Surviving the Third Floor

I live on the top floor of a three-story building in Studio City. I’ve lived here with my girlfriend and my cat for close to a year now. On the surface, it’s a pretty great arrangement. Studio City is nice, we have good Italian food and tacos within walking distance, the neighbors here are friendly, our apartment manager kind of reminds me of Lou Reed… All good things. At first, being on the top floor felt like being on top of the world a bit, or at least at the top of the apartment social ladder. We could stand outside our front doorway, which opens above the courtyard, or from our back balcony and look down on our kingdom and all who lived within it, like some sort of minor lord in a Hawaiian shirt.

And then summer hit.

All of you who live in upper level apartments in warm areas know what I’m talking about. Every evening, the sun sets, the world cools and the Southern California weather turns brisk. By early morning, there’s dew on the grass and a sweet, kale-scented breeze in the air. (Everything in LA smells like kale. Haven’t you heard?) It’s mild and comfortable. Except for in our apartment, where it’s a balmy 85 degrees and has been since the prior afternoon.

Look, I know hot air rises. Everyone knows that. But what I didn’t expect was for this apartment to hold onto that heat like a tea partier holding on to outdated ideals. There are about five different windows in this place, and opening them doesn’t seem to make much of a difference at all. Fans don’t seem to help move the air around. Short of moving our bed out onto the balcony, there doesn’t seem to be much that works when it comes to cooling the place down.

Of course, there IS the air conditioner. We do have one. I always feel guilty about turning it on, though. I’m not an overly guilt prone person, but there are two things that seem to do it to me. One is eating greasy, unhealthy food. The other is turning on the air conditioner. The first has everything to do with my high cholesterol, but my guilt over air conditioning can almost entirely be pinned on an ex.

A few years ago, I dated a woman who was heavy into environmentalism. Now, before anyone gets started, I’m a firm believer in environmentalism. I try to impact the environment as little as possible, but I’m not perfect about it. I know I could be doing a lot more and for some reason, all of that guilt has decided to target my use of indoor climate controls. I resist turning the air on until all of us here are on the brink of passing out, and when I finally do, it’s with thoughts of how disappointed my mother would be and how I’m a terrible, terrible father for leaving my son and his children a Mad Max world to inherit. (Let’s face it. As much as you may love Mad Max, you don’t really want him as a son.)

I know it’s stupid. I’ve even brought it up with my therapist a few times, and how much it makes me dread the heat every year. He didn’t tell me it was stupid, but I certainly felt dumb after realizing I had just dropped $20 to spend an hour literally talking about the weather.

So stupid or not, the air conditioner isn’t going on until the heat becomes intolerable, and currently the heat’s not there yet. But it’s enough to make living at the top of the world not seem like such a great thing anymore. More often than not, I find myself getting out of my home and castle to mingle with the masses in an air conditioned movie theater or café, leaving my cat to look down on our kingdom since she’s the only one of us who doesn’t seem to mind the heat. I suspect one of her ancestors may have belonged to a Pharoah or some other renowned Egyptian. In fact, if the cats in Egypt handled the heat as well as she does, I think I understand why the Egyptians revered them. My cat’s ability to tolerate the hot weather is worthy of admiration, and I can totally seeing that leaping up to worship if the temperature were to hit 120 degrees with any regularity. So yeah, maybe the Egyptians were on to something. Maybe instead of turning cats into memes and viral videos, we should be seeking their wisdom for dealing with the heat.

They’d probably just tell us to turn on the damn air.

Clearing the Cobwebs

There was a time, not that long ago, that I used to edit comic books. I started as a staff editor at the now defunct Tokyopop, then entered the world of freelance contract editing. Which, as it turns out, isn’t much of a world. It’s more like a small town in south Kansas. But I made my home there for a few years, working on fun comics like Fraggle Rock, Dark Crystal and Labyrinth until my financial obligations required me to move on to something else.

There was a time, also not long ago, that I used to blog here pretty regularly. But as you can see by the date in the entry below this one, I haven’t done that in quite some time. In this case, however, I haven’t stopped blogging. In fact, I’ve been blogging quite a bit. I’ve just been doing it on a much higher profile site. For those who don’t know, I’m currently the full-time content editor for the DC Comics and Vertigo blogs, which means that instead of editing comics, I’m now editing and writing site features. You can see some of my more recent entries here, if you’re curious.

If you know all this, you may think I’m filling space by stating the obvious, but there seem to be a good many people who don’t know what I’ve been doing. That became clear to me a couple of months ago when I finally added my current job—which I’ve been at for over two years now—to my LinkedIn profile. I must have received at least three dozen messages congratulating me on the gig. If you were one of the people who sent one, don’t worry. You were in really good company.

This didn’t surprise me. This is partly because you can’t add so much as a comma to your LinkedIn profile without it blasting it to all of your connections, but mainly I don’t expect anyone short of my parents to follow my career. You have your own life to worry about. I don’t expect any of you to give two shits about mine. But if you’re reading this, then you must enjoy my blogging or my writing in general, and I feel I owe it to you to explain why this place has gone without an update for over a year. Which brings us back to my job.

Let’s just say it keeps me busy at a level that took some getting used to. I’ve worked long hours in the past, but this is the first time that almost every single one of those hours has been spent tapping on a keyboard. Hey, writing is what I do, it’s what I enjoy and it’s what I’m best at, but it can certainly tire you out. I come home mentally drained fairly regularly and the last thing I want to do is spend more time in front of a computer.

But that’s a problem because while I enjoy the writing I do for DC (and it really is a lot of fun), it’s not MINE. It’s theirs and more to the point, it’s largely promotional. I try to take a creative or informative approach, but when you get right down to it, I’m part of their marketing team. So I’m making an effort to carve out at least a little time each week for writing that’s strictly for me. For now, it’ll be primarily blogging, but who knows where it’ll go from here. There are more comics, prose and plays within me, and they’ve been screaming to get out for a while. And they’re really fucking irritating, at times. Seriously, if I can get them to shut up for a few weeks, that alone will be worth it.

So yes, I’m clearing out the rats and spiders who have taken residence here since I left it to stagnate. (I actually like spiders and have kept rats as pets, but neither are interesting blog subjects.) Instead, I’ll be writing about movies, TV, sports, life in Los Angeles, relationships, single parenthood, health, spirituality… Basically, whatever interests me on a given day. I’ll also continue to write about comics and the industry as a whole. These past few years certainly haven’t made me any less opinionated or frustrated at the mistakes I see made time and again in the comic book industry and community.

I’ll do my best to make it all interesting in hope that you’ll do your best to stop by here every once in a while. But whether you do or not, I’m determined to keep this blog a lot fresher than it’s been because while there may have been a time I edited comics and updated this site regularly and it may not have been all that long ago, it doesn’t matter. What matters, is what I do with it now.