Category: Landmarks

October 25, 2002 /

Ben Folds was stunning, again, this time even more so because he was playing solo–just him and the piano (which I think is still the name of the tour)–and it didn’t feel like anything was missing. He got an almost unfair amount of music out of it: stomping the pedals like a kick drum, tapping on the mike in lieu of toms, and of course conducting the audience in place of strings or trumpets or whatever.

And that might be the best part. I went in planning to scream for Where’s Summer B.?, easily my favorite BF5 song and one I didn’t really expect to hear even upon request. And he DID play it! Without provocation, as like the fourth song! And we got to sing the best background vocals in any song ever!

So that was good. And then! Not only did I finally meet Jon’s friend Ana, who is unspeakably cool, but we met a bunch of UK friends at the Tolly Ho afterwards. These included my old friend Audrey, whom I hadn’t seen since spring (and before that not for probably two years), and her roommate Alden, whom I’d never met. It was a great time.

And then, the next day, Audrey and I were commenting (via email) about how much fun the whole thing was, and that we should hang out more often, and I asked her to the Centre fall dance and she totally said yeah!

The (large) part of me that is still a sophomore in high school is dancing for joy right now.

Anyway, the week has been work work rehearse rehearse other than that. This weekend’s Centre homecoming, and though it can’t possibly match my own for nostalgia, I’m sure it will surpass it in quantity of graduated friends. Or you could take Lisa’s hunch and predict that it’s going to be “mad drama.” Whatever. I’m just looking forward to sleeping in.

so she won’t sleep better alone
and they won’t feel better alone

September 24, 2002 /

Whoops. I put together the entry just before this, about an hour ago, thinking that I didn’t have much besides internet stuff to talk about. I completely forgot that yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my very first online journal entry.

That does make it by far the longest-running journal of any kind I’ve had, but then the next longest was about four months, so it’s been that for a while. And of course I can’t say it was the first NFD entry, because it wasn’t NFD then, just the journal I put together for kicks and hid behind my webcam pic. The interface was pretty awful, but then I was modeling it almost exactly on Emma’s. Also, I was young.

Anyway, yeah, wow, a year. One hundred forty-six entries, for just over four tenths of an entry per day. Since I was trying for one every other day, that’s not too bad.

I’ve fallen down a few times recently, but at least now it’s for different reasons. Maybe running is the art of not slowing down, and walking is the art of just getting up. I haven’t kept anything going this long before, and I’m still going now, and there’s something to be said for that.

Here’s to a year.

September 20, 2002 /

I was wrong, incidentally.

Scent memories still freak me out a little sometimes. I know it’s really because long-term storage is next to the nose’s part of the hypothalamus, or whatever, but in practice it just works out so that even weak smells bring back really vivid scenes.

As it rained all night (during Homecoming! bastard rain!), and as we were dolled up for the occasion, Caitlan and I were sent with the rest of the candidates to wait in the library. As the library was locked, we hung out in the rear lobby of the Industrial Arts building downstairs.

The doors there were locked, too, but on the other side of one of them was the original MCHS CAD lab, the site of the first programming class I ever took. I’d messed around in BASIC since I was a kid, but that room was where I learned about Pascal, and about having a weird knack for it. Six years later I’m about to graduate with a BS in Comp Sci. The room still smells the same.

I wasn’t expecting much of a real homecoming, and in fact I only saw two other people from the class of 1999, one of whom recognized me. Instead I got memories of the game two years ago, when my brother was on court. I watched him and his friends stride around like giants who were still learning to shave. I was so proud and awed I thought my heart would burst. I had a girl on my arm with the biggest smile in the world.

I thought about Erika for the first time in a while tonight, and it was sharper than I thought it’d be. I thought about my brother, and how he’s felt lately. I wish I’d really known how to shave myself, so I could have shown him.

September 14, 2002 /

Amanda and Jon got me a betta! Like the fish! They just about made my year. I haven’t decided what to name it yet. They inform me it’s a boy, but I think it’s going to get some kind of proper noun anyway, so that may not matter. (Does it ever, with fish?)

I’ll put up pictures soon, but right now I’m enjoying Amanda’s mullet too much. After that I think the fish may just take over everything.

“The Fish Take Over Everything” is a great name for a band.

Update 1614 hrs: Idaho! (is the name of the fish!)

June 1, 2002 /

As seen camwise, I have a lightbox. Like a real honest to goodness lightbox. It is made of a box with plexiglass on top, and it has a light switch on theside, and when you flip the switch these two fluorescent lights on the inside come on and you light it up FROM THE INSIDE. So you can trace things. It is a miracle of modern technology.

Like most of the web cartoonists who have one of these, I built mine instead of buying it–if by “built” you mean “stood around and made helpful grunts while Mom’s boyfriend, Joe, did all the real work.” It ended up taking six hours and costing about $50 in materials, plus probably hundreds of dollars’ worth of skilled labor on Joe’s end that he wouldn’t even let me chip in for. He’s a really good guy, and amazingly skilled with anything related to carpentry or building. He tends to stay away from computers, but lately I’m starting to think that’s a wise attitude.

Anyway, I have a lightbox, and it’s well beyond merely “cool” into “slopy” territory. I need to sand down the corners, probably, and maybe stain or varnish the wood, and I’ve got a can of glass obscurer that I may or may not use on the window to diffuse the light a little. We’re going to Gatlinburg tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll pretty much have to test it out tonight if I’m going to do a comic thisweek.

I’m guessing it’s going to cut my inking time in half, at least–which will knock that out of its top place as Most Dreaded Part of doing the comic. Now the writing is all I have to fear.

Back Wednesday.

May 18, 2002 /

I don’t really guess I’m qualified for this. But sometimes you have to write, and sometimes you have to speak for thedead.

I was in love with Alycia Smith for a long time. She knew it, and she teased me about it, and then she was in love with me for a while but nothing ever came of it except friendship, because that’s how things like that work out most of the time. We stopped talking as much after I graduated–I came here to Centre, and a year later she went to U of L. We saw each other at church sometimes, on weekends home.

Maybe a couple months ago, she IMed me again out of nowhere, and we talked and it was sweet and beautiful and we were starting to get to be good friends again. I missed talking to her in real life. I was looking forward to this summer,and maybe seeing her again.

You know this is coming by now, I guess. She drove over the median sometime yesterday, or last night, and ran head-o ninto another car. She, her boyfriend in the passenger seat and the other driver were all killed.

Alycia would hate reading this. She was a much better writer than me, and she wouldn’t stand for this kind of cliche. Especially the part where I tell you that it’s sitting on my brain now, like I think I’m going to wake up; where I tellyou that she was alive, more alive than anyone; where I tell you that she of all people…

She lived a little outside the lines. She wrote brilliant sad stuff that yes, was amateurish, but showed every sign of blossoming into real brilliant mature poetry and fiction. She drew pictures with the touchpad on her laptop. She had sex with more people than are usually in one bed at the same time.

She had beautiful long black hair that she cut to a bob after high school. I asked her to mail me a lock when I foundout she’d gotten rid of it all, and she promised she would. She never did. She loved manga and black and Poe and girls and boys and English. She sent me a bunch of naked pictures of herself the other day, half as a joke. She’s beautiful in every one of them.

She beat me out of a spot in the Governor’s School for the Arts once, and I was a little disappointed but mostly proud. I went to GSP instead of GSA, and we left around the same time, and while she was gone she started writing me letters–stories and jokes and cartoons and brilliance. I got them all in a box from my mom one day, and I sat in the library and read through them and could barely believe that people like her existed. That was four years ago, less one month.

Alycia didn’t really want to get old. I always hoped her life would outlast her lifestyle. It didn’t, and now the people who loved her have only who she was to love, and not who she would have been. I wish it were enough.

May 12, 2002 /

The first time I kissed her it was magic, real honest to God magic: starlight, and streetlight, and trees shaking their leftover rain down on us. Everyone on campus disappeared, and every car in the city stopped, and there wasn’t a sound except a little wind and the silver of her laugh.

There’s a wonderful little book I have called Rats Saw God. Everyone who was ever in high school should read it. It’s about relationships, and people, and love and being kids; one of the most resonant lines in it, for me, was “why ruin something so perfect by trying to make it last forever?”

The first time that question appears, it’s being asked of the protagonist; the second time, he’s asking it himself. I always thought I’d understand it if I had the chance. I think tonight I did.

Magic doesn’t last forever; it doesn’t last, period. I get that now. I’m glad I do. I’m glad I just had the only good breakup I’ve ever had, and that it wasn’t really a breakup at all, just an understanding.

I’m going to miss Emily a lot this summer, but that just means it’ll be even better when I see her again in the fall. And after all, why ruin something so perfect by trying to make it last forever?

April 28, 2002 /

Yesterday morning, my uncle John got up at some ridiculous hour and ran fifty kilometers. Fifty kilometers. Then he kept walking until he had done fifty miles. Then he went home, had something to eat and went to an unusual retrospective of his work.

Uncle John makes custom birthday cards, and has done so since he was a teenager. A few weeks ago, my aunt Dana started sending letters to friends and family asking to borrow any cards we might have saved. Of course, everybody had saved everything–you don’t get a personal work of art in the mail and throw it away when you’re done.

They got enough cards to fill four rooms full of shelves (and they had leftovers). During the day it was an exhibition for clients; that night, when I got there, it was food and a jazz band and my uncle’s fiftieth birthday party.

It was one of the best gallery shows I’ve ever seen. The sheer volume of work and creativity and originality was humbling and inspiring and it still stuns me a little to think that I own at least a dozen of those original pieces myself.

I think it was my tenth birthday when I got the foldout card. It was a huge battle scene my uncle had drawn and then left half-empty, inviting me to fill in the rest. It was perfect. It was one of the best presents I’ve ever received, and I could probably redraw it from memory.

I was a weird little kid, and if I’d been born to different parents I probably would have been a Ritalin poster child.The only things that could get me to sit still for ten minutes were a big fat fantasy book or a chance to draw with my uncle. I didn’t quite get all the genes that give him his talent, or maybe his dedication–he did better stuff at fifteen than I can hope for now–but everything I love about sequential art comes from trading panels with him on “Captain Zero” and “The Adventures of Petey.” That this site exists as more than a blog is due to him.

A dozen cards, a million comic strips. Happy birthday, Uncle John, and thanks for all my presents.

April 22, 2002 /

HELL YEAH

I said HELL YEAH. Show was amazing. Last time Angie played inCincinatti, 60 people showed up (the club can hold 140). This time there were maybe 40. That is a tragedy, what with him having a wife and daughter to feed, but for us it was kind of a treat too.

Angie–it was just him and his drummer (Derek?)–played for at least two hours, sans set list, taking requests from the crowd. About two of us, as I recall, were actually from Cincinatti; most of the rest were apparently just following him along the Ohio River. And then there were the four college students sitting on the floor two feet from the stage, grinning like idiots. We would have danced, but then the people behind us wouldn’t have been able to see.

So yeah, basically they played whatever we asked for–all but two tracks on this album, plus good chunks of his first indie CD (seen above, autographed) and his new covers album. And it was great. It was incredible. They got the fullest sound out of one guitar and a Junior Miss drum kit I’ve ever heard. Angie was wearing a Ramones t-shirt, which was kind of (situationally) ironic,because… Well. Bono always says the reason he started U2 was because he saw the Ramones and wanted to be in a rock band. I saw Angie Aparo, and now I want nothing more than to pack up my drums and piano and move into a van and play in a club every night for a hundred years.

(No worries, Mom. I can’t drive a van yet.)

March 8, 2002 /

Glorious, hellish, surprising, panicked, funny, awful, done. Except not really surprising at all. I’m starting to recognize that there’s a reason people rave about this kind of timed project–the artificial limits bring out ability you otherwise have no reason to use. Anyway, it was worth it, and this is what I got.

“Grant Marlowe Saves The Day”

That’s there to read only if you’re well beyond “bored” into “catatonic.” This is not to say it wasn’t entertaining; I was lucky to be assigned an incredible director and a great cast who made the play into more than I could have hoped for.

There is a full account of the whole process that led to the play, but it’s freakishly long and boring. I wrote that and I’m keeping it for myself; I don’t recommend it for human consumption. I just wanted to have a good record by which to measure all future periods of stress (“Rescuing my pregnant sister from a burning house with my arm broken in three places? I give it .6 Playfests”).

Also, my stomach’s all better now.