Four Years / Natural

October 16th, 2024

If you feel a little lonely, you’re not alone in that, and it’s natural to feel.

My mom made sure I knew that.

She’s been gone four years today.

My dad got married last weekend. It was a beautiful day. I was the minister of their wedding. I got a lot of questions about my part in it, but the one I got most was: why?

It’s a great question. Sharp. To the point.

And I thought the answer was complicated, but it’s not.

When I was growing up, my mom would check in on me frequently and ask me specifically if I was feeling lonely. I’ve wondered why and I think it’s because being alone was one of her fears. Like funny people who make you laugh because they don’t want you to feel the same desperate way they do inside, I think a lot of what we say and do is to defend ourselves against the shadows that are stitched to our feet.

She wanted me to know that even if I felt lonely, it was okay. It’s a thing that everybody feels. But if I am feeling it, she wanted to remind me that she was here. That I’m not really ever alone.

Something that I really focus on with my sobriety is the idea that I never want to be the reason that somebody else fails. I want to give what I can, offer my tools, do anything within my power to help others succeed.

I gave my blessing and was the minister at my dad’s wedding because my mom told us that we should never be alone. She reminded me to give what I could, offer my services, and use my power to generate connection and joy. She insisted on hugs and games and the dirtiest jokes you’ve never heard. (That was a deaf joke, in her honor.)

If you feel a little lonely, you’re not alone. It’s as natural as the unnatural feeling that surfaces when someone we love disappears. We owe it to ourselves to hold those feelings up to the light and examine them. To check in with the people we love who carry them. And to not stop the cycle of feelings, the ones that grow after we allow the soil to restore itself, the happiness and laughter and strength we thought we had lost forever.

Everything grows back. It’s all totally natural.

Take a look, it’s in a book

October 14th, 2024

“Are you a reader?” I asked her. I always ask when people approach my table now.

“Yes?” the woman said, her face distorted.

I asked why it sounded like there was a question mark at the end of her answer. She said she was startled by the question. Doesn’t everyone like to read?

I’ve been tabling as a writer and artist for almost seven years now. Early on, I learned something surprising but valuable.

I’m an excitable person, and I get really excited to share; if you’ve ever been to my booth, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I love to tell people all about my work, which consists mostly of words. But sometimes, towards the end of my high-energy presentation, a listener would smile at me politely (or not), and inform me that they simply do not read.

This type of incident happened so often that I made the conscious decision to ask people if they read before I start to speak.

I also wanted to know the numbers.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% (nearly 130 million) American adults read below a sixth-grade level. For some people, this statistic is shocking, but for others, this aligns with their personal experience. If you’ve been on the internet, that number might actually feel low.

So why does this matter?

If reading is hard or takes work to do, then it isn’t fun. And if it isn’t fun, then there isn’t any reason a person will want to read unless they have to.

Which brings us to Theia.

When I was getting the first reviews, people really loved to tell me how easy it was to read and how excited they were to finish it so quickly.

I was crushed. My writing is easy? Am I just a stupid man writing stupid books? (The verdict is still out on that, btw.)

I just needed perspective. I soon learned that finishing my easy book (and genuinely enjoying the story) led people to want to read more books. Different books, longer books, more challenging books (overrated imo but whatever). People became better readers. And embracing that has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my (extremely modest) career.

My passion for creating accessible excellence has created excitement for the thing that I love to do.

I hate when people say this, but read that again.

We can all do this. We can complain all we want that the world isn’t the way we wish it was, but what are we doing to help? You can take the things you love, that give you light and life, and you can make them accessible to everyone. You can be the opposite of a gatekeeper; you can knock that gate shit down.

More of that, please. I had so many excellent conversations and made such strong connections this past weekend at FallCon. More, more, more of that. A huge thank you to the MNCBA, staff, and volunteers for putting on a professional show with purpose.

I’ll see you next Saturday at the Twin Cities Book Festival.

Say Aaahh

October 8th, 2024

What is education in a democracy?

Why, education is how we make antibodies.

I’m in college now, so I’m insufferable (“But you’ve always been insufferable!” you say and you are so right, ma’am); a lot of my studies so far have about our literacy.

Reading, sure (literal literacy should never be taken for granted, and any comment section on the internet will remind you of that), but really how literate we are when it comes to information.

Most of us have no idea how bad we are at telling if what we’re reading or hearing or seeing (and sharing!) is true or not; the worst part is that most of the time it’s pretty easy to figure out. But we live in the eye of the perfect human storm: ignorance, laziness, and our biases.

We look for evidence, not to provide the truth, but to prove what we think we already know, or what we want to believe is true. Bad information, like a virus, makes us sick.

Education gives us antibodies. And that includes education about information.

The next time you come across some info, think about where it came from. If it came from the person who did the thing or witnessed the thing, it’s a primary source. We rarely get news from the source. If someone writes about the thing from a primary source, that’s called a secondary source. It’s also uncommon to get news this way.

Most of the information we get is from what’s called tertiary sources. It’s basically a game of telephone. I watched a thing from a girl who heard a thing from a boy who read a thing from the primary source.

The info, like a note in class, can get changed, a little or a lot, every time it gets passed along.

This is why it’s important we know where our information is coming from.

The next time you see a meme about, say, grocery prices, look for the source on that meme. I will bet you a ton of crypto that there will be no source. But that won’t stop half a million people from sharing it, even though it is literally not information. And it is deeply embarrassing that so many of us do it. Embarassing, and deliberately divisive.

I’m running out of ways to reach people, but I have a super fun way of looking at politics. It really is delightful. Try it! Take a story from the news, and then pretend that it’s in a history book. In fact, replace the name with a historical figure and see how you feel.

Some examples:

“Despite having already been convicted of 34 felonies, being found liable of sexual abuse, and leading an insurrection to overturn an election that led to six deaths, Richard Nixon ran again for president. How the country didn’t see Watergate coming is a mystery to historians to this day.”

“During a political rally, Stephen A. Douglas called his popular challenger Abraham Lincoln ‘mentally disabled.’ Douglas’ supporters cheered along, as insulting the disabled and minority groups had long been part of his speeches.”

“During his presidental campaign, George Washington sold coins with his face on them at several times their actual value, virtual trading cards, crypto, and gold sneakers, while constantly reminding the public of inflation and their inability to pay for such necessities as groceries. He avoided speaking on the massive tax cuts he had passed during his previous term that benefitted the wealthy, as corporate greed was the main reason for high prices.”

“Theodore Roosevelt, during a live televised debate, went on an extended rant about immigrants eating people’s pets, which was an entirely false claim. Those same claims were repeated and wreaked havoc on a small Ohio town, who pleaded for him and his campaign to stop.”

When you do this, it allows you to see what’s happening today as it really is: it’s history, but you just don’t always see it like that until you do.

Perspective is another kind of education.

And education gives us antibodies.

And you hope that your body stays healthy enough to fight any disease; you hope that our votes are enough to keep a democracy alive.

As above, so below.

But this is a reminder that vicious cancers exist. And they can win. They do.

Stay educated. Stay literate. Vote.

School Update: October ’24

October 2nd, 2024

I can’t believe it, but I’m already six weeks into being back at school at DCTC. People keep asking me how it’s going so let’s talk about it!

• I joined a club! I went to my first Creative Arts & Writing Club meeting today… and I walked out of the meeting as the new President of the Creative Arts & Writing Club! (No, I am not even kidding about this.) I am so looking forward to this part of school, connecting to other creatives and doing good work together.

• I’m ahead in most of my classes! I have a schedule of two in-person classes and three online; the online course instructors encourage us to get ahead, which I am taking to heart. I’m stretching muscles I haven’t used in years and gaining brand new brushes to add to my kit.

• I’m obsessed with my Environmental Science class! If you’ve ever talked to me at length you know I’m one of those insufferable Captain Planet kids; getting in-depth information about our planet is nothing short of magical. This is the kind of stuff I do with my free time anyway, but now I get credit for it!

• I’m also taking a bunch of writing classes! Maybe I’ll actually get good at it someday!

• A lot of you have asked about my degree: I’m finishing a Graphic Design program I started at (the now-shuttered) Brown College in Mendota Heights. I’ve always loved drawing and design and I feel like, while writing has always come naturally to me, visual art is more difficult for me to express. These skills are hard-won and priceless to me.

• The catalyst for me going back to school was seeing Governor Walz on TV talking about a bill they passed that (if you make less than a certain income) will cover a significant part of your education. I thought it couldn’t be real; it is real, it’s called the North Star Scholarship, it started this fall and I am lucky enough to receive it.

• Most of the time I’m working really hard and feeling really good about this, but I have moments where I am completely overwhelmed and terrified and I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. I remind myself that nobody knows what they’re doing and that’s okay. I just need to take it a day at a time.

And that’s about it, I think? I appreciate all the people who have offered supportive words and high fives. You’re the best. Now let me get back to my homework! (And no: Marvel hasn’t eaten any. Yet.)

National Recovery Month

September 24th, 2024

September is National Recovery Month.

If you’re reading these words, then congratulations: you know someone who struggles with addiction!

I couldn’t begin to list all the reasons why I’m public about my own sobriety, but there are two big ones:

1. I believe that light is a disinfectant; that so many of us suffer with darkness privately, when parting the curtains and opening the windows can do so much to alleviate that loneliness. I think that if I would have seen more people I know be honest about their struggles, it would have encouraged me to be more open about my own, and maybe even earlier.

2. I wanted to give a different, specific face to the abstract ideas we have of addiction. There are general stereotypes that are both harmful and easy to subscribe to, boxes we can drop addicts into without a second thought, and while I can’t introduce you to every amazing person I’ve met through recovery, I can show you me, and I can share as best I can what it’s like to live with blessings dressed as curses.

So I have, for almost seven years now. I do the normal social media stuff: photos of my dog, memes, please buy my new book. But I also write about hard stuff, like loss and grief and my sobriety journey. I do this because I believe life is about balance, and extending that to the internet only makes the internet a better place (and the internet is all too often not a very good place).

I knew my life was unmanageable, and I eventually came to realize that alcohol was keeping it that way. The idea of ingesting actual poison was impressively carved into my Play-Doh brain as normal consumption for a species that claims to be the most intelligent on this planet; my physical being is often possessed in ways I don’t completely understand.

This is just a reminder that recovery is possible. It looks different for everybody. No one does it wrong, as long as it works for you.

I’m grateful for my family and my friends and for kind strangers; I’m grateful to the monster inside me that loved me enough to change.

If nobody has told you today: I love you, there has never been and never will be anyone like you again, and I’m glad you’re here.

Your life starts today, over and over again.

telescope

September 16th, 2024

Some days you look into a telescope and all you can see is the immense, infinite universe, nebula swirling like frosting and stars sparkling like sprinkles; other days all you can focus on is a black hole, consuming its corner of the cosmos.

There are typical anniversaries when it comes to loss and then there are the abnormal ones. If you have dead loved ones (shout out!) you probably hear me. We have standard days of annual mourning, and then we get bonus days, personalized, the weird ones that bend us in magnetic, mysterious ways.

Today is one of those days for me.

We got exactly one month to get hit with, absorb, and accept what was happening with our mom. We found out there was something wrong on September 16th; that something wrong stole her away on October 16th. There wasn’t anything fair about it then; there isn’t anything fair about it now.

To say I think about her every day is like saying I breathe every day. Like, fucking duh. Of course I do.

Sometimes those thoughts are magnificent, like the universe. I watched the Emmys today (I worked open-to-close yesterday and they didn’t invite me to the ceremony AGAIN). Every time a winner thanks their mom, for “all the unconditional love and support,” I leak like a gutter because I know that unconditional love and support, I lost it, but it’s something that lives in my heart until that thing stops beating.

Sometimes those thoughts are devastating, though, like the aforementioned black holes. As I resume the role of student again, I darkly wonder how many years I’ll have left on this earth after I graduate. If I live as long as my mom, I’m already over two-thirds through my life.

Two-fucking-thirds.

I feel like I’ve accomplished so much and I still feel like a baby.

A baby with gray hairs forming at my infant temples.

We got a month to deal with it and it’s been almost four years and I haven’t even begun to deal with it, and once I deal with it? It’ll probably be over.

That’s so sad but it’s also hilarious, the kind of comedy that starts deep in your stomach, comes up through your throat and makes you cry tears of every flavor.

Most days I look through the telescope and I see it all: the joy and the beauty and the humor and the light. But some days, the weird days, the abnormal anniversaries we celebrate all alone, I look through the telescope on the wrong end and see only black.

At times like these, with thoughts like this, I just remind myself that telescopes turn around.

Contagious Magic

September 4th, 2024

It’s easy to feel disenchanted.

Like every trick has been revealed and every rabbit is dead in its hat.

But what if the natural state of this world is magic? What if all it takes is patience and our attention to unlock it?

I repeat this idea to myself as I try to embrace every moment, every person, every failure, every opportunity, every day.

I fail as much as I try but I never fail to try again.

One of the biggest lessons of my life has been this: if I stay open, if I am patient, if I don’t just notice but see, then I open myself up to finding magic, and to magic finding me.

I know where to find magic. People joke that a squirrel of any age always seems like it’s living its first day as a squirrel; but that’s the way to the magical life, where everything is always novel, everything is always new.

Coffee is magic to me. It’s literally just water and heat and beans but it feels like so much more, doesn’t it? The smell, the taste, how it feels. Sometimes we pour it absentmindedly to fuel or even resuscitate ourselves, but something special is lost when we don’t meet it with our full (though not-yet-caffeinated) attention.

When I see an airplane — not just feel it in my peripheral, but notice it, see it — I’m five years old again. That goes for anything that can fly. You guys, things fly. In real life. And we act like that’s normal shit.

Yes, I know where to find magic, but it won’t ever find me in return unless I let it in.

I often embarass myself when I meet new people. Duh. Not because I’m an inherently embarassing person (though that verdict is still out), but because I get really excited to see people.

I used to think I only got that nervous way with “celebrities” but my energy with “celebrities” and everybody else is the very same; most of the world is vastly more interesting and talented than I am, and a chaotic enthusiasm spills out of me that I just can’t seem to blot out.

Being open to people is a way that magic can find me again and again. So many life-affirming conversations have happened because we allow ourselves the space to cast these interpersonal spells. Spells of weather and laughter and gossip and hope; healing spells for every time we hurt.

Feels like people hurt a lot lately.

I don’t know. Maybe the magic is made up. Maybe it only exists when I try really hard, and even then it’s only in my head.

I fail as much as I try.

But, like a true magician, I never fail to try again.

Comic Class 101!

August 24th, 2024

Our deepest gratitude to everyone who attended our very first Comic Book 101 class at Mind’s Eye Comics and made it such a success!

When I was kid, I was obsessed with drawing, storytelling, and the Burnsville Center. It was one of my favorite places in the world. I don’t know if the boy I was would believe how life was going to turn out; that one day he’d not only have published comics of his own, but that he’d be teaching a class for kids just like him at the mall he loved so much.

Thank you all with all my heart for your creativity and energy and participation today; thank you for making a dream come true. Thank you for spending your genuinely precious time with us and being a part of this community. We hadn’t done this class before and yet we figured things out together as they happened pretty well!

Like Eric keeps saying: this is only the beginning. Stay tuned for future events, and feel free to share with us events that you would like to see!

Bored Room

August 19th, 2024

I don’t give advice, but there are things I say often that I think are worth saying.

I wouldn’t call it wisdom; in fact, they’re just words from an arrogant, not-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is asshole (these are all choice words said about me in my own comment section over the years).

I can’t help but notice how increasingly reflexive human beings are with their phones. I’m sure you’ve seen it too, unless, you know, you’ve been too busy looking down at your own. I’m guilty of it at times. It’s not generational; I see just as many elders who are incapable of enduring a moment where nothing is being said or scrolled, though I do work with a lot of young people, and some of them have had these devices placed firmly in their fingers from birth.

We are in constant stimulation, bombarded from below with lights and sounds and the tightly-edited and barely-formed opinions of eight billion faces.

You don’t have to be around people for long until one of them inevitably, dramatically declares that they’re bored. And this is where I, an arrogant asshole, like to chime in:

“It’s okay to be bored.”

I mean it. It’s okay.

It’s okay to experience time as it’s moving at regular speed.

It’s okay to spend a minute in your own mind, to check in with your own thoughts, to sit on the floor in the attic of your head.

It’s okay to discover parts of yourself that you’ve forgotten or haven’t known yet. It’s okay to get to know you and how you feel and what you actually think.

We are not meant to be optimized. I say this to me as much as I say it to you. As an artist who answers to no one, who isn’t supported or encouraged to create by anyone, who will never produce any work unless I do it myself, I constantly feel the pressure to use every aspect of my life as steps towards goals, when being alive is the only real goal.

Life isn’t an algorithm. Our brains and hearts and souls are supposed to collide, with difficult people and uncomfortable situations, with near-impossible challenges and crushing boredom.

And it’s all okay.

It’s fine and, better than that, it’s the opposite of our phones. The more you live life, the more you realize it isn’t about you. How cringe is it to read comment sections where mobs of people complain that something out there displeases or despairs them because it just isn’t for them? (How cringe is it that I use cringe?)

Technology can be great. It can take notes and photos and videos to support our memories. It can connect us to people we may not see often or might otherwise never meet. There are positives in the plastic boxes in our pockets.

But think about how you use it.

And rethink it. Rethink everything. Rethink time. Rethink space. Rethink boredom.

Back 2 School

August 12th, 2024

Twenty years ago, I tried to go to college. I failed. Kanye West wrote an album about it.

I’ve done a lot with my life since then.

Writer. Artist. Dad. Restaurant guy. Superhero.

But never achieving a degree has both been a deterrent to realizing or advancing any kind of career, and it’s also really f×+%ing bothered me.

So, at 39 years old: I’m going back to school.

I’ve been accepted to DCTC and I’m going to finish the degree I started in 2004, starting this fall semester.

I want to make it absolutely clear that I am the luckiest person because of how my life actually played out. If I had finished school then, I probably wouldn’t have met my best friends, the love of my life, had my son or my dog or wrote so many songs and books. My life in restaurants has informed every cell in my body and soul, and I know what it is to work hard and do a good job, and I’ve come full circle in realizing the power and importance of service. I’ve been shaped by every person I’ve met: saints, assholes, and everybody between.

I do think I have more to offer this world, and if it takes a piece of paper with my name on it to make them notice, then okay. Let’s go.

Let the nightmares about being naked in class once again commence.