Rich Mintz  

I have a professional event in Philadelphia this week and since the weather will be clear, I’m going to take the motorcycle down and back. Here’s the exact route I’m planning to take:

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Google Maps says 101 miles and 2 1/2 hours (150 minutes), meaning an average speed of 40mph. That may actually be realistic, so allowing 3 1/2 hours for the trip (including stops) is probably generous. We’ll see how it goes.

I have a new power pack for the camera, so I should be able to shoot some interesting footage on the way down. I’ve also installed Kuryakyn throw-over saddlebags (which are quick-release but hold fine on the road) — they aren’t a perfect fit but the convenience outweighs that. Pics below.

On the Aimee Mann episode of Portlandia, in the dumpster-diving sketch, Carrie Brownstein is wearing my dungarees!

I’m in my second semester of cartooning class at Third Ward, the hipster arts & crafts/shop-class school in East Williamsburg. I signed up because I wanted to try some sort of creative endeavor that was visual and (largely) non-verbal. This was in part just to try something new, and in part to shatter my sense that I didn’t have what it took to be visually creative.

To be honest, it was a rough start for me. I’ve had to keep reminding myself that I don’t have to do any of this “right,” that it doesn’t matter which techniques are “authentic,” that any way that gets the job done is “legitimate,” that I can choose my own tools and methods according to what I like. Obviously there aren’t conventional ways of doing things, in cartooning just as in any other conventional expressive form. And there are useful techniques to learn, and practicing those techniques makes me better at the “craft” side of cartooning. But the “art” side matters too, as does the commercial side (in that comics are meant to be reproduced, which has its own implications for technique and materials).

But within a week or two, I realized that I had more talent than I thought. I turned out to be somewhere in the middle of my class in terms of drawing ability (which I didn’t expect), and I learned that being in my late 40s gives me a kind of natural vision and comfort with myself and my work that younger people (even talented ones) typically don’t have. And as I’ve learned more about technique, I’m coming to enjoy the act of cartooning more than I did at the beginning.

One thing that has helped is that as a longtime fountain pen user, I’m comfortable with nib pens, and even though I don’t have experience doing small, fine illustration work with them, I know how to hold them and have an innate sense of what kind of line will be produced by a given combination of nib and hand motion. It gave me a jolt of early confidence to see my classmates splattering ink all over themselves. I actually prefer the look of brush-drawn work, but I don’t think I have the hand control to make the brush my primary tool. (I’m practicing my brushwork today.)

I’ll be posting some of my work here as I finish it. Right now I’m working on a short project about junior high school superheroes in Queens.

After five months of not posting here, I’m going to try to get back on the horse. The reasons for the gap are varied, but all of them are some version of “life got too busy,” which is the only reason that matters.

More to come.

I’m afraid that my bike training regimen hit a speed bump. I had a good second week, but then an emotionally rough weekend due to circumstances beyond my control, and guess what? It turns out I’m not always in the mood to bike 25 miles, who knew?

So I spent week three putting another 60 miles or so on the electric bike and getting no exercise at all. Which is fine — the electric bike is lots of fun, for reasons totally unrelated to my physical health, and to be fair to myself, I brought my weight down about 6 pounds since I started this regimen and have held it there, so good stuff. But as my boyfriend reminded me today, I only have a couple of months before I have to bike a hundred miles in a day, which is a lot more miles than I’ve ever done before. So I’d better get cracking.

Today it rained off and on (nothing like Wednesday, now that sh*t was extreme) so I didn’t take the electric bike in the morning, which meant I found myself at work in the evening with only my trusty red folding bike, which I hopped on and rode home in a steady light rain, and I remembered why I enjoyed riding it so much (bounce bounce bounce! the Tigger of bikes) and something tells me I’ll do 15 or 20 miles this weekend and I’ll be back in the saddle.

I have to say that four days in a row on the electric bike (including a couple of trips all the way up to the West 70s and back) were a joy of their own. I’m up to almost 400 road miles and getting mighty comfortable on the thing, which is well-engineered for stability and fast enough to ride in ordinary Manhattan traffic without feeling outgunned — in fact, both drivers and cyclists tend to mistake it for a motorbike, which gives the former a useful paradigm for interacting with it, and occasionally pisses off the latter. I got a nasty lecture from a (lady!) cyclist yesterday that I didn’t quite understand, since I’d taken great care not to crowd her or ride up on her. But I’m mature enough (and, as importantly, have had enough time in New York, where everyone’s pissed off about something) not to pay too much mind to angry people getting up in my face for their own reasons, and I just waved and let her ride on.

I’m trying to resume a daily writing habit again, after reading Laura Vanderkam’s short book (really just a long article) about making more out of your mornings. I have a limited appetite for business books (and I have to be in the right mood, and the author has to be less oblivious of his/her own biases than they usually are, etc. etc.), but I liked this one, in part because she was making three main points that everyone basically already knows but most people are too lazy to do anything with:

1. If you want to incorporate a change into your life, don’t just dabble; instead, work systematically to make it a habit. That way, you won’t have to think about whether or not to do it. Your inner autopilot will take it over.
2. You have more time than you think; you’re just spending it watching Toddlers and Tiaras and screwing around on the Internet (or sitting around drinking, or whatever) rather than in pursuing the life change you say you don’t have time for.
3. For most people, early-morning time is both potentially high-productivity time, and relatively free of external obligations, so it’s a good point in the day to try inserting some life-changing habits.

That’s it. You don’t have to read the book now (although you can; it’s easy and there are a few nuggets I didn’t quote here).

I flirt periodically with a daily writing habit (see, for instance, this post); it’s hard to keep up. But I seem happier when I’m getting daily creative exercise, so I’m going to try again. In terms of the emotional benefits, it turns out I’m fairly ecumenical regarding what it is I’m working on. I have a couple of poems and longer essays going; there’s a short story or two; and then of course there’s this blog, with both the short pieces I dash off and the longer pieces that take some thought. And, of course, there’s the cartooning class that I’m starting next week, which may turn out to be a bust but that I’m still excited about.

The problem isn’t finding time to write, it’s finding time to write when I’m feeling energized and creative and loose. I do have a history of productive mornings, at least before the Internet came along and ruined everything — left to my own devices I fidget for a while but I do eventually settle down and work. I’m too smart for tricks like Freedom, and besides, it’s nice to have the Internet to look things up; not screwing around on it is a matter of good habits rather than enforcement. So I think I’m going to experiment with a regimen like this for a while:

• Set a consistent wake-up time (let’s call it 7:00 during the week, 8:00 on weekends). Go to bed early enough that I can tolerate that. If I can, I’ll inch the weekday wake-up back toward 6:30 or even 6:00, but let’s take this one step at a time.
• Out of bed when the alarm sounds (and, based on my history, I’ll probably wake up at 6:58 without it). Shower, dress, and make coffee, and be seated in my “creativity spot” in the house by 7:20.
• Allow one hour (until 8:20) for unbroken creative activity. If I get fidgety, I can stop at 8:00 (40 minutes), but under no circumstances before. Fidgety is part of the point — I want to know what the awkward silence ends up producing.
• No restrictions on what: writing this blog, taking notes, doing research toward a creative project, drawing my cartoon series that will make me world-famous, finger-painting, deciding what recipes to include in my cookbook, etc. Creative work on the computer counts, or with pen and paper, or (theoretically) on a typewriter; writing in my journal counts; work for an audience or work for my secret self counts. No rules.
• Actively police my Internet screwing around during this time. Turn off notifiers. Directed Googling for links is okay, but no Internet rabbit-holes, no Twitter, and no email. Especially no work email. There are plenty of other times in the day for that.

One of the important points here is that I’m not predefining what “creativity” means. Really anything I do that is expressive or experiential, rather than about consuming the endless stream of low-signal-to-noise junk that’s around in the air, ought to count.

After that, we’ll see. But I’ll live with that for a while and see what happens. I’m excited!

I just wanted to acknowledge that my bike training regimen is going fine. While I’m not formally tallying miles, I am out on the bike every day, and trying to fit in a long ride (15 miles or more) every day that I have the time.

In the past week I’ve biked through Brooklyn and Jersey City; been to the Upper West Side three times; and, yesterday, rode a 25-mile loop from the Port Imperial ferry terminal in Weehawken north to the George Washington Bridge, across the bridge, and down Broadway (and the 9th Avenue bike lane) allll the way home.

My official scale is at the YMCA, not here, but I’m guessing I will have dropped at least three pounds in 10 days once I get myself over there for a weigh-in. So that’s good, too. And I’m feeling better all around. As I’ve noted previously, exercise makes me less hungry, in a virtuous cycle that makes healthy living easier, and on a day like yesterday, with lots of exercise and controlled (but not starvation-level) intake, I end up with something like a 1,500-calorie “credit.” Or, to put it another way, yesterday alone I lost half a pound. (Yay me!)

The errand that I had to run in Jersey City tonight was to check on my storage unit, in an antiquated fireproof warehouse on the edge of the old downtown. When I moved from Jersey City to Brooklyn (from a 2nd-floor walkup to a 3rd-, 4th-, and 5th-floor walkup), there was a bunch of stuff I didn’t know what to do with and didn’t want to schlep all the way across state lines just because.

Because downtown Jersey City is kind of a pain in the ass to get to without a car (and because, even if I do take my car, the Holland Tunnel toll is, what, $40 now?), I haven’t been there in roughly two years, so I figured it was time to move the stuff out and into a storage unit closer to home. Fortunately there’s a lovely, more professionally run storage facility (call it the “Storage Palace”) a 6-minute bike ride from my apartment, the sort where you imagine a butler in a morning coat will collect your box of crap from your car on a ginormous silver tray and fly it up to your cubicle on angel’s wings. It is 50% more expensive than the one I’m giving up, for slightly less space, but I rationalize by saying (probably accurately) that I’ll be able to use it more intensively, moving things in and out of storage as often as weekly if need be. It doesn’t hurt that my new storage unit is immediately adjacent to the parking lot where my car lives — I can imagine some efficiencies arising from that.

So I have to move my stuff from one to the other this month. And I couldn’t remember what “stuff” I even had in there. So it was time for a reconnaissance mission.

Now, let me say right off that I’m not a hoarder. What I am, though, is a Projects Person. I am the sort of person who will vow to learn to play the bluegrass fiddle, or learn to speak Dutch, or become a cartoonist, or read everything ever written by Robert Sheckley. For each of those vows, there is a set of equipment and/or accoutrements, and I will typically acquire same, place them somewhere in the house, and then get distracted by a newer vow with its own accoutrements and forget about the previous set.

I inherited this tendency, independently and reinforcingly, from both my parents, who were and are most emphatically Projects Persons in their own right, wide readers and dedicated (and ecumenical) hobbyists. Father: reads Chinese well enough to puzzle out restaurant signs, speaks it well enough to order lunch; can decipher Urdu inscriptions; former General-class amateur radio licensee; hobbyist cryptographer, 50-year amateur magician; mother: home darkroom, serial interior designer/real estate agent/home renovator; crocheter of afghans; writer of published cookbooks; provider of roomful of arts and crafts supplies and drafting tables for her young children; serial creator of her own garden in every home she’s occupied in my lifetime. Even my late grandmother influenced my habits; by the time she retired to Northern California, her little house in Tujunga was packed so full of stacks of paperback books she was going to get around to reading “someday” that it was hard to move.

In short, I grew up in a house full of books on every conceivable subject (with dozens or hundreds more coming in every year), full of crayons and butcher paper, full of a hundred cookbooks; the sort of house where it was most emphatically considered “normal” to dabble in any sort of recreational pursuit one felt the slightest urge to dabble in. In my early youth, I made meatloaf and chocolate cake and collected stamps and drew fanciful maps; in my teens, I earned myself an amateur radio license; in my thirties, I learned to code passably well in Perl. I bought that bluegrass fiddle in my thirties. And I have carried those habits right through to middle age. (If you know me, you may be aware how many bicycles, fedoras, and/or bottles of gin are in this apartment at the moment.)

Unfortunately, I live in a large zero-bedroom loft apartment in a century-old commercial building. My walls, ceiling, and floor are all white, which means that all my crap is in plain view for everyone to see. So I can’t bring all those plastic tubs in here — in fact, we spent much of the last two weeks just hauling clutter out in a sustained and systematic spring cleaning. (Hard rule #1: if you haven’t touched it in two years and it has no sentimental value, IT GOES. Hard rule #2: “What if I need this someday” is not “sentimental value.”)

Hence the storage unit. When I unlocked the metal doors this afternoon, I was greeted with this:

Nothing wrong with any of that stuff. Some of it is useful, at least theoretically, and there are indeed items of sentimental value in there (including every high school and college paper I ever wrote, and the last 50 copies of the catalog I produced for my bookstore in 2002) — but more than half of it will end up in the trash after (or before) it gets moved into the Storage Palace.

I’m glad I’m the sort of person that tries things he’s curious about. But I’m also learning to be the sort of person who (with difficulty) is learning to say “no thank you, I’ve got enough projects going on at the moment.”

I had an errand to run in Jersey City this evening. The PATH train doesn’t allow bikes during rush hour — I’ve never seen anyone enforcing that, but why risk it? — and I like being on the water, so I left work and biked up to the 39th Street Hudson ferry terminal in midtown Manhattan.

I’d never been to that terminal before, and I was surprised how bustling it was — not exactly crowded in the way the Lackawanna Ferry terminal in Hoboken must have been once upon a time, but still busier than I expected. It reminded me of a small airport (Lansing maybe, or the Marine Air Terminal at La Guardia). It had 8 or 9 slips, and boats being announced and coming and going more or less continuously during the evening rush, to half a dozen destinations.

So I bought a one-way ticket to Newport (and a bike ticket) and rode the ferry across to the Jersey City waterfront. The Newport terminal is deserted — just a rush-hour stop, basically just a dock bolted to a patch of asphalt, but I rode around the boardwalk and through the Newport business district into downtown Jersey City, and across to take care of my business in the crook of the expressway that approaches the Holland Tunnel.

Afterwards, I rode around Harsimus Cove, Hamilton Park, and downtown for a while. Five years ago or so I lived in downtown Jersey City (near 5th and Brunswick, if you’re keeping track), on the second floor of a tumbledown triple-decker near a vacant-lot-turned-community-garden. It was cheap, and the owner was friendly and respectful, and the neighbors were civil, so I pretended not to mind that if you set an egg down on one end of the kitchen floor it would roll to the other end.

In 2007 the neighborhood was “in transition.” It’s still a mixed neighborhood, in transition culturally, racially, economically — but it feels safer and more settled. There are new businesses on Newark Avenue, a couple of new restaurants around the park, a very nice ice cream parlor on 1st Street two blocks from the PATH. (There’s also a spiffy-looking Key Food that replaced the filthy C-Town supermarket I used to avoid.) Tiresome-looking gay couples of a certain age (i.e., mine), always a reliable indicator of neighborhood investment, were about. I stopped for an excellent burger and a couple of cocktails at the tavern at 9th and Coles right near Hamilton Park (what used to be on this corner? I can’t even remember), swung by the ice-cream parlor (which I knew of only as a result of jealously reading Linda Yang’s Foursquare checkins), and made my way south to Paulus Hook for the return ferry to Wall Street.

I’d taken this ferry before, when I lived in Jersey City. It’s obviously a heavier-traffic route — bigger boats, and apparently seven-day service. The Midtown-to-Newport ferry is a short ride downriver, but Paulus-Hook-to-Pier-11 is a sweeping ride across the top of Upper New York Bay, past Liberty Island and the Staten Island ferry terminal, with the lower Manhattan skyline in full view ahead of you. It’s probably the best $7 boat ride in New York — plus $1 for my bike, which you can see threatening to tumble into New York Harbor in the photo above. It didn’t tumble, though, and I rode home the few blocks from Pier 11 feeling like I’d had an adventure at sea in the middle of the afternoon.

Not for the first time, I biked home from the Upper West Side today down Broadway, this time from 96th Street (via Columbus Avenue to Broadway in the West 60s) all the way down to Fulton Street. That’s about 7 miles, and thanks to the smart policymaking of the New York City Department of Transportation, most of the route was via protected bike path or separated bike lane.

In particular, the mostly-separated bike lane is continuous from Columbus Circle (at 59th Street) to Union Square (at 14th), passing through or around some of NYC’s primmest real estate, including the Times Square megaplex, the Greeley Square/Herald Square agglomeration, the Madison Square/Flatiron conurbation, and Downtown Union Square.

In all four of these areas, and through some of the stretch in between, ginormous swaths of land have been given over to pedestrians, and those ginormous swaths are, for the most part, densely occupied by people. Once you get used to the fact that you’re dodging people and not cars, it’s actually more fun to ride through these pedestrianized zones than it is to battle car traffic. You’re reminded that transportation in the public sphere is a social act, and that saying “excuse me” and “thank you” (and, occasionally, “oops, sorry”) to people on foot is one of the things that makes biking more interesting than driving.

The first couple of times I rode through Greeley Square and especially Times Square, I was frustrated by the people walking in the bike lane. But you know what? People are what the city is for. I have a bell and a mouth; I use them both (politely). I have brakes; I use them to slow down to a more human speed. And I enjoy the fact that, on a sunny evening, thousands and thousands of people are out in the street doing nothing in particular. What’s it going to take me, four and a half minutes longer to go all the way downtown?