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A new year showed up this morning like a clean sheet of paper. No eraser marks. No excuses scribbled in the margins. Just space. So here it is, plain and honest. This year, I resolve to stay smoke free. Not because it sounds noble. Not because it looks good written down. But because every smoke-free day has quietly proven it’s possible. One day stacks on another, and before you know it, the habit starts to feel like an old story I don’t need to reread. The second resolution is just as important. I resolve to take good care of Whiskey...

This cat is ridiculous. In the best way possible. For starters, she’s a rescue cat, but still a kitten. Most rescue cats arrive like they’ve already seen things. Full grown. World weary. Maybe carrying a tiny bindle of regrets. Not Whiskey. When we got her, she was just a little thing. She's so young, she could be Jeffrey Epstein’s cat. Then there are her emotional negotiations. Her pleas for love are fickle, dramatic, and subject to change without notice. Last night she was laying perfectly still in my bed, looking innocent, angelic even. Then I heard it. Achoo! I said...

Most of my long-range goals are finally pinned to the corkboard of the future. Book events mapped out. 2026 looking busy. It starts with a new gallery in Whittier this January and stretches all the way to Vroman’s, the oldest independent bookstore in California, sometime next summer. On paper, it looks respectable. Organized. Almost professional. And yet, one familiar ghost slipped past me again. Comic-Con. San Diego. The big one. They haven’t accepted my work for the last three years. Ironically, they did accept me the first time I applied four years ago. Same artist, same brain, same hands. Different...

Today I went to the clinic, and it turned out to be an easier day not to smoke. Mostly because I wasn’t exposed to it. In California, the laws around smoking keep tightening, and honestly, that helps. Fewer people smoking around me means fewer moments where my brain starts whispering bad ideas. Sometimes the best willpower is simply not having to fight at all. But what I really want to write about today is responsibility. Specifically, the strange, sneaky, heart-tugging responsibility of raising a kitten. Most cats, I’m told, wake their humans by meowing relentlessly until food appears, as if...

I want to clear something up, mostly for myself. When I say my goal is to be smoke-free through April, I’m not secretly planning some cigarette-shaped celebration at the end of it. I’m not saying, “Hang on until April and then light up.” What I’m saying is simpler and more honest: the book fair in April is my next landmark, and I want to arrive there still not smoking. That matters. One of the most useful things I learned in the group at the Anaheim hospital was this idea of not collapsing everything into a single moment of failure. Quitting...