Most mornings during the week I spent at my parents’ place started with this view from their kitchen. My father would come in and make coffee and put out food from the refrigerator and we’d talk. Then sometime later my mother would come in. He’s always been an early-riser and she never seems to go to bed before 3 or 4am. I imagine the alone time has to’ve contributed to the longevity of their marriage.

Most of my visits now include trips to the basement to wade through old photographs, drawings, and children’s books for research material for the book I’m working on. One of the things I found this time though was a sheet of slides of Jinx Cafe paintings. The ones on my site were always kind of crappy so I took the opportunity to make some new scans. 

A couple weeks into smartphonelessness I can report a few observations: the sky is bluer and there are many more hours in a day when you don’t have a screen to constantly distract you wherever you go. I don’t miss “liking”, “following”, “reblogging”, and “retweeting” everything. I do miss the CTA bus-tracker a bit and relearning how to text on a flip-phone’s a bitch. Overall it feels like unplugging a bit was the right move. It makes writing these newsletters a lot more worthwhile if nothing else.