#26

It is Monday, October first. Where I am, it was a wet and gray day. I have walked the family dog twice, once in the rain and once in the drizzle. I have eaten small, simply prepared meals featuring chicken meat as protein, a few pieces of fruit, and drunk plain water and black coffee. I have read quietly, tickled the family piano, and blown on both my trumpet and my cornet. Been losing my chops on the horn and getting them back for ten years now, after diligently playing in school bands for eight.

Seventeen years ago today, also a Monday, the first Achewood strip posted. The fateful year of our lord two thousand and one, when I was on the cusp of adolescence.

I didn't do a thing.


--JL

#25

Life has been most disturbed of late. How it rankles, even grates--even, I say, grinds upon me to come to you twice in a row bleating apologies for my unconscionable silence. Nevertheless, life has been most disturbed of late, and what can be done?

Well, I could disturb my sleep in order to maintain output even in the face of unexpected tasks and duties. But subtracting from your own quality of life merely to live strikes me as the enterprise of a fool, and I no longer have that young man's verve which lends such foolery charm, and the purposefulness of experience farming.

Old heads will know what I'm talking about--letting a young person do something like an idiot, wasting a bunch of energy for nothing because they think they know better than you, and they're hungover and grumpy because they ate a cold spoonful of beans four hours ago and didn't sleep so much as laid unconscious on the couch they rescued from the landfill, surrounded by empties and overflowing "ashtrays". You could do the task in two seconds with a practiced, well-rested gesture, but you know what? It's okay that they'll take two minutes just to fuck it up. They need this pain in order to molt that hideous chrysalis.

That's how I became an adult: with my own gin-reek roaring in my nostrils, slicing my hand open for the ten hundredth time, showing up late to open the store only to find that I left the key in my other pair of pants, getting into an actual fistfight with my boss' husband, running over a dude's toolbox with the fleet vehicle, my ex screaming at me in front of customers, shattering a five hundred dollar piece of glass...

The whole trick is having done stuff wrong so many times that I can see myself doing something wrong from a mile away.

Anyway, tomorrow is October first. Not just October first! It is Monday, October first. A special day in the calendar of my people. I like the number seventeen. I have mentioned this.


--JL