Once again it’s that special time of year where it becomes vitally important that people who have seen the latest installment in a never-ending big-budget movie series not “spoil” the plot by talking about how shocking it was when Thanos declared his eternal love for Bucky.

It is also that special time of year when people like me who haven’t seen any of these movies feel compelled to grumble about them dominating the discussion.

I kind of feel like the story of how serialized adventure movies went from being a series of shorts filling out a matinee to a completely archaic form to something that squashes the global box office under its titanic spandex-clad ass a few times a year has a lot of interesting things to teach us about financing and story-building but holy crap if I never hear another damn word about Star Wars or the Avengers or whatever in the rest of my life I would be pretty happy.

Anyway I should have some breakfast.

Back in 2008, I drew what would eventually become the traditional portion of the Tarot of the Silicon Dawn, and made big prints of those images for a gallery show. Most of ’em sold; the rest went into my closet. A few years later, I moved to Seattle, and brought the ones that didn’t sell all the way across the country with me.

I’m moving to New Orleans now and I really don’t wanna haul all of them another couple thousand miles.

Here’s what’s available:

(edit: a lot of these sold pretty quickly, thank you everyone! I’m down to three now, none of which are the super-bulky Majors.)

2×3’ Majors: Fortune, Lovers, Hanged, Temperance.

Suggested price $50, plus shipping – looks like $45 to the West Coast, $70 to the East, none if you’re in Seattle. Everything but the Lovers has had some interest, I’m waiting to see what folks think of the shipping before I mark ’em as sold.

sorry, both claimed!

Both of these are gone too. That felt good.

12×20” Courts: Queen of Wands, Chevaliers of Wands, Pentacles, and Swords, King of Pentacles

I don’t have a photo of her, she’s got the same frame and border treatment as the others. :)

both of these are gone now, yay!

these two are both sold now, hooray!

yay, these are both sold too!

9×13” Minors: 3w (above), 10s, 5p, 5s, 5w, 7c.

Both of these are SOLD, thanks genie friend <3

oop, sorry, this lady and her reflection are sold!

I didn’t take photos of these last two, they’re framed exactly like the other Minors.

Also I have this:

She’s two feet across, acrylics, glows in the dark/UV, and may contain an uncharged “guardian” enchantment for your home. $200 suggested price, make me an offer.

All the Tarot prints are one-off giclée prints, done on a huge printer with like eight or nine different ink tanks for a wide color gamut.

Suggested prices are $30 for the Minors, $40 for the Courts, and $50 for the Majors, plus shipping – I don’t have shipping estimates right now, if anyone out of town wants one I’ll get some. But honestly if you are in Seattle you can pretty much name your price as long as you’re willing to come pick it up yourself and give me some cash.

(Shipping estimates: minors can fit in a USPS flat rate box to anywhere in the US for $15. Majors look to range from $50 to ship to CA, to $70 for New Jersey. Might be a bit more for someone in the Gulf South. Haven’t gotten one for any Courts yet.)

Comment here or send me some email at [email protected] and we’ll work things out.

Tonight I went to Lil’ Woody’s for a burger, then to Pie Bar for a slice of pie and a drink.

The first time I went to Pie Bar, several years ago on a cold night where I felt like an adult who could have dessert first if she damn well pleased, I said to myself, this is a cool little place with a nice romantic vibe, I should take people I wanna sleep with here in the future. And I have, now and then. Thinking of that on the way home, I find myself pondering if there’s anyone I should take there again before I leave town for good. Or anyone I should take there who I haven’t yet.

These sure are not thoughts I ever really expected to be in a position to have when I was a sad, angry teen boy.

Anyway. It was good pie.

A while back, I encountered an excerpt from a book of magic by the Chilean mystic/movie director Alejandro Jodorowsky: a cure for homesickness. Acquire a box of dirt from your homeland, and regularly sit in a comfy chair with one’s bare feet resting in this dirt.

It sounds at once goofy and exceedingly obvious, at least if you look at the world through a magical lens.

I keep on thinking about that spell as I go around my apartment, putting things in boxes. Because a while back I acquired a whole bunch of Mardi Gras doubloons from my hometown of New Orleans, and scattered them about the floor of my living room and bedroom to create a cartoony sort of “dragon’s lair” ambience. And now and then I would stand barefoot in them, wiggle my toes, and feel really good about doing this. I chalked that up to the mostly-joking “I am a dragon!” thing I have going on in my life; of course dragons feel good when they’re wallowing in their hoards, right? But maybe I was just doing an unwitting variation on that homesickness spell.

I keep on thinking about this because, while most of the doubloons are packed into a few small boxes, I keep finding more of them hidden under things as I work on going through everything I own and either packing it up or selling/giving away/donating/trashing it.

March 4: Nick and I got on a plane in Seattle, sat a while, then got off another plane in New Orleans, picked up our rental car, and went to my friend Lewis’ place to sleep.

March 5: We joined Lewis and Jeanine in going downtown, as we had accidentally scheduled our trip to coincide with Mardi Gras. Their plan was to bicycle about the city and sample the parades; we didn’t have bikes available, so we split up. When we got to Zulu, I raised my hands, hollered for beads, and got smacked in the face by a whole bag full. I shared them with Nick and then giddily dragged him up Zulu’s route against the flow of the floats, stoping regularly to scream for beads. He got hit in the side of the head with one of their medallions and was worried it drew blood for a bit. By the time we’d caught Rex at fast-forwards, he was utterly exhausted and overloaded with all these new sights and experiences, while I was feeling a place inside me get filled up that I hadn’t realized had been empty half my life.

Over the next few days we drove around New Orleans, checking out neighborhoods, and scoured various rental mapping websites to figure out what area we wanted to live in.

March 8: We started filling in an application for either of two amazing three-bedroom places in Mid-City and realized that, technically, someone in the Seattle postfurry scene from whom we were both Very Estranged was our second-previous landlord. We diffidently contacted her asking her to be chill if our new potential landlords followed up on us truthfully listing her in the list of past landlords. She demanded an apology from Nick, which he wrote at length.

We spent the weekend, in part, worrying about how this was going to go over. She could potentially ruin our chances if they contacted her, y’know? But we got the application finished off, and submitted electronically.

March 11: We went by the realty office to let them know we’d submitted the application, and wanted to make sure it was in the running for both places, not just the one officially assigned to it in their online system. They told us it was, and that they were handing off our application, and those of the four or five other people interested in these two places, off to the property owner that morning; we could expect some news within the hour. We bummed around midtown for a bit with lunch and chilling in City Park, then went back to Lewis’ place in Harahan (where we’d been staying).

Shortly after getting back, the phone rang. We did not get the absolutely dreamy three bedroom shotgun house one block off of Canal but we got the only slightly less amazing (and slightly cheaper) 3br shotgun two blocks off Canal was ours if we wanted it, and could come in to sign the lease today.

Five minutes after that, Nick got mail from the Very Estranged ex-friend going on at great length about the many, many sins that both he and I have committed to her person, her absolute blamelessness in all of our interactions, and how she could not ever say anything nice about us ever. We laughed. All that stress and fear, for naught.

Tomorrow, we run in town to grab the keys, then fly back to Seattle. And start packing or selling all our stuff. I think we may be hanging the beads we caught in a place of honor when we start decorating the new place; they really felt like the city saying HEY WELCOME HOME in its own special way.

It’s far from a perfect city. It’s got its flaws. It’s got its disasters. But I think that after twenty five years away from it, thirteen of which were spent leaning what “winter” is really like, I will be glad to be back home.

October 2017: Astronomers in Hawaii discover an extrasolar object shortly after it’s slingshotted around the Sun. They name it ʻOumuamua, which roughly translates to “first distant messenger” or maybe “advance scout”.

June 2018: ʻOumuamua’s trajectory changed without any visible reason for it to do so. There’s probably a mundane explanation. It’s probably not a course adjustment on its way to the next destination. It’s probably not a deliberate wiggle to acknowledge that we were watching it and talking about it. There’s probably a perfectly fine reason for it being ten times shinier than the average comet, and there’s probably a perfectly sensible reason that its slow trajectory change was consistent with what a light sail would create rather than the abrupt change of a breakup or outgassing. There’s probably explanations for all the other interesting facts the chair of the Harvard astronomy department lists in this article, too. It’s probably not aliens.

January 2019: During a lunar eclipse, when humanity is paying a lot more attention to the moon than normal, something flashes on it near the middle of the eclipse. “Just a beachball-sized meteorite”, astronomers are currently saying. “Happens all the time, we just can’t see it when the sun’s on the moon.”

It’s probably just something mundane. Probably something boring. Probably not the work of an extrasolar probe that either knows it’s been seen, or doesn’t care if it is. It’s probably not something dropped on the moon by an alien probe.

Four days later, astronomers (again in Hawaii, with followup observations in London) notice a very low-mass object taking a highly erratic path around the earth outside the Moon’s orbit. Kinda like a trash bag blown in the wind. Looks really light for its size. It’s probably just a piece of junk that fell off of one of our satellites or something. Probably. It’s totally just a coincidence that the Popular Science article about this that I’m linking to compares it to the mechanics behind solar sails. It’s probably not some kind of exploration package ‘Oumuamua dropped off when it zoomed through the “Goldilocks zone” of our solar system. It’ll probably fall into our atmosphere and burn up, or get knocked out of anything resembling Earth orbit in a couple weeks.

Probably.

I’m probably just stoned and telling myself a story.

It sure works as the opening act of a first contact story, though. In the tiny possibility that it is one, I hope it’s more “The Day The Earth Stood Still” than “The War Against The Chtorr”.