Travels and things
I was, am, all over the place this month.
I shot some video before a heavy rain storm with hail the size of quarters hit us!
I try to write one of these things once a week. June was an epic failure. July hasn’t been much better but it’s not over yet! I have been going through low-grade burnout lately. It comes and goes. I feel very inspired for a little while and then lethargic the next. Some things I’ll try to cover here. I went to Athens, Greece for over a month, did a convention of sorts, and visited my folks in Erie, PA.
Athens was uneventful. Not boring, just mellow and cool. I arrived a day ahead of Molly who was coming from London (I think) after a great book tour for “Here where we live is our country”. She was only in Athens for several days before she went to Paris for a few days and book events. Everywhere she went there were packed rooms and many questions. The handful of events I saw were great, so I assume all her other ones were similar. I see her every day so she told me all about each one. She arrived from Paris on fumes and I was frantically trying to finish my last issue of Toxic Avenger. We didn’t do much but we love our apartment in Athens and were perfectly happy with drinking coffee, playing chess, and enjoying our space.
My hard drive with all my art on it shit the bed right at he start so that hampered my flexibility to post art etc. for the last month. My HD is currently in “rehab” and hopefully will be recovered. The fellow at the tech place seemed pretty confident he could recover it. We’ll see.
The first few days in Athens were dealing with the break-in of our apartment. My tools were all stolen and a few little objects that didn’t make sense. One was our chess board! The thieves mostly just took things with handles. All my tools were in tool boxes and cases with handles. They left the door ajar and we think the folks who we let stay in our apartment months earlier might not have locked the door properly. We also think the original point of entry was the balcony because we have an Air B&B next door that we share the balcony with and the partition that separates it is really easy to jump over. Molly found some iron work guys to weld a good barrier in place. I think it will work.
We went to our first Greek island on this trip. Serifos is even more relaxing than Athens is for us. We didn’t know anyone, there wasn’t much there in the way of entertainment. It was a good beach that we walked over a mountain to lay on. There was one bar and one restaurant next to the beach. It was my first swim in the Mediterranean Sea. I swam out in Coney Island once, but I don’t remember it being very salty. This spot was really salty! The water was also in the low 70’s and was perfect.
Molly and I did almost everything together. It was great. We have a similar sense of humor so we laughed at a lot of the same things and enjoyed the whole atmosphere in Athens. Last time we were in Greece it was around Easter and we got to see a crazy bonfire on a highway next to a church that was mostly built with gasoline and matches. There were explosions and heat. This time we got to see the “Anti racism festival” sponsored by the Anarchist community in Athens. It was really cool because there were a bunch of different ethnic groups offering their native food. Athens has a lot of different ethnicities that have immigrated there from north Africa and the middle east. The food was fantastic! We saw a lot of great art and there were two stages for performances. One was traditional ethnic dances and music, the other was more contemporary bands. We saw a Greek rap group that was pretty popular. The crowd was packed in and they flashed images of war and protest on giant screens behind the group. Molly’s night was made because one of the images was one of her illustrations! It was a very cool moment. I understood about three words the whole time but the energy in the crowd was electric. Electricity is universal.
Ten days after getting back to NYC I rented a car and drove to Troma-Thon at the Mahoning theater near Lehighton, PA. I rolled in Friday evening, set up at a table and sold a few books. My plan was to sleep in the car at the drive-in and be ready to go the next day. I woke up with a sore hip and drizzling rain. My first thought was to bail and drive to Erie. I checked the weather which was calling for rain throughout the day. It was outdoors and all my stuff was paper. We had a tarp overhead but any wind and my stuff would turn to pulp. I decided to go out for breakfast and think on it. As soon as I pulled out of the lot, I decided to drive to Erie. I was on the road for about 2 hours when I stopped to check my phone and found out that everything was cancelled due to tornado warnings and apparently someone had vandalized the marquee causing an immediate falling out with the venue and the Troma people. I was glad I went with my first thought! I ended up driving in pouring rain for the next 4 hours until it started clearing as I started heading north on route 79 near Pittsburgh.
Erie is always home to me. I don’t feel any connection to the place anymore, but my family is still there. I guess my family feels like home and by extension Erie does. It’s weird because everywhere we go my mother has to announce that I’m from NYC to everyone and given the chance tells everyone I’m an artist. I guess she’s proud of all that? She seems oblivious that I’m kind of cringing and nobody she’s telling seems to care. They will usually smile and maybe give a nervous laugh. Sometimes there’s a “My cousin went to New York once.. didn’t like it.” or something to that effect. Usually I don’t look like I’m from wherever I happen to be. People in NYC ask me where I’m from every now and then. I’ve been here over 36 years, more than half my adult life! I don’t look like I’m from Athens when I’m there but when I say I’m from NYC they just nod as if that tracks. I could have three heads and they’d be like, “That’s what a New Yorker looks like.” I never felt like I “fit in” when I was growing up in Erie anyway. I guess that’s just my regular way of being.
I hung with my sister Molly more this trip. We had some good talks. I didn’t call any of my usual friends… I mean my one friend I keep in touch with. I only met with my high school art teacher, Mary Rosiak, who basically pushed me with support into the art world. I loved her as my teacher right from the start in 9th grade. She was exactly the personality I responded to at that time and even now. Good intentions, laid back, but had firm boundaries. When you saw her art you knew she had a lot more thoughts going on than anything she could express in words. The art was the only way to let things out, you could see why it was necessary. She’s in her early 80’s now and she showed me the art she was working on for a gallery show. It was so inspiring. As I get older I am always looking at all the ways aging presents itself. My mother, in her 80’s, works out daily. My dad, also in his 80’s, sits on the couch dealing with pain and watches sports, news, and weather, all day. Mary is making art, and doing little projects around the house. My sister who is in her mid fifties is still working full time. Her husband is not in the greatest health. Probably one of the funniest people in Erie, but has a bad back and horrible diet. He doesn’t get around very well and he’s about 60. My niece turned 27. We all met at an Italian restaurant for dinner for her bday and she’s got the world in front of her. She just graduated with a special degree in psychology that took her 6 years to complete because she didn’t take out loans and worked full time throughout. She pretty amazing.
Contrast that with her older sister who my mother and I picked up from a methadone clinic. We don’t have the resources to help her. She had a fentanyl addiction and a lot of other crap I will spare you of the details. The meds she’s on caused her to gain an extra 200 pds. She’s been off all the drugs for about 2 years but is still a mess and capable of making bad life choices. She is also difficult to be around as she is understandably sour on the world. She was always negative and a little dark even by 7 or 8 years old. My sister has pretty much cut off all ties with her but my mother has grown more caring as she’s gotten older. To the point I think she enables my niece and my niece is a manipulator as most drug addicts are. My mom has some firm boundaries but not enough.
My latest Toxic Avenger story arc wraps up on Wednesday with Issue #10. Matt Bors, the writer, has outdone himself with this story. We killed three presidents, ruined a couple of iconic places in Washington DC and lived to tell about it. It was a pain in the ass to draw the Oval Office so many times but worth it when you read the story.
