You know how sometimes you are precognitive? Not in terms of anything so mundane as a premonition, a dark dream. Just – you do a task two days early, and then it turns out that you had to do it that way. Your body felt the future, and moved in rhythm with it, even though your mind knew not.

That is a fancy way of saying I drew this comic well ahead of time, and then was called out of town unexpectedly. If I hadn’t finished drawing/scanning/prepping when I did, there would have been no comic. Not the end of the world, but still I like to think that some part of me knew. While my brain was busy being petulant, telling me not to go hiking, not to read, not to write, not to do any of the normal things, my hands were busy, sketching panthers.

When things aren’t great there is a strange comfort (to me) in thinking that time is like a tide: a bit of water crawls forward before the larger wave crashes in. Your feet get wet before you swim, or dive, or drown. Maybe it’s because it makes me feel connected to something larger. Maybe it’s because it lets me wonder what I might intuit next – which is just another way of saying: it lets me wonder about the future.

I just got an email congratulating me on booking travel I didn’t book. (Uh oh/ugh.) I just took a trip I didn’t plan on taking. The world is poetic. The world is connected. The world is very strange.