Letter

Moving to another town is a time-honored way to give oneself a fresh start. Wipe the slate clean. Get rid of the old patterns. Change the scenery. Be reborn.

Sometimes, though, the thing you’re fleeing follows you, no matter how far you run or how hard you hope to be free of it. If the thing you’re hoping to fix is a marriage, it can become an albatross dragging you under, rather than letting you fly.

A new job tempts Krystle Ratticus to leave Chicago and try Milwaukee. Her new marriage is already floundering but she’s bent on making it work. This is such a familiar impulse. You don’t wanna keep failing like all the times before, so you double down. Put all your chips down on the one “lucky” number even though you know deep in your bones that number’s cursed.

Felix barely lifts a finger. He feels Krystle should pay the bills while he pursues his music pipedreams. He’s a user and she lets herself be used, believing her love and care will pull him out of the mire he wallows in. But no one can fix anyone else no matter how much they want to or how hard they try. Insert whatever truism you like best here because they’re all true. We all run our own race. Best that can be hoped for is to run alongside someone else for a time, maybe share a few gulps of water now and again. Let them get a breather. Share a laugh.

Krystle tries a bunch of jobs to get by but each eats her up a different way. She’s in a strange town with no support system, no one to turn to when things go sideways, tied to man who expects her to pull him along. It’s a goddamn disaster. Yet she keeps trying to make it work. They give up on Milwaukee and go back to Chicago, then the marriage goes tits up.

What I’ve always loved about Krystle’s writing is the plainspoken humor of the way she describes her jobs and relationships. The first zine I read of hers was The Greasy Spoon’s Weirdo Du Jour. It documents her time at a restaurant I knew very well. I liked the zine so much I tried to get my then-publisher to give her a book deal. Everything I’ve read of hers since confirms she should be publishing books. Not that, at this point, a book is any more legit or real than a zine. The technology is such now that anyone can put out a book-shaped thing. There’s no bigger percentage of people with anything to say than there ever was, going back to the advent of the printing press.

This is one writer who deserves a wider audience.

This new thing she’s made is tough and funny and kind of heartbreaking. Get yours here.

I wrote about Amalia Ulman’s movies, which I love.

As I’m about to board a plane to LA, I get an email I’d been dreading. It puts me in a foul mood throughout Soutwest’s cattle-call. So much that I refuse to give up my first-row aisle seat for a late-arriving paraplegic. I feel like a selfish asshole but am in no condition for another hit so soon.

I don’t fly often but each time I do I’m reminded of what an unpleasant experience it is. All I want is an aisle seat near the front so I don’t have to sit sideways and can escape ASAP.

Luckily, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio sucks me in enough to forget about my frustrations for a few hours. It is the next book I’m designing and illustrating.

I don’t have any strong feelings about LA one way or the other. This is a family visit, so I’m grateful it’s not the usual Boston. This is what I like about LA best.

I take a look at the mural I painted January. Seems like the California sun hasn’t killed it yet.

My niece is double the age I saw her last. She’ll be walking soon. She’s rapidly becoming a person.

I meet up with Bruce for a late lunch. We were supposed to meet in January but the fires prevented it. We talk for a couple hours. It’s often jarring to meet someone I’ve corresponded with intensively in person for the first time. But there’s little awkwardness between us. It’s easy, which is a relief.

This is his local diner. The waitress flirts with him relentlessly. After she leaves, he tells me he smelled liquor on her breath.

K asks for a drawing of the Creature from the Black Lagoon for a tattoo, so I spend my free time drawing him from various angles. He’s a looker without doubt.

I hadn’t made a mixtape for someone in a decade before K came along. Now I make them all the time. To be clear, these are not the canonical cassette variety but recordable CDs. I found a bunch in my desk drawer, biding their time, sure they’d be of use once more. Now there are none left.

Nowadays a mixtape—whether made for someone special or to be played in a bar or restaurant to encourage further consumption—is called a playlist. But in order to share one, the giver and taker have to be on the same platform or system. Sadly, such is not the case for K and I. She’s Spotify while I’m Apple Music. But we’ve found very labor-intensive workarounds.

As I said, I make her CDs. I don’t have a CD player anymore but do have a disc burner that attaches to my laptop. When I started, I thought I could download music from Apple and put it on disc but that’s not a nut I’ve been able to crack. The files are encoded in such a way that they won’t be burned. There’s ways to jailbreak them but that’s beyond my technical abilities for now. What I do is hook up my digital audio player—the thing one gets if they don’t use a smartphone to play music on the go—and attach it to the laptop. This device has hundreds of hours of tunes. I spend a lot of happy time scouring it for suitable material. Some of the files are not MP3s—those I upload to an app that converts them—then I rename all the songs so they’re numbered in the correct sequence, attach the burner, load the blank disc, and fill it up.

When the disc is done, I write the title of the mix with a Sharpie all over its top and set it aside. I get cardstock, paper, bits of ephemera, markers, a gluestick, and scotch tape to assemble the sleeve. Before decorating it, I feed the paper into my Smith-Corona and type out the track list. Then I improvise a cover from the gathered materials and it’s done.

The other day, K told me she’s getting a cassette deck. She intends to start making me real mixtapes. This is a serious upping of the game. I have a cassette deck but haven’t recorded a tape in thirty years. I spent this morning researching how to do so with modern equipment. I’m missing at least one necessary cord. I also have to buy blank cassettes.

I can’t wait…

Made another zine. Signed/numbered edition of 30.