So much of this life has been unsettled. Running, waiting, running again. But no complaints, not really. The good outweighs the bad.

So much running, it teaches you to look sharp. When the world is road and a series of rest stops, you start to see the differences as sharply as the similarities. This hotel looks just like the last, but look here: the pictures on the wall are different. That stretch of highway has gone on for years, but there’s a new mile marker, same as the last, but just a little higher. You learn to look forward, count the ground you gained, remember the things you’ve seen, and that everything moves in circles, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t gone anywhere.

And the waiting, well. Everyone needs to learn how to wait, sometimes. Take moments of peace and patience, and never forget what it’s like to move. Always be ready to go, but don’t forget to live, now. You don’t have to unpack, but don’t sedate yourself to get to your flight.

Those are things I learned a little later than reading, but a little before I started school.

Mom and I ran to Scottsdale, Arizona, before I was old enough to know what we were doing. I don’t remember much of the drive through California, but I can conjure images of the desert, the highway, the radio — not the car radio but a giant boombox with a tape player and Disney readalong tapes I’d well memorized. I only had normal child remembering, then, or I think I would have tried to catch more of the scenery as we tore south. I knew we were going, but it wasn’t until we got there that I think I started to understand we were Gone.

We ran a lot, while we were there. Mom was a nurse, swing shift, and we ran to daycare so she could get to her shift. And we hightailed it out of there at the end of the day, when the sun was down and no one else was running anywhere. But then, in between the running, we took our time in empty grocery stores, deserted donut shops, quiet parks, and just us matinees on days off in scorched strip malls.

The world was perfect, in between the running — but we were always running out of time.

Scottsdale was rotting and molding and dying from the inside out. Every time a new development went up, it tore up the festering soil, and spread the disease into the air. And the air was often still, but the desert wind would pick up at the worst of moments, and spread that fungus through the city like a plague. The thing about Valley Fever is that, although it generally manifests no worse than a flu, if you happen to weigh nothing at all already, you might have a worse time.

So I took a breath, one day, and the dying city of a dying summer spread to my body.

And it all sounds very romantic when I put it like that, but what bluntly happened is I inhaled a fuckton of mold and I started losing weight I didn’t have.

That’s when I started to understand running and waiting, for the first time.

Wait, maybe I’ll get better. We’re still running, just wait. Wait, it’s almost over. We’re running out of time.

And I started… understanding. I started paying closer attention to everything, because I knew I’d have to leave soon, one way or another. I started noticing how tired mom looked, sometimes. I started seeing how worried she really was. I started trying to figure out why we’d come here in the first place, and why I didn’t want to leave, even though I didn’t like everything. If I close my eyes and flip back through the album of my mind, the world pulls sharply into focus, those months, as details became important — filed away forever.

And that’s why I remember, so perfectly, so sharply, the rain.

I remember the feeling inside the apartment, the air getting sharper but fuzzier at the same time. The sky outside was a hazy violet of sundown, the inside was a brown and yellow mess from the kitchen light. My giant boombox was on the floor, where sometimes I recorded letters to send to my grandparents, songs and letters, and sometimes I recorded nothing at all just to listen to it played back. But mom and I gathered up the big metal bowl and some pots and went outside to the concrete sidewalk outside the door and waited for the rain.

We could see the storm coming from miles away. The sky was a flat and sparking mirror of the desert below. And we put the pots and bowls down to catch the warm rain and waited. I think the world was quiet, but I remember the sounds of traffic below, so it may just be that I don’t recall what we said while we waited. There may have been some soft sounds first, but soon enough came the roar of the storm, the singing of the metal catching the water. I danced, and laughed, and knew what perfect moments can come if you just pay attention. The good always, always outweighs the bad, if you let it.

Sometimes you have to wait, sometimes you have to run for it, and sometimes, if you’re ready for it, you can catch a bit in some battered pans to water the plants after.

Okay, that last bit’s rain, but the metaphor holds.

You know those Sundays, the ones that you’d kinda like to do something productive, only nothing worth going to is anything closer than a boring drive away, and god, you could call someone, but what would you really do, and hell, before you know it it’s getting late and you’ve got to get up early tomorrow and what the fuck was today even FOR?

That’s what life is like in Northern Virginia. Every. Single. Day.

There are few places in the US, possibly the world, that I could say less about than NoVa.

If you’re there: I’m so sorry.
If you’ve never been there: Thank god.
If you’re thinking of moving there: What’s wrong with you?
If you got away from there: High five.

D found the Overlook.

No, we weren’t the first — the Roanoke Valley Overlook is mile marker 130 on the Blue Ridge Parkway, just about the most visited National Park in the States. But from the lack of bottles, cigarette butts, or even tire tracks, we might just have been the first people to find it that spring. And it was the first time either of us had stood in the dark on the side of that mountain, looking down at the valley that held us both in different ways. And it was D that got us there, and that was something special, too.

There was no real reason to D and I driving, that spring. We just started one day, and didn’t stop for a while. I remember the day, just after the chains came off the tires, just a the snow was turning into something a little more manageable and far more miserable, sitting at a coffee shop and watching her fidgeting with something no one else could see. I remember saying, “Let’s go somewhere,” and the grown-up part of me wants to think some conversation followed — but I’m pretty sure we just took our coffee to go, walked out to her little blue car, and headed out of town.

D drove, and I navigated, lit cigarettes, kept the music high to drown out everything but the sound of our real voices. Navigation’s a pretty easy job when you’re not on a schedule, and you’re not heading anywhere in particular. We’d see an intersection on any one of a million stretches of Virginia highway and I’d call left, right, or gun it until the sun went down. On the good days I’d get us back home again before dark. On the bad days I knew better.

There were a lot of bad days.

I was along for the ride, but she was running away.

She swore she heard voices. Pretty much everywhere, none of them friendly. And maybe, you know, maybe she did. Could be she was born crazy. Could also be that coming out to her loving and supportive parents at 16 and being swiftly met with hugs and tears and a year of the best drugs money could buy to fix her fast did it. Like I said, D was running away. Problem was, she wasn’t running from a place, so there was no where to run to. Except away. Except hours on the road with no one but the woman in the passenger seat that kept the music high, lit cigarettes, called directions, made conversation, and let her go into auto-pilot and away from the world.

She didn’t take her drugs when we went out. She and I weren’t dating, nothing close, so I was no threat to her fragile heterosexuality. It was safe to go clean, and her parents didn’t know but they were pretty okay with me. Just praise Jesus their daughter was making straight friends, y’know? The healing could begin.

And man, did we have some adventures, anyway — good, clean fun. It was me that found the giant bridge in the middle of nowhere, the haunted schoolbus embedded halfway down a hill with books still under the benches. I navigated by the sun and kept a mental list of rest stops for food and gas, made sure we ate and didn’t break down on the side of a mountain. We covered some of the same ground sometimes, but mostly we aimed for roads we’d never seen. The straighter and longer, the better. Anything that went with driving music, anything empty for speeding, anything far and away.

The music was important. I wasn’t much past a kid, myself, and sometimes I couldn’t talk her off the angry ledge. But the music, that always worked. On the worst days it just needed to scream. NIN worked in the afternoons, For Love Not Lisa in the mornings. I hated Tori but she had a place, too. Ani and Soul Coughing could even the motor out when it started to pass. It was another sort of navigation, picking the playlist. Shining the right CD to keep the car moving, keep the anger down, keep the world flat, keep the wheels on the road. Sometimes she’d aim for the fences for a just a second, and I’d light us two cigarettes to remind her a suicide would be a murder, and the wheel would level out.

Easy does it, we’re on the road and everything’s going to be just fine. A million miles from everything, and no one expecting us back any time soon.

D found the Overlook on her birthday. 18 years old and no party, just another drive. We hit an intersection on our way out of town and I hadn’t said a word. The car slowed to a stop and she looked at me, confused and a little scared.

“Not today, birthday girl,” I said, “today you get to pick where you go.”

“What? No, you…” She paused, looking for the right words, “… that’s not… C’mon. You find the good stuff. And you’re the only one that ever knows how to get us home. I’m always lost after ten minutes. Getting lost and eaten by wolves isn’t a birthday present.”

“I’ll still get us home. You pick where to go. And then, y’know, maybe we’ll have sex or something. You know it wouldn’t be statutory anymore.”

She laughed, and we were still pulled over on the side of the road. “You’re not gay,” she said.

“Nah, I’m not. And you’re not my type, anyway.”

She looked at me, asked for a cigarette, and the car was still idling.

“I’m gay,” she said, letting out the smoke. “Even when I’m on my medication, and can’t think straight — oh my god I never said that out loud before ‘I can’t think straight’ but that’s the problem…” and she started laughing so hard I knew she was about to cry. “Fuck,” she said, “Just fuck.”

“I know. Pick a road, kid,” I said. “It’s your birthday, and we’re burning gas just sitting here.”

“Yeah,” she said, and pulled her sunglasses down of the sun visor. Mine were already on, she hadn’t seen my eyes all morning.

“Yeah,” she said, and turned the car to the East.

We drove all day, ate in the car, and were on the Blue Ridge Parkway when the sun went down. It wasn’t a bad day, but we drove into the evening. The music was low, and we talked louder than usual, laughed more than was strictly necessary. She picked the roads, and I still lit the smokes and kept an eye on where we were. I could feel home burning in the background, and we never got too far away. Out of sight, but not quite out of mind. A safe distance, I knew, even though she was lost as anything.

She was taking the turns on the Parkway too tight after dark, and we weren’t talking anymore. She knew the next turnoff I’d pick the way home. But she didn’t expect me to say “Slow down” when I did, and we almost veered into the side of the mountain when she slammed on the brakes.

I laughed, it was all right, no one dead.

“Nah, it’s all right,” I answered, to no question in particular, “just no rush, you know?”

So we were turning the curve at a reasonable speed, and I was scrabbling under the seat for the dropped pack of smokes when D saw the pull-off for the overlook.

“What was that?” she asked, and I hadn’t seen and didn’t know. She pulled us around and into the U-shaped pull-off, a dim and unmarked thing, there across the road from the granite wall of the mountain. She turned off the car and got out into the pitch, and I shoved the pack of cigarettes into my back pocket and joined her.

From the Overlook, in the darkness, there’s a sheer drop down to the bowl of the Roanoke Valley. Far in the distance the city glows weakly — it’s no stunning panorama. It’s a dim smattering of lights beating back the darkness that crawls over everything. As our eyes adjusted it got no more impressive. If anything, the darkness got deeper, and the smallness of the city more apparent. A puny outpost with scrawny veins stretching out to smaller and smaller towns down the line.

From way up there, all we could see was how big the world was, and how little of it was home.

And that’s when she finally cried.

She wasn’t going home, that night, not to her parents house. She was going to crash with someone again, but she’d been kicked out last week. I’d had no idea, hadn’t seen her in a couple of days and we never really talked about Now or Parents, anyway. We weren’t that sort of friends. But I wasn’t surprised, and I lit a couple of smokes, and she cried for a while.

“Where the hell are we, anyway?” she finally asked.

“We’re up the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere.”

“Yeah, but what city is that, I mean? Is it Roanoke, it’s gotta be, right?”

And I knew it was, but what fun was that? So I answered, “God, I hope so, or we’re totally lost.”

“You’re never lost,” she laughed.

“Yeah, true. But that’s just because I’m not worried about where I’m going.”

“Oh, that’s real deep,” she said, and flicked her butt out into the abyss. “Whatever. You can get us back.”

“Yeah,” I said, and crushed my own dying cigarette underfoot, residual California-mind screaming about forest fires. “We’re all right.”

We were a half an hour away from town, music low and gentle, the Overlook miles and miles behind us, when she turned and said, “That place was pretty. Not as cool as the bridge, but really pretty.”

“Yeah. You did good.”

“Think you could find it again?”

“Sure. We didn’t go that far.”

“Felt like it.”

“We took the long way,” I admitted. “It’s just a few miles from where we started.”

And she laughed. “Figures,” she said.

And then, “Thanks.”

“Yep,” I said. “Left, here.”

It’s been so warm here, this week. No, no it really hasn’t — it’s been in the 70s maybe edging to 80s — but the air is so still and it’s hard for me to sleep, day or night. Harder still for me to scrounge up an appetite, but that’s every summer, anywhere.

I don’t do well with heat. Even a little.

I never really lived in New Orleans. Oh, I had a beautiful apartment there: a two-story space with a spiral staircase, right at the edge of the French Quarter. My upstairs, wrought-iron balcony overlooked Armstrong park, and no tourists strayed as far as my block. The sweet clerk at the market on the corner knew my name, stocked cat food for my cat. I paid $400 a month rent, because if you crossed the street to the North you weren’t in the Quarter anymore — but beat cops took coffee at the hotel two doors down, and I was going to live forever back then, anyway.

Well, no. I was dying, not metaphorically, and not slowly. I don’t deal with heat, and I was living in New Orleans in the middle of the summer. And I had enough money every week to buy cigarettes or food, and smokes lasted longer.

And it was too hot to eat. Too hot to drink coffee (though I did, anyway). Too hot to sleep at night. I could catnap, or pass out, more likely, in the very earliest hours of the morning. The city was quiet then, the stores all closed until after noon, and the air… sometimes the air would stir, just a little bit.

The days lasted for weeks. It was storm season, and it always, always felt like a storm was about to break. Then the sky would tear open and beat the ground for a minute, two, ten — oh such perfect moments of not dying — and then stop. A few moments after a rain and the air was hot and thick again. Waiting. Still. Dying.

And I remember beauty there, too — but I knew I couldn’t live there. I was waiting, too, not to break or die (though every day, swimming through the swamp air, oh it felt like it sometimes), but until I was full enough. I was not a tourist, but couldn’t, wouldn’t dig in to be a townie. Just, like so many of the people I passed every day, being taken by the Big Easy, biding my time, not breathing too fast or too deep. Just being in the city, silly little me, seemed like something worth doing for a while. Just learning a new place, but too young to think about settling in one.

The plants went first. They thrived for a week or so on the balcony, and then they started to wilt from the inside out. Water, fertilizer, sun, shade — nothing could be done. They weren’t native plants, and the air was too thick for them to breathe.

Then came the brownouts. I’d be walking down the street, and then I wasn’t anymore. I’d come to at my doorstep, or the bar, or the coffee shop, or, once, on the streetcar as the conductor called out Calliope. “KAHL-EE-OPE!” and the sound of it, so not the word my head expected to hear, snapped me out of it.

And still I stayed on. And really, New Orleans is a beautiful city. I understand why people want to live there. I understand better why people are willing to die there. It was giving me nothing, and I was asking for less, but it was beautiful.

I walked every inch of the French Quarter that summer. Every street and cross, every dive and shop. I circled wider, now and again — The Garden District, melting with moss and decay; Magazine, echoing shots late at night; the CBD, bleeding out at the end of the day and fluttering into unconsciousness as everyone went home — but it was the Quarter I wanted to remember, the faces and people there. I read Tarot in the square for a month to take in the stories of a million tourists, and make friends with a half a dozen runaways and old guard. I memorized the bricks and stole the edges of awful and beautiful music leaking out of upstairs windows.

Years later, when I went back, I could still navigate the place by sound and feel. It had changed, in subtle ways, but nothing that mattered. The runaways were new, the old guard had turned over, some of the bars had new names and others had flaking paint — but I still remembered the heartbeat of the place, could still walk the bumpy streets without tripping. I wonder, now, after a storm tore the skin off so much, what would be different. I don’t need to go, though — I know what would still be the same.

And then one night I took three swallows of cheap, watered down beer, and passed right the fuck out on the floor of the bar.

Because, I mean really, any idiot that’s been having heat brown-outs for a month and eating every few days at best is pretty much looking to bite it in a side-street bar. In no way can I romanticize the fact that I really was not a smart kid.

But I came to with a huge bartender holding ice to my forehead and murmuring “princess” while four other huge, angry looking men hovered around looking for someone to shoot. I did have friends. And when I blinked to consciousness, the bartender handed me a glass of water and said, not unkindly: “you just don’t belong here.”

A week later I flew North. Just as Autumn came.

Walking to the store for cigarettes affords me a view of the end of the world, every day. I turn the corner at the end of my block and there it is — nothing but horizon, grey sky or blue, blinding silver at sunset and forever black at night. When the fog rolls in there’s even less to see (or more, depending on the day). But there it is: the land ends just a few steps from my most mundane of daily errands.

It starts up again, of course, a million or so miles later (a little beyond where I could swim, at least). But doesn’t it always? At any rate, I’m not getting much further west, not for a while at least (and I’ve a sneaking suspicion it’ll take me going east to get there, anyway, and isn’t that the way it always goes, too?), so I’m playing with some plugins that’ll take me back East, North, South a little, and around in a lazy scribble of a timeshifted travelogue. When I think about it, maybe.

We’ll see. It’s taken twenty-nine years to dot this map, so I’m in no hurry to trace it back.

Is it just me, or is today full of uncertainty and hormonal angst? It’s probably just me. I hope it’s just me. But surely, we could all still use a good laugh. Here’s an OBG (Oldie But Goodie) that never fails to bring on schadenfreude-laced tears of hysterical laughter:

Via Kevin, thanks. Click here to see the letter itself embiggened.

See also:

• Passive Aggressive Notes
• Fake APStylebook
• Apostrophe Abuse
• My Very Worst Date
• The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
• Texts From Last Night

---

Post tags: Culture, Memes, Silly-looking types, Theater

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Sorry for going quiet for the last few days -- I've been in Vienna, Austria, giving a talk at the "Future Space" event. That bit is done, but now I'm off to another project.

The trip included the surreal experience of being interviewed by Die Presse, Austria's newspaper-of-record -- an interview which, of course, included photographs. And the photographer got a bit... artsy.

Posting will pick up again next week.

Yes, that time has come again. After the previously detailed delay-for-pulping, Phonogram should be available in the US today (And the UK Tomorrow). The first five pages are available to read here, though spoilers from the off, and there’s been a selection of reviews already. Do they like it?

Comics Daily: “We?re past the point with Phonogram where it can really be judged by any sort of normal critical standard.”
James Hunt, Comic Book Resources: “Issue #5 of “Phonogram” might be the most challenging comic I?ve ever read, and in case there?s any doubt, that?s a good thing.”
Scott Cederlund, PopSyndicate: “This a nearly perfect comic book.”

Yes, it appears they do. Though I wish they’d come out and say it instead of using such mealy-mouthed language.

(We’re totally due for a critical backlash, I suspect. Bring it!)

One of the darker, more character-study issues, I think. Hope you enjoy it as much as it can be enjoyed.

The Twitter account of industry magazine PRODUCTION WEEKLY just posted on teh twittarz:

The CW will again try to adapt Warren Ellis’ comic book "Global Frequency," this time Scott Nimerfro will script the pilot.

Which I discovered because half a dozen people retweeted it at me within about thirty seconds of it landing.

I haven’t been cleared to comment yet, so I can’t really add anything to this. I’ve spoken briefly to Scott Nimerfro — by which I mean I threatened to have him stabbed, and he thanked me and told me a funny story about how he’s had worse threats — and he is Okay.

Anyway. Yes. Shouldn’t say any more until I get the nod from the studio. But yes.

(Also, yes, I did tell John Rogers. But John, you know, has his own hit show LEVERAGE these days. One of his temple houris told me that John, from the depths of the bed made of golden vaginas that they wheel him around in, wishes me luck.)

Kelly Sue posted a photo:

Found this on UrbanMamas.com:

Art and motherhood: A difficult combination?: “

At Wordstock last month, I sat in on several readings and discussions by writer mamas, and recently I’ve been very closely following other mothers and writers on Twitter and Facebook. I’ll admit to a fascination that’s part curiosity and part … jealousy? longing? … as I watch them juggle motherhood and their art. From a distance, it seems they’re doing it better than me.

I’ve finally gotten to the point where I believe I could finish my book proposal any day (really!) and I’m finally having a essay published in print this month. After years writing online, I’m coming into this artist-writer bit, slowly, with lots of squeaking and complaints from my family. It’s been hard, especially on those nights where my oldest has decided to go off melatonin, a gentle sleep aid we’d been using to good effect, and I must restart the process of coaching him on calming himself. For three hours.

A friend Tweeted she was locked in her bedroom this weekend, finishing a few last chapters of her book as her husband wrangled her boys. Another acquaintance, a writer dad, seems as if he’s frequently out of town on book readings and fabulous events, trading off childcare duty and glamorous writer things with his poet wife. I asked an author I admired at Wordstock how she managed to write with children — and she’s a single mother, having adopted a little girl internationally. ‘Very expensive childcare,’ she answered.

Then yesterday, I read in the Oregonian about this fabulous couple here in Portland. They’re both visual artists and she’s an accomplished writer. They’re gorgeous and cute and funny and successful. They have a three-month-old baby. I’m so jealous! (On the same page: a story about the Decemberists’ guitarist and his lovely girlfriend, Seann McKeel, who’ve started a series of concerts for children and parents to help entertain their three-year-old child. She’s also an artist. Oh!)

In my house, juggling art and motherhood don’t go that well. A two-year-old literally hangs from my arm when I’m in the middle of typing an especially inspired sentence. I go to a coffee shop to write for three hours, and when I come home, the slow cooked meal I’d begun has burnt and homework hasn’t been done — my husband was focused on the littlest and his nap, the laundry…

Are you, too, trying to combine some passion — whether it’s writing, art, a political or non-profit endeavor, or a really rewarding job — and motherhood? How have you managed? Do you sometimes feel that everyone but you is doing great? Or do you have secrets, tricks of the trade, that make it all come together?”

(Via urbanMamas.)

(whom you know better as comics creator D’Israeli)

(is living in Greece for a while)

(and these are his photos of his time there so far)

Excellent article from Julian Smith for New Scientist about wingsuited skydivers trying to cut the last cord from old-style jumping, and effect chuteless landings. Excellent quote therein:

Von Egidy sees her suit as a step towards a grander vision of people soaring like birds, not just gliding. "There could be nothing more challenging on Earth than to explore the limits of direct human flight. We are in fact far better suited to flight than we believe."

Ben Templesmith is wandering the UK, watching re-runs of THE SWEENEY and peering through your windows at night. These are the details on where to see him, how to commission a piece of art from him for dirt cheap, and exactly what he’s prepared to do to you sexually under the current exchange rate.

(is living in New Zealand currently)

(and wearing R Stevens squid socks)

• The Belbury Parish Magazine
  the organ of Belbury Poly/Ghost Box/confusing & haunted British electronic music
  (tags:music haunt )

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Behold the dress that bespoke pervert-enablers Ego Assassin made on request by/for the Hello Kitty 35th Anniversary Fashion Show on 14 Nov 09. Ego Assassin make many things. We like people who make things.

Good morning/afternoon. This is Warren Ellis dot com.