Dear diary, it finally happened! They all said it would, but until this past glorious weekend, I never believed that it would. A fresh new feeling swept over me, heralding a bold new change, and at once all my anxious dull care was swept off my back and down the street like so many copies of last week’s Village Voice. Dear reader, it is true! At long last:

…until I get mugged, anyway.

And whose “♥” could resist “♥”ing NY, after a weekend of a caliber such as mine was just treated to. There was libation! There was entertainment! There was education! There were deep conversations and trips to Coney Island and communions with seagulls. There were zine readings and cartoonist meetings and arcade bleatings. There was pizza and hot dogs and hamburgers and bacon. There were sing-along basement shows, and suave dances in Latin after-hours clubs. There were chubby schoolboys and hardened ghetto youth carrying huge bouquets of flowers. There was snowfall and subways and sleeping in late. There were cheap boots and yoga and Black Lions. There was this:

And this:

(The latter of which depicts a bookshelf at the Strand, which sells only the older of my two books but has chosen it as a milestone to find your way alphabetically across their graphic-novel shelves, imparting the illusion that I actually have my own section of books at the Strand. An incidental yet significant surprise, in its own private way, and hard not to take as a small laurel extended by the city towards your humble narrator.)

It is because of all this, my cherished and patient reader, that I could have been found strolling the slushy streets of my lovely new home all weekend, whistling a jaunty tune, and ruing the explosive lack of decorum with which I tarnished your monitors in my previous Playhouse post. Please consider that transgression but an ungainly growing pain from yet another bewildered immigrant to this fair, decaying and epic city, as, like a young platypus struggling within the confines of its safe, warm egg, we scramble our way out into the joyful mud of LIFE — that real life, at the cusp of things here in the Naked City. And so I hath been reformed, and verily hath seen the light.

I will spend this week drawing, trying to renew my driver’s license, walking two sweet dogs, and trying to figure out how to install a Biggie ringtone on my cellphone. I’ll probably also be going to this. Eyyyyy… it ain’t so bad, right?