The blog never died. Forget the “write once a day” premise - it crashed into the reality of vacation. I was in a yurt near Joshua Tree National Park, living my midlife crisis fantasy, and decided: This was a bad time to post.
From that point, I disappeared into the vacation. Halfway through, I wrote maybe 30 percent of a post about how the life I was enjoying in Los Angeles was exactly what I imagined retirement to be; taking it further, it was making me question how much leisure you can enjoy before you’re giving up on “life.” At some point I wondered if the thought needed to be unpacked at length; later, I decided it wasn’t much of a thought at all.
That’s what vacation is for! As usual, I brought more books than I could read. As usual, I bought more books, but just a couple - a collection of Slim Aarons photos, “Nolympians” about the socialist campaign to stop Los Angeles from getting the next available Olympic Games, “Los Angeles: A Study of Four Ecologies,” and “Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio” by Derf Backderf.
The last of these was extraordinary. Backderf, a one-time underground cartoonist with a distinctive blocky style, has released two other novelistic stories based on his life. “My Friend Dahmer” broke him into the big time; Backderf really had been a high school friend of the serial killer and blended his own (sometimes banal) memories with what he’d researched after Dahmer was arrested. “Trashed” diverged more from the source, turning Backderf’s brief time as a sanitation worker into a character study and in-depth look at the profession. (Think of the zoological chapters in “Moby Dick.”)
“Kent State” nearly removes Backderf entirely, starting with an anecdote about him, as a child, seeing the National Guard put down a Teamsters protest. Doesn’t really matter. The story is Backderf’s reconstruction of the 1970 killings of four students by the Guard on the Kent State campus, one of those events I usually think of in a post-60s montage. Backderf turns the event into a sort of sequential Richard Linklater film, profiling guards, victims, narcs, and other students in the 96 hours around the event.
“The Book of Strange New Things” was the other book I ran through quickly, an artsy sci-fi novel from a few years ago that was turned into an awful-sounding Amazon pilot. In the show, a priest becomes a missionary to the first habitable planet discovered beyond earth, after his wife dies. In the novel, his wife is alive. That would be a swerve even if the letters between the missionary and his wife are the spine of the whole thing - earth is undergoing end-of-humanity-feeling convulsions, as the missionary builds a church with the “Jesus Lovers” of Oasis, who communicate through faces with no eyes or mouths.
Fun stuff, and I’ll start writing again daily here, hopefully shaking off the time-off stupor before long.