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Get wet.

March 30th, 2021

Another instructional video. The Secret to Superhuman Strength, # 33.

Skiing with Sal

March 11th, 2021

The second in my series of instructional videos, “The Secret to Superhuman Strength.” I’ve been backcountry skiing with my friend Sally for 13 years now–she is my inspiration.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

March 9th, 2021

I’m coming back to this neglected, vintage blog to post some stuff. I have been instructed to promote my upcoming book, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, on social media. I am a bit loathe to wade into that septic morass, but it seems it must be done. Doing it here on WordPress as well as on the wider web makes me somehow feel a little better about the whole thing. Here I have some control and am not vying for algorithmic attention with QAnon.

I got this idea for a little instructional video series of “secrets to superhuman strength,” so here’s the first one. (I thought calling it #27 would motivate me to do more than one.) The book is about my lifelong pursuit of physical fitness, and how it has saved me by getting me out of my head and into my body. It’s about a lot of other things, too, but moving in an energetic fashion, especially outside, is key.

merging and purging

April 14th, 2017

In honor of National Library Week, which is almost over, here is a post about books. Hol and I have kept our books separate until now. But ten years in, it seemed time to organize, cull, and merge them. There were piles of books everywhere, and it was impossible to find anything. It was a big project. For the most part our libraries were very complementary—Hol has large swaths of botany, natural history, poetry, and Jung. I have more fiction, memoir, lit crit, and Freud. But there were a few points of overlap:

In these cases, one of us had to give up a book. I had signed copies of Sarah Schulman’s Girls, Visions, and Everything, and Judith Katz’s Running Fiercely from a High, Thin Sound. Hol had a signed Howl. So we’re giving away the unsigned ones.

For some reason we had three Moosewoods between us. We kept the one with the most notes and food spatters in it. Neither of us could part with our Hero With a Thousand Faces, or A Room of One’s Own. Or The Brothers Karamazov. I never read it, but it’s my dad’s Modern Library edition. Hol read it, and can’t let go of those well-thumbed Penguin Classics pages.

There was one other interesting point of complementarity. I have a boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia that I got for Christmas when I was ten. Somewhere along the line I lost one book—The Last Battle. Bizarrely, Holly, owns one volume of the Chronicles of Narnia—The Last Battle. It’s a slightly later edition, but it fits neatly into the slipcase with the others. A complete set at last.

Postcards from the Edge

April 13th, 2017

The second post-trump episode of Dykes to Watch Out For. It’s up on the site of Seven Days, my local alt weekly here in Vermont. I plan to continue doing these on an occasional basis as a way of staying sane.

decluttering

April 13th, 2017

When I moved into my first apartment after college, in 1981, my friend Stefan gave me this can of water chestnuts as a housewarming gift. I kept moving it from apartment to apartment, house to house, throughout my twenties and thirties. I had a vague plan of writing a comic about it, as the one constant in all that flux, an eternal housewarming gift. It’s been kicking around my current home for twenty years.

Holly and I just did this massive purge of our books. I never thought I would ever get rid of books. When I read Mari Kondo’s “Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” and got to the part where she instructed you to toss your books out, I tossed her book out and kept all the other ones. But after a recent encounter with a hoarder, I can see that I really must let go of a lot of these books which are blotting out the sun. The can of water chestnuts got caught up in the purge. I’m going to open it now and see what nearly forty year old water chestnuts look like. Then I will compost them and recycle the can.

Goodbye Maggie

January 6th, 2017

Maggie Jochild left the planet this morning. I dug back into the historical recesses of this blog and found this page where her comments created, as they always did, an elegantly digressive, looping colloquy with the other commenters. What an innocent time that pre-Facebook era was. And what a great connector we had in Maggie. She will be missed.

Maggie Jochild

January 3rd, 2017

Sending white light out to Maggie Jochild, old blog pal from back in the pre-facebook era. She is very ill, possibly dying. Maggie met her partner Margot through this blog years ago. Margot has managed to get from the UK to Austin, TX, to be with Maggie.

This is a photo of Maggie getting her hair cut at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival back in the day. I ripped it off–hope that’s okay–from this post she made about her first time at Michigan. A highlight:

And I tell you:  If I had had to deal with male socialization there on that land, I would not have found the freedom to become who I am now.  It simply would not have been possible.

I am very glad Maggie became who she is now. The world is a better place. You can read more of Maggie’s work on her own blog, Meta Watershed.

Same as it ever was, only much worse

November 23rd, 2016

Since I stopped drawing Dykes to Watch Out For at the tail end of the Bush administration, people have asked me many times if I thought about my characters, and if so, what they were up to. And I would have to be honest. No, I didn’t think about them, and I had no idea what they were doing.

But last week they all started flooding back.

Happy Thanksgiving

November 23rd, 2016