Утро. Солнце встаёт, освещая пустые безлюдные улицы. Город просыпается. Город зовёт меня выйти наружу из моего маленького комфортного привычного мирка навстречу новому дню. И я выхожу.
Сегодня у меня нет маршрута, нет плана, нет цели. Я просто брожу средь его белых стен, находя будто бы случайные подсказки, намёки, ориентиры, оставляемые мне Городом. Город ведёт меня одному ему ведомым маршрутом, время от времени приводя в странные незнакомые места, раскрывая мне свои тайны. Иногда он позволяет мне заблудиться в хитросплетениях его переулков, но каждый раз находит способ подсказать верное направление.
Вечер. По тёмным улицам, освещаемым остатками вечерней зари, я возвращаюсь в свой дом, в свой мир. Я иду мимо тысяч таких же домов, в каждом из которых притаился свой собственный мир. Все они составляют душу Города.
Сегодня Город показал мне рыжего кота на широком подоконнике, окунул в аромат цветущей сирени, вывел к маленькому кафе на старой улице, где бариста поведал мне секрет южной ночи. Потом я нашёл странный заросший двор, в котором незнакомец в сером плаще рассказал, как когда-то на этих самых улицах повстречал свою любовь.
Под тёмным южным небом, сотканным из звёзд и черноты, я возвращаюсь домой, чтобы записать всё увиденное и успеть посмотреть сны прежде, чем наступит новый день, и Город вновь пригласит меня в путешествие.
This probably loses its spark in the telling but it really cracked me up.
Phillies broadcaster 1: [opposing pitcher] is really talking to himself out there.
broadcaster 2: Good communications is key, Tom.
A fair number of people here have cellphones. A small percentage of those people have been trained on the value of texting by their children and grandchildren. Turns out Dixie - the woman who came over Wednesday to find out how to do kinky hair on knitted dolls - is one of them. I got a text this morning from an unknown number that just said 'test'. I replied 'A+'. Then she sent me her question and remember to add her name. Well done, Dixie!
And in other Timber Ridge peops news... I was looking up something in the Timber Ridge app and spied that the new person moving into Gail and Roger's apartment is now listed! moving in June 3. with picture and bio and wow. She's not a frail old wallflower. She spent many years as admin in the county court system and also many years in local politics. And still works as a travel agent part time.
Martha has been whining that our floor is running out of people with enough marbles left to contribute. I sent her the link to Jackie (new girl) this morning and she's all excited. I also sent Jackie an email.
I had dinner last night with my friend, Steve (who is also a good texter). He's so nice but he's so boring. Hilariously, yesterday, he got hearing aids for the first time and he was having fun listening to everything. It was pretty funny. 'This dining room is noisy!'
Just got a note from Erica that the pool fix it guy isn't coming until Monday. Still icy. No volleyball. Sigh.
The vet left a voice mail that Biggie's drugs were in. So I'll go back again and hope this time they really mean it. Also I might stop at the grocery. I have this idea for a cuke and melon chopped salad but I don't have any cukes or melons.
A quick reminder: today is is the last day to register for NarraScope 2025 if you want to attend in person. (Remote attendance will be open until June 18th.) If you want the conference rate at the University City Study hotel, you need to grab that today also.
Friday workshops are up on the schedule, too. As always, workshops are free, but you must be registered for the conference (remote or in person) to sign up for the workshops.
Gluten-Free Flour Power - Bringing Your Favorite Foods Back to the Table, by Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot: A gorgeous cookbook with lots of color photos and not one, not two, but THREE custom flour mixes. One is like an all-purpose flour and is mostly starch (cornstarch, tapioca starch, white rice flour, brown rice flour, nonfat milk powder, potato flour, xanthan gum), one is closer to a whole wheat flour (arrowroot, sorghum flour, white rice flour [or millet], brown rice flour [or sorghum], potato flour, milk powder, guar gum), and one is a low-allergy blend (tapioca starch, sweet rice flour, arrowroot, sorghum flour, potato flour, golden flaxseed meal). And now that I type that out, they're all pretty starchy, as it's the first ingredient in every mix. They're going to give different results, but the authors claim you can use any of the three flour mixes in the recipes.
The recipes have measurements in volume and weight (grams). They're sweet and savory and cover the basic to the very fancy. I mean, the authors pulled out a loaf pan with dimensions I'd never seen before in my life. They also think you have the time, resources, and energy to cold-smoke masa harina. Don't ask.
The font choices are kind of annoying, but it has a useful index, and if I hadn't already hitched my gluten-free wagon to America's Test Kitchen's custom flour mix, I might have given this a try.
demesne (dih-MAYN, dih-MEEN) - n., manorial land retained by the feudal lord and not rented out to tenants; (law) possession of land as one's own; land belonging to and adjoining a manor house, estate; a realm, a domain.
This is a synonym of many senses of of domain, and indeed is a doublet of it -- both are from Old French demeine/demaine/demeigne/domaine, main sense being power, domain was taken directly from that into Middle English, while demesne, originally spelled demayne, passed through Anglo-Norman first. As to why this word switched from using -y- to -s- to indicate the vowel before it is long, that's a tricky bit, but there seems to have been influence from mesne (pronounced MEEN) meaning intermediate in a feudal context. As for that Old French domaine, it's a noun use of an adjective descended from Latin dominicus, belonging to a lord or master, from dominus, master/proprietor/owner, from domus, home/house, from PIE *dṓm, house/home, from the root *dem-, to build.
One of my goals for the next twelve months is to do a themed monthly post. Having given it some thought, I decided to simply post photos taken from my bedroom window. So each month there will be two or three photos marking the passing of the seasons. In addition, on the occasions when I'm away for a night, I shall also include a photo from that window.
As part of a flurry of posts on Daring Fireball yesterday afternoon, John Gruber said something that really seemed directed at me. It was a sort of throwaway comment in the post about Apple Stores:
And the big partners, like CompUSA, absolutely sucked at showcasing the Mac. Their demo machines were frequently broken.
I was the reason one of those demo machines was frequently broken.
It was in the early 2000s, and there was a CompUSA near my office that I visited frequently. This was during my eight-year Mac hiatus, but I was still interested in what Apple was doing. I kept tabs on the state of the hardware and on OS X to see if and when it was time for me to return from the Linux wilderness.
One of the Macs my local CompUSA had out on display in its Apple ghetto was a G4 Cube. I had read somewhere that they ran hot, so one day I put my hand a few inches over the Cube to feel the convective flow rising out of the top grille. The machine immediately overheated and shut down to protect itself.
Let me be clear (as clear as the Cube). I didn’t put my hand on the grille—it was at least 3–4 inches above it. But that was enough. And from that day forward, every time I passed that Cube, I put my hand above it and caused a crash.
So in my own way, I was part of the success of Apple Stores.
A video yesterday reminded me of the Saudi Line proposal to build a brand new very linear city (or linear arcology, one long building) in western Arabia. I looked again at the numbers, and wow it is nuts.
170 km long.
500 m high.
200 m wide.
(Area 34 km2.)
It's supposed to be higher than it's long! Crazy. You could probably bring the cost down just by flipping those two numbers (though maybe ventilating a 500 m wide building would be a bit more challenging, I dunno.)
For minimizing trip lengths you would want a circular city, or something close like a diamond or grid. But I can see some appeal of a linear city: simplifying your high speed transport by needing just one backbone route, and keeping it easy to go outside the city into a greenbelt/preserve. (Not sure how much point to that there is in western Arabia, but anyway.) So I wondered what a saner proposal might look like.
1) drop the arcology and just go with a conventional city with streets and buildings.
2) Have the width be at least a 5 minute walk from edge to spine, so 400 meters, making it 800 meters (10 minutes) edge to edge, which avoids the need to have any cross transit. This is 4x the width, so could reduce the length from 170 km to 42 km. (Though the original proposal used the height to be very high density, which I'm kind of waving away.)
You could double the width, for a 20 minute edge-edge walk; 1.6 km x 21 km.
But since you're trying to avoid cars, you should go in for bicycles and other micromobility, at let's say 3x expected walking speed. 2.4 km edge to spine, and 4.8 x 7 km in shape... which is actually almost a square, whoops. And you'd probably need cross-transit again for the minority who can't use any form of wheels, or the larger group who don't always want to. Still, it's a city where every point is a 10 minute bike/fast powerchair ride to the central spine, at 15 km/hr.
San Francisco is actually bigger than this, so I've just discovered that SF could be way nicer than it is (granted SF has hills.)
To keep a line shape better, go back to the 10 minute width of 800 meters, triple it for bikes, now you have a 2.4 x 14 km city, and can get some real rail use out of your backbone, while it's still a 15 minute walk from the center to the edge.
Man in Norway Wakes Up to Find Huge Ship Has Crashed into His Backyard: 'It Was So Unreal' The container ship was just a few meters from Johan Helberg's home when it ran aground on Thursday, May 22
Forty-five years ago this month in a neighborhood in the southeast Bronx, the masters of a new music genre came together to jam. Their style was so fresh it didn’t even have an agreed-upon name yet. The event was described as a “disco tribute,” but the lineup included DJ Afrika Bambaataa, the Original Jazzy Jay, and Sha-Rock—all now recognized as among the originators of hip-hop.
That night at the Bronx River Community Center, though, the DJs and MCs didn’t take top billing. The evening’s tribute was to the genre’s “flyer men.” Flyers were how musicians spread the word about their shows. Printed by the thousands to hand out on street corners, the advertisements were meant to be ephemeral, tossed out when the party was over, but more than 1,000 of them have been preserved by the Cornell Hip Hop Archive, with nearly 500 shared via JSTOR by the Cornell University Library. The flyers were collected by those who recognized that the art form that emerged in Black communities in the Bronx through the 1970s was about more than music. The artists who designed these flyers, often in mere hours with little more than a pen and a photocopier, were creating a visual identity for an all-new culture.
Bronx River Center, May 30, 1980. Click on the image to take a closer look.
The flyer promoting the the celebration of the flyer men was printed on pink paper with an energetic cut-and-paste style. It wasn’t the most memorable of the designs that fluttered around the Bronx in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it was created by one of the community’s most prominent artists, who name checked himself in tilted lettering: “Flyer King” Buddy Esquire. (He also called out his brother, Eddie Ed, who was lesser design royalty: the “Flyer Lord.”) Cornell University has digitized about 100 of the estimated 300 flyers Buddy Esquire designed between 1978 and 1984 as hip-hop moved from community centers in the Bronx into the mainstream of American life.
J.H.S. 123, Dec. 9, 1978. Click on the image to take a closer look.
Buddy Esquire—born Lemoine Thompson in 1958—was self-taught. He began his artistic career in 1972 as “Phantom 1,” the tag he painted on the sides of the 2 and 5 trains through the Bronx. That was long before the word “graffiti” was regularly paired with the word “artist,” but the spray-paint practice gave Buddy Esquire an appreciation for letter forms that’s evident from his earliest flyers. Though he’d been a writer—as graffitists were known—Buddy Esquire rejected most of the conventions of graffiti when it came to fliers.
“It took some time but I eventually created my own style,” he explained to OldSchoolHipHop.com in 2001. He felt the need to set himself apart from other flyer makers, he told Cornell PhD student Amanda Lalonde in 2011. (Buddy Esquire passed away in 2014.)
In the Cornell collection, which began as a donation of material that hip-hop historian Johan Kugelberg collected while writing Born in the Bronx, you can also find flyers by Eddie Ed, whose work often included cutout photographs, portraits, and playful cartoons of the luminaries of the hip-hop scene, and Anthony Riley, whose eye-catching designs made bold use of black backgrounds. “Riley’s flyers get brothers to think,” Melle Mel of Grandmaster Flash once said.
T-Connection, May 24, 1980. Click on the image to take a closer look.
“That’s what I tried for, you know,” Buddy Esquire told Lalonde, to “give it a level of class even though it was just a ghetto jam.” He would eventually come to call his own style “neo-Deco.”
P.A.L., Dec. 8, 1979. Click on the image to take a closer look.
The Art Deco style of the 1920s isn’t something typically associated with hip-hop, writes Amanda Lalonde. “What, then, do these flyers— dynamic in their mixture of styles, yet enigmatic in their seemingly anachronistic use of Deco elements—communicate about the status of shows and live hip hop in this culture?” Like hip-hop, she writes, the flyers were a mashup of influences.
In Buddy Esquire’s artwork Lalonde finds the distinctive borders and dry-transfer fonts of the Art Deco era alongside hints of graffiti art in the stars, arrows and other 1970s flourishes that dot the flyers. Buddy Esquire claimed the comic books about the Fantastic Four he read as a child and a sign-painting book he checked out of the library as a teenager as inspirations, but Lalonde identified another, more subtle influence on the flyer man: the Art Deco buildings of the Bronx.
“If the posters were purely Deco, they would have been anachronisms with little appeal and relevance,” she writes, “but Buddy Esquire’s Deco components, surrounding contemporary elements, seem to wink.”
T-Connection, Mar. 6, 1981. Click on the image to take a closer look.
Buddy Esquire himself held on to many of the flyers he produced, the works stored haphazardly in his mother’s basement before finding their way to Cornell’s collection. Perhaps he saved them because he recognized in the moment what he would later tell Lalonde: “they do, in a way, signify a time,” one that would be lost to history without such documents. Or perhaps Buddy Esquire just wanted to prove, as he told OldSchoolHipHop.com, “I am the King of Flyers! Period. I hate to put it like that but facts are the facts.”
A Wednesday morning in May is a strange time to be trick-or-treating—especially if you’re an adult wearing business casual. The Indiana Convention Center had just opened to visitors for the second day of Sweets & Snacks, the largest gathering of the candy and snack industry in North America. Along with nearly 15,000 other attendees, I went from booth to booth trying samples. By 10:40, I was sipping a complimentary blue-raspberry-watermelon Icee while a woman to my right took a selfie with Mr. Jelly Belly. At the Slim Jim booth a few feet away, a bunch of people in blazers gathered around a smorgasbord of meat sticks. The only thing that could get between attendees and their snacks was the occasional free beer or run-in with a mascot. At one point, the Jack Link’s sasquatch attempted to steal my Entenmann’s mini muffins.
I had come to Sweets & Snacks to taste the future of junk food. The annual conference is the industry’s most prominent venue to show off its new products. Judging by my three days in Indianapolis, the hot new trends are freeze-dried candy and anything that tastes vaguely East Asian: think “matcha latte” popcorn. But right now, that future looks shaky, particularly for confections. Candy embodies everything that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes is wrong with the American diet. It’s mainly sugar (which Kennedy has called “poison”), counts as an ultra-processed food (which Kennedy has called “poison”), and is often colored with synthetic food dyes (which Kennedy has called “poison”). Last month, RFK Jr. announced a goal of eliminating synthetic food dyes by the end of 2026, a major threat to an industry predicated on making bright, eye-catching treats. In an email, an HHS spokesperson said that “Secretary Kennedy has been clear: we must build a healthier future by making smarter choices about what goes into our food.” The spokesperson added that “the secretary is committed to working with industry to prioritize public health.”
Evan Jenkins for The Atlantic
At Sweets & Snacks, I did not encounter an industry that was gearing up for change. Instead, it was RFK Jr.’s worst nightmare: an unabashed celebration of all things sugary, artificial, and indulgent. On the convention floor, it was hard to find a single product—beyond the litany of meat sticks and the occasional mixed nut—that would get RFK Jr.’s stamp of approval. Even a finalist for the convention’s annual salty-snack award, Vlasic Pickle Balls, contained tartrazine, a synthetic yellow dye that Kennedy has specifically bashed. As I stuffed my face with sugary treats, I began to wonder: Was the industry delusional about Kennedy, or the other way around?
RFK Jr.’s presence was conspicuously absent from the moment I arrived in Candy Land. “Anywhere over here is fine,” I told my Lyft driver as we pulled up to a hulking red M&M. Candy companies have already been investing in healthier options: Mars bought snack-bar maker Kind in 2020 and proudly displayed the bars in a booth alongside their more traditional M&Ms, Skittles, and Starburst. But the only vague mention of the looming RFK Jr. threat on the convention floor was a billboard posted by the conference’s organizers, the National Confectioners Association (NCA). It reiterated the candy lobby’s longstanding message: Candy shouldn’t be lumped together with other ultra-processed foods, because it is an occasional indulgence.
It’s hardly surprising that candy companies aren’t abruptly changing their products in response to pressure, even when it’s coming from the country’s top health regulator. Americans bought $54 billion worth of these treats last year. In April, the health secretary boasted that the U.S. food industry had “voluntarily agreed” to remove synthetic dyes from their products, but judging from the items on display at Sweets & Snacks, the candy industry has little interest in fulfilling that promise anytime soon. When I asked Christopher Gindlesperger, NCA’s senior vice president of public affairs and communication, if the candy industry had an understanding with RFK Jr. to eliminate synthetic dyes voluntarily, his response was simple: “No.”
Some of the discussions around dyes are understandably frustrating for the industry. Federal regulators haven’t done the sort of thorough academic evaluation of these dyes that’s typically expected before trying to push them out of the food supply. (The state of California released its own evaluation in 2021 and found that “synthetic food dyes are associated with adverse neurobehavioral outcomes in some children.”) At the same time, the candy industry isn’t doing much to signal that it recognizes the growing concern over these ingredients. It’s hard to be sympathetic toward companies that purposefully market unhealthy products to children through the use of mascots and funky colors. I was taken aback when I stumbled upon a Despicable Me–branded coloring set that let kids color in a cookie with a marker filled with tartrazine.
Evan Jenkins for The Atlantic
The industry’s efforts to uphold the status quo are risky. If Kennedy is intent on enforcing an actual ban on synthetic food coloring, it could have a monumental impact. Making the switch to natural colors is not as simple as FDA Commissioner Marty Makary let on when he told food makers during a press conference last month to just start coloring their products with fruit and vegetable juices. Natural colors are typically more expensive, and they’re far more finicky than their synthetic alternatives. Moisture, pH, and even light can cause the dyes to degrade. A naturally colored M&M might be red when it leaves the factory, but if it sits in your pantry too long, it could take on a not-so-appetizing color. There’s a question, too, of whether there are even enough fruits and vegetables in the world to supply the food industry with enough natural dye to serve the massive U.S. market. “The amount of crops that go into some of these dyes is just so high that we don’t necessarily have these crops planted,” Renee Leber, a food scientist at the Institute of Food Technologists, told me.
Here’s yet another concern: Natural dyes may alter the taste of certain treats. The company behind Dum-Dums lollipops has suggested that replacing artificial red dye with beet juice could make its red lollipops taste like beets. (That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Many companies already sell products in Europe without synthetic dyes. And Katjes, a German company sandwiched between Jack Link’s and Harvest Snaps, was giving away its rainbow unicorn gummies, which looked plenty eye-catching to me, despite being colored solely with fruit and vegetable juices.)
Food dyes are only one part of the RFK Jr. threat that the candy industry faces right now. Yesterday, the Trump administration’s “MAHA Commission” released a much-touted report on childhood health, calling out sugar and ultra-processed foods as a major contributor to the youth chronic-disease problem. When I spoke with Gindlesperger, he was quick to point out that candy is far from the biggest cause of America’s sugar problem. (Sweetened drinks are.) “People understand that chocolate and candy are treats, and consumers have carved out a special place for them in their lives,” he said. He cited an analysis of CDC survey data that received funding from the NCA, which showed that people in the United States eat roughly 40 calories a day of candy.
But that analysis doesn’t distinguish between kids and adults. Data are scant on children’s consumption of candy, though if you’ve walked with a kid down a candy aisle, you can probably tell that most haven’t fully grasped that gummy worms are meant to be an occasional indulgence. “It’s really difficult for a child who has access to candy to stop eating it,” Natalie Muth, a pediatrician and dietitian, told me. Candy consumption among kids, she added, is a “big problem.”
In a country where nearly 20 percent of children are obese, more needs to be done to protect people from the candy industry’s worst tendencies. But mandating any such changes will be incredibly difficult for RFK Jr. To ban tartrazine alone, the FDA would need to compile a docket of information demonstrating its harm, issue a draft regulation, take public comments, and then finalize the regulation. Gindlesperger said the candy industry is waiting for the FDA to formally review the safety of the dyes it takes issue with: “We support and would welcome that review.” Even after all those steps, the food industry can—and likely would—sue. There’s even less precedent for cracking down on sugar. Kennedy has acknowledged that a sugar ban is unlikely, and instead has argued for more education about the risks of having a sweet tooth.
If Kennedy succeeds in ushering in actual reform, the “Make America Healthy Again” movement won’t truly revolutionize the American diet until it figures out how to redefine our relationship with certain foods. Whether Kennedy likes it or not, candy is part of our national psyche. He can’t simply wave a wand and ban trick-or-treating or candy canes. Over the course of three days, I saw grown adults fill multiple shopping bags with free treats. Candy companies displayed bags of their products to show retailers what they’d look like in a store, and the bags literally had to be taped down to avoid getting swiped. (Some still were.) I learned that attendees commonly bring a second suitcase just to haul their loot home.
Evan Jenkins for The Atlantic
Nothing quite epitomized the affection for treats like the impromptu dance party that broke out near the close of the conference. Chester Cheetah, Ernie the Keebler Elf, the purple Nerd, the Lemonhead, Bazooka Joe, Clark Cheese Head, and Chewbie, the Hi-Chew mascot, all began to sway in unison to a marching band that was hired to entertain guests. Conference attendees clamored to get a video of the spectacle and snap a selfie with their favorite mascot. The moment was absurd, and funny, and more than a little embarrassing. Still, I couldn’t help but pull out my own phone and crack a smile. Perhaps it was nostalgia for bygone Halloween nights, or maybe all the sugar was just getting to my head.
Флоридский уголовник в очередной раз выстрелил себе в ногу, объявив 50% тариф для ЕС. Неужели этот дурачок всё ещё надеется, что европейцы будут стелиться перед ним, выклянчивая какие-то особые условия?..
Comics Curmudgeon readers! Do you love this blog and yearn for a novel written by its creator? Well, good news: Josh Fruhlinger's The Enthusiast is that novel! It's even about newspaper comic strips, partly. Check it out!
Shoe, 5/23/25
This strip would be — well, not funny, exactly, but it would at least make some sort of sense if the Perfesser was married, which to the best of my knowledge (derived from a literal lifetime of reading the syndicated newspaper comic strip Shoe, oh my god I’ve wasted my life) he … isn’t? Unless his wife is unseen and unmentioned, and living in some room in his home that nobody goes into, which would make that already depressing house way way more depressing.
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/23/25
TIRED: In the absence of defense attorneys, the government’s police power will range unchecked, with the regime being able to put disfavored individuals into prison on a whim
WIRED: “I would prefer not to go to jail” is an impulse for which a rational market exists, and if market participants are willing to expend resources to fulfill that desire, even in the absence of defense attorneys, someone will step up to provide a counterparty
Archie, 5/23/25
I love how shocked and indignant Pops looks in the third panel here. How can you young people just let your days slip away from you like this, without drinking in every minute of your wild and precious teenagerhood? You’ve got to live, kids, live!
It'a tough to engage with the world and its events when the media largely pursues a bread-and-circuses approach in order to catch attention. I realize that that attitude doesn't come out of nowhere, that human beings do turn to look and linger at a crash site.
But it does no good whatsoever for anyone to feel my heart tearing in pieces over any news coming out of Washington DC, either engendered by the assclowns currently infesting governmental centers, or in the environs (the recent shooting) so my intention to ostrich becomes more vigorous. What's more, the spouse, who usually watches the news every waking moment, even turned off the yatter yesterday.
I try to fill my time with purpose and pleasure that harms no one. Plan things I hope will bring pleasure to others, like: my sister's seventieth is coming up. I took a slew of our old super eight films to a place to get them converted and color corrected, to surprise her with--I hope. One of those super-eights is from 1948, when the parents' generation were all young, all those voices gone now. Most of the films are from the sixties and early seventies, before my parents split; then they start up again in the eighties with my spouse having bought us a camera.
It's going to take time to convert that stuff--the small box I chose will be just under a grand. Phew. But I've been waiting years for the price to come down, and I figure I daren't wait any longer.
In just for me, I'm busy reworking some very early stories. And realizing that ostriching was a defense mechanism that started in when I was very young, coming out in my passion for escape-reading and for storytelling.
The storytelling urge was very nearly a physical reaction,a kind of invisible claw right behind my ribs, partly that urge, and partly a shiver of anticipation. I can remember it very clearly when I was six years old, in first grade. I already knew how to read, but that was the grade in which public schools in LA taught reading, so I got to sit by myself and draw while the others were taught the alphabet and phonics. Writing stories was laborious, and I got frustrated easily if I didn't know how to spell a word, but I learned fast that adults only had about three words' of patience in them before they chased me off with a "Go play!" or, if I was especially mosquito-ish, "Go clean your room!" or "Wash the dishes!" (That started when I turned 7)
But drawing was easy, and I could narrate to myself as I illustrated the main events. So I did that over and over as the other kids struggled thru Dick and Jane. This became habit, and gave me a focus away from the social evolution of cliques--I do recall trying to make myself follow the alpha girl of that year (also teacher's pet, especially the following year) but I found her interests so boring I went back to my own pursuits.
I do remember not liking the times between stories; I was happiest when the images began flowing, but I never really pondered what that urge was. It was just there. I knew that most didn't have it, and for the most part I was content to entertain myself, except when we had to read our efforts aloud in class, there was an intense gratification if, IF, one could truly catch the attention of the others and please them as well as self. I remember fourth grade, the two class storytellers were self and a boy named Craig. His were much funnier than any of my efforts. Mine got wild with fantasy, which teachers frowned on. I tried to write funny and discovered that it was HARD. It seemed to come without effort to Craig.
In junior high, I finally found a tiny coterie of fellow nerds who like writing, and we shared stories back and forth. Waiting for a friend to come back after reading one and give her reactions made the perils of junior high worth enduring. One of those friends died a couple summers ago, and left her notebooks to me. In eighth/ninth grade, she wrote a Mary Sue self-insert about the Beatles. I have it now--it breathes innocence, and the air of the mid sixties. Maybe I ought to type it up and put it up at A03. I think she'd like it to find an audience, even if it's as small an audience as our tiny group back then.
Anyway, a day is a great day if I have a satisfying project to work on...and I don't have to hear a certain name, which is ALWAYS reprehensible. Always. And yet has a following. But...humans do linger to look at the tcrash site.
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