it's been a month since my last entry, and it's been kind of a nonstop hectic time since i got sick. usually, after i am sick, it takes some time for me to catch up on stuff and resume business as usual... but this time, so much happened directly afterwards that it's taken me until now to start to feel like i'm back to my normal busy schedule as opposed to having a pile of stuff to do that's disproportionately larger than my available time.

ok, so i'll try to back up and gather this past month's events into a semi-coherent narrative. a lot of it is simultaneously complicated and mundane, but i should be able to convey a sense of the overall vibe. this is probably going to be a long post, but hopefully after i catch up with the present, my future journal entries will be shorter and sweeter.

when i left off last time, i was just beginning to recover from being extremely sick for about a week, and had taken off of work to recover. the following weekend, despite not being quite back to 100%, i decided to go through with my previously planned trip to upstate new york, for two reasons.

  1. there was a memorial service on sunday for a close friend of mine from grad school who recently passed away; it felt important to make it to this for emotional closure
  2. due to complicated family logistics, we needed to arrange to transport a very old and shitty extra car to my house, to be stored in my driveway while some of my family are in mexico for the winter

as mentioned, the logistics of the family car situation were complicated, but in addition to saving my younger sibling from having to manage street parking an extra car, this car was supposed to provide me with backup transportation since my own car, a 2005 subaru, seemed to be having some mechanical issues.

the first leg of this trip involved meeting my sibling halfway between our homes (we live 2 hours apart). andrei, my partner, really wanted to go to this georgian restaurant in westchester, so we met there, had an excellent meal, and then andrei drove the shitty family car back to our house in new haven while i drove my sibling back to their house in kingston in my subaru.

the subaru made it through the first two legs of the trip fine, so the next day, i continued west towards alfred, ny, the town where i went to grad school and the location of the memorial. along the way, i stopped at an outdoor poetry book fair in a random patch of grass in a rural town where my friends brigid and sparrow were doing a performance as their collab project, ball of fire. brigid was one of my closest friends when i was living upstate last year, so i was really excited to hang out with her. and i've also known sparrow since i was a kid, so it was fun to reconnect with him as well. we sat in the grass in the shade of a very wide maple tree, amidst piles of fallen leaves.

after getting lunch from a food vendor at the book fair, i resumed my journey. my gas tank was empty, and there was no cell service to load gps directions, so i stopped at the next random local gas station i passed while following whatever roads i came across that seemed to lead west. i had been trying to be selective about where i got gas, because i was concerned that my car's recent issues were related to a bad tank of gas that i got the previous month, but this seemed to be my only option as i had no idea where the next gas station would be.

well, sure enough, after i filled it up, my car's engine started knocking again. well, i was more than halfway to my friend max's house in alfred, and the memorial was the next day, and i really didn't want to miss it, and the engine knock was not extreme. so i pressed on, while trying to drive as gently as i could and stopping occasionally to let my car cool off. the knocking was happening on and off, but more and more on as the drive progressed, despite me topping off the tank with high octane gas and adding a gas tank additive. i finally arrived at max's late at night, three hours after my original estimate. luckily, max is a night owl, so we jumped in his truck and went to wegman's, a grocery store that is also open late, to get some food to cook for dinner.

max is my old roommate from brooklyn, who coincidentally started the art program at alfred university a few years after i finished my mfa there. it is always excellent to get to see him. being back in alfred was a bit weird for me. i've only been back a few times since spring 2020, which was my final semester, in which the whole campus shut down and i had to finish my thesis work quarantined in my tiny off-campus apartment, where i lived alone, and saw no one for weeks at a time. so when i finally moved back to civilization, i left that place like a bat out of hell. also, my friend leslie, who passed away, was my closest friend throughout my time there, so it was sad to feel his absence and the regret that i didn't get to visit him more since we finished the program together, and he stayed there working as a professor and technician.

the next day, max and i went to the diner and met up with my friend izzy, who also did the same electronic arts mfa program as me and leslie, overlapping with us for one year. izzy brought their partner too, who we hadn't met before but who is very into bicycling and helps run a bike co-op in providence, rhode island, where the two of them live now. it was an unseasonably warm day for october in the finger lakes region, so we ended up going to the swimming hole and hanging out there for several hours.

despite not having brought a proper bathing suit, i impulsively jumped into the freezing cold stream and then alternated between dipping into the water and drying off on sun-heated rocks. i'm not sure if this was the best idea as i was still a little bit sick, but it was very beautiful to see the fall colors on the trees and feel the elements. i thought about leslie a lot because he was a big nature guy.

the actual memorial event was brief, sweet, and kind of awkward. i saw a bunch of people i haven't seen in a long time and they planted a ginko tree on campus in leslie's memory. then afterwards a group of us went to the old mill, and sat outside on their deck and shared conversations around a propane fire pit thing, which warded off the first few hours of cold after the sun went down.

i had initially planned to drive home that night and work tomorrow, but after experiencing the state of my car on the way there, i called out of work for monday and spent that day crawling back home slowly in the subaru. the engine situation wasn't getting better, so i decided to engage the "backup" vehicle when i finally resumed work on tuesday. unfortunately, the shitty extra vehicle owned by my family turned out to be... well, shitty. the whole front end felt loose, so i brought it into the shop and they gave me a repair bill that exceeded the monetary value of the vehicle itself to redo the front suspension system. considering the overall terrible condition of the vehicle, my family declared it scrap.

in between commuting to work in our 1988 camper van, i also brought my sad subaru into the shop for them to check it out. they basically said, all we can do is put fresh 10W-30 in it and hope for the best. well, i didn't have high hopes for that engine, and having a giant van as the sole vehicle owned by me and my partner wasn't an option. i needed to get a new car.

for my adult life, my strategy has been to drive very old cars that i bought for cash or got for free, and maintain them as best i can until it no longer makes financial sense to do so. well, the last two cars i bought — the 2005 subaru, and a 2002 volvo station wagon that died in like 2019 — both ended up being particularly bad investments, lasting me a year or less despite pouring money into repairs.

well, i decided to change my strategy and try to get a newer car this time. for me, this meant joining the large segment of society that has to make payments each month on a car loan. i had a strong aversion to taking on this type of debt, but on paper, the math made sense — if the vehicle was reliable, the monthly payments would have been cheaper than the random, unpredictable repair bills for the old subaru anyway.

so began my quest to figure out how all of this car loan stuff works and managing all of the surrounding logistics. unfortunately, this was very time consuming and required me to take more time off work. i am very thankful to my bosses for their understanding and flexibility during this time!

i'll spare you the details, as they are quite boring, but i became the proud owner of a 2018 honda hr-v. since it seems like station wagons are no longer a thing, this was the closest car i could find to the form factor of my subaru (which i really liked), while also having much better ratings for reliability.

after succeeding in obtaining a new vehicle, which took a little over a week, i immediately shifted focus to clearing out my driveway by selling the subaru and the shitty family car on facebook marketplace for cash. my family's car, a toyota, turned out to be a hot commodity in the overseas parts export market, and sold almost immediately. the subaru went a few days later to a pair of older fellows, who seemed to have a hobby of collecting random vehicles (one of them said he owned 20 cars?!) sadly, i received a call about a week later that the subaru's engine had died. well, i felt kind of bad about that, but i did sell it at a significant discount and with full transparency of the potential engine issues. and i'm pretty sure the guy just kept driving it as-is without addressing the issue. yikes...

that whole car saga really occupied a large portion of my mental energy for the entire month of october! i'm glad it seems to be resolved for now. i wish that my current lifestyle did not require me to even own a vehicle, but the art studio i work for is about 8 miles outside of town in an area completely inaccessible by public transit. and i really like my job.

however, there are a few other things to report that don't have to do with cars or funerals. andrei and i did a short livestream performance for the internet archive's virtual staff meeting, which was very fun. i also made a new section of my website, called notes, which gives me a different way to gather certain pages that i don't want to fall into obscurity with time (like a blog post does when it gets pushed to page 2 or 3 in the feed).

the reason i wanted to make a notes section was that i wanted to write about an art project i've been working on. i started it when i was sick and home from work, and then the whole thing kind of got pushed forward until this past week, when i finally had time to finish some illustrations and gather my notes into a format for others to read. i already described it in depth on my website so i won't go into it here, but here's the link if you want to check it out: palomakop.tv/notes/runicon-cypher

with the completion of my font project and the accompanying e-zine, i finally had something to share with the zine club people, who had been waiting patiently with no updates for me all month. zine club is kind of organized so that each new thing i send out feels kind of like a surprise, so hopefully no one was like, actively waiting and frustrated, but i felt bad about it regardless and i hate missing deadlines. now that i've at least delivered something cool for people to check out, that's weighing on me less. i hope to be back to business as usual with zine club next month, because it seems like these recent hectic events were outliers, and i should have more time to devote to making weird art in the coming month. (knock on wood!) i also hope to reconnect with my online communities more as i've been kind of MIA since all this started. maybe i need to do a new newsletter soon too.

other things that happened since my last entry:

here is some miscellaneous photographic evidence from the past month as well. i think that about covers it. so consider this journal fully up to date (maybe too much so). until next time...