4. don't over-decorate your mind palace

here’s to all my fellow only children who thrived in quarantine

depicted above, my last two brain cells waking me every morning.

I like the quiet.

I am an only child. I acquired a late-in-life stepbrother, but it was long after I’d moved out of the house, so I was an only child. People always ask if it was sad to grow up without siblings, but really I can’t imagine having had to share my territory like that.

When I was a kid, I used to wake up and see the house and its contents as the components of a mission. My parents both worked and I had to occupy my day. From dawn to dusk I was going to get in a few hours of TV time (more than a lot of my peers, for better or for worse, I suppose) but I had a bunch of other time to fill. Especially if it wasn’t a school holiday, in which case I usually spent the day at my maternal grandma’s house. (I called her Nanny.)

Nanny didn’t have cable, and she wasn’t the sort to sit down with me and play with toys. She was a Scorpio like me, but not at all stern: she just wanted to be left alone to drink her tea, read books, watch PBS, and occasionally hit up a thrift store library. So you might be able to tell, she was formative. She was the high priestess of Quiet Time.

I feel like my days used to be long stretches of quiet time I was desperate to break up with something, anything, but now it’s harder to come by. The ‘relatable’ version of this is being the kid who used to read for hours a day, who now has trouble finishing a book. (This was me for a time. I’m much better about it now. )

my late grandmother, who was far cooler than any of us. i mean look at her

I remember long days with my Nanny as I try to learn to protect my quiet time, putting down my phone and my accessibility, making the active choice to drown out noise, say no to Twitter, not respond to every text, and the best way to describe it is it feels like being a kid again. She was so, so good at it - and I know she would be, even if she’d ever had a cell phone (she didn’t.) But from her I learned - waking up on a day where you know you aren’t going to let the noise in is like waking up on Christmas morning.

Look, sometimes days go pear-shaped. It happens. Sometimes the peace cannot be protected. The tire will go flat, the friend will need you and you want to be there, the child/pet/spouse will be on your nerves, the boss will ruin your mood. That doesn’t have to ruin your quiet - it isn’t about having the day to do nothing.

On the contrary, the days where I manage to protect my peace are the days where I’m most productive. Tuning out exhausting background noise makes shit happen in a way nothing else does. Not just stuff you need to do, but stuff you want to do - like getting new ideas and listening to your own feelings. It’s pretty cool.

Hey, speaking of new ideas:

NEW BUSINESS

X-CORP IS OUT! Thanks for picking it up, if you did. If you didn’t and you want to know what it’s like - it’s Billions, Succession, Silicon Valley, every high tech deal swapping show, but it stars a cast of mutants with incredible powers with incredibly cool and slick art by Marvel newcomer Alberto Foche and incredible covers by the legendary David Aja.

The main two characters? Angel and Monet - which seems like a pretty clear good cop/bad cop situation until you realize they’re both playing good cop/bad cop inside their own heads. Can they make X-CORP into what Krakoa needs, a corporate facing entity that can play nice with humans, or are their differences just too great? Doesn’t that sound cool?

Oh look at that, I have a few digital codes for X-CORP #1. Comment below if you’d like one and I’ll reply with it for you. You can get a chance to read the book and see if you wanna subscribe to the rest. We’ll do three (maybe more.) This way you can get caught up before—

THE HELLFIRE GALA

Both of the issues I wrote for this thing, X-CORP #2 and EXCALIBUR #21, are absolute bangers, I’m not going to lie to you. Here are some teeny tiny art peeks to thank you all for being patient - it took me a month to get this newsletter out.

CALL TO ACTION

Protect your quiet, yeah? Promise me you’ll turn your phone off for a little bit this week, or at least put it on Airplane Mode if you use it to read books (I’m a Kindle person, I get it, reading books on my phone is my favorite late-night diner activity.)

POTPOURRI

• My good pal Matt Rosenberg included this newsletter in a rather kind lil roundup of newsletters he likes. Give a holler if Rosie brought you here, and sign up for his newsletter, while you’re at it! It’s a good one.

• Jason Aaron has a good one too, at “Beard Missives.”

• So does Kelly Thompson, while I’m at it.

• And of course, as always, Daniel Lavery’s ‘Shatner Chatner’ is one of the best online.

• I’m vaccinated and I hope you are too. If you’re on the fence about getting vaccinated, allow me to remind you about diner milkshakes above. I drank a butterscotch milkshake at Mel’s the other night for the first time in a year and it was transcendent. Please get vaccinated.

• I like to always highlight a charity - the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund could use immediate aid, for obvious reasons.