Friends

I'm too quick to say I have no friends. I just have very few in NYC. But I just woke from a dream this morning where one of my best friends (and fellow TenTon founder) Scott St. Pierre and I fought drunken karaoke wrestling frat boys, and that's not even a little odd. His wife and little boy are back up in Massachusetts as they try to sell their house in NJ that I never had the chance to visit unfortunately.

Also in Massachusetts is my hetero-lifemate Boston Scott, the only individual I've ever given a nickname that stuck. We'll be working film projects come next month and I can't wait to see him in person again as it's been way too long. But we've called each other every few days, every other week, just to make sure we're both alive and kicking, the passion to create still burning in us both as we survived massive turmoil over the past year or more.

Back on the TenTon side of things, I've downloaded an app that makes it so I can post right to our forum so I can talk to those boys once again. I found out Phil and his wife out in Arizona had their baby boy Phinneas, saw Jason Masters in South Africa's new work for Wildstorm, my man-crush Chris Burnham in Chicago's new work on Officer Downe and Coheed & Cambria's comic series, touched base with Jason Baroody and Jong Kim in NJ who I need to see soon, and the rest of the gang there.

I need to get out to NJ to see a friend who I can't talk much about here in detail, but haven't seen in years, and was at one time him and his brothers were closer to me than my own family. It's a shame that it's a state so close yet without a car so difficult to get out to, and to make excuses, my life has just been such a mess for so long that I couldn't get it together enough to see anyone outside of NYC.

I also just got a script for a new Army comic script for IDW from my friend Jose Torres who reinvented himself as an Army Ranger, now married and with a child on the way down in Maryland. I miss seeing him and watching crazy movies and talking comics, but I know he's finally living a life of adventure like he always wanted.

Also down in Maryland is a friend of mine Michele Satory who I've reconnected with via Facebook who I haven't seen in 20 years. I had known her before I knew anyone that I still talk to these days, even casually, from Long Island. Seems we both went the route of bad relationship and starting over after our 20's.

Over on Long Island, my friend Gary Foster and Mike D'Amato are both living out there, still playing music, rocking out the suburban life I left behind. I've been a tad nostalgic for the old days where things were easier, going to diners, roleplaying in basements, driving aimlessly around the neighborhoods blasting metal from the cassette deck. The old crew is long overdue for a reunion.

Which brings me to the friends I do have here. Tim Mucci still lives in Park Slope, and now I live closer than ever in Sunset Park. We're about to re-launch the comic/writing podcast we started last year and it's just crazy thinking about how far we've taken that, and how engrossed in the world of comics we've become since then.

I'll probably swing by Bergen Street Comics tonight as they're having a block party, so perhaps I'll see some of the comic aquaintances I've met while hanging out with Reilly Brown. I can't say enough about Riles, except that he has proven himself to be the best friend I always wanted, there for me time and time again. Our comic is coming together splendidly, and I wouldn't be so confident and with it without his help and support.

Hopefully as the comic takes off I can finally put together the literary zine that Ben Hosley and I have been planning since we met at the New School years ago. He's got a job in the West Village now so I imagine we'll be hanging out more once we both get settled. We bond over the desire to write something real, struggling with our inner demons and dissatisfaction at the writing in the world today, hungry for something real.

Back to comics, the only person who was my real friend through my twenties while I rotted on Long Island was Chris Chua, who I developed a graphic novel with. Over years we put together an epic 200 page comic which we self-published as first a 48 page preview, then a digest 64 page preview edition, which we gave out to every working comics professional we could find. Things got strained, or weird, and I was a mess who needed to change his life drastically from the stability of suburbia to the madness of the big City. Things haven't been the same between us for years but I hope that I can fight through the awkwardness to make things right.

There's too many friendships that I've had end because people grow apart or there's something unsaid, too much time passed to know what to even say to one another. I don't want that to be the way it is, but it's hard to fight that weirdness. I hope by putting this out there in the world I can take one big step towards bridging that gap between being friends from before and being friends now. I miss you all.