Almost May
I was sick when I turned 36. This was back in December 2019, when we didn’t worry too much about those sort of things. A fever and a cough was nothing more than a sign of weakness, and you’d better not spend too much of that sniffling, feverish time at home, lest you let middle management know you weren’t truly committed to your work. Capitalism doesn’t slow down, and neither should you.
I remember laying on the sofa, actually quite sick, thinking about the year 2020, about the things I would do in this penultimate year of my mid-30s. 2020 had always been a year of repute in the sci-fi novels and comics I read as a kid. In the Blade Runner universe, there were already hover cars and androids indistinguishable from humans by November 2019. Granted in Dick’s original novel, the world has been devastated by a nuclear war. Nowadays it’s not too terribly strange to think that most of the sci-fi to be written won’t be set up by the Cold War era fears of a nuclear holocaust, or even the 2001 fears of terrorist attacks and/or an authoritarian government’s response to these attacks, but the 2020 reality of a pandemic that altered our day-to-day life at a pace none of us were prepared for, and still may further alter the way we see and approach the world and our places in it. This coming flu season seems to have many of the brightest minds rather worried. If I were a praying man — which I only am on an airplane experiencing turbulence — I’d pray to the goddess of science to guide those working on vaccines and treatments for this awful fucking virus that has taken too many of our friends, loved ones, and neighbors.
In any case, this wasn’t the 2020 I was hoping for. There weren’t any Replicants demanding to know their maker. My partner and I were planning to fly to Washington, D.C. in late May to see my mother and grandparents, as well as friends from the years I spent in university in Northern Virginia. We’d even convinced friends in New York City to head down I-95 for a weekend to hang out. Additionally, we had plans to head to the Oregon Coast for Jen’s birthday, and there were tentative plans to head to Los Angeles and San Francisco for long weekends to see friends, and longer weekends in Austin and New Orleans for similar reasons. And with Jen’s father living in Trieste and me wanting to introduce her to my friends from Stockholm, there had been hopes we might swing a European trip, filled with train rides and visits to Berlin and Copenhagen.
I feel like an asshole to complain, though. I’m lucky to still have a job that let’s me work from home and to live in a lovely house in an amazing city in a state that is not terribly impressed by our idiot president’s calls for us to inject and/or ingest bleach to fight off covid-19. And I have incredible friends who I am thankful to have in my life, not just to break up the monotony of quarantine life with phone calls and Zooms, but to work on awesome projects with — from an electro-post-punk EP to a podcast about nothing to this strange zine.
And it’s with that love and excitement, as well as a true appreciation for the dread and horror — no longer on the peripheries, but affecting many of us directly — that I am launching the first “issues” of This Strange Spring. And I am super thankful to those who agreed to be part of this strange project, namely the devastatingly talented Willehad Eilers and Ted Barrow, the stars of issues 1 and 2.
Not to steal to their sunshine, as Len were so worried about back in 1999, but there are so many rad humans coming up in future issues. And I hope to circle back with many of these rad humans as we continue to push through this strange new normal into a post-pandemic world. Especially as I had no idea that Wayne Horse was a skater!
Please keep safe out there, okay? If not for you, but for our friends and neighbors.