Back in 1990 a memorial service was held for Jim Henson. The event was broadcast on PBS, where I watched it. I was invested in the moment because I was a big Muppet fan and (separate from just Sesame Street) found a lot of comfort in PBS. So there I was, in Revelstoke, in our home’s basement rec room, standing in front of the TV watching one of my heroes being laid to rest on my favorite TV station.

I grew up Catholic and was an altar boy for many years and served at a lot of funerals so much of the ceremony was familiar to me but I think I remember feeling detached. At some point, Big Bird walks down the aisle to deliver his eulogy. As he does he turns to someone in the congregation and does that funeral nod people do in these situations. I immediately think, “Ya ruined it, Big Bird. Ya ruined Jim Henson’s funeral.”

You see, Big Bird, at the time, was six years old. And if you’ve ever seen a six-year old tasked with this kind of responsibility, you know they perform it with an intense earnestness. A six year old would have fixed their eyes on the podium and made their way there solemnly. I would have.

Big Bird’s nod was not just an adult affectation, that kind of sympathetic “I know” people give to one another at funerals, it was also a specific kind of move that, to me, draws attention to the artifice of puppeteering. I didn’t know that the puppeteer who performed Big Bird was Caroll Spinney, an indisputable master of his craft, but in that moment I believed whoever was working Big Bird made a poor choice.

When a piece of art or performance grabs me, I go all in. Few people can suspend disbelief as high as I can—there’s video evidence of me shouting myself hoarse at professional wrestling matches—but if a piece of art doesn’t grab me, then all it takes is the slightest small thing (something as small as a nod) to make me say “Ya ruined it”. And I never know what that one thing is going to be.

So, why are we talking about this? Well, I went into this blog post with the idea of asking myself how I’m going to react to criticisms of my own work. JIM! is on the cusp of being reviewed widely (as of writing this, I have already received my first review… it was forwarded to me three days ago, it went live today) and I know the prospect of bad reviews are something that can cause a lot of authors a lot of stress. All the same, I’m not sure I have anything interesting to say on the subject! Maybe it sounds phony or falsely brave, but I’m less concerned with how many stars the book gets than I am with what the reviewer takes away from it. The aforementioned review… it was good. Very good. And I’m grateful. But what moved me most (and there’s video evidence of me being moved) was that the reviewer appeared to understand exactly what I set out to do with the book. I’m thankful for their review—if it’s not too corny to say it, I felt seen.

Perversely, I’m looking forward to the slightest small thing in JIM! that’s going to land the first “Ya ruined it, Jerrold!” in my lap. People’s personal peccadillos are unpredictable, but I think I know what’s going to do it:

Uneven wardrobe choices among my characters (eg. pants, no shirt versus shirt, no pants, versus completely nude). I mean, really, what was I thinking?!

I’ll share one more funny detail from Halloween… among the 1,200 trick or treaters was a special visitor, a DHL courier who we all assumed was a grown-up wearing their work uniform as a costume but who was in fact an honest-to-goodness delivery person dropping off my printer proofs, fresh from China. I was engaged with kids, so my friend Anien accepted the package. It was only at the end of the night that I realized what had landed on my doorstep. Here’s my face when I did:

I was supposed to be writing a treatise on sasquatch urine but I started painting some color studies this afternoon and got carried away well into the evening. No regrets. Between coloring these and another half dozen pages, I think I’ve unlocked something in my usually trepidatious approach to watercolor.

A good feeling. Let’s see where these cows lead us.

Thank you, Madeleine.

I’m starting to wonder if the old internet really is dead or if I’ve just been too distracted by my phone to realize that there’s still people out there making sites “just ‘cuz”. Sites like HAD. Stumbled across it today and saw this poem I liked.

I posted over on Instagram two pictures with a small story.

My kids found an injured monarch butterfly on the sidewalk. We picked it up carefully and moved it about a block down the street to where we knew a neighbor kept a patch of milkweed. Whether the butterfly would have preferred to be laid to rest at a honeysuckle bush, we’ll never know, but we noticed a few caterpillars in the same garden and that felt right.

The post was offered in response to the Los Angeles fires which are heartbreaking and familiar.

The fires we had in Northern California back in 2020 were a bit north of us. Far enough that we weren’t scared, but close enough that we could smell it. Our skies were orange and there was enough ash in the air that outdoor recess was cancelled at our local schools and parents, as they always do in these moments, turned to the Mister Rogers quote “Look for the helpers”.

You’ll find few people who admire Mister Rogers as much as I do (I’ve watched the YouTube crayon video about a million times and I remember exactly where I was when I learned he had died) but I’m starting to feel like that quote is being overused. It does work, when you’re feeling overwhelmed, to have a point of focus. And knowing that there are people looking out for each other is always a good feeling. Still, I’m thinking the quote needs to change to “Be the helper.”

Three years before that picture above was taken, California had another wildfire rip through a city. One family’s experience was chronicled by cartoonist Brian Fies here.

Looking for “the helpers” time after time after time is a bit numbing. And when I say it’s time to be the helper I don’t mean (necessarily) donating to affected families or voting (of course you should vote) to increase funding to your local fire departments. I mean it’s time to begin the work of dismantling the organizations that make these wildfires inevitable, common, and frequent. Everything is, after all, all connected.

I had two feelings behind my butterfly post. The first was to offer a reminder that there are opportunities for small acts of kindness all around us. The second was just sort of a vague hope that we are in a moment of metamorphosis and that we’ll come out of our cocoons with stronger, more beautiful wings.

Listening to:

I’m not one to rain on another’s parade. I’m not the type to tell someone their favorite band is, in fact, not very good or the sort who’d suggest a chef add one more shake of pepper into their chowder. All the same, I’ve got just a *little* bit of a chip on my shoulder about how many people have moved from social media to Substack… and I’m not sure why. To be clear, I have no problem with the move from social media. When Twitter was bought out and people began migrating to Mastodon, Hive, Threads, and Bluesky—and none were seeming to stick—I had a secret hope that the end result of all these false starts would be a return to blogging. The Substack format is, more or less, blogging and the Substack site is, more or less, an RSS aggregator. But I just can’t seem to get into it.

I have, for the last… let’s say ten years… lamented the death of blogging. I remember so fondly the early part of the 00s, how my time was spent online. I would surf from site to site and hope any one of my favorite writers or artists would have uploaded some new essay, photo, sketch or, best of all, an interesting link. In that case, you would surf over to this new undiscovered part of the internet and lose yourself in some new information or experience. It was the best! It was also (not so unlike modern social media) a huge time suck but there was an active participation that was very different from having an algorithm spoon feed you content.

Okay, so here we are, more than a few first steps into a post micro-blogging world and guess what, Substack is taking off! Artists and writers are posting fairly regularly over there and my reaction… a mild indifference! What the heck?! I’ve been granted what I wanted and I’m still holding out for something else.

This is clearly a me problem. I *think* what it is is that I haven’t yet grieved the old internet, I haven’t yet shed my frustrations at the engagement driven social media apps, and I haven’t yet accepted that the world spins ever forward. We can’t go back to blogging as it was, so maybe Substack *does* make sense—there is, actually, a lot of good kidlit stuff on there, illustrator Alina Chau has collected it into one big list.

Anyway, I feel like a bit of a Rotten Ralph. There is no reason for me to be salty at a platform that is giving writers and artists a place to share their work. All the same, I’m going to keep blogging. It works for me. I have zero means of tracking engagement, but I like that. It’s kind of like my private YouTube livestreams where I am simultaneously speaking to everyone and to no one. A bizarre exercise, but I like it.

Until next time, everybody and nobody.

Following up on my favorite animals post to let you know there’s more to the Baby Bear story. Here it is.

When I was about three years old, my mom took me to Mervyn’s. She was shopping, I started exploring and got lost. I was found by someone on staff who took me to the customer service area and asked me my name. I would only say “Baby Bear” so they had to go on the PA and say “Would Mama Bear please come to customer service, your Baby Bear is looking for you.” Apparently, everybody in the store thought this was incredibly endearing and the manager of the store thought it worth preserving as a series of newspaper ads that ran in the Napa Valley Register from February to April in 1977.

Okay, that last part is made up but everything up until the newspaper ad is true. My mom loved telling this story and would, for the rest of her life, address her cards to me with “Dear Baby Bear”.

Has there been too much negativity in these last posts? I feel like there’s been too much negativity in these last posts. I took a lovely walk this evening and caught a gorgeous sunset. Here’s a photo that doesn’t do it justice.

I’ve been meaning to write about a certain movie since the start of the summer but I haven’t quite been ready to. It felt like I had all the time in the world, as usual, and what’s more, I knew writing about it was going to make me cry. I’m not uncomfortable crying, mind you, I just didn’t want to deal with these particular tears. But I just looked out my kitchen window, thought about the movie and I broke down. So, here I am, late in the evening on what I guess is the last day of summer, tears in my eyes, and I’m finally going to put my thoughts to paper.

It always really bugged me that in KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE, Kiki sets off into the world so ill prepared. She’s a young witch-in-training with no discernable witching skills (except for flying on a broom). She leaves home, as is witch tradition, on her 13th birthday and makes her way to a large city where she faces a number of setbacks in her journey to becoming the city’s resident witch.

The movie is beautiful, the themes of independence and reliance (on self and others) are honest and true. Kiki is one of those perfect Ghibli films but I always wondered, what the hell were her parents doing for the last 13 years??? This question always kind of ruined the movie for me.

So why am I having such a strong reaction to this movie and this question? Well, I just dropped off my daughter at college. The event has been hanging over my head since spring break earlier this year when we did a campus tour. I thought about my child’s impending adventure and found myself suddenly relating to Kiki’s parents. What the hell have I been doing for the last 18 years??? I’m not saying my kid is ill-prepared (I made sure of this, we used to make “Witch’s Brew” in our back garden out of flower petals, woodchips, and compost), I just wonder now if there’s any amount of preparation a parent can provide that makes them feel they’ve done their job. I looked out the kitchen window tonight and thought about all the many ways I could have done more. Or if not more, done different.

The universe is pretty big on giving me obvious signs. Or maybe I like looking for signs. Either way, this discovery we made as we drove into the campus was a fitting coincidence.

The theater near my kid’s college is showing KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE. Why here, why now? Who knows. What’s my takeaway? Let me tell you.

At the end of KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE, Kiki has found inspiration and purpose and is happy and that’s all I’ve ever wanted for my kids. My hope is that I’ve prepared my kid well enough to identify what inspiration, purpose and happiness look like (if not what it means to them) but I also know that, like with Kiki, this is a journey they have to make on their own.

Now listening to:

Updating to say two things: first, I’ll take backseat to very few people in my love of Miyazaki films. One of those people is my daughter. I love Miyazaki films, she lives them. There was always one of either Totoro, Porco Rosso, Spirited Away or Kiki in rotation in our DVD back when she was little and their impact was strong. These days she might identify with Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle, but back then she was Fio. We used to play Porco Rosso which was sitting longways on our living room couch pretending it was an airplane. We’d tour the Mediterranean, land and then pull up the cushions to hammer away at the engine before taking off again. Second, the reason for my tears might not be so deep as all I wrote above. I just miss my kid. She’s a fun person to have around. (Cut to Jerrold crying, flying solo on his couch.)