvel who were there on my LAST day.

I’ve edited, colored, written, and packaged for Marvel, Gemstone, Teshkeel, and DC in that time, with a side trip to Scholastic and a lot of side trips into my own writing. I traveled for 2001 and 2002 and did no comics work (even claimed I would never return to comics, which lasted until I realized writing paid even worse than anything I’d done up to that point, including working the salad bar at Roy Rogers), so while it’s been thirty years since my first day, I guess I have a mere 28 years under my belt.

I’m a little embarrassed that after three decades, I’m not in anyone’s masthead, not an executive with a title and parking space. But I realize too that no masthead would substitute for the job in Kuwait and Cairo, the two solo expeditions around the world (the second making comics from my laptop even behind Chinese firewalls in Tibet), the “residencies” I assigned myself in Mexico, Barcelona, Namibia, Uganda, Australia, Berlin, Cape Town, or the endless months fighting with my own manuscripts.

January 4th, 2001.

Sixteen years to the day I boarded the Amtrak at Penn Station in Manhattan to embark on my first trip around the world.

Maybe January 4th and I have a thing.

Happy New Year

Back and forth, back and forth. LA, NYC, LA...I'm not the first person to be shredded into ragged wisps, pulled from one coast to another, my life in the East, my work out West. 

Many people have a loyalty to the weather of SoCal, the energy of NYC. Me? I just want to be home where I belong. I've probably spent more of my life traveling than pretty much anyone who doesn't work for an airline or freighter company. I learned that the concept of home evaporates after a while, that in the end, one must choose between solitary adventure and a support structure with friends and family.

Can you have both?

Sure.

You can move abroad permanently and build a life elsewhere. But constant movement generates a helluva lot of firing synapses, novelty, adventure, and mostly, that part of my brain that needs to spill all this input onto the written page. God, I miss that in my current life of routine. But you can't have constant adventures AND be part of the lives back home without spending time at home. That's just a kind of calculation, simple math for the soul. Something desk jockeys can find reassuring as they battle the mind-numbing deathly boredom of routine while they see friends off having epic, year-long adventures.

There is no right or wrong in this equation, but there is a lot of x=x, while y=y. X never equals y, or sometimes it appears to but that's an illusion. In the end, x reverts to x, y to y. A bit of algebra for how to live. Dabble in one or the other, but ultimately, dabbling too long in y results in a life of y. 

I'm delusional. I suck at algebra. 

Anyway.

Today, as on every New Year's Day since I opted into traditional-day-job lifestyle, I caught an early morning flight from Newark to Los Angeles. 

Was I glad to leave, considering it was brutally cold in Jersey City? Considering I spent most of my week caulking around windows, putting wood filler in the flooring cracks, taping plastic to the hundred-year-old door, digging the electric blanket Turbo gave me out of storage? Yes and no. I couldn't wait to get back into the warm weather of Burbank, but Burbank means work, and work means stress and exhaustion. Such is life. Why should I be any different? 

A year ago today, I was pleased to start my year off with an airline upgrade.

No upgrade today, but look at this view! I definitely scored the right seat. 

When your life is x, it's the little things. 

This Old House

Check out my old apartment, sold for $465k.

I sold it for $300k in December of 2006.

Comparison: kitchen detail from 2005/2017

Don't feel badly for me—I only paid $125k for it in November, 2002, and I once figured out I had spent $16,000 on renovations. The before photos are a reminder of what a crappy place it was when I bought it. Before I got sick of listening to the front door buzzer all the time and walled up the parlor door with two levels on insulation and sound-deadening board. Before Al replaced all the lighting switches with push buttons, before we put in that fake tin ceiling later sold as "original detail," before Turbo scrubbed all the paint off the old hinges and I matched the missing ones at Olde Good Things. Before we got the fireplace cover dip-and-stripped. Before I dug the old pocket door out of the wall only to find half of it was missing. Before the fake-wood shutters, now removed. Before me and Yancey and MK ripped up the ugly old carpeting and found the beautiful heart pine floor underneath after a week of tearing up plywood (I still ache from the memory). Before I learned how to move and plumb an island sink. Before the stained glass bought off eBay, before the transom, before the old gaslamp I re-installed only to see destroyed by the interim owners, before we glued up medallions, before exposing the brick in the kitchen, before rigging up wall cabinets on the floor in front of the brick and faking a countertop from wood. Before the condo owner upstairs landscaped the backyard.

I was able to turn the proceeds from the sale into 1) my wonderful house in Bergen-Lafayette 2) my great little condo in Burbank by Warner Bros, and 3) a comfortable nest egg where I don't have to panic all the time.

Still, I am impressed. The people who sold it for $465k spearheaded the drive to fix up the exterior of the building. It really went downhill for about a decade. The story was that the condo association paid painters to redo the front, and the painters took the deposit and vanished. The place steadily went downhill until the owners of 1L got Sylwester from Kearney to finally, magnificently redo 350 8th Street.

Two units immediately changed hands for exorbitant amounts of money, after years of owners losing cash on their deals. Good for them.

It really does look great. See?

Scenic Holiday

My mother lives at the foot of Skyline Drive, and takes every chance she gets to drive along the crest of the Virginia mountains.

Here is the highest point near her home as it looked on the afternoon of December 25th, 2017.

My Mother the Seer

My mother had my baby scrapbook sitting out on a table, so I opened it up.

This caught my eye.

Prophetic. And hilarious.

Holiday Party 2017

Silliness.

Research and Restoration

Back in September, when I was home for a few weeks, I made a trip down to City Hall to see if they had any old photos of my house.

JC used to have a great collection of photos, but they were damaged in the flood waters of Hurricane Sandy, the same flood that dumped four feet of water into my basement.

(I wasn't there at the time. I was safely above the water on a 4th-floor apartment in Hamilton Park. The previous owner had to sort out the flooded basement in Lafayette.)

City Hall had low-res photocopies of photos of my house, so I took those. It's hard to see exactly what my "tin house" looked like, but when I walk down the block, I see earlier restorations. I don't know how accurate they are, because Lafayette isn't legally a historic district, thus there is no requirement to restore facades to their 1938 appearance.

I hope the photos are eventually restored, and meanwhile, I'll have to take my best guess from the photos and from the restorations on the rest of the block.

Houses from down the block

School Night Out

If you'd told me in 1986 that Daniel would be headlining shows across the country, that he'd even play at the Hollywood Bowl at one point, I might have believed you. I had heard his tapes, heard his raw talent, could hear the perfect songs behind the thumping and the chord organ and the coyote saying aroo-aroo-aroo.

Probably not in 1996, though. Maybe not even in 2006. Things were rough for a while. But here we are.

And here I was, young for a night, heading backstage on a school night. It's not the thrill it once was as I've got an eye on the clock the whole time, never quite able to overlook that I have to work in the morning. And it's not like you can bluff your way in at these big shows--you need to set up a pass in advance.

I sat outside at the counter at Two Boots just before the show, and a homeless guy came by asking for money. "That could've been Daniel with a few twists of fate," I thought. He's lucky his family accepted his problems as their responsibility. And he's lucky to have a tolerant diaspora of friends he has known for 30-40 years. He is complicated, to say the least. His memory is strange to me—he doesn't remember the people he's met in the room, but he remembers taking me to a Butthole Surfers show in 1986, and going to the movies in West Virginia in 1992. He remembers me getting out of my car and lifting up the seat to let him into the back with Louis and Nick from the Chronicle. He remembers I work at Marvel. I don't. I work for DC now and I've told him that a half-dozen times. That's not how his memory works anymore.

He and I snapped a few photos together. I help my phone out and we looked at them.

"I don't even recognize myself in photos anymore," he said.

I knew exactly what he means. He's aging faster than I am—he is on medication, doesn't exercise, drinks too much Mountain Dew. But I see it in myself too.

Listen up and I'll tell a story

About an artist growing old

Some would try for fame and glory

Others aren't so bold

And everyone in friends and family

Sayin' "hey go get a job

Why do you only do that only

Why are you so odd?

And we don't really like what you do

We don't think anyone ever will

We think you have a problem

And this problem's made you ill

Historical Landmark

I found this while researching a possible trip to Tunisia.

And it made me laugh.

More Home Improvements

Stuff I bought and hung up in my Burbank condo:

I bought a Moroccan mirror. My plan was to go to Mexico and buy a Mexican mirror, because it seems more appropriate for SoCal, but the Moroccan store is right by the North Hollywood metro. So Moroccan it is. 

A coat rack? Well, sort of. An everything rack by the front door. I have been looking for an interesting coat rack since I moved in. I finally gave up and got a cheap one.