As in, whiling away the time. Portmanteau, with "milestone". As in, implied marker.
Yesterday's Whilestones were:
(i) Inking a portrait of David Kammerer, which I penciled months ago. This is the second rendition of Kammerer, and the correct one. Began inking approximately ten minutes before--
(ii) Doing a radio interview with Eamonn Clarke in Wales(?) about John Smith & Jim Baikie's 'The New Statesmen'. Had kicked around the idea of doing a podcast about it a year ago, and then last month Eamonn hit me up and said let's do it. So I finished my re-read of TNS at 6am, then wrote up my notes, had an orange & some tea, inked for a minute, and did the thing. It was enjoyable & embarrassing, all at once, because I've no right to talk shit about Alan Moore, but then, perhaps I do have right inasmuch as I'm queer and Moore isn't. So I slagged 'Watchmen' some, and I praised 'The New Statesmen' some, and I generally hemmed & hawed & eventually figured out to take a cue & record an outro. Eamonn was most kind & generous. It was one hell of a way to start celebrating...
(iii) My fourth birthday. I keep thinking it's been five years since I cracked my skull, and it hasn't been. It's only been four. Four very busy years. Siegfried wanted to take me out to get my nails done, but there weren't any slots open, so it's scheduled for later in the week. In the meantime, we--
(iv) Planted two native pollinators in the community garden and did some upkeep on our plot, before...
(v) Going to Kathy Osterman beach and picking trash. It's a habit, cleaning up the minute shards of plastic & half-eaten straws & desiccated cigarette butts, bottlecaps & sandy napkins & deflated mylar balloons. The buried children's toys, sandbox molds & hearty injection-molded trowels, those we put aside for some seekers of joy to find. And then we--
(vi) Retired home for a bit of art. Got surprisingly far with that portrait, yesterday. Didn't intend to. But basic linework's half-done now! I tried to record the process but that only resulted in some choice footage of the back of my ear. So...
(vii) There was another whilestone, but the veil of discretion must be drawn over its celebratory nature & causal placement in the chain of accomplishment & pleasure that resulted in my turning 4, or 50. Because technically, it's fifty. But technically, my legal birthday isn't for another six months, either. At any rate, a good day overall, because--
(viii) I wasn't this guy four years ago, and this wasn't my life. It's wonderful to grow into being myself, at long last, and shake off the South. In the south I couldn't have told my husband how much he's changed & revitalized me. In the south I couldn't recognize myself or my aspirations. More than anywhere else in america, the south conditions the human animal to repress & censor & deform itself. It teaches us to betray our own best interests in favour of What The Community Thinks. It teaches us the belt, the paddle, and the freshly-cut privet switch. It teaches us to hate ourselves, just enough, to deserve saltine cracker Christ. Man, leaving Atlanta was retiring from a gig hoisting a pitchfork in hell.
(ix) Also to be filed somewhere in all that were some re-reads. I reread the 11th chapter of Watchmen, to confirm a thesis spouted aloud during the pod, because from the moment Eamonn stopped recording I started asking "Did I free-associate that shit?" Re-read confirmed what I knew: Joey & Aline are collapsed atop one another against the spraypainted Hiroshima Lovers, the sacrifice New York's publishers demanded of Watchmen's author. As a corrolary, also re-read 'The Screwball Asses', an auto-critique of queer revolutionary tendencies in France in 1973. Because these are the things I think about as I build a queertopian webcomic, which...
(x) I totally failed to promote, coherently, on the Mega-City One podcast. Self-promotion does not come natural, even to the sort of self-absorbed dinosaur who still believes in The Power of Blogging. Hey, it's a beginning.
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