I just woke up on my couch after a nap I took to bridge the gap of jetlag before I sleep. A nap where I snoozed my alarm and got dragged into a nightmare. More sad than scary. Lots of my nightmares, when they come, which isn’t often, are about my trying to get through to someone who isn’t really listening. I sorta haunt my own subconscious, trying to sneak through, first subtly, and then in the emotional equivalent of clanging pots and pans. In the end it isn’t real and I wake up embarrassed and sweaty and wishing whatever my brain is chewing on would break through or get spit out already.
I got home yesterday after a month abroad, a little bit of a writing exile, banishing myself to a small town in the south of italy to work on a screenplay in the silence of being alone.
It sounds sadder than it is, I do maybe my best work this way, and I’m writing about a guy who’s a little lost in his own life, so it feels appropriate locking myself into this room beneath the long metronome of a church bell, surrounded by cats splayed in the sun.
I spent the preceding days walking Rome with Becky Cloonan, who while younger than me is one of my oldest friends. We came up on very different but chronologically similar tracks and it had been a while since we’d gotten to talk to such ridiculous excess. We made stupid jokes and drank endless coffee and tried and likely failed not to annoy anyone stuck eating dinner with us. But even all these many years into a career that anyone would envy, Becky inspires me, the kinda weirdo who would make comics even if the robot overlords took our jobs, the kinda weirdo who will make comics forever, anyway. Because the comics are the thing.
We walked the ancient and occasionally rainy city, punished by basalt stone and a chaotic structural approach to sidewalks. We wondered aloud why we live elsewhere and not in a particular bowl of pasta. We looked at the bones of capuchin monks and feasted on artichoke hulls and Renaissance.
I don’t remember where I heard this, but maybe it’s appropriate to the sentiment: everything you see around you is someone’s life’s work. Rome exists like a kaleidoscope of structures and memory from infinite hands and timelines past, trying to coexist like the peeling edges of subway ads pasted one over the other.
If you get a chance, stare into its horizon with a friend.
I took a lot of pictures, some of them I like, and I don’t know what else to do but post some of them here.
