The online home of Adventure Cartoonist Lucy Bellwood
Add cardboard (carbon), gently torn, to some dried leaves (carbon), and the leftover zucchini bits and broccoli floret (nitrogen) from dinner, and you’ll end up with a singularly useful and generative substance (“soil”), from which all other life now stems. Is that not amazing? And it’s available to you. The earth’s deepest and most primal incantation.
I lost track of Cassie for a year or two but I’m now I’m subscribed to her newsletter about compost and it’s great.
The Terra Nova Expedition is the Millennials’ polar expedition. We’ve worked really hard, we’ve done everything we were supposed to, we made what appeared to be the right decisions at the time, and we’re still losing. Nothing in the mythology we’ve been fed has prepared us for this. No amount of positive attitude is going to change it. We have all the aphorisms in the world, but what we need is an example of how to behave when the chips are down, when the Boss is not sailing into the tempest to rescue us, when the Yelcho is not on the horizon. When circumstances are beyond your power to change, how do you make the best of your bad situation? What does that look like? Even if you can’t fix anything, how do you make it better for the people around you – or at the very least, not worse? Scott tells us: you can be patient, supportive, and humble; see who needs help and offer it; be realistic but don’t give in to despair; and if you’re up against a wall with no hope of rescue, go out in a blaze of kindness. We learn by imitation: it’s easy to say these things, but to see them in action, in much harder circumstances than we will ever face, is a far greater help. And to see them exemplified by real, flawed, complicated people like us is better still; they are not fairly-tale ideals, they are achievable. Real people achieved them.
I am leaping out of my chair and whooping and cheering and hollering about this passage from Sarah Airriess’s latest Patreon post. (The whole essay was released early for Patrons, so you can either become a supporter to read the whole thing today or just wait it out until it becomes more widely available in a month. Personally I’d recommend the former, because Sarah’s Patreon is one of the best around, but I’m biased.)
This talk originally accompanied the launch of The Worst Journey in the World, Vol. 1, Sarah’s graphic novel adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of the Terra Nova Expedition. I’m holding my copy right now, and it’s one of the most beautiful comics I’ve ever seen. Again: my appreciation is probably heightened by the fact that I’ve been following along on Patreon for years as she’s shared the process behind every page, but even without that context it’s a beautiful, beautiful book.
In the microcosm of caregiving, I’m learning this lesson over and over again: it isn’t the systems that make it bearable; it’s the people. It’s Gabriela texting to say she’s bringing over a rotisserie chicken. It’s Jim coming by in an hour to take my dad out for a visit to his favorite coffee shop. It’s Jen holding space for our cohort of young caregivers to show up and commiserate with each other over Zoom because she went through what we’re going through and wants to pay it forward. It’s Hayley texting a loving thought from across the country when I somehow need it most. It’s Sarah picking up my watch from the place in Ventura that I keep forgetting to stop at and then coming to help me build a bed frame. It’s also whoever left a free mattress in the parking lot behind Vons.
I think back on the way I lived through the first ten years of my career and it feels so different. I was bolstered and supported by community, it’s true. I was even asking them for help at every turn to make my books and my work possible! But somehow the ways I’m relying on others right now feel so different. I’m humbled so much more thoroughly by letting people in during this season of my life because it’s not just creative anxiety anymore. That’s peanuts. That’s easy.
This is the real shit.
It’s not freezing to death in Antarctica shit, but some days it feels real close. I’ve feared and loathed the thought of anyone seeing me like this for so long, but time and time again I see that people want to help each other. Or, at the very least, my people want to help me. And my dad’s people want to help me. And my hometown wants to help me.
I just have to let them in.
If queerness can be understood as a longing, a technology that allows us to glimpse something new that we sense before we can see it, a dowsing rod, a black light, then water might be the catalyst that dissolves our attachment to whatever is keeping us from it, from ourselves.
It’s very hard not to quote the entirety of this essay by J Wortham, which manages to articulate so many angles of my obsession with getting into bodies of water. I wrote a fair bit about my plunge habit when I first moved, but there were many more beyond what I covered. This week it was the frigid Pacific Ocean under a drizzly Santa Barbara sky, then the broad arroyo of the Ventura River, then Thacher Creek in Horn Canyon.
It’s been a winter blessed with unusual—almost unprecedented—amounts of rain.
Part of the reality of searching for queer respites is that they are fleeting, ever-evolving, a question without a resolved answer.
Their writing makes me think of Heraclitus.
Queer time is a sensate way of life, the kind treasured by people who perhaps understand with crackling urgency how circumstances can change in a moment, and the importance of pleasures that even in small doses can sustain you for weeks, months, years after the moment has passed.
Both times I’ve been at Wayward (a decidedly queer space) I’ve swum more frequently than any other time in my life, and yes: those pleasures have sustained me for the last three years. The daily naked plunges in the lake woke me up after naps and started me off right on foggy mornings; they soothed and refreshed and coaxed and shocked. They gave me a touchstone of what it felt like to be fully embodied, fully held. Given the self-obliterating caregiving role I find myself in now, I’ve needed it.
This total immersion of my body into water, repeatedly, without fear, allowed for a total surrender of the illusion of separation between self and the natural world, the universe, whatever you want to call it. If you don’t believe in god, say ocean. Diving nude into the ocean in broad daylight, without fear of reproach, opened a portal to a higher consciousness. Ordinary, and then extraordinary. To be near the sea is to be humbled by its magnitude, to watch your priorities be reordered to its scale. What are self-consciousness, fear of the future, existential worries, to the ocean?
The last night we were on the island, after the main cohort of retreat attendees had gone, we hiked through the forest and over the cliff to the sea. After warming up by a bonfire on the beach, there was no more reason to wait. Two of us waded out into the freezing black water, stepping gingerly over beds of oyster shells until it was deep enough to paddle. I was shuddering and staring, willing and wishing, just about ready to turn around and admit defeat when I began to see it: the water beneath me erupting in stars, bioluminescence eddying around my limbs, all of it too beautiful to seem real.
Each time I allow myself to be enveloped, something is remembered for me: a place, a feeling, a fluency. I can’t always name it, but it’s too powerful to deny. It’s almost as if the parts of myself that have gone missing are recollected in water.
The stars that night were glinting, and the bonfire on the shore waited like a beacon, but the brightest shimmer was running down my forearms, spiraling behind my palms, reminding me of everything I could be.
Hello, hello, hello.
(Previously from this spot: 2022, 2021)
It’s been hard to get out of the house recently.
Our neighbor of 31 years died in February, followed by my godfather in March. They each meant very different things to me, but both occupied an archetypal permanence that’s hard to reconcile with death. And all grief is linked, isn’t it? This thread pulls on that one and so on and so on until the tapestry unravels and you’re left holding a mess of snotty string.
The last two weeks of my wall calendar are utterly blank. I’ve learned to read these gaps in my paper trail as markers of total emotional exhaustion (although sometimes they correlate with the thrill of a new relationship). In this case, I know the data is missing because I’ve been too tired to track whether I wore my mouth guard, too forgetful to know if I attended a Zoom meeting, too frazzled to write Morning Pages. Too much. Too much.
Last night I finally turned my phone all the way off and threw it behind the bookshelf. I buried my laptop in the couch cushions. I hid my iPad in the closet. I hucked all this technology out of my room because I was drowning in it, trying to get away from everything.
Instead, today, I walked. Not for long, but enough to remember what my legs are for. Enough to see how everything has changed from storm after storm of rich rainwater filtering into the hillsides since January. You can stick a finger in the earth and water pours out. Every divot in the trail is a spring.
We’ve passed the equinox. Life is coming back.
I stopped off to download my Twitter data yesterday and caught a notification from this lovely thread that Brendan had put together sometime around Christmas:
Down among the thinkers and tinkerers and connectors, said the notification, he’d written some very sweet things about me. It came as something of a surprise.
It was a mention of “unselfing” by Helen Macdonald that drove me back to blogging in 2020. Since then I’ve heard it surface in other places. Annie Dillard describes it at length in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, saying “[…] I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I often wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.”
Both women have their fingers tangled up in something true.
I feel it when I’m driving the highway, lost in dark thoughts of mortality, only to abandon every thread for a glimpse of a hawk on a telephone pole. The moments before sleep when a barn owl’s screech pulls me out of my own body. The day I left the house in a foul mood to pace the gravel drive, stomping up and down until the lifeless body of a hummingbird stopped me short and lifted the needle of my displeasure.
I know the value of unselfing more than I ever have before, living here, doing this work, marinading in the near-depth of near-death.
But this thing that Brendan gave me feels somehow the same—an inverted twin sensation: being reminded out of the blue of Who You Are (or Were) Perceived to Be. It comes to me in a season where I’ve stopped saying hello to myself quite so often, possibly to the point of forgetting who that self even was before now. I say hello to death, I say hello to loss and calibration and labor and tending, but I don’t always say hello to me.
And the minute I type that I’m thinking of Sarah Ruhl, and these lines from the first essay in her book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write:
I’ve written about that line here before, and the mantra repeats in my head as I walk through the meadows near my house.
All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow.
All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow.
All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow.
And yet, and yet, and yet…
I miss her. I miss that Lucy. And so Brendan’s tweet feels like a kindness. Perhaps the kindness that social media kept drawing me back in with for all those years: a whole realm of people who could look at every passing thought and doodle and hard-won victory and low moment and interview and blog post and reflect back someone cohesive and true.
True only to what I’d shared, maybe, but still.
Something I couldn’t see with my own eyes.
Something the hawk sees when it’s looking back at me.
When things get overwhelming—as they have been for the last, oh, six months or so—I default to logging phone numbers and quotes and book recommendations and ideas in my to-do list app rather than filing them in their appropriate places. This never goes well for me, since my to-do list then becomes an un-completeable heap of Weird Stuff that elicits instant anxiety every time I look at it until one day (today) I rush through it and delete or file everything that isn’t an actual Task.
One of those items, a mere two months old, was to mention that this graph made me emotional the same way seeing a bunch of drivers pull over for an ambulance in early 2021 made me emotional.
Taking a closer look at the demand history graph; check out the change from 5:50 PM to 5:55 PM (right after the EAS alert was sent out): a drop of, and I kid you not: 1.21 gigawatts (rounded to 2 decimal places). #FlexAlert #heatwave pic.twitter.com/QH1GS6EZ4b
— Matt Fern (@MattF_NorCal) September 7, 2022
These days when I see exhortations to conserve power or water or any other communal resource, I’m alarmed by how cynical I’ve become. Maybe it’s living in a drought-blighted valley where the local country club maintains an emerald green golf course, knowing that however many penalties the water district imposes, the wealthy will just pay for more water. Or maybe it’s general pandemic-era weariness. I don’t know.
But we had a massive heatwave in early September, prompting the powers that be to send out a state-wide text encouraging people to reduce their power usage and avoid blackouts—and it worked! People were asked to make a sacrifice for the common good and they did! You can see it!
1.21 gigawatts. How about that.
I’ve become a person who says I’m going to do things and then completely fails to do them and it feels so intolerable to my sense of self.
In my support group for young caregivers we talk about the emergence of new selves from this season of our lives. How they’re unfolding in real time. How we haven’t fully met them yet, or learned what they really care about. What they’re capable of.
Past Lucy—or Portland Lucy, as I’ve been thinking of her—excelled at Doing Things, but Present Lucy isn’t up to the job. Past Lucy still says “Thanks so much for thinking of me. This sounds like a great project! I’ll get you those initial sketches by next Friday,” while Present Lucy says “Have I already taken his blood pressure this morning? How long has it been since he ate? Will I be able to sleep in my own bed tonight or are his legs still too weak to go up the stairs to his room? He needs a bath today. When did I last cut his nails? Is that the alert system going off? Oh he just got out of bed. The nurse is coming at 1pm. The phone’s ringing—oh shit it’s the lawyer. I was supposed to sign that engagement letter. What did we talk about at the appointment? I can’t remember. It’s already been a week. How long has it been since I ate? I need to change his Depends. Time to take the blood pressure again. The nurse said he shouldn’t sleep too much during the day, but the physical therapist said to be careful not to overdo it on the exertion. Should he be exercising right now? Should he be asleep right now? What’s this check I just found in my desk? Agh, there’s the package I told her I’d mail before the weekend. Last weekend? What day is it? I need to do laundry…”
(and on, and on, and on)
The friend I’ve been doing coaching work with looks at me sternly from our Zoom window. “You need to let go of the idea that you can work in an environment where you’re constantly being interrupted by a medical alert system.”
Okay, so I have to leave. Go to the studio. I’m lucky—so lucky—to have a studio. I just need to get there. To get there I need to have slept enough to get up early enough to go before he wakes up. To get there I need to get the ingredients to make the quiche to bring the food so I can stay long enough to work. To get there I need to get gas in the car to drive across town to be there on time. To get there I need to have enough executive function to put all the pieces in place, and we already know how well that’s going.
“I hope your dad’s doing better after his stint in the hospital!”
I parrot back platitudes, but I don’t know what they really mean. He’s recovering from three surgeries and adjusting to new medications and succumbing to mortality all at once.
He went in unwell and for a moment I entertained the fantasy that he’d come out better. Not cured, just improved on some level. And maybe he is. Maybe it’s hard to see beyond the fatigue and the confusion to the circulatory system beneath. The miscalibrated meds a mask for actual health improvement. But it doesn’t feel like he got better. It feels like he’s just getting worse, and we’re over here pushing so hard to try and stave off something inevitable.
Portland Lucy will be back after these messages.
(But will she?)
(And if not, who’s coming in her stead?)
Cross-posting from Patreon because I want to keep this stuff on my site, too. CW: this post talks about an ER visit, elder care, and grief.
Two days ago I was trying to explain to a partner how intense being a caregier is despite there not being very much “action”. My dad is stable. He doesn’t have a clear timeline. I just know that he is old, and often confused, and needs my help.
Yesterday that looked like agreeing to take him to The Farmer & The Cook, the local venue where the collage pieces we made together have been hanging for the last six weeks. That’s where I took this photo. He misses being out and about every day, greeting his public, watching people going about their business. It’s one of the things I struggle with most: I want him to be safe, and I also want him to be happy.
It was set to be a scorcher, so I made extra sure he’d had breakfast and his smoothie before we left the house, tried to get there early in the day, parked him in the shade.
But maybe I jinxed it, talking about there being no action, because ten minutes after I took this photograph he had an episode—slumped over, drooling, unresponsive. His dentures slid out of his mouth one after the other in a slow-motion horror show I’ll never forget. I kept hoping he’d snap out of it but he didn’t. Someone got me ice. I found myself wondering if his insurance would cover an ambulance. I didn’t know what to do. I called my mum to come join me and asked her to bring the walker, because we’d gotten him into the car with the walker on other occasions when he got wombly, but in this instance it was totally laughable because the man was clearly unconscious.
He was gone.
She arrived, took one look at the situation, and called 911. I just kept holding his shoulders, patting him down with ice, trying to bring him round. It is awful to feel so useless in the face of a crisis. I knew he needed to drink water but he couldn’t drink. How was I supposed to get him to drink?
He looked so small when they put him in the ambulance.
Driving the half hour to the hospital on the tail of the paramedics, there was no way to know what we were in for. Would he be paralyzed? Would he be dead? Would he remember? Would he be fine?
There’s a sick sense of relief bound up in an episode like this because we understand acute crisis. I can talk about “hospital” and “collapse” and “emergency” and people will understand—even if they’re just drawing from pop culture, they’ll understand.
But every day as a caregiver carries that load of uncertainty. It’s not as loud, so we can function, but it builds and builds. It ripples. It reminds me that it’s not just my dad whose life could change or end at any moment—it’s me. It’s everyone.
Even when nothing is happening, so much is happening.
I spent 9 hours on the sidewalk outside the hospital, waiting. It was 90º out and miserable. No waiting room privileges because of COVID. Mum had to be the one person allowed in the ED with him because she knows his doctors and medical history better than I do.
One impossibly kind nurse got me back to see him for three minutes, which wasn’t enough, but also was. I heard his voice. I saw his eyes open and smiling. I got to stroke his hair.
They kept telling us he was going to move to the hospital proper, where he’d be allowed two visitors, but when they finally did move him, four hours after that initial, tantalizing announcement, visiting hours were over. I had to stay outside.
I’m paying a lot of attention to labyrinths this year. I’d already been outside the hospital for two hours when I went to move the car and realized I’d been sitting twenty feet away from this:
I’ve stopped being surprised by this sort of stuff. I just start laughing and saying “Okay, OKAY I get it” to no one in particular.
I walked it when the sun finally went down and the temperature dropped enough to move in.
In ten minutes I’m going to drive back to Ventura to pick him up and bring him home, apparently no worse for wear. No stroke, no heart attack, just…age. Heat. Dehydration. Blood pressure. Who knows. And this makes me feel relieved and grateful and exhausted and also so angry. Because even if he’s fine, we’re left carrying the weight of how it could’ve gone. These pendulum swings of possibility.
I’m left remembering his teeth in his hat on the floor of the car, riding down the highway with us on our way to the unknown.
Last year I took a photo in this spot on April 11th. Happened to end up here again today while I was talking on the phone with Nia and realized I should do the same thing again. I lay in the grass under the valley oak at the bottom of the hill, stroked the velvety neon leaves unfurling at the end of every twig and branch, and thought about coming here in 5th grade after endless games of Predator/Prey in the groves further up the Saddle.
If the grass is still this green in April I’ll be very surprised, but I’ll take a photo that day and see. We had early rain this year—a rich rush of green. Maybe it’ll hold on. I’m still becoming acquainted with being here for a full year’s cycle.
Hourly Comic Day is an annual tradition in the comics community where folks set out to draw a panel (or two, or three) for every hour they’re awake on February 1st.
It took me a couple weeks to get through finishing my pages from this year because it was a) hard to fit in inking and watercoloring and posting around caregiving, but also b) just exhausting to deal with emotionally. Still: I’m so glad I did it. In 2021 I was right on the cusp of uprooting my life in Portland to move down to Ojai and look after my dad. Now I get to have a record of what the rhythm of these days has been like, and I’m sure I’m going to appreciate it more and more as time goes on.
There’s more to say but I’ve been formatting and posting these pages in various ways all day as I spread them across my internet haunts and I am wiped, so I’ll just get on with sharing them. If you’re finding this through an RSS reader, be warned that the gallery won’t work! Ya gotta click through to read it easily. (Also! An accessible edition with panel by panel alt text is available here thanks to a collaboration with various folks from the Friends of the Space Gnome Discord server. Blessed be their name.)
You can read previous Hourly Comic Day installments at the following links: 2021, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011.