I’m so out of practice here, guys. At this, at everything. My bios all still say that I publish this comic “most every Wednesday,” which I realize is now a functionally fraudulent claim, though perhaps we could instead categorize it as aspirational.

It’s been a chunk of a month. Harvey got pinkeye, then we all got pinkeye, then he got an ear infection, and meanwhile he wasn’t really sleeping, then we all got sick again just after getting better, now we’re almost better. He’s supposed to start preschool/daycare on Monday, which of course means we’ll all probably get sick sixteen more times, but at least I’ve budgeted that into my emotional well.

I actually think about this blog all the time. I think through problems in the mode of writing here; in the voice of it, I should say. My mind has been scraped raw in those unwritten posts (or rather, written, then discarded, mentally; so much invisible paper and ink), which makes me feel guilty as I sit here right now, without all that vulnerable precision. I forget what I wanted to write about: like a novel finished in a dream, these posts exist in the dreamtime of my parenting, the psychological stolen moments when driving or sitting in a baby pool outside watching Harvey do wheelies on his push bike. As in a dream, they dissipate upon waking.

We went to New York for a month, and I must say, after spending years of my life feeling vaguely proud of myself for not living in New York, I liked living in New York an awful lot. Of course it’s vacation brain to a certain degree, as the weather was delightful for, say, 75% of the time (then we had a terrible week of heat doom) and I don’t really know what it would be like to parent a toddler through constant rain. (Though I certainly was, myself, a toddler through constant rain, and I don’t think I came out any worse for it. We had wet pants all the time. We had to dry out our shoes. Fine. There’s a certain quality to a warm piece of clothing that’s slightly damp, how it’s icky but still protective, how you get just as used to the wet coat as you would a dry coat and will still peel it off yourself reluctantly when the time does come to peel.)

I have been working, if not so much on comics: and not so much the past couple of weeks, when I have mostly spent Harvey’s nap time reading. Which is, to be honest, pretty nice. I’m reading Lev Grossman’s new King Arthur (or post-Arthur) book The Bright Sword, which is simply delightful. Such a brick of a book, but I could stew in it forever. I worried that his particular vernacular warmth wouldn’t translate to an actual Arthurian setting (as opposed to the world of the Magicians trilogy where everyone is supposed to have contemporary referents), but he just went for it, and it works.

What will my mind be like when Harvey is being cared for by someone else during the mornings? Will I waste all my time being sad that I miss him? Maybe, though that isn’t usually the case when my sister-in-law watches him, and he adores her, so hopefully he and I will both adore a new phase of life. It’s just strange to be the prime mover of this new phase: with every other phase of Harvey thus far, he’s just taken a developmental leap and we’ve hurried after and tried to keep up.

(Arguably, the same is true here, and I am just making a bigger accommodation. We’ll see.)

It’s cloudy right now. Delightful. The whole world sere and grey. The bird feeder is full of seeds, which Harvey calls “crackers,” because I told him they were the birds’ snacks. Things are tumbling around in reality as if in a rock tumbler, and we cannot keep our feet beneath us—that’s not the point of the tumble. The point is to get bounced and bruised and come our smoother and sleeker and chicer or anyway different. The point is not to come out the same.

End note: if you would like to read some new fiction of mine, I have three stories either out, or coming out soon:

• “Good Neighbors” is in the most recent issue of The Florida Review, which I believe you can buy here. (Yes, I know that’s their Submissions page, but they also have issues for sale!)
• “The Next Day and the Days Ever After” is reprinted in the McSweeney’s Quarterly 25th Anniversary issue (issue 74), which is very exciting; the whole issue is great, and I love this story, so I’m glad it’s getting a second audience
• “The White Horse” is coming out in the next issue of The Greensboro Review, and I can’t wait. (It’s not out yet, but when it is you can find it here.)