What Happens Next: "....And There's Nothing I Want To Do."

Hello, all:

So many excuses! So little time!

Long story short, I wanted to put in at least an entry or two before the close of February and get one out by now. But, frankly, every time I sat down to write something, somebody died?

First, it was someone who I guess you’d consider a close acquaintance—that kind of person you don’t see for years at a time but hug when you do? (Because we were both huggers.) And with some kind of history someone who didn’t know either of us would go, “hmmm, that seems….fraught.” Well, I found out that person died right around the holidays, and that was a blow.

Then, David Wolkin’s dad? I’m not sure how one would characterize David either, I guess: I consider him a friend, but the amount of time we’ve spent together has been slight, and if wasn’t for his writing and his willingness to text a hermit like me, it would be somewhat presumptious to think of him as a friend. (It probably still is, but I hope he doesn’t mind?)

As you know (if you know David), he loves inspiringly. (I almost said infectiously, but that sounds wrong.) I love Waffles, I love Keeli, I love David’s dad—all because he loves them so openly and so cannily.

For dudes like me with a somewhat more conflicted relationship with my dad—it’s still hard to believe amy dad loved me once I got older than the age he had a dad, as if all he had was a set of instructions up to a point and past that point he just shrugged—David’s love for his dad was a very bright and enviable thing. The fact it sounded so clearly mutual, the fact his dad sounded in so many ways the opposite of my own dad (for whom community was cultivated as a resource, and was never regarded without suspicion (in private, where no one would see))…there’s just a whole bunch of things there I admire and love from afar in a way that feels semi-mortifying to mention. I can’t imagine his loss, even mitigated as it is by the love, community, and memories still left.

And then, you know, Akira Toriyama.

I’m not much of a celebrity weeper—I think I save my parasocial relationships for people like David who might like me back!—but Toriyama was, by every account, a fucking giant, one impossibly hard to parse with my sad-ass school of “[manga-ka] is like the [comic artist] of Japan” analogies. (I still think one the most apt—and meanest—things The Comics Journal ever did was a three column chart so you could assemble your own Harlan Ellison hyperbolic blurb. Apt and mean, but still a lesson ignored, unfortunately.)

Toriyama’s death makes me feel very small. His life! My inability to provide any kind of tribute to it! The story goes that when Toriyama wrapped Dragon Ball, Shonen Jump lost a million readers when he stopped—almost a sixth of its readership. Can you imagine?

Part of me is at the age where I just kind of want to be okay with being silently in awe of it—our lives, and the insane paradox of simultaneously huge and small they are—and part of me is, like, “fuck, why couldn’t I have gotten my life to the point where I could talk about this in a way where someone who didn’t know could feel it?”

But I didn’t.

Growing old is such a privilege, because you get to see all the things you didn’t become and didn’t do, and you get to be okay with it. Because you get to see what you did instead and, if you’re lucky, all the things you did and all the things you became more than suffice—they’re good.

And I have been, on balance, unbelievably lucky.

Enough so, I feel pretty well-prepared for the next step—getting to be okay with the time when you stop doing anything, when you no longer become anything. You’ll be nothing more than a memory, and even then only for a bit.

So, you know. Kind of hard to have all that in the back of your mind and still feel like the world should know your thoughts about Ogami-San Can’t Keep It In, Vol. 3. (I love the cartooning, but the story really dipped to a place I think of as “vamp until you get the anime.”)

And yet, I still want to write to you guys? So my hope is getting all that off my chest will clear the way so I can still talk about the stuff i want to talk about, all that dumb “oh hey, the one super-solid John Constantine pitch I had almost twenty years ago is suddenly valid again” and “does anyone else try to search online for how to buy Japanese vending machines?” or “Why does The Bear blow so much of my good will with every season finale?”

Now it’s over, I’m dead, and I haven’t done anything that I want….

Or!

I’m still alive, and there’s nothing I want to do?

-Jeff