In these final hours...
No summing up of 2005 is in the offing here. I haven't felt sufficiently moved nor have I martialed the momentary discipline to force such a piece from me. Reviews of the year are to be found in every flavor with little effort anyway.
Very little of 2005 remains, and it occurs to me that I'm not finding myself any more settled on a comfortable path - a path with a heart, as the Taoists say - leaving the year than I did entering it. That can't help but make me a little sad. (Passengers, please note that the mini-melodrama warning light is now on.)
I continue to feel less than mature and more than spoiled, the brewmaster's recipe botched. A yeasty beast of stench and froth. Metaphorically speaking, of course. I shower daily.
I'm already bored with the analogy. I'm too lazy to either clean up the mess and start again or torch the place and move on.
I believe that a great many of us never pulled out of the funk we dropped into in late November of 2004. The official results of the national election... it's felt like being a time traveller who's found himself in 1946 and is staring in bafflement at newspaper reports that Herr Hitler is still Reichsfuhrer (though, I suppose, as the last one to hold that office he still is... but you know what I mean.) It's all wrong, and that the wrongness of it isn't fading the way all nightmares do has left many of us trying to rub the sleep from our eyes for the past thirteen months. You really screwed us over this time, Lord Dream!
Why am I writing something here now? Because letting a year end without comment - no matter how artificial the divisions in time are? Sure. Because this is supposed to be a space for what's on my mind - one of the primary reasons for these weblogs, even if I avoid that much of the time by posting links to articles, oddities and jokes instead? Yeah, that, too.
I have superstitions -- or, to be more empowering, sufficient knowledge of myself - - against public declarations of intent. It's why that Deadwood/Al Swearengen quote up top resonates with me, even if I'm not taking "God" in the usual meaning. My God's a mean-spirited sonuvabitch who lives in my head, loathes the accomodations and has a wider, stronger reach than I do. I've written on the core of all that enough times in enough places that I've surely done so here, though I'm not interested in searching it out. So, while I may indulge in some resolutions I'll not be doing much of that publicly.
We've all fallen into the time-off mode of drastically random sleep schedules and individual pursuits and lack thereof. So it was that I found myself up past 7 am today, having spent much of the early morning hours doing some writing and searching out some likely candidates to invite into Legends APA for 2006 -- our 20th anniversary year. I dropped eight of those in the mail this morning, as much as anything so I could leave 2005 believing I'd done one bit more to justify my being reinstalled as APA president in the December elections. Trying to find people who will enjoy the experience, who either don't have 'Net connections or don't want to discuss comics, etc. on websites or messageboards, and who play well with others without being too safe and bland... it's an important mix. That's a sling of seeds cast out into the dark; it'll be weeks before I find out if any of them begin to take root, but at least I know I took a shot at it before the close of the year. It also used the situation to reformulate the template for the invitation, so I'm in a better position to do this at regular - the intent's monthly - intervals in 2006. (Uh-oh. A warning light there. Sounds suspiciously like a minor resolution to me.)
I was out for a drive before and through what passed for sun-up on this gray day. (The weather's hardly been helping my mood, with too little sun and too many periods of drizzle. Awful, depressing weather for this time of year especially. It's winter. I want Winter, not this ugly cuckoo, pretender. At least it's finally cooled off again.) I did a little shopping at Genuardi's just past 6am, including picking up some freshly baked bagels and some cream cheese (for those so inclined - I like cream cheese in cheesecake, but hardly anywhere else - but everyone else here likes it) then came home and made a breakfast of eggs and sausage. Our holiday "schedules" are such that while Travis was still asleep and Ari had just woken up five minutes before I got back, Nick was still up.
The workers at Genuardis were kicking around the recent revelation from their masters that starting sometime next week they'll be opening at 5am instead of 6. With them also being open until midnight, one observed, they may as well stay open around the clock. That such a move could just be sprung on them on such pitifully short notice reminds me of the picketers who used to stand out in front of many of their locations. Genuardi's is not a union shop. But, hey, this is a GOP-hoodwinked, By Thine Own Bootstraps-messaged U-S-A! (hey!) , never mind that that's been sold to a dim public largely by people who never really had to worry about financial security.
The day was taken up in trivialities and ultimately otherwise passed as ephemerally as any dream not worth fighting to remember.
I've pulled the cork on a bottle of Zinfandel the in-laws, strangely enough, gave me for Christmas. I drink so rarely, but I do generally have a small glass or two when we visit on a holiday. They've done a great deal for us in the closing months of 2005, making a gift so unnecessary, so redundant, but having a bottle of chilled wine in the house, and it being New Year's Eve... Well, what would I save it for? I've only come close to finishing a first glass so far.
Rather than belabor this staggering-in-text, I'll wish any who come this way a happy, hopeful and fulfilling 2006, and be done with it. It's time to get some new year's snacks set up for us.
Comments
Or, to put it another way, with the net available for this kind of communication faster and cheaper (free, for many), it's unlikely you'll find folks who are emotionally inclined to indulge in the slower, more inflexible print-only medium, and who are willing to pay high Xeroxing fees for it, too.
I doubt that insight's worth much to you; it's not like you have a database of geeks with office jobs you can raid. Nonetheless, geeks with office jobs (or who work for Kinko's) are who you are going to end up with. (Or, I suppose, simply geeks with good, fast printers who don't mind buying a lot of paper... even there, though, I suspect you'd be better targeting geeks who can slip a ream or two of office copy paper into their backpacks/briefcases every once in a while.)
Just a thought. Told you it was low cal.
H: I'm primarily targeting people who either are not into the online environment or who at least appear to be inclined to write and mail letters of comment to publications that the more rabid of the on-liners consider to be redundant.
Access to free photocopying is always a plus, but evidence shows it's not a requirement. We have several people on the roster who I know have no access to free photocopying. This is not only from knowing their jobs (the guy working in a McDonalds likely has no such access there) but also because sometimes the Kinkos bag and receipt are occasionally dropped with the freshly-copied material into a mailer. Yet, they're in the mix, often contributing a dozen or even over 20-page zines. Some people simply don't see a point of pouring so much time and effort into a purely electronic environment. Even if the material stays out there for decades, it's lost in a daily flood of new material. Making something that someone can pick up in one's hand and read anywhere, and which will still be there if the power goes out, is more important to them than the theoretical access to millions that the online environment offers.
There are quite a few people (at least half the time I'm among them) who find the online environment frequently a demonstration that text that is too cheap is also often nearly worthless. People who find what passes for exchanges in this environment as frequently ugly things. While the same has certainly been known to happen in print - people take their temperament with them wherever they go - it's far more prevalent online where time to type is frequently the only requirement. We have several (including the most recent addition) who has a foot in both worlds, and who's come to the smaller, more club-like environment of an APA for a different experience than they're finding online.
Beyond that, (beneath that, perhaps?) more and more workplaces have computers and printers all over the place, and even where there might not be a full-size copier a great many office printers are also scanner/copier combinations. The man who predicted the rise of the paperless workplace has likely long since been crushed by ridicule and hung himself in the janitor's closet.
Will the costs involved eventually doom APAs and other print zines? Perhaps, but the doomsayers - as have been the case for comic books - have been delivering the same message for years and yet both are still there.
We'll see.
Besides, one of my aims for 2006 is to lift part of the economic burden from our members.