From the time my daughter was in her early teens, she frequently wore a pair of waterproof boots that matched virtually nothing she owned. They were polka-dotted, although I can’t remember if they were black with pink polka dots or pink with black polka dots. The latter, I think.

On any number of occasions, my wife would ask her to please, please wear anything else on her feet but those boots. But asking a teenager to change an item of clothing is like asking a bird not to fly or a fish not to swim. Whether it’s because she loved the boots, or because her mother hated them, my daughter wore those boots for years.

I got a voicemail yesterday on my cell phone. I was at work, in the new building housing the three radio stations I work for. The cellular coverage in my studio is less than stellar. I could tell the voicemail was from my daughter, but I could not make out a word. “Hi, Dad,” I think it began, but it could have been “My bad.” It could have been anything. 

I texted her (for some reason text messages seem to go through fine) and asked her to text me back with whatever message she had left for me in my voicemail. Moments later, I got a text, which became a series of texts between myself and my daughter, in which I learned that she was moving out, right away, and moving away, to take a job with a company that travels from town to town. Essentially, she’s run away and joined the circus.

I have no idea how this major life change will work out for my daughter, but I did a little research and was pleasantly surprised to find out that the company appears to be legit. I couldn’t find many negative comments about them online, and the few negative comments I did find did not indicate flaws in the company that would likely affect my daughter in any way. 

Penny ante stuff. Piffle. And the truth of it is, she’s an adult now. While it would have been nice to have a little more warning, she has the right to do exactly what she did: accept a new job, pack (some of) her stuff, and leave town. This all happened last night.

I won’t say I wasn’t emotionally affected by this sudden, unexpected turn of events. For nearly 19 years, she’s been a huge part of my life, every day. For nearly 17 years, we have been a family of four — six, if you count the cats. Reflecting last night on how we are now a family of three — five, if you count the cats — I got more than a little misty-eyed. Choked up. I didn’t actually cry, but that was a distinct possibility. My baby’s grown up. The little girl who I watched come into the world, who looked me straight in the eye minutes after she was born, and never cried but just studied everything around her like she’d arrived at a destination she’d long been waiting to arrive at — she’s packed (some of) her stuff and gotten the hell out of Dodge.

And amazingly, nothing made it seem quite as real as going out to my car this morning, on a gray, overcast day with spotty rain spitting down, and seeing those old, worn-out boots propped up against our garbage cans, discarded. Waiting to be taken away forever. Those boots, the most solid evidence that time is passing, that one era has ended, and another one has begun. For those of us left behind, an era of now being three (or five) instead of four (or six). For her, the beginning of the rest of her life.

* My wife Lora is having robot-assisted surgery tomorrow, hopefully bringing an en to a few years now of health problems that have varied from aggravating to incapacitating at times. I’m glad there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Today was spent helping her with a cleansing regimen about which, the less said the better. All I can say is that she is stronger than me by multiples of 50. Any good thoughts you can send her way tomorrow are very welcome.

* She can’t eat for over 24 hours before the surgery, so Easter dinner went right out the window. I did take Aaron to lunch at Five Guys, which was good, and then came home and watched a few episodes of the animated Justice League with Lora before she fell asleep on the couch. So here I am, typing words into the computing machine.

* I got the Wally Wood Stories Artist Edition hardcover yesterday. IDW has produced one of the most beautiful, if unwieldy books of comic art ever produced. I still think the big Kramers Ergot was not worth 125 bucks, but this ood book is another thing altogether. The art is reproduced at the same size as the original art, and scanned so that you might as well be holding that same art in your hands. You can feel Wood’s personality and artistry on every page. This is a treasure of comic art, reproducing some of the most classic and gorgeous comics ever created. Can’t wait for the Batman Year One volume reproducing David Mazzucchelli’s originl art, although it’s difficult to imagine it will be as jaw-droppingly impressive and vital as this Wood volume.

* Also picked up the Flex Mentallo HC yesterday. The recolouring job consisted of batch-converting every page with the “drab” filter in Photoshop, I’m convinced of it. If you’ve seen the original comics, you’ll realize what a shitty thing it was to do this to the book.

* “It’s such a long time, since my better days,” Natalie Merchant just sang out of the speakers of my laptop. I don’t really feel that way at the moment, but I always liked that line, and her music in general. 

Even though I’ve had my new laptop for over a month (is it still new? It feels new to me), up until this morning I had not blogged from a coffee shop using their free wifi. It’s such a cliche, but it’s something I really wanted to do — to be able to take a portable computer almost anyplace and connect to the entire internet for free seems like a miracle for the ages. I know most people probably take it for granted, but it really seems astonishingly unlikely that humankind could have ever reached this level of sophistication. If we had all reached it at once, if the vast majority of people living on the planet weren’t shut out from such luxury, it might even be something to celebrate, instead of something to feel mildly embarrassed by. Yes, in many ways some privileged people on this planet are enjoying a future of the type Gene Roddenberry and his colleagues proffered on Star Trek, but in that glorious future, there weren’t entire countries and continents suffering for the affluence of the elites. Sitting here tapping away on my laptop, sipping piping hot English Breakfast Tea, it’s not hard to feel like an elite, no matter how barren my bank account or how recently minted my slight good fortune is. (Three months ago I was staring down the end of my unemployment benefits and wondering if I’d ever get another job.)

Of course, most people don’t believe the affluence enjoyed here in Los Estados Unidos will ever end. Me, I read too much and think about too much to think the ride’s gonna continue much longer. Read last week’s column by Jim Kunstler and ask yourself seriously how much longer we can all pretend the economic system isn’t a desiccated corpse. How long before it takes more than the value of a gallon of oil to suck a gallon of oil out of the ground, and how much longer after that signal moment anyone at all will work at providing cheap oil for the enormous global energy demands of our era. And if you do any research at all, you’ll find that shale, solar, wind power — you name it — there’s no energy alternative that can sustain the way of life that we enjoy. In 50 years, or maybe 10, life might look more like the opening scene of Soylent Green, with the old man riding the stationary bike in his family’s apartment just to keep the lights flickering.  Will my kids enjoy laptops and iPads and flying cars? Honestly, do you think so? I’ll be happy if they can spend their adult years safe and well-fed. But even that, I think, will depend on ingenuity and flexibility, two character traits that most Americans seem to have long ago forgotten about.

Gosh, honestly I didn’t intend to go dark here in my first session blogging from a coffee shop. I can’t blame it on the tea, because it’s delicious. But I am serious when I say that the changes that are coming seem closer now than ever — our political system is hopelessly broken and the Occupy movement, as well-intentioned and mostly right as it was, doesn’t seem to have the furious energy and hate that sustains the tea-baggers.  As with most problems, the root cause is a lack of education and a lack of will by the older generation to prepare the young for what’s ahead. We’re all so busy trying to get by day to day that we spend little or no time thinking about whether we live in a culture that can maintain itself into the future, fueled by the nearly-depleted remnants of creatures that lived and died hundreds of millions of years ago. There’s some degree of irony in our last hundred years being fueled by their extinction, and speeding our culture well on the way to its own.

Sold off 106 books today, mostly graphic novels, in the hopes of making some space in my room. I’ve known for some time I need to simplify my life, and even though it was five boxes of books I offloaded, and I let them keep the boxes, it still feels like my bedroom is crowded, disordered, a mess. It feels like a reflection of my mind, which never seems to settle down, and certainly never seems like an orderly place.

The new year brought with it a new job, and now a new computer (upon which I type this very blog post), and after nearly two years of feeling like I was stuck in limbo, all these new elements are welcome. There are other things in my life I want to make new, and some I want to eliminate altogether. Clear out some room. Simplify. Organize. Maybe I’ll find the time.

Random notes: Watched the mostly-excellent special features on the new Justice League: Doom Blu-ray today. Nice tribute to the late and much-missed Dwayne McDuffie. One person remembering how Dwayne was sometimes slighted or underestimated reminded me of an unfortunate incident on a private comics mailing-list I used to run, in which a major comics retailer made some unbelievably asshole-y comments about Dwayne, not realizing The Maestro was already getting the emails. That was the end of Dwayne being a part of our little secret society, which is a shame, because he was a smart guy and I always enjoyed interacting with him. The few times I see mention of that retailer it reminds me how very wrongheaded some people can be, and yet they can still achieve a degree of success within their field, unfortunately. Radio has taught me much the same lesson numerous times.

Enjoyed pizza with my wife after I sold off those books today, and then we went and I waited semi-patiently as she picked out gifts for a baby shower coming up next weekend. Somehow 19 months of unemployment made me a little more patient in waiting for other people to get done the stuff they need to do. I guess that’s one good thing to come out of it. 

I think this June will make it ten years I’ve been blogging. I mentioned recently to someone I met in 2005 that I was blogging back then, and he said “There were no blogs back then.” Okay, well, I know I started in 2002. I’m just too lazy to look up the exact date right this second. *

I do remember that I signed up for a paid Blogger Plus account, because it offered a more stable and reliable platform and interface than regular old free Blogger; two weeks later they upgraded everyone to Blogger Plus for free. They sent me a Blogger hoodie by way of apology. I think my daughter still has it in her closet somewhere. My oldest blogging artifact.

As I write these words, I am waking myself up with an ice-cold Coke Zero and half-listening to Imus, back after he took Preznit’s Day off yesterday. My son has the whole week off, but since my wife and I (and our daughter, too, amazingly) have to work all week, I don’t think his vacation will be anything to get too excited about it. These days he seems happy to play his X-Box 360 anyway, and seems to be single-handedly propping Blockbuster up by making daily trips to see what 99 cent games they have in stock.

The news guy on Imus says Rick Santorum is still the front runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Jim Kunstler often has said that The Long Emergency will lead to political madness, and I think the nation tolerating Santorum’s hate-based campaign proves Kunstler’s theory. I wish progressives had a credible candidate. Hell, I wish the Republlicans had one.

Hmm, sports is on now. Carmello Anthony, Jeremy Lin, Knicks, Nets, blah blah blah. The only thing that bores me more than sports is country music. **

My online comics buddy Yan Basque does these daily updates on his personal blog — I’d like to get into the habit of doing something like that. I recently got a new laptop computer that’s given me a lot more portability, and I want to get into the habit of blogging more regularly again. I’m still getting used to the flat (“recessed”) keys and the touchpad. They’re so alien to me. I did get a wireless keyboard and mouse bundle but now that I’ve had this thing a couple of weeks, I feel like using those would be both an added, unnecessary step and also cheating.

“Bill Maher catches Linsanity,” says Imus’s producer, previewing an upcoming segment. Linsanity. That’s one disease I am 100 percent immune to. 

—-

* June 7th, 2002

** This is a lie. They bore me in equal measure.

 

My sister (born Deborah, self-christened Whims) died this week, an event prompting condolences from well-meaning friends and acquaintances, but no condolences are needed. All her death really evokes in me is a sense that something bad and wrong has come to an end.

It quickly became clear that I should have kept the news to myself. Because while I am genuinely grateful for the support and comfort of those around me, the only sadness I feel is for my sister’s son, a decent, bright and good-hearted guy who has suffered terrible confusion and probably a good deal of pain due to my sister’s activities and behaviour of the past few years. The plain truth of the matter is, and death shouldn’t make us afraid to be honest, my sister was a troubled person, a virulent racist, and she brought pain and discomfort to my family for most of the time she was alive. 

Such a terrible thing to say. Such a terrible thing to feel you have to say. And yet there it is. My earliest memories are of late-night threats made over the phone, against my mother, by my sister. As a young child she filled me with fear. As an adult she usually filled me with disgust. For every kind, decent thing she did — such as assisting my wife and I with groceries once when we were very poor and newly living together — I could name you twenty that would tear your guts out.

The worst:

There were four of us kids that my mother raised. My oldest brother, my sister, me, and my younger brother. There’s more to the story than that, much more, but for the purposes of this reminiscence, that’s all you need to know. My oldest brother was adopted, but never knew it. My mother began demonstrating Alzheimer’s symptoms in the 1990s, and as the disease progressed, eventually my sister (a nurse) brought my mother (also a nurse, in better, stronger days) to live with her. Around 1994 my mother died, and my sister wrote the obituary that appeared in the newspaper.  

That obituary was how I found out my mother had died, because my sister didn’t bother to tell me. That obituary was also how my older brother found out he was adopted. Can you imagine being a middle-aged man, never mind a troubled Vietnam veteran, being told for the first time that you were adopted, by reading it in the newspaper? “Nancy Doane is survived by her adopted son Robert…” began the paragraph that must have devastated him, as my sister intended. She was a vicious, spiteful person. After my mother’s death, my sister spent many months trying to seize control of some stocks that my mother had intended me to inherit. There’s no doubt of her intentions, because she told me herself, and added my name to the ownership of the stocks. When my sister finally gave up trying to get them turned over to her against the stated wishes of our mother, and turned them over to me, I cashed them in as quickly as I could. My wife and I were raising two very small children, and were making very little money. As a result of the stock sale there was enough money to buy ourselves wedding rings (we hadn’t had the money for them, or much else, at the time we got married), a new pair of sneakers, and exactly one nice meal out at a decent, but not extravagant restaurant. I hope her failed attempt to steal this minor amount of money from me as I was starting out my own family was worth the two decades of contempt I carried for her ever since. 

There’s so much more. The time she knocked my then-preteen brother on his ass for impulsively saying something both innocent and true. The time she stole everything from a husband she married solely for what she could get out of him, waiting for him to go to work, then backing up the moving van and taking it all. More, more, more. But it finally took her racist rants on immigration to prompt me to unfriend and in fact block her on Facebook. I just didn’t want any more of her hatred and negativity in my life. 

A few weeks back I received word that she seemed to be falling even further into dangerous behaviours and habits. There was talk of drug addiction and loaded handguns, mutterings of revenge for being fired, likely with good reason. I began to wonder how much longer she could live the way she was living. Now I have my answer. Not long. My wife told me today that my sister’s death was news she never expected to hear. I told her I’d been expecting it for weeks.

I don’t know yet how exactly she died, and honestly there’s a lot more about her that will remain forever unknown to me, forever a mystery. Late-in-life hints that there may have been so much more lies and deception on her part than I really had ever could have guessed, although actually I had wondered about some of it from time to time. But the truth is, the death of my sister is not painful for me, though I feel for those to whom it might cause pain. For me it’s mainly about closure, about the open wound that was her life, not so much healing as just finally coming to an inglorious and not-entirely-surprising end. The only lesson I could offer up from her long, destructive life and quick slide from madness into death, is that we all will be remembered not for what we wanted to be and wanted to do, but for who we actually are and what we actually do. I wish I could remember my sister fondly and with love, but unfortunately I remember her too well for that. All I can say is, goodbye, Whims, and thanks for the groceries.

So Wal-Mart is bringing back layaways, a retail strategy originally introduced during the Depression of the 20th century (as opposed to the one we’re living in now) to allow retailers to claim money from people who are already financially depleted by taking advantage of the fact that at least some people still get a regular paycheck, however anemic that check might be. 

The advantage to retailers is that even if a “consumer” is virtually bankrupt, as long as they are getting a regular check, they can be tempted to buy big-ticket, non-essential items like big screen TVs, X-Boxes and iPads, and pay for them in installments. Once you’ve given up enough of your income to cover the expense, the retailer gives you your item and for a few days you can feel like you are keeping up with the Joneses.

Far better, in this ever-faltering economy we live in, to save your money, use it for important things like food or rent, or if you must spend it on non-essential goods, at least spend it at a small, local business that will likely re-invest your money in your own local community.

While Wal-Mart’s revival of the layaway will certainly be seen by many desperate shoppers as a real boon to their holiday shopping this season, the truth is that most people here in Los Estados Unidos are already past the financial breaking point, and Wal-Mart’s move is not a beneficent kindness, but rather a cynical cash-grab, a workaround for the fact that most of us are already past the breaking point, but desperate to create one more “normal” holiday season for our families before we all have to admit that abject poverty really is the new normal. 

As I write this, my neck of the woods (upstate New York, an hour north of Albany) has about 36 hours to go before Hurricane Irene arrives. The latest word from weather experts on the radio is that when she gets here, she’ll likely be a Category 2 storm carrying 80-100 mile an hour winds. I’ve told the kids to keep our outdoor cat indoors, because I would hate to see him carried to the heavens, like Enoch. I just know it wouldn’t end as well for Ralphie as it did for Enoch.

I’ve been thinking for the last 12 hours or so about writing some sort of profound rumination on current and near-future events, but I find nothing is coming to mind. I guess it’s because the storm could hit us, or it might go out to see, and the quantum uncertainty seems to have me frozen in place. Although I did stock up on extra Charmin. It’s not like we won’t find a use for it even if Irene passes us by entirely. After all, Halloween is coming.

I do find myself looking around at all our stuff and wondering if it’ll still be here Monday. Outside, there’s a glorious blue sky putting the lie to the idea that anything untoward — not to say catastrophic — might be slowly making its way toward us. So I see my comics and my action figures and my wife and my kids and I can’t wrap my brain around the idea that this storm could wash it all away and drown us in a whirling sea of shit and piss and rain and other people’s stuff very shortly. The shed on the side of the house? That’s not in the best shape, and I know if we even get 50 mile an hour winds, it’ll likely be in Maine within an hour or two of the storm’s arrival. Maybe pieces of it will make it to Nova Scotia, prominently mentioned now in storm coverage, and coincidentally where my mother’s mother was born, around the same time Jack the Ripper was busy making headlines.

It’s funny to mention “storm coverage.” I mocked Albany’s news/talk radio station earlier this week for making much ado about virtually nothing in regard to the Virginia-based earthquake that rattled some buildings up this way and was felt by some (but not by me). But I imagine that station has made plans to have news people available to go live in case the worst happens (and likely even if it doesn’t). Sadly, closer to home, we have eight radio stations in Glens Falls and the chances of any quality news coverage airing on them over the weekend is virtually zero. I’d wager most of them won’t even have a live body in the building throughout the worst of the storm. Having spent over a decade doing radio news, I even whimsically imagined myself offering my services up gratis just to make sure people got information, but it’s more than likely they’d turn down my offer, thinking their canned music and weather forecasts recorded two or three days ahead of time will serve the public interest, which after all is why the FCC licenses radio stations in the first place. Hell, the neglect of broadcast ethics and standards circa 2011 C.E. means most local stations probably couldn’t go live and take phone calls without hours of work by an engineer who actually knows what he or she is doing, anyway. If you think there’s anyone left who cares, think again.

So, that’s as profound as I’m going to get, staring down the barrel of this particular gun. I’ve stocked up on toilet paper, I’m pretty sure our shed is going to be washed away, and I’m angry beyond words that there’s no local broadcast infrastructure in place to take care of the people of the community I live in.

If you’re in Irene’s path, I wish you every possible bit of good luck. This could all amount to nothing, although with one meteorologist saying the storm could be “worse than Katrina,” I really have a feeling it will probably amount to a bit more than nothing. Good luck to us all, though. 

Nothing you own is worth more than 33 percent of its 2005 value; everything you need costs 50 percent more.

The first number will fall; the second will rise. 

From here on out, anyone who doesn’t understand, accept and plan for this change will be extremely frustrated, unhappy and unable to function. 

Dear Senator McDonald,

You may not remember me, but I remember you. I interviewed you twice in my radio career. In fact, you were the first newsmaker I ever interviewed, in the mid-1980s working at WKAJ in Saratoga Springs. Later, working at WABY in Albany, I interviewed you for the station’s half-hour public affairs show, and came away from that second interview greatly impressed with your integrity and passion for what’s right, no matter what political pressure was put on you by your party.

Thank you, Senator, for your promise to support equal marriage rights in New York State. As a straight, married man I believe my marriage and the marriages of all people will be made STRONGER by recognizing the basic right of any adult human being to marry any other adult human being that they love and want to spend their life with. My wife feels as I do, and so do most of the people I know. Recognizing equal marriage rights is another step forward for our state, and I salute your courage in taking a stand for equality and basic human decency. Don’t listen to the voices of ignorance telling you you’ve made the wrong decision — you’ve chosen equality over ignorance, and I thank you for it.

Alan David Doane
Glens Falls, New York