Comic Plans

For my 16-page comic, I'm going to cover an event in my life, rather than a friend's: my trip to Ocean City last summer. This was a week-long vacation taken by myself, my younger brother of 3 years and my mother, and it was in the wake of my father's death.

For him, a four-year battle with cancer ended when it spread to his brain, and because his last wish was to die in his home, the family basically revolved around him, and his mother and father came to help take care of him. I spent my nights staying up, sacrificing sleep to pace the basement and get a little peace of mind, but I was eventually found and put on the night shift, sleeping a few hours a day and spending the dark hours near a baby monitor, checking to make sure he was still breathing.

He lost the ability to speak properly, then the ability to speak at all, then the ability to communicate, then consciousness. I think the last thing he ever said was "No."

So, in short, we needed a break. My mother braved a gigantic metal bridge and we all put up with carsickness in order to travel to Florida while it was still bearable. We received the highest corner hotel room on the best hotel available, so big it cast shadows across the beach.

And the beach...

The water in the beach is all composed of the same type of atoms moving at roughly the same speed. It's connected to every river and ocean in the world, and if you wade into it you're touching millions of people by proxy. That water is the same water as rain, the same water as drinking fountains and soda, the same water as blood and urine. That water is older than living organisms, and has comprised all of them. The water in your body was in rainstorms that battered Rome, the guts of dinosaurs, and the roiling seas before the first cells. It comes from meteors and obeys only the moon, and when you see the way it moves you understand why cultures near large bodies of water seem calmer and simultaneously you feel like it's reaching out for you and you remember the dangers of being pulled out to sea by a current.

And then you see the sky and there's nothing else to make it seem closeby or dome-shaped, no clouds to give it distance or depth, but it rises from the horizon higher than you can see even though there's nothing in your way it's all there but you can't comprehend it just like the water there shouldn't be that MUCH of it there and it's so unnatural even though it is Nature and

I finally understood agoraphobia.

I slept on the couch, because there weren't enough beds to go around. And that week, I read On A Pale Horse by Piers Anthony, which sounds symbolically fitting, but I though it was very flawed for a masterpiece. After the couple hours I spent on that, I spent the rest of the week reading all (at the time) 102 chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It was 600,000 words, difficult to describe without sounding silly, and one of the three best things I've ever read.

Especially this.

Ironically, I never swam. I did try, during the evening, but no one told me that all the shells came in as the sun waned.
I couldn't step into the tide without being shredded by them, and eventually I had to give up and head back to the hotel. Walking the boardwalk was pretty fun, though, and so was the area in general. There are some great pictures of it in wintertime, where the whole area's closed and covered in snow.

That was one of the big seeds, I think, in my turn to travel. I'd love to go back there, someday soon.