eating a cold nostalgia sandwich
where we take a little trip down memory lane
I’ve been reading Dan Simmon’s novel, The Terror, this month. In this story, about the doomed Franklin Expedition of 1845-1848, whose purpose was to find and navigate the Northwest Passage, the officers and crew of the ships Erebus and Terror find themselves stuck in the frozen solid sea of northern Canada for three years. The temperatures rarely rise above 0º, the wind is always howling across the deck, there is no light for five months at a time, and life in the Royal Navy being what it was, the sailors must still attend to their duties and tasks as they struggle to survive on a day-to-day basis. All of this is exacerbated by the threat of an unseen menace skulking around out there, on the ice, something like an enormous, man-eating polar bear, that occasionally appears and eats an able seaman or a young lieutenant, leaving frozen body parts and blood on the deck of the ship. And this takes place during the good part of the story, where the sailors still have hope that they might get out of the ice and return to England.1
I don’t know what February is like where you live, but this is basically how it’s felt in Philadelphia since Christmas. Yes, we had the respite after the Super Bowl where hundreds of thousands of happy citizens, setting fire to overturned cars in celebration, temporarily warmed things up. But generally, it’s just been cold and somewhat depressing.
One might think that while the weather outside is frightful, I would spend those hours drawing, and as a result, have a lot of neat new stuff to show here in my newsletter. But one would be wrong about that. I’m at a weird spot with work where everything is either in some sort of holding pattern and I’m waiting for something from someone, or else it’s at a place where I’m working hard but with nothing to show. I have one picture book where the final art is done, for the most part, and I’m awaiting acceptance and approval of the cover sketches. Nothing to show there. Another book is in a much earlier stage, where I am still working out the mechanics of how the story operates. If you follow this newsletter, you might know that this is one of my favorite things about books. But there isn’t much to show at this stage, just tiny little thumbnails.
The insect manuscripts are still out with my agent right now, so no news there. The astronaut graphic novel is also in the nascent pitch stage, and I don’t have any new work there, either. As a result of all of this, my mind has been wandering back and forth between two things, mainly, which I’m going to try and intersect here in this edition of Random Orbit.
What I will do on my Summer Vacation
First, I’ve been doing what anyone would do as they watch the snow fall and the wind blow. I’ve been thinking about some summer travel plans. I have two trips lined up this year. The first, in May, is an artist’s residency workshop in London, where I’ll be making collages for a week. I’ve never taken part in a residency or a workshop like this. The workshop will be run by
who has a terrific newsletter here on Substack, and Les Jones, who is the founder and editor of Contemporary Collage Magazine which featured my work a while back. In addition, this will be my first visit to London, and I can’t wait.My second trip is to Bergen, Norway, in late July for some sightseeing and bike riding. This will be with a group of friends I’ve bicycled, camped, traveled, and basically raised my kids with for twenty years. We went to Scotland in 2019, we rode from Pittsburgh to Washington DC in 2023, and we’re all just counting the days until get on the plane to Bergen.
The second thing that’s been filling a lot of my headspace has been nostalgia. Not the sitting around and ruminating kind of nostalgia, but a particular type of nostalgia that is brought on via old photographs. I mentioned in a recent edition of this newsletter that I’ve picked up a new camera recently. It’s a very modern, very capable digital camera, and I’ve been using it with some very old lenses. I’ve had a great time carrying the camera everywhere I go, including the opening for my collage show, several local bike rides, and a long weekend that Sacha and took to New Orleans. Working with these old lenses led me down the stairs to some boxes in my basement filled with slides negatives and photographs I took, often with these same old lenses, between 1985 and around 2005. These photographs were taken in places I’d forgotten about and of people who, in many cases, I’ve not seen in decades. There’s my old San Francisco roommate Bruce, who lives in Seattle last I heard. There’s that guy I shared a dorm room with. Look, it’s New York City in 1985, and there’s the World Trade Center.
Some of the people aren’t so lost to me. They’re just different now. There’s Wilson, my now-26-year-old on the day he was born. There’s cartoonist Jessica Abel, who lives here in Philadelphia and with whom I had dinner recently, but in 1997, in Portugal. There’s my best friend (and twice best man) Jason, sitting on a park bench in Savannah in 1990. And look, there’s me, the day I dyed my hair blonde, in 1996. Look how young I look. Look how I had no idea what was coming next.
passport, please
Around the time I began making these travel plans and found these photos, I realized that my passport was about to expire. Passports are themselves a funny little portal of nostalgia. The entry and exit stamps aren’t as colorful and unique as they used to be, but they still remind me of the trips I took that they represent and the places I visited. Tunisia, 1988. France, 1991. Mexico, 2018. Oh yeah, New Zealand, 2013! And then there are the photos. Passports and passport photos are updated once every ten years, so often you’re traveling with someone who has the same name as you, and who might kind of look like you, but often represents a different person than you might feel at departure time. My first passport photo was taken in the summer of 1988. I was 20 years old, bright-eyed, naîve, and I wore all of that in my photo. Nine years later, I presented that passport at the Toronto airport and had to prove it was me. That me was nothing like how I looked or felt in 1997.
I dug out all four of my old and expired passports, and in each, I recognized who I was and what part of my life I was living on that day the photo was taken. There again is that fresh-faced 20-year-old who was about to travel overseas for the first time, moving to Paris for his junior year abroad, the year that changed him more than any other. It’s filled with stamps to and from France, as well as some stamps from Tunisia, which caused me to get pulled aside and questioned every time I presented it for years afterward.
That passport expired in 1998, after returning from Portugal. I didn’t travel internationally again until 2004, and the photo I had made then shows a frustrated and tired 36-year-old who had been clobbered hard by adulthood and some life events that he wasn’t prepared for. I don’t feel like the ten years I traveled with that photo of that me were adequately represented. Photographs are funny things.
Things got better, and I took some pretty great trips abroad with that sad sack that sort of looked like me. It expired in 2014, and in 2015 I was planning a trip to Italy with my brother and my son. Time for a new passport photo. I was in my 40s now, and I wore glasses. This picture and passport accompanied me on that trip to Italy, and the Dominican Republic, to Mexico, Scotland, Iceland, and five weeks in France last summer. That me was okay to travel with. I recognized that me.
That photo from 2015 was taken at a passport office in a post office nearby. Things have changed some since then, and the US Passport Agency now offers the option to use a photo one can take oneself with instructions on how to do it. Use flat light. A blank wall. Don’t smile. No glasses. I’m fifty-six now, and I have more lines and less hair than I had ten years ago. I like wearing glasses. I don’t like not smiling. But I know how to take a picture. I set up the camera and adjusted the lighting2. I thought about what I should wear that would somehow represent me in my travels for the next ten years. I focused the lens,3 turned on the self-timer, and checked the results. In the middle of all of this, one of the cats got curious, attracted by the blinking red light. The instructions don’t say anything about a cat. Can I use the cat?4
Loved the cat. Didn’t love the red hoodie. I put the cat down, changed clothes, re-focused, and tried again. The light blinks, and the timer counts down.
10, 9, 8… London. Norway. Who knows where to next?
7, 6, 5… This photo will represent me in my travels until I’m 66 years old. Christ. What will I be like at 66 years old?!
4, 3… Don’t smile. Do I look tired? Too late.
2, 1… *click.*
I have some larger galleries up, if you like to look at photos. There are the photos from Portugal in 1997, where I attended a comics festival for eleven days with Jessica Abel, Tom Hart and Jason Lutes, and others. And a gallery of my earliest photos, from New York City in 1985. This second one will grow considerably as I scan more photos.
Spoiler alert: it gets worse, and they don’t.
A desk lamp aimed at a mailing envelope taped to a wall to get reflected light. Pro.
An old Konica 52mm lens from around 1980.
My brother works for the State Department, and while he doesn’t handle passports, he did tell me the cat won’t fly.
What an interesting ramble through your life in the old passports, book thumbnails and film photographs. Thanks for writing this.
Watched THE TERROR on Netflix (gruelling, heartwrenching) and now I must read the book 📖 Warm regards!