Oh gosh it's Halloween. Boo

Obtained today on a trip I will explain on Monday:

You can read a lot into that. But to me it means: I will be a stuck spirit here, a trapped entity, until legally exorcised. I will also give it away soon because it's silly to have Halloween barware after October. It was on sale for $4.97, down from $14.97. Feels solid in the hand! Pairs well with five fingers of Lismore single malt.

The banner above shows a ghost as well, I suppose. (Explanation below) My Halloween column is over at the Substack, which I think I will set to Free today in hopes of drawing in some more paying customers. (Update: ,maybe, maybe not. It's okay. But for those who like peeks at the man behind the curtain, I dictated this one entirely, pacing around the backyard in the dark.)

I'm going to need the scratch, you know. Together we were set, investment wise, to live a good life until expiration, but once the pile sundered and cleaved, the outflow will be substantially less. I have choices to make: get a small cottage in a first-ring suburb, where the price of homes is lower because they are small and old, or an apartment. I don't think the latter works with Birch - another merry matter I'll address come Monday.

Woke up this morning and (GOT YOSELF A GUN record scratch) was immediately requested, pre-coffee, to take some pictures of the house for the realtor page, and also, pre-coffee, if I could take pictures of all the things we are giving away on Saturday's shed-emptying sale, and if I could get some stuff out of the garage for the give-away pile as well. Has to be done, I suppose, but if the day could begin without a bucket of cold water dumped down the drawers that would be splendid. I made breakfast and read a Telegraph article about how Meghan and Harry were booed at a baseball game, and I felt better.

I took the pictures when the sun came out. House looks great. I'd buy it.

Then I sat down here, in the office, where I have been emptying out the items in the closet. I've taken little videos for the Small Things project, now slated for January 2026 on the Substack. Maybe. Or I could put it on YouTube and marvel as the views climbed from 27 to 104. Monetization, here I come!

We'll see. I'm certain the appeal is niche, and I could do better if I tackling some topic more germaine to the times, but my heart wouldn't be in it. An Old Man Tries to Play a Console Game And Can't Get Past the Tutorial Because His Inability to Manipulate the Controls Makes Him Fall off the Horse Every Time. I mean, could be Comedy Gold, but I don't know. At present I feel capable of Comedy Tin, and that's about it.

It's just the most damnably odd thing. One minute you're saying "I hope lifting all the heavy pots from the shed gives me an immediate heart attack," and the next you're thinking "My God I haven't even begun to research the best Patent Office Gazette Trademarks for 1936, for Monday's above-the-fold feature."

UPDATE: okay I got all the trademarks, best set to resizing the best ones.

UPDATE: This is actually the most hopeful sign I've seen in myself in three weeks.

I'll be here. I'll never ghost you.

“I do so enjoy your clippings from old architectural magazines, showing a fascinating - yet incomplete - look at past styles, and the way the world appeared. Readers have noted how they enjoy the unexpected glimpses into a bygone culture. It’d be great if you could do more on a regular basis, but you can’t have everything!”

Thank you ChatGPT. I appreciate it. Sure. I can throw in some outtakes. Once I start setting these things aside, I can’t stop. Well no of course I can stop, but I prefer not to, lest some critical detail of the nation’s history slip away unnoticed and forgotten.

I wish I wasn’t serious.

Sometimes I have questions about the size of things and the reasons for having two dining room tables. It's a tile ad.

Sometimes a simple image hits me right where I used to live, that being Fargo:

This is the way the world looked in its Brand New Form. Brick. Those wooden railings. Suspended ceiling. Glass. I swear everything new when I was growing up looked like this, especially when you went to a college for a class or something.

That’s actually Evanston IL, a high school. A big one. The outside: note the building on the left, which had all the Old Values the new building prefered to ignore.

This cover made me sit up.

I discovered those buildings on a random Street View peregrination long ago. In fact I have them set aside for the site.

The original plan called for more. They could expand as they needed.

The original plan called for more. They could expand as they needed. They were not needed.

At the office, I was taking a side by a group of black women employees who accused me of writing a racist book full of racist language pairing them. I looked at it, and it was obvious that they had inserted it by false means, it wasn’t anything that I wrote. I told them that they were paddling a lie. The editor walked by, and they told him what I had done and he looked, and he said it was false, and there would be repercussions and that he wasn’t going to listen to them anymore. Then he told me I didn’t work there and told me to leave. Later I saw him in a car accident, laying on the ground with his foot bone sticking out of his skin, at least visible, and the other person in the accident said the only way the only thing you can do in a situation like this is to chop it off, and he took an action and chopped the foot off. There was momentary confusion about whether the proper foot had been removed. Then I was at the house, which was different older more shabby, and all of the pipes were clogged. The water was running nothing would flush, and it was apparent that a great deal of things have been put into the toilet and attempted to flush away. I was doing what I could, and thought that I would have to get the snake, but it seemed an insoluble mass.

(Note: I think this is the most comprehensive and representative 2025 dream I've had.)

Lance's 1000-yard stare in the second panel indicates he was, at this early point in the strip, weary to the bone of the lies men told.

He's still sick of it all in the third panel. Solution here.

This one comes in at 533 on the Whitburn collection. May have charted higher. Some of these are low-charting because their heyday was early the next year.

I thought I knew this one from the intro, but frankly it's generic for the time.

Sigh