Letter

Feels like I haven’t worked on anything new for months. It’s only been a couple weeks but I don’t have any firm concept of time. I overcompensate by being early everywhere, but, really, only right now ever feels real.

During last week’s trip east, talk got to the cupboard in my folks’ basement. It’s filled with maps and notes from decades of trips taken and not taken. My father and K agreed that planning for and anticipating travel, then reviewing and recalling it after is better the actual thing itself. I don’t understand any of that. But I always just wanna stay home.

The couple weeks before this trip I’d decided not to start anything new so as not to be frustrated by having to pause while I’m away. Intentionally not working on things is pretty damn frustrating but I got through it and, just as we were about to head back to Chicago, I got a green light I’d been waiting for.

Stan texted me with dates for a show we’d been discussing over the past few months. He’s been trying to sell his building, so all plans were up in the air. He’d hoped to be done with this a year ago but with the berserker wreaking havoc with the economy, real-estate enthusiasts are uncommonly skittish. He may have to hold onto the place a few more years. Having art shows in the frameshop showroom will hopefully not scare off would-be buyers.

The following Monday I hit Unique looking for small frames. Unfortunately, a middle-aged couple have gotten there before me. For ten minutes I stare daggers through their backs as they methodically pick through every available frame multiple times, their cart nearly tipping over with some fifty they’d already selected. The woman finally turns her head and innocently inquires whether I want access to the shelf. Having scored only scraps, I pedal up to the other Unique up on the Northwest Side. By the end of the day I have about ten new old frames.

The show will be a continuation of what was up in the display cases at the Rainbo in August. Sumi ink, graphite, and ballpoint illustrations from Moby Dick, Babbitt, The Marvel Universe, The Suicide’s Grave, The Sound and the Fury, and Winesburg, Ohio.

More details as they become available. It’s just good to be doing something again.

I wake Saturday morning to find a UPS box by the back door to the side of the bikes. It must have arrived sometime Friday. This is where the landlords leave my mail when it is delivered to them.

I’m not expecting a package but judging by size and weight I have a suspicion about what it might be. Squinting at the label, spotting ISBN numbers, confirms it.

I wrote here in late summer about the bad turn my dealings with Arcade Publishing took. I’ve done a pretty good job of not fixating on the way a thing I had high hopes for going all to shit. There are plenty of other things for me to get obsessed with besides this one particular failure. But a box on a doorstep will snap one’s attention right back to what was far from mind.

When I effectively ceased communications with the editor in New York, I told him the only thing I expected out of his company going forward was the back half of my advance. I suppose somewhere in the back of my skull I knew they’d send the books anyway. Now they’re here. I can’t throw the box in the trash. I have to open it.

I flip through one, then the other. There’s nothing glaringly wrong. They didn’t put the author’s name and book title on every page like they did in the horrible excerpt they’d shared in August. The books look approximately the way I intended them to. I won’t pick over them too carefully because that just begs for disappointment and anger.

It’s a relief that they’re acceptable. I still have no intention of working with this publisher again but I won’t pretend these books don’t exist like I’d planned.

If you’d like a copy of Suicide’s Grave or Marvel Universe, just follow the breadcrumb trail. Both will be officially published November 4th.

A couple people I know died on a day K and I were in Western Massachusetts. She wanted to look at old cemeteries that day. Something must’ve been in the air. She’d looked up one about an hour away in an old guide book but my brother said there were a couple little ones in his town.

I don’t have any special attachment to boneyards. Maybe it’s because I know so few people buried in them. The youngest person lying in this one had arrived in 1909 or so. The first death news of the day was an old friend of my parents’ back in Russia. I have no memories of this man except his frequent mention when my folks talk of friends in the old country. They came to the graveyard with us and I assume they were thinking of him while looking over the field of weathered stones.

The other guy who died was someone I knew. I got the news via text and didn’t say much in response. I knew he’d been sick.

They say if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I got a couple more texts about his passing in the following hours. I made a few snide remarks to K and kept it to that for the most part. There’s little to be gained from sharing my thoughts sometimes. I found the first tribute posted online right away. There will likely be many more.

We went to a second little cemetery. In the first we were looking for faces with wings; there were none of those in the second. Instead, many stones featured hands, most pointing upward. My favorite, though, was holding a set of interlocked rings, the last one broken off. I’m guessing it’s an Oddfellows or Quaker thing.

There will be more frequent cemetery visits to come. Perhaps I’ll form more personal attachments to these places then. It’s the most natural thing I can think of.