Reflection #17/40

Last week Jackson was sick. He was having trouble breathing in the middle of the night and Alice took him to the hospital at 3 AM. She hoped they would tell her that she had nothing to worry about, but they determined that he did have a problem and admitted him. They were in the hospital all day Monday and did not get home until 1 in the morning.

Everything turned out okay, but it made me think of all the times I have been scared about Jackson’s health, starting before he was born.

Jackson was a big baby. Very, very big. He was also breach, meaning that not only could he barely fit inside his mother, but he was turned the wrong way. A traditional birth would be way too difficult so they scheduled Alice for a C-section.

Just before our family vacation, the doctor decided that Alice shouldn’t go. So I ended up driving through South Carolina with my parents, Cynthia, and Abby. While we were stopped for lunch, I got a call from Alice. She was panicked; she had gone to get an ultrasound, and the technician had warned her that she was at risk for pregnancy loss.

“Pregnancy loss” is the worst euphemism I have ever heard, in that it completely fails to make the thing it’s describing sound less terrible. Hearing this from Alice, in that Zaxby’s parking lot, was probably the most terrifying moment of my life.

We got back in the car, and continued driving, but my heart was racing and I could barely think straight. A few minutes later Alice called back. Alice had talked to her doctor, who had calmed her down, and said that the ultrasound technician should not have used that term, that things were not that dire, that Alice just needed to check in regularly so she could make sure everything was going smoothly.

That was reassuring, but my mood was pretty much ruined for the rest of the vacation. And, the day after we got back from vacation, when Jackson was born, I was excited, but I couldn’t stop worrying. The whole time we were in the hospital, I kept wondering, when is the other shoe going to drop?

It took me a long time to accept that, knock on wood, Jackson is healthy and happy and, as an added bonus, adorable. I am extremely grateful for that. Eventually my paranoia subsided. Now I still worry about him sometimes, like when he gets sick and has breathing problems, but generally I'm just glad to have him around.

Reflection #16/40

Pretty much every Sunday, from my earliest memories up until I left home for college in 1993, my family went to church, came home and changed clothes, and then went next door to my grandmother’s house. She always made roast beef for lunch on Sunday. And, in addition, she always made about fifty sides to go with the roast beef. There were mashed potatoes, rolls, either a half a canned pear or a slice of pineapple, vegetables, and more that I’m probably forgetting. Every Sunday was a celebration.

At one point in my youth I foolishly decided I didn’t like mashed potatoes, so my grandmother would set a potato aside for me, and I would have a plain, boiled, non-mashed potato. Even when I started liking mashed potatoes again, I didn’t say anything, because I enjoyed having my own personal potato.

I especially enjoyed drenching the roast beef in Worcestershire sauce, and the potato—a boiled potato doesn’t have a lot of flavor on its own, but douse it in Worcestershire sauce, and it’s a delight. And then you can use a roll or two to sop up the extra sauce on your plate.

After lunch my sister and I would play. Sometimes I would nap. In the evening, either I would still be there, at my grandmother’s house, or we would return. We had left-overs for dinner. Roast beef sandwiches, with potato chips and pickles and whatever else we found in my grandmother’s cabinets. Her cabinets were always well stocked.  

I miss that Sunday meal; I miss my grandmother. 

Reflection #15/40

We’ve spent most of 2015 getting the house ready to sell. This has involved going through our belongings and getting rid of some things and packing up others.

A few months ago I was sorting through the binders full of hand-drawn comics that I kept in a bookshelf in my bedroom. I have drawn many, many comics over the years. And, as I looked through these binders, I had an epiphany.

For years I was jealous of Robert Kirkman. Really, really jealous. You remember Robert Kirkman . . . I talked about him in Reflection #5. He was a guy who worked at my local comic book store, who was roommates with my friend Steve. He wanted to make comics professionally; I wanted to make comics professionally. Back in 1999, I would have thought I had a better shot at making it.

But Kirkman self-published a comic called Battle Pope, and then got a gig writing a Super-Patriot mini-series for Image, and then did work for Marvel, and got his own Image comic, Invincible, and then another Image series called Walking Dead. And before you knew it, he was the CEO of Image Comics, and, you may have heard about this, they made a TV show based on the Walking Dead.

Kirkman and I started out in the same place—we were both nobodies in Lexington, Kentucky, who wanted to break into the comics industry. We both had a certain amount of experience writing comics. The different between us was that Kirkman had a whole lot more drive and ambition than I did. He climbed his way to the top, and became a massively influential figure, while I . . . hung out and, you know, occasionally self-published some mini-comics.

For years I blamed myself. If only I had worked harder, like Kirkman, I could have been a success. I could have at least gotten published. Looking through my collected body of work, though, I realized something. None of this stuff would have ever been popular. The ideas I have tend to be weird and non-commercial. Even if I had worked hard, when I was younger, and aggressively pushed the comics I worked on, none of them would have ever really taken off.

Robert Kirkman is not a hack; he stays true to himself, and writes what he wants to write. It just so happens that what he wants to write coincides with what millions of people want to read. When I’ve stayed true to myself, my comics have been wildly unappealing to a mass audience. Once I realized this, it was strangely liberating.

Not as commerical as The Walking Dead.

Reflection #14/40

Remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? Back in 1984, I was a big fan of them. I would check them out of the school library. One day, near the beginning of 4th grade, I saw that another kid had checked out Choose Your Own Adventure book #10, The Lost Jewels of Nabooti, by R.A. Montgomery. I asked him about it, and we started talking. And that is how I became friends with Dale Floyd French.

Floyd—he went by “Floyd” at the time, though later by “Dale,” and later still by “Floyd” again, depending on who you were—was confident, outgoing, and smart. He won the 4th grade spelling bee. He was an academic star. If that wasn’t enough, he was also a really good artist. The two of us started drawing comics, at first separately, to show each other on the bus in the morning, but later in collaboration.

Probably our greatest creation was the Barn Bots. They were heroic robot animals who could transform into farm equipment. To, you know, hide on the farm. Their base was a run-down old barn, that was secretly a high-tech fortress in disguise. They waged a never-ending war with the evil Swamp Bots. I was the one who came up with the name Barn Bots; Floyd created and designed the best characters, like Slop (pig who turns into a fence) and Rep-Turkey (turkey who turns into a snake).

In addition to comics, we also wrote our own line of books, cleverly titled “Pick Your Own Adventure.” We wrote tons of those things. They had names like “Wacky Weather,” “It’s Not True—Oh Yes, It Is!” and (my favorite) “Your Appliances Are Alive!”

It was with young Floyd French that I learned the joys of writing and drawing stories, something I’ve kept with me ever since. And, out of all the people I knew back then, he's the only one I've kept in touch with ever since. He's no longer the same self-confident, eager kid he used to be--"not self-confident" is quite an understatement--but he's a good artist, and all these years later he's still my friend. Thanks to R.A. Montgomery.

Reflection #13/40

As I mentioned earlier, my first novel was a surreal detective story called The Lobster-Quadrille.

I wrote my second novel shortly after we moved to Cincinnati, when I was unemployed and didn’t leave the house much. Working on it was therapeutic. The novel was . . . Did you hear the story about the teacher who wrote a novel and published it and then lost his job because the school district thought it was inappropriate? Yeah, I’m not going to tell you any more about my second novel.

My third novel was inspired by my college years. It had some nice parts, and was coming along pretty well, but it had structural problems. I got about three-quarters of the way through and set it aside to try the National Novel Writer’s Month challenge. My third novel is still incomplete.

In July of 2009 I participated in NaNoWriMo (which is technically in November, but whatever) and wrote a novel in a month. It ended up being a young adult fantasy novel called The Akseliad. The problem with writing a novel in a month, though, is that you have to do a lot of revision afterwards; I spent the next six years working on it. It also ended up being way longer than a YA fantasy novel can be, so it split it into two books. It’s now my fourth and fifth novels. Someday soon I’m going to try to find an agent and work on getting it published.  

My sixth novel is well underway, and is a complete departure from The Akseliad. Instead of young adult fantasy, it’s about grown-up reality. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, though I am told by the members of my writing group that it is extremely depressing. 

Reflection #12/40

When we first moved to Cincinnati in 2005 I had no job, I didn’t know anybody, and Alice was often away at work. Sometimes she was gone for weeks at a time; within days of us moving in, for instance, she flew off to Arizona for a mission trip. I was alone in our new house, with no idea what to do. It was not a good time for me. I became depressed.

I had imagined that once I quit working in retail I would be able to find the job of my dreams. But I was too lethargic to look for a job. It was hard enough just to get out of bed in the morning.

Alice was supportive--extremely, ridiculously supportive--but months passed and the sadness did not go away. I really wanted to be happy again, and I started to think that maybe I could get some kind of pill that would fix me up. I got a list of psychologists who were covered by Alice’s insurance, and I chose a name off the list, and made an appointment. It turned out that, out of all the therapists in Cincinnati, this guy was the one most passionately opposed to the use of psychoactive drugs. He’s written books about it. There was no way he was going to help me get a prescription for anything.

But that was okay, because he helped me see the obvious (in retrospect) solution to my problem. The more I stayed at home alone, the more I withdrew from the world, the less functional I became. The only way to get better was to reconnect with society. Instead of holding out for some perfect job, I needed to just get any kind of job, and get back around people again.

I took his advice and worked at Target for a summer, and then at a movie theater. I decided to become a teacher, and I went to grad school. I got a teaching license. My first year as a teacher, I became a father. Everything I am now, everything in my life, was defined by how I came out of that depression. In a way, it’s my secret origin. 

Reflection #11/40

On August 3rd, 1999, I started work at Barnes & Noble in Dublin, Ohio. I was glad to have the job, because I had just moved to Columbus, and was going to get married in a little over a month. On my first day a manager named Matt Kish gave me a tour of the store. He was a funny guy; I immediately liked him and hoped that we would become friends. According to him, he decided early on that I was some sort of right-wing nutjob and should be avoided. I guess I don’t always make a good first impression.

But one day Matt came into the break room and found me reading a copy of Jack Kirby’s Forever People. He asked if I liked comics, and I said yes, figuring he was probably just interested in recent well-known stuff. Then he surprised me by saying that Jack Kirby’s New Gods was one of the best things he’d ever read.

A little bit of backstory: Jack Kirby, the greatest American comic book artist of the 20th century, wrote and drew a series called New Gods in the 70s. It was all set to be his magnum opus, an epic story told over the course of years, but tragically it was cancelled with issue #11. People of my generation had not had a chance to read the series until it was reprinted as a cheap paperback in 1997. I bought a copy as soon as it came out, and it was, like Matt said, one of the best things I’d ever read.

So we bonded over Jack Kirby, and even though Matt was a cruel, bitter man who delighted in tormenting others, we became friends and, over time, boon companions. We talked about comics, we collaborated on making our own comics, we argued about weighty philosophical issues, and we stayed in touch when we lived in different cities.

Okay, so maybe calling him a cruel and bitter man is unfair. Matt often gave me a hard time, back when we worked together, but he’s also shown me plenty of support, encouragement, generosity, and forgiveness over the years. He has been a true friend. And, eventually, he became family, when he became the godfather to my first-born child.