The Fears of a First Time Father

There's just 15 days left until Rachel's due date and I'm finding myself more and more distracted by the day. This article does an excellent job describing my current state of mind, perhaps better than I could even express. I was particularly struck by how well I could relate to this passage:

"While all this excitement wells up in me I am petrified. We attended birthing classes last month, and while it was fantastically interesting and a necessary part of getting ready for the big day it also brought home the fact that a day unlike any other we have ever experienced is rushing towards us. It will involve incredible pain, frustration, anxiety, and eventually the massive excitement we will have when we see and hold our baby. These thoughts leave me feeling nervous, scared and somewhat sick. What have I done? Why have I done this to my loving and caring wife? While she is amazingly beautiful in her full-blown pregnancy I am scared for her and the pain she is ready (and willing) to endure."

A Dream About Tom Waits

Here's another poem, called A Dream About Tom Waits. As the title alludes, it was inspired by the artist's incredible Orphans triple album, released last year and is an examination of the strange confluence between imagination and celebrity.

Living in the Past

After seeing it listed in both Gilbert and Jaime's Top 15 albums of all time list (see my own Top 10 list in my analysis of Love & Rockets #23), I finally decided to get Elvis Presley - The Sun Sessions on CD. Now, for me to come out and say this is outstanding is kind of like encouraging everyone to rush out and watch Citizen Kane. These Sam Phillips-produced early sessions from '54-'55 are widely proclaimed as the birth of modern rock 'n' roll, so of course they're good. You don't need me to tell you that. What surprised me about this CD is that early in his career, Elvis sounded a lot more like Johnny Cash than I ever would have imagined. Not in his singing voice, which is quintessentially Elvis and much higher and smoother than Cash's, but in the clunky, rhytmic guitar and overall sound. I don't know, this might be a stretch, but from the first time I heard the opening bars of "That's Alright Mama," I had the feeling that I'd heard this before. There were also a couple of songs which I had heard other artists do ("Tomorrow Night" is beautifully covered by Patty Griffin on 1000 Kisses, and "Just Because" is covered by Jorma Kaukonen on Blue Country Heart, both great albums worth downloading), but I never realized they were Elvis covers.

In this day and age, where all that matters is the new (just on ESPN this morning, the anchors were having a meaningless debate about "who's now," Derek Jeter or LeBron James, whatever that means), I've recently found more and more pleasure in rooting through the treasure chests of the past. While I've written quite a bit about my joys of rediscovering classic comics (right now I'm working my way through Sandman Mystery Theater and George Perez's classic Wonder Woman run, as well as re-reading Dan Clowes Eightball), I have also been enjoying some old classic TV shows I missed the first time around. Right now we're in the middle of season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show so widely praised among the comic book geek community, I almost feel ignorant admitting I haven't watched it before now, and Freaks and Geeks, a "brilliant but cancelled" show that I became interested in after seeing the excellent movie Knocked Up by the same creators.

Of course, all of this will likely be put on hold, as we are now less than 3 weeks from the due date. When asked the inevitable "are you ready?" I am inclined to answer honestly - no! I mean, I'm excited, I'm curious, I'm proud and I'm anxious to get started, but ready? I don't know how anyone can ever be ready for such a massive, fundamental, seismic shift in the basic routines of their life. The most I can do at this point (besides continuing to work my way through the baby books rather than the dozens of more enjoyable distractions noted above) is to simply try to remain open to whatever changes are thrust upon me, and not to let stress, exhaustion, confusion and fear dominate. Flexibility and patience are the keys, I think. If that is what is meant by being ready, then yes, I suppose I'm as ready as I am going to be, but I would be lying if I didn't say the whole thing is just too overwhelming to really describe.

The Ballad of St. Mark's Place

Another one of my poems is up at Literary Escorts. It's called The Ballad of St. Mark's Place. It's kind of a meditation on aging and the transformation of cities over time. Check it out.

Reality Check

I stayed up til 1:00 am last night decorating the baby's room. I put up all the decals (the walls are blue, so we had bought little sea horse, sea turtle and stingray decals). We also got all the baby furniture - crib and changing table - delivered today. Suddenly, for the first time, the room really does feel like a baby's room. It's incredible. I guess this really is happening. I'm going to be somebody's father!

Insomnia

Another original poem of mine, called Insomnia, is up at Literary Escorts. This one is a couple years old, but I still kind of like it, unlike most of the poems I wrote during that time. Anyway, I have several more that will be published in the next month, so if you like what you see, please check back.

Love & Rockets #23

My new Shelf Life is up at Sequart. Can you believe I have been working on this project for over a year and a half already? It's been a labor of love, obviously, and one that I am proud of, but I do kind of miss reviewing new comics. Look for a couple of newish reviews coming soon!

The Forgotten Painting

My first poem, The Forgotten Painting, is up for your reading pleasure at Literary Escorts. It's a tragic tale of eternal love. More poems to come soon.

Baggage Check

It’s been a long while since I just did a straight up blog post, so, after a long holiday weekend, here’s what’s going on in my little corner of the world.

Obviously, first and foremost on my mind is the baby, which will be here in just a few weeks. Despite having read a few of the baby books (yes, I saw Knocked Up), it still does not feel real to me. I am in this weird sort of limbo right now, where everything I do, all the normal things like reading books, comics, watching TV, exercising, hanging out with friends, going out to dinner, and even sleeping have this weird, unidentifiable feeling attached to them. It's like in the back of my mind, at all times, there is this vague sense of the monumental change to come, yet nothing concrete enough to be able to put into words. Anticipation without any reality. I think not knowing the gender of the baby adds to this, but still I try to tell myself to just enjoy everything now, which I do for the most part, but knowing that such a seismic shift in my life is coming just makes it all feel weird. Don’t get me wrong, I am very excited! This is the most important thing I will ever do in my life, bar none, and I know how critically important the first year of a baby’s life is, in terms of bonding, etc. so I am committed and excited, but it still doesn’t feel real.

As for the other stuff, I finally got off my ass and actually submitted some writing this weekend. I have never had a problem with the actual creative process, in fact, if anything, I write too much and could use an editor, but I have always been awful at doing anything with the stuff I write. I have made a few feeble attempts at submitting stuff to literary journals in the past, and have, of course, published a lot of stuff online, but as far as getting my best stuff out there, I have been slack to say the least. I think it's partly a confidence issue, but moreso it is just a hell of a lot of work, none of which is fun compared to the creative stuff, and so it always seems to fall to the back burner. Anyway, we’ll see if anything comes of it.

I am also very close to finishing my book about Sri Lanka. I’d describe is as “a photo travel memoir.” It’s tentatively titled “14 Days in Sri Lanka” and I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do with it exactly. Publishing online seems like my best bet given how expensive color printing is, but I am considering doing a small print run, say 20-30 books, just so I have something to give to family and friends. I will also send it around to some publishers and see if there's any interest, but I'm not optimistic about its prospects.

As far as comics go, I have been continuing to read and enjoy Love & Rockets. It’s not only been rewarding in the sense that I am really immersing myself in such outstanding and classic work, but also in that it's a great personal challenge, a marathon of sorts. I may hit a huge speed bump when the baby is born, but hope to be back up and running with it by Thanksgiving.

I’ve also started reading Sandman Mystery Theater, a series which I collected but never read more than the first storyline of. So far I’ve made it through the first 20 issues, and while the series starts out kind of slow, it really starts picking up steam once Guy Davis takes over as the regular artist in issue 13. Davis has an ideally suited style for this comic, a jittery, wavy line that at times looks like scribbles, yet comes together in a way that's hard to describe but it works. And the period research Davis did - everything from the costumes to the city shots to even everyday household items - is outstanding. The entire series (or at least what I own, which is up to issue #45) is consistently broken into four issue arcs, a format which works well in Wagner and Seagle's hands. This series also had some outstanding photo collage covers by Richard Bruning and Gavin Wilson. I don’t think I ever really inspected them until now, but the pulp, pre-WW II feel is pretty interesting. Overall, SMT feels like one of those underappreciated Vertigo series that has gotten better with age (think Milligan's Enigma or Morrison's Doom Patrol, or even some parts of Ennis' Hellblazer). When it was coming out in the early 90s, it was largely overshadowed by Neil Gaiman's Sandman (of which it both fortuitously and unfortunatly shares its name), but in retrospect, this is every bit as mature and unique a book as Gaiman's was.

Also, last night I started reading Syncopated Volume 3, a black and white anthology of "first person reportage" comics and short essays. It’s edited by Brendan Burford, and looks to be the next big ascendant comics anthology to hit its stride, joining the ranks of SPX and Kramers Ergot. Definitely worth check out.

Love & Rockets #22

My latest Shelf Life is finally up over at Sequart. It took me longer than expected to finish this one, though I think this has more to do with baby-related activities competing for limited free time than anything else. I am still hoping to finish three more columns before the due date (August 15) though of course, if the baby comes early, that will have to be put on hold. At any rate, I hope you enjoy this latest column, and, as always, please let me know if you have any feedback.

Literary Escort Services

Julian Darius, founder of Sequart, has launched an excellent new website today called Literary Escort Services. It's an online literary journal which features fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, artwork and photography.

"Our general mission is simple: to mesh the high literary with the vital real avant-garde that high literary circles often miss. Readable academic non-fiction will blend comfortably with lively, vital, intelligent essays on popular culture. From fiction that cuts like a knife to fresh nude photography, all will have a home here."

The site will be updated daily. Over the next month or two, I will be featuring several of my short stories, poems, and comic scripts on the site.