Summer 1992

During the summer, I drew a comic strip called "Life With Zara." I got the idea when I found my 7th grade comic strip. I started "Zara" on June 3 and stopped it on September 4, since with school I would no longer have time for it. The characters were me, Cleopatra and Zara. Cleo's appearance was based on an ancient relief. Zara was Moroccan because I found a story about the djinn in a children’s anthology called Magic in the Air. I could just draw the clothes in the pictures.

The story was called "Mischief in Fez," and had many details about the djinn myths, which I incorporated into "Zara." For examples, the djinn make a "whirring and humming," and jackals love the taste of djinn flesh. Zara's features were adapted from a picture of a servant girl in the story, and her name came from another servant. Somehow, I figured her eyes should be huge; maybe the djinns in the story had huge eyes. Her clothes came from a picture of a wealthy woman. Her water jar came from page 249 of the book. Since I didn't have a picture of a Moroccan bottle, I used the water jar instead. I also drew a picture of the inside of Zara's jar, with its torch, a table, and a bed.

I even incorporated a dream I had my senior year of high school about going back to meet the teenaged Shakespeare. In the dream, I also met a blonde girl who was a time-traveler. In "Zara," there are also several allusions to the works of Jane Austen. In the 7/29 strip, Zara shapeshifts into a fennec, which was drawn from a "Mischief" picture. One hairstyle was taken from The Brass Bottle, a 1964 comedy movie I had seen about a genie in modern times. Burl Ives was the genie Fakrash, and Tony Randall was the master. Ironically, Barbara Eden was Randall's human fiancée. Fakrash's brunette daughter wore her hair the same way I did in the 8/1 strip.

The very last panel was an obvious take on the I Dream of Jeannie opening credits, with the cartoon of Jeannie and her bottle. In 1995 or 1996, I drew a picture titled "An Afternoon with Zara and Cleo." Zara's dress came from Eugéne Delacroix’s Women of Algiers.

My Utmost for His Highest seemed to have a relevant message for whatever I was going through when I was going through it, even though I read it twice over two years with totally different problems. I told Pearl about this, and she said others said the same thing about it.

As a child of maybe two years when Queen released "Bohemian Rhapsody," I had never heard the song before. In the summer of 1992, the movie Wayne’s World brought it back onto the radio. It became one of the most popular songs of the year, since it was timeless.

I had always been into rock. I listened to Christian rock and metal in high school, and in 1990 or 1991, started listening to secular rock as well. But now, dance music took hold of my imagination, especially the long, techno mixes which B96 (Chicago) played late at night. They seemed to go on for at least 15 minutes at a time. Techno took me to a special place in my mind, away from the problems of the world to my very soul. It was a place of happiness, dancing, outer space, inner space, and no limits. Music, for me, has never been just about the beat. That's why I can listen to both Static-X and Enya.

This may have been the year that brats suddenly appeared at our family reunion (July 4, Three Rivers, Michigan). Brats? In Michigan? Now that I'd been in Wisconsin, Wisconsin culture seemed to be popping up everywhere.

I re-read Jane Austen's Persuasion in July. A couple loved each other, then broke up, then met again years later--and could not be civil to each other. (I won't give away the ending.) It was so detailed and emotionally true that it must have been based on real events. In the late 90s, I read in Jane Austen: A Life (David Nokes) that she had indeed experienced a similar event. Unfortunately, her boyfriend never came back. He had been persuaded to stop courting her because of their social stations, just as in the novel. This was the last novel Austen wrote. Writing it seems to have put her in mental anguish, since she had never quite gotten over the breakup.

"I just heard a squealing cat outside. Catfight! Catfight! It got Hazel to sit up and take notice. She has a new friend now, so I wonder if it was involved. It's an orange one that comes up to the master bedroom window while Hazel's in the house. A friendly white one lives across the street, but Hazel doesn't seem to like her. Maybe she's related to the orange one. So I guess we can now talk about 'Hazel's little friends.'...

"Local news has been so interesting lately. The usual murders and shootings, of course, which, unlike in S--, happen every once in a while; but what really trips me out is the controversy over train whistles. Letters have been in the [South Bend Tribune's] Voice of the People ever since about the time I came home, saying, 'I live by the tracks and can't get any sleep at night,' 'Why don't you move away from the tracks,' 'The engineers are whistle-happy,' and 'The engineers are most certainly not whistle-happy.' Some people were going to throw water balloons at the trains, but they decided to restrain such behavior, and throw water balloons at the caricature of a train instead.'" Fond du Lac went through this debate seven years later.

I started the novel Peter Pan on August 3, and finished it in the wee hours of August 6. Somehow, the new song "MidLife Crisis" by Faith No More seemed to fit. Both are dark, though Peter Pan is more depressing. Peter Pan--that beloved children's story--is depressing, you ask? Yes, I say. It's filled with fighting, death, betrayals, and children growing up to forget that Neverland was real and that they had actually lived in it. Yet I loved it. Though when I read the play in 1994 it seemed meant for children (especially when the audience was told to clap to bring a fairy back to life), the novel seemed to be written for adults. I'd heard that the play was for adults, and that its message was, "You can never be a child again." Yet if anything had this message, the novel did.