Sycamore Press April 2025: Back to Basics

In keeping with last year, this is coming out about a week later than I’d hoped. Unlike that time, I mostly owe the delay to, uh, being depressed rather than being on a fun trip. That’s not to say that I haven’t gone on fun trips since we last chatted though! Quite the contrary, in fact. I can’t wait to catch you up on what I’ve been up to lately. Let’s get into it.

“I got so tired of discussing my future
I started avoiding the people I love”

—Jeff Rosenstock, “Nausea”

(Whoa! Kind of a bummer quote this time. Is everything OK? Is there anything else we should be getting into right now?)

General Life Updates

The month started off with a real spectacle in the form of By Storm’s first show ever under that name. The venue was super intimate, which was a real treat considering the crowds the duo drew while still touring as Injury Reserve. This felt like we were just going to see a local act perform (which I suppose we were). Nathaniel Ritchie and Parker Corey were on the same level as our swarming semicircle of bodies, only separated by a little booth.

The sound, on the other hand, was huge. It was a very resonant and even spiritual experience — sometimes triumphant, sometimes somber, and often just plain fun. Tracks from By The Time I Get to Phoenix performed along with a healthy dose of new material ranging including both the latest singles and some unreleased material (some of which seemed like it was being workshopped a little bit in this live setting). All of it was amazing. And I got a tee shirt.

On a very different note, I also had my first Renaissance Fair experience. I was on the fence about going, but I ended up having an absolute blast. Just seeing all the amazing cosplay and historical + fantasy dress was worth the price of admission. And screaming and barking from the crowd while the jousters shirk the stated rules of the competition, WWE style, and start having it out with their swords? Priceless.

Later on, a trip to Tucson made for a nice reset. I was particularly fond of the lengths the city goes to in controlling light pollution. I guess I just liked that they believe in something so much. There was an vibrancy there — some of it tacky tourist fare, but a lot of genuine local color too. I think it’s especially easy for cities these days to lose their sense of place. Tucson seems to be holding onto some worthwhile things. I also encountered a lot of bovine imagery on that trip, which I decided I’d use as a kind of visual throughline for this e-mail, ha.

Oh, and the place where we stayed the night had a really nice kettle. It makes the world’s most pleasant ding! and helped me get my hot water fix. (I told you I’ve been drinking a lot of hot water lately, right?) Also, there was a market that stocked some really good canned fish and fancy salt and sherry and other snobby stuff I like!

Stuff I’ve Been Reading/Listening To/Generally Into This Month

• 🎵 💿 Judee Sill’s self-titled 1971 record, especially the standout track “Jesus Was a Cross Maker.” I love the idea of calling the guy who you’re sort of telling off a “bandit.”

• 🎵 💿 Early in the month, I had a huge bout of listening to Television’s 1977 masterpiece Marquee Moon. I love it even more now than I did in high school, but my favorite tracks are mostly the same. Besides the title track, I had “Venus” (I love the way they say, “huh??”) and “Elevation” on repeat.

• 🎵 💿 Some other songs that were in heavy rotation at one point or another are “Sound Check” by billy woods & Kenny Segal (I love a Quelle Chris feature), “jesus extract” by Sleepytime Trio, and “Good to Go” by Elliott Smith.

• 📚 Finally finished Crime and Punishment. It was, unsurprisingly, an amazing read and fit with the delirious and deranged state I have been finding myself in lately.

• 📚 Read Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science by Terrence Keel. This was an enlightening read and especially interesting as an evolutionary biologist. Keel argues that the idea of grouping humans into supposedly distinct racial categories arose from a distinctly Christian intellectual history whose core elements have endured at least in part through the of the eugenics era and all the way into the modern-day study of genetics and human origins.
  
  You can tell that this was written for an academic audience, but it was still easy enough for me to follow despite being from outside Dr. Keel’s field. Not too long, either.

• 📚 Just started Ulysses at the very beginning of April! It’s already a much easier read this time around compared to my half-hearted attempt back in high school. Having read Dubliners and (especially) Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man has helped considerably, I think.

• 🎥 Watched The Substance (2024). I’m late to this one (as with all film ever), but ohhhhmigod it was SO fun! Some really poignant moments as well. It doesn’t require a lot of work on the viewer’s end to grasp what the movie is about (thematically speaking). That would defeat the whole point. You might need a strong stomach though: The Substance proceeds to wallop you relentless with its point while carrying it out to its logical, bloody conclusion in truly extreme fashion. A riot of laughs and horrified gasps for the whole family.

• 🪡 I’m scheming about getting into sewing things by hand. As if I needed more hobbies!

• 📔 Stationery freak that I am, it may be surprising that I wasn’t doing more of this to begin with, but journaling has been a great comfort to me lately (and a helpful resource in support of, among other things, my overall OCD treatment plan). I have a lot of journals and notebooks, but I haven’t always taken the time to write out and reflect on my uncensored thoughts and feelings. Certainly not to the point of making a habit of it, until now. It’s another great screen-free activity too. And I can doodle in there!

Webcomic & Blog Updates

Hey, here’s a webcomic for you:

This was another big part of the delay this time around. It’s kind of funny that it took so long, given how simple the premise of the strip is. I didn’t even draw a second character!

The composition feels a little off in this one too. That’s probably because I scrapped a lot of background detail late in the process since it didn’t contain any visual gags or real narrative relevance and ended up being mostly obscured by text anyway (to the point that it was hard to discern what the setting was even supposed to be). I guess this is all a side effect of me not giving myself a lot of colors or pixels to work with.

On a related note, I decided to collapse all future writings on the site into one all-encompassing hub of blog posts rather than discrete themes or series. Feeling less beholden to a particular format or standard of quality will help me post more, I hope. I think it will also help my better evaluate the newsletter’s proper place in the Sycamore Expanded Cyberverse so that it doesn’t become too stressful for me and generally stays fun and fresh.

Don’t worry. There’s no risk of the newsletter going away or anything. There just might be a few changes to the format and release schedule. One thing I’ve been thinking of doing is naming these by issue number instead of by month. The month labels make me feel bad about being late, but an issue number would make me feel proud, like, “damn! I’ve done 17 of these??”

Wrapping Up

This year has been more difficult than I could have ever imagined. I’m sorry if I’ve been meaning to write you individually but haven’t. I really want to feel connected. In fact, it’s kind of what I want the most. It’s no fun being avoidant like this. Journaling has helped a lot for managing this on a day-to-day basis, as I detailed above.

One kind of remarkable thing is that, in those moments when the haze does clear for a moment, I realize that I have been taking some pretty huge steps in various areas of my personal life. I’ve also been accomplishing a good deal at work. And I guess I should feel all the more proud of myself that I have done so much while carrying this deep hurt.

As much of a bummer as all that sounds, I think you’re gonna see me blooming in a big way over the next year or so.

Thoughts on any of this? Stories and updates from your own experience of the past four-ish weeks? Requests for tax filing advice? Only about a week left — don’t forget! Anyway, send all that stuff my way at asksycamore [at] mailbox [dot] org, why dontcha. Or just give me a call sometime. I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time! I love you! Thanks for being a fan!

Dutifully yours,

———————————————— N.