250 Words on Ewoks

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

In college, I knew a girl named Debbie. We worked together on our university’s bus system, called Unitrans. I drove double-decker buses and Debbie was one of the conductors who took fares, rang stops, and kept riders safe. It was a fun job.

During school breaks, Debbie made movies. She once returned talking about playing an Ewok in the next Star Wars film. Nobody knew what an Ewok was. You can see her in Return of the Jedi; she’s the one who crawls over to mourn its dead mate. Under layers of latex and fur, she’s heartbreaking.

Debbie had a tremendous career after graduation. She played Thumbelina in Total Recall, the Tiny Avenger in In Living Color, and had roles in Seinfeld, Men in Black, ER, Boston Legal, Grace and Frankie, and much more. 

I saw her signing autographs at Comic-Con International in San Diego a couple of times. I wanted to stop to say hello but her queue was always long and I was always on my way to something else. I even knew my opening line. “I bet I can say one word that will make your entire day,” I would have said, before pausing and adding: “Unitrans.” Next time.

You know where this is going. Debbie Lee Carrington died in 2018. Learn the lesson: take the opportunity, say hello, make someone’s day. You may not get another chance.

Some Star Wars fans dismiss Ewoks as a cynical merchandising ploy. Never me. It’s different when you knew one. 

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Happy National Comic Book Daughters Day!

Christmas is nice, Halloween is fun, but today, September 25, is one of my favorite holidays because it's a two-fer: National Daughters Day and National Comic Book Day! And I'm in the rare (unique?) position of being able to combine them because my daughters have appeared in every graphic novel I've done! 

In the past I've posted images showing my girls in my published books, but here's something new: my family, including my daughters, as seen in an unpublished graphic novel I've completed but whose fate remains uncertain. We're in the middle of a large crowd scene, which is a nice place to hide caricatures of yourself and people you know.  

Happy National Comic Book Daughters Day, Chiquitas!

250 Words on the O'erhanging Firmament

 

Most people who live in the cities or suburbs don’t see many stars. Certainly fewer than a hundred. 

A journalist friend who grew up in the country once wrote a newspaper piece on myths about the Milky Way and was surprised when I pointed out that most of his readers had probably never seen it. The edge-on glow of our galaxy’s arms was part of the familiar landscape to him. 

I’ve been to some remote places that had good “seeing,” which is what astronomers call the viewing conditions. Clear still air. I remember three that were so extraordinary they nearly overwhelmed me. Instead of a hundred stars, you’d swear there were a hundred thousand. So many stars, so bright and dense, that I couldn’t find even the most familiar constellations among them. So much starlight it felt heavy.

One: I was a Boy Scout, maybe 12, camping in the Sierra Nevada, sleeping bare-faced under the sky. Two: I was driving home from college, near the border between Napa and Sonoma counties in northern California, where I pulled my car over to gape. Three: a few years ago near Taos, New Mexico, when the Milky Way was truly bright enough to read by.

My freshman astronomy professor said that most people only pay attention to the world below their eyeline, ignoring the half of the universe that’s overhead. To be fair, in many spots there’s not much to see up there. But in the right spot, it’ll take your breath away. 

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Amazing Adventures Coming Soon!

The unboxing this morning. Always a thrill to open a package and find newly published books that you had something to do with.

Life Achievement Unlocked! I wrote about this back when I did the work, and soon it will be out in the world: a six-page Avengers story I wrote and drew is part of MARVEL SUPER STORIES: AMAZING ADVENTURES, the second anthology featuring superhero stories by people who don't normally do them, aimed at middle-grade readers. A short stack of books arrived on my step this morning and will be available to everyone else in November.

As I told Editor Charlie when I pitched my story, this really was a bucket list item for me. I collected Avengers comic books for years, and at one point had every issue ever published. I am inordinately proud and excited that my story is one of 15 in this book, including ones by much more renown authors like Jarrett Krosoczka, Judd Winnick, Dean Haspiel, and John Jennings. As far as I'm concerned, my story is Avengers canon. It really happened.

I plan to attend one book launch event in the Bay Area in early November that I'll announce when it's announcin' time. A couple of other contributors are scheduled to be there. If more events get set up, I'll let you know!

WOO HOO! 

The title spread of my little contribution. I drew the picture on the left, which is of the Beast, a founding X-Man and long-time Avenger, who stars in my story. I didn't write the intro text on the right but it's swell. One of the challenges we faced with my story is that my knowledge of Avengers lore--who's a member, where their HQ is--is out of date, so we framed my story as an adventure from their past.

I thought a few process junkies might enjoy seeing my original art compared to the published page. This is what I mean about my knowledge being out of date: when I was young, the Avengers HQ was the Stark family mansion in Manhattan. Not anymore. But I really wanted to draw the mansion, and honestly I drew the heck out of it. For this job, lettering and coloring were done in Photoshop (letters are a typeface I made of my own hand printing).

250 Words On Growth

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

I’ve been surprised that my sixties have marked a period of tremendous personal growth, by which I mean organic materials growing out of my body in new and alarming ways and places.

First, from inside my nostrils and ear canals, hairs in a riot of textures and colors intent on tickling and harassing me. Also, more startlingly, right out on the very tip of each ear, a little crabgrass patch of hairs poking up like wiry antennas craning to pull in a distant TV station.

When you’re 11 and a school nurse hands you a pamphlet titled “Your Changing Body,” they never mention that someday you’ll be shaving your lobes.

Seborrheic keratoses are brown scaly waxy lumps that, as one medical website colorfully describes, “look as if they were dripped onto the skin by a candle,” and my epidermis churns them out. They’re benign, if you consider looking like the Fantastic Four’s Ben “The Thing” Grimm benign. 

The ones I can reach, I scrape off with a fingernail. You’re not supposed to do that and it’s not supposed to work, but I do and it does. For those on my back that I can’t reach, I see a dermatologist, who freezes them off with liquid nitrogen.

At my last visit, she looked and said, “Wow, that’s a lot.” After treatment, I asked if she’d gotten them all. She shrugged as if to say, “I’m not a miracle worker. Make peace with the reality that this is how you look now.” 

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After the Lahaina Fire

The newspaper article in this link reports what Karen and I were up to yesterday afternoon. 

Karen's old boss, county Supervisor James Gore, called Tuesday and said he wanted to bring a busload of folks from the international "After the Fire" conference to our neighborhood, and asked if Karen could say a few words and I could provide a couple of signed copies of A Fire Story. One particular point of the visit was to show a contingent from Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii, which was wiped out by fire a year ago, what a neighborhood looks like seven years after it burned to the ground. 

Karen spoke, then I spoke, and Gore spoke. We told them our story, and assured them that if they face every day with purpose and work together as a community, they'll get through it. I gave my book to the mayor and a city councilwoman from Lahaina. The mayor, in turn, gave Karen and me little pins from their city. We told them they're not alone. 

We hugged, we cried.

I found myself unexpectedly moved--"unexpectedly" because I've told my story in a lot of places to a lot of people, many of whom had lived their own version of it. I thought I'd gotten used to it. I think this was different because it was on my turf, in a little neighborhood park that was the only plot of grass and oaks that survived the fire, and the Maui folks' trauma is still so fresh and raw. 

I'm not fond of my quote in the linked article. "Punch them in the face" was said as a joke and doesn't necessarily come across like one in print. But I think we were able to provide some real-life insight and advice that we can only hope they find helpful.

It was a good and sad event.

250 Words on Odd Numbers

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

People like oddness.

Magicians know that most folks, asked to pick a number between one and five, will say three. Most asked to pick a number between one and ten will say seven. 

When I was young, my Grandma taught me my first lesson in art composition: objects grouped in threes are more pleasing to the eye than those grouped in twos or fours. I don’t know how she knew that, she wasn’t an artist, but she was right. We are drawn to the balanced asymmetry of odd numbers. 

One odd number is “Belphegor’s Prime,” Belphegor being a high-ranking demon in Hell whose cursed number is 1,000,000,000,000,066,600,000,000,000,001. It’s a palindrome—the same forward and back—with 13 zeroes on either side of a 666 in the middle. It’s also a prime number, indivisible by anything but 1 and itself. A similar so-called “beastly palindromic prime” is 700,666,007. Sinister!

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung and physicist Richard Feynman both extolled the prime number 137, which seemed to surface in their work more often than it should, hinting at some inscrutably deep pattern in the universe. Some scientists wouldn’t be surprised if, when the Theory of Everything that unites subatomic quantum mechanics with cosmological relativity is finally discovered, its formula has a “137” in it.

One of my favorite numbers is 51, because it’s 17 x 3 but somehow seems like it shouldn’t be. 

Of course, according to writer Douglas Adams, the Ultimate Answer to Everything is 42. How odd that it’s not odd. 

Sauce Day!

Yesterday was our first big tomato-harvesting and sauce-making jubilee. Our climate is mild enough that we'll produce tomatoes until the first frost, so there will probably be more crops and sauces to come. We freeze it and put away enough to last throughout the year!

We planted four tomatoes this season: Roma, San Marzano, Sweet 100 cherries, and Better Boy, which was new to us this year. In addition, we have a TON of basil that will both go into this sauce and be made into pesto which, again, we'll freeze and use well into next year. 

I know few things as satisfying and gratifying as picking something from your garden in the morning, cooking it, and serving it for dinner that night. 

Karen and Riley harvesting our crop. Riley LOVES cherry tomatoes; any that hit the ground are hers. I made this U-shaped raised bed, which doesn't have a ton of square footage but is efficient and sufficient for us. You can see a bit of our basil patch peeking out behind Karen.

Today's yield, which will be clean, sliced, and tossed into a pot.

Eleven cloves of garlic ready to be diced. In our family, we call that "a good start."

Everybody in the pool! We'll cook it down for a few hours now. We don't bother peeling the tomatoes (hundreds of cherry tomatoes!), but will use an immersion blender to smooth it all out later.

Added at 1 p.m.: Added some basil and hit it with the immersion blender. Then added spices, Parmesan cheese, onion, bay leaves (plucked from trees in a nearby creek). Sometimes we leave it vegetarian, but this batch has ground beef, browned in another pan (with the onion) and added. Now we just give it a few hours to percolate and thicken. Beautiful color!

Added at 6:30 p.m.: Farm to Table in about seven hours! Fresh sauce on a nest of wide fettuccini, with Romano beans from the farmer's market and a nibble of garlic bread. It was good. Very good.

Leftover sauce headed to the freezer. Depending on how many we're feeding, each container is good for one meal or more. We'll probably make another batch as big or bigger in a few weeks.

250 Words on Kids and Other Humans

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

I love kids and kids love me. I don’t know why, but if I’m in a room with a hundred adults and one kid, that kid’s eyes will lock onto mine like a magnet. If there’s a kid in a restaurant looking over the back of their chair, they’re looking at me.   

Maybe because I look back.

I like to think kids, like dogs, are good judges of character and their attention reflects well on me, but I don’t know that.

You might say it’s because I approach the world with childlike openness and wonder, but I don’t think I particularly do and, even if I did, they wouldn’t know that.

I do acutely remember what it felt like to be a kid, which is why I never tease or patronize them. I know they can feel deep embarrassment and perceive condescension because when I was their age I could. Of course I adjust my vocabulary, but I know kids can have interesting conversations about sophisticated ideas because I did. 

Kids aren’t stupid, they’re just inexperienced and uninformed. Both conditions will be remedied in time.

I also try to get down to their level. My mother told a story about being a young girl visiting a sheep ranch. The sheep terrified her and the adults laughed, until her grandfather kneeled to her height and said, “Geez, from down here they look like monsters!” She never forgot his empathy and compassion.

Perhaps the trick is treating kids like people. I remember.

250 Words on Skydiving

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

I parachuted out of a plane three times, which I am proud of because most people quit after one. 

I was in college. The jump school at the tiny airport—so tiny I once I drove my car onto the runway thinking it was a road—was operated out of a ramshackle hut by a grizzled Korean War paratrooper, George, who warmed his classes with an oil drum fire he fueled by squirting gasoline into it.

These days, I understand novice skydivers jump from 10,000 feet in tandem, an instructor strapped to their backs. Back then we jumped solo from 3,000 feet, using a static line that opened our chutes for us. Over time, you’d demonstrate the form and skill needed to jump from higher altitudes and pull your own ripcord. 

I didn’t advance that far. 

A year or two after my third jump, when I still hadn’t entirely retired the idea of jumping again someday, George died in a skydiving accident. He’d been sitting near the open door of the plane when the emergency chute on his chest popped open and caught the wind. In jump school he’d taught us that, if that happens, you immediately leap out the door after it. George didn’t, his chute tangled in the tail, and he fell to his death.

I figured that if my jumpmaster sensei could go out like that, I wouldn’t have stood a chance, and that was the end of my skydiving adventure. It was glorious while it lasted. 

All Done Painting the Roses Red

Before and After: a few days ago, I posted some studies I did in preparation for doing a painting I promised Karen for our living room (you may recall that her only requirements were "big" and "red"). I also promised to share the results. Well, now it's done. Pic 1 above the blank sheet of watercolor paper I gave her for her birthday two months ago. Pic 2 below is the finished art. It'll do.

The Dog That Didn't Bark

I rarely post about current events for two reasons: nobody cares what I think, nor should they, and; I've never seen a Facebook post change anyone's mind. Still, I have two unrelated observations with a common thread:

1. Watching the Democratic National Convention, I've seen Barack and Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter's grandson, JFK's grandson, and all sorts of governors, senators and representatives. More are forthcoming.

In contrast, where were George W. and Laura Bush at the Republican Convention? Where were Dick Cheney and Dan Quayle? Descendants of Ford, Reagan, Bush or Bush? Where was Mike Pence--oh yeah, his former boss tried to murder him. 

It's a very stark contrast between a political party and a former political party that's become a one-man cult of personality. I think the list of people who DON'T show up is as interesting as the list of those who do.

2. Similarly, I'm fascinated by what ISN'T happening in the Middle East, namely that Iran hasn't carried out its promised retribution against Israel for the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Like Sherlock Holmes in the story "Silver Blaze," I am struck by the silence of the dog that didn't bark. 

Although this thought could be rendered obsolete at any second, it seems to me that there must be frantic diplomacy happening behind the scenes, probably involving the U.S. and several other countries, scrambling hard to keep the lid on this mess. Somebody's been talking to Iran and making it very clear to them where their larger interests lie.

In art it's called "negative space," the shape of the nothing around something you're drawing. Your geopolitical thought of the day: "nothing" can be as revealing as "something."

250 Words on the Odds

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

Studying quantum physics* taught me that reality is a crapshoot.

Electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. aren’t tiny marbles that orbit and ricochet off each other. That old Bohr atomic model was obsolete a century ago. Instead, each is a nebulous cloud of space that has an extremely high probability of behaving like an electron, proton or neutron. It could also behave like a donut. The odds are never 100 percent, and whenever you try to pin one down it squirms away.

Einstein said, “God does not play dice with the universe,” but the science says She does. We are all the consequence of trillions of individual subatomic dice throws happening every picosecond of our lives. 

Those probabilities can be expressed as a wave function, like an enormous squiggly curve, just as throwing two dice produces a bell curve that peaks on the number seven. Electrons, protons and neutrons are all wave functions and we are the sum—the superposition—of all the probability waves that comprise us. I’m a wave, you’re a wave. Hello, my wave is waving to your wave.

In 1763, writer, editor, and lexicographer Samuel Johnson answered a philosophical argument that nothing truly exists by kicking a large stone as hard as he could and declaring, “I refute it thus!”

All Johnson proved was that the odds of his and the stone’s wave functions occupying the same space at the same time were vanishingly small. Whether that says anything about the reality of their mutual existence is debatable. 

* I don't assume that all my friends and readers know I got my bachelor's degree in physics, so I have actually studied quantum mechanics. I did some time in Hilbert Space. That in no way makes me an expert—mostly it taught me exactly how ignorant I was—but I think it does make me better informed than most. Also, this footnote does not count against my 250-word limit, a loophole I may exploit in the future!