Awoke last night to the sound of thunder and discovered a mad storm brewing, lightning from every direction blasted bursts of light into the apartment. Most of the morning was gray, the city enveloped in thick clouds. Then suddenly by day's end, the blue behind the clouds revealed itself and the sun shone bright. It would've been sweltering hot had it not been for the windy tail end of the storm playfully lingering about.

Not much of an art-making day, but a good day nonetheless. Newsletter drafted and scheduled for late Friday night central time. Mythomatic orders dropped off at post office, and groceries picked up. Many emails responded to, but still going through the rest. 51 between inboxes, but many are notifications, and a few are bills.

Tomorrow should be a good TSG day, and Friday can be blocked off for Project Oldbook.

#journal

Drew and designed this cover back in 2019, but it wasn't published until late 2022, and I only got my comp copy this year because Walter (Chaw) was so adamant about getting it signed by Walter Hill for me. I'm glad he did, it's a delightful and humbling inscription which I'm keeping private. A fluke at the publishing house seems to have resulted in the absence of my credit though. Oh well. More pix of the book here.

Still recovering from toddler germs, may need another full day to recover. Can't write or draw for shit, so I figured working on [very belatedly] populating the website with projects from the past couple years is a mindless enough task for me to muster. Also getting the new newsletter platform in order. Getting all systems up to speed for optimum operation. There will be quite a bit of that over the next month or so after which I'm hoping for smooth, seamless sailing.

#work #journal

Counting myself lucky to have this ramen spot around the corner from my place for when my little angle brings home some of the sinister daycare illnesses he harbors.

Today will be a day for recovery and tidying up and very little else. Reserving my energy for a proper full grind in the days to come.

#journal

I don't drive. Which in America is hard enough as it is if it were only your own body that needed transportation, but with a child it's almost impossible to exist unless you succumb to the country's car-centric ways. This is especially true in a city like Houston where getting my kid to and from his daycare (a mere 2.5 miles away) has been nothing short of a pain in the balls.

Solo parenting this past week meant dropping my kid off at his daycare in an uber, only to uber back to my place where I also have my work setup. The same back and forth is repeated in the late afternoon, bracketing my work day which is also sprinkled with things like dinner prep, laundry, dishes, and tidying up (all of which with child I tend to need to do more of). Once he's back at the house, it's a back-to-back marathon of dinnertime-pottytime-bathtime-playtime-storytime-sleeptime, cherishing every moment of it, but falling prey to a deep kind of ultra exhaustion by night's end. Only to repeat the entire process the next day. A few consecutive days of this and you successfully have that living dead look down. No makeup, prosthetics, or special effects necessary.

I'm not even gonna get into the lack of productivity this causes.

I've been looking into hiring a trustworthy car+driver service to take care of my kid's drop offs and pickups because he'll be with me for the entirety of a month soon, but apparently this is so unheard of in this country that it's proven to be quite difficult.

Life in America is a case of constant problem-solving things that people don't even have to consider at all elsewhere. The United States is an exercise in obstacle course design as nation-building, I swear to god.

#journal

Had big plans for today (accounting, Project OLDBOOK, TSG, and cooking up a storm) but have instead been rendered paralyzed by an unforgiving migraine. Medication useless. Hard to do anything at all when you can hardly use your eyes or even think through the sharp jabs of the dull knife of pain.

#journal

“First thing in the morning”—Great value is placed on the first thing you do in the morning; be it slurping a spoonful of raw honey, exercise, making your bed, journaling, showering or what have you, it feels like every other person will advise you to do that one particular thing in the morning. That if you do that one thing, the rest of your day is somehow supposed to go swimmingly. Problem is though you can't possibly do all those things first thing in the morning. By definition, the first thing in the morning can only be one single thing. Which one should it be?

I'm tempted to give up and do absolutely nothing at all at this point. Spend my first hour staring at a wall or something.

#journal

Newsletter out, last time through Substack. Transitioning over to EmailOctopus, because their pricing tiers strike me as fair and one of my favorite newsletters (Dense Discovery) does some nice layout stuff with it, and I'd like to do some nice things with mine, really make it my own. Hoping to get it going by next month, and sticking to a monthly schedule from here on out. I can't believe there was a time when I managed to do it weekly. Like how do you even?

Inboxes and RSS reader at zero, fridge replenished, and a couple contracts drafted and sent out. Tomorrow I bake granola, ink two pages of TSG, and hopefully manage to carve out 3-ish intensely productive hours on another thing I've agreed to do; let's call it PROJECT OLDBOOK. I'd also like to squeeze in some exercise before taking my kid out to dinner.

Beat.

#journal

Third day in a row to wake up with a migraine. Beginning to think that the culprit lies in my new supplements.

In other news, my TBR pile has grown rather unruly.

Some of these are partially read (a terrible habit), and that's not even taking my Kindle titles into consideration. I also have a borrowed copy of Rushdie's THE SATANIC VERSES coming in from a friend. Will have to move onto that one so I don't end up holding onto it for too long, and then I think I'll get going on Thompson's FEAR AND LOATHING which I have actually yet to read but am kind of dying to after watching the film adaptation for the first time a few weeks ago.

It's a hot, beautiful day here in Houston, Texas, temperatures soaring at 26 celsius just asking for one to kick back and linger but I cannot turn off my brain from the great many to-do`s on my plate, whether it's continued work on some of my ongoing projects or the resuscitation of things I've been neglecting like the website and newsletter. I've also been putting off accounting for way too long now, and there are a number of houses things to tend to.

Also thinking about how to best maneuver work stuff with the summer month I'll be getting to exclusively spend with my kid (a first for me). Was initially thinking of planning a trip for us to Egypt during that month, but there are time, cost, and logistical considerations to take into account.

No wonder my head hurts.

#journal #reads

My instagram feed seems to have become populated by more targeted ads than content from the actual people I follow, a less than surprising development, I s'pose. Many of the ads seem to be hawking solutions for dealing with extended fatigue, which I have indeed been suffering from lately. Is this something that just happens in your 40's?

I've never been much of a drugs or supplements person, but it may just be time for that to change. Unless I've been brainwashed by advertisements to believe that that's exactly what I need. It's hard to know for sure anymore.

#journal

One time I went to pick up my kid from daycare and the minute he saw me, he started crying. Not because he didn't wanna be with me, but because he was in the middle of putting a puzzle together and he wanted to see it through before leaving.

I saw that and knew exactly where he got it from. Working on this last THE SOLAR GRID script and finding myself incapable of stepping away from the thing and doing other very necessary things, like, y'know eating or exercising or going through my inbox or, or or.

Terrible habit.

Smoking is another one I seem to have picked up in recent months, which is funny because everyone knows it's something you start as a teenager, not in your 40's for fuck's sake.

#journal