My parents’ three mistakes goofin’ around downtown
Before I get into this post about my trip, I want to say that if you ordered a book in the last two weeks, thank you! and they are going out tomorrow. If you emailed me about a missing order or a mistake, please be patient as I try to track them down and respond to emails. If you need to contact me about an order, please email juliajwertz@gmail.com. Pretty please do not facebook message me. If you emailed me recently and I do not respond by Monday, feel free to email me again as I’m sure a few emails got lost in the shuffle. Okay, enough of this, here’s a post totally unrelated to comics or books or shows or any of that racket:
Disclaimer: I’m going to start posting more often about travels and urban exploring adventures I did over the summer since it was the first time I’d taken a break from comics in many years. I normally refrain from posting about trips on account of who fucking cares, but if I’m not making comics about something, I want to document it in another way for future reference. So consider this an extremely abridged and trivial version of a comic.
I usually visit my family during the fall in order to avoid the existential dreads that arise from going home for the holidays, and this year I went in October to accompany my older brother on a road trip down the coast and into Arizona. I prefer red eye flights to cut down on airport kerfuffles and crowds, but when leaving NYC I try to take morning flights just so I can see this:
I grew up in Northern California in the foothills of a valley on the last street on the edge of town in a 120 year old farmhouse that my parents bought for about 20k before living out in the boonies was considered a desirable thing. (now the houses around us go for upwards to a million or more) Here’s the street as it is today…
and the house as it was in the 80′s.It hasn’t changed at all in the last 30 years. I took a lot of interior photos to compare to drawings in The Infinite Wait, but I’m going to save that for another post.
You can’t really see it, but this banner downtown is a warning about the glassywinged sharpshooter, which is a big problem in town. Also a specific moth that’s reeking havoc and, as the second photo billboard shows, bug smuggling. It’s a small town.
On Thursday, my little brother and I drove to San Francisco for my book release party at Needles & Pens, but first we stopped off in the Presidio to do some tomfoolery. Jonathan was much better at it than I on account of his youth, so I’m only posting photos of him.
Then we headed on down to the Sutro Bath ruins, one of my favorite parts of the city.
I crept really close to an egret and snapped this photo and blew my own mind:
This is what the Sutro Baths looked like in 1896:
and here’s what it looks like today. (Note the same rock out in the ocean on the first photo)
Below the cave you’re allowed to go in is a little passage to the other side of the mountain. You have to trespass at low tide to get in and it’s full of barnacles and sea anemones, so if you do it, tread lightly. Also be warned that you’ll get a filth on your hands that you can’t wash off no matter how hard you scrub, so don’t touch the walls unless that’s something you want to marvel at for days like I did.
The book party at Needles & Pens was packed, thanks so much to everyone who came out for it! Sorry we ran out of books so fast. You can order one from me or Secret Acres if you want, or go back to Needles & Pens later when they have more. Here’s the audience and me reading with Marinaomi and Tessa Brunton.
On the way home, we picked up the older Wertz brother from the Oakland airport. I wrote it that way because later on the trip we saw this sign and it was weird:
speaking of brothers, here’s some obnoxious photos of the three of us goofin’ around, either to my mom’s delight or horror, not sure which.
My older brother and I took a walk down the street to find our old creek fort behind the berry bushes, which was now grown in, save a few remnants of the rope swing and some boards from the two story tree fort.
Back in the day, we’d bent/tied the branches to build a tunnel to a little fort inside the berry bushes, creating a leafy, thorny passage way accessible only by small children, where the Playboys and cigarettes were stashed.
Here’s the tar tunnel under the street we played in…
and the old bridge in our backyard that has long since falled into the creek.
My brother took this photo and captioned it: “I caught it and tried to sell it to an exotic pet shop but they said there wasn’t much demand for these because of all the snacks you have to constantly feed them.”
It turned out that our stroll down memory lane resulted in me getting stung by a hornet and Josh stepping in poo. But to my brother’s credit, when the hornet was inside his shirt, he chose to alert me by song instead of screams, so that was delightful. 
The next day we met up with our old man at the diner we used to go to every Sunday before church as kids. These days, he’s really into “eating diatomaceous earth, food grade, not swimming pool grade,” which is a pretty interesting and horrifying way to get rid of bugs. It’s worth looking into if that’s your concern. Seems like they should use that to get rid of the glassywinged sharpshooter.
The diner hasn’t changed much, except for the removal of the booths and a paint job. This the counter where I would go sit and pester Ned, the short order cook who would sneak me hot chocolate and donuts.
We tried to get dad to take photos of us on my iphone, which led to a series of “laughing at dad being old” photos, a joke he’s totally in on.
My dad lives here in Arizona but he was in town fixing up an old boat out in the marina.
Despite being around two of the most foodie capitals in the world, we kept eating at the taco truck by the junkyard because it was fucking delicious. My brother and I share the same sentiment about food while traveling, which is that neither of us care and it takes up too much adventure time to sit down to a long meal. We street trucked our way through Paris last year too.
Then we sat around making some serious faces because Josh just got instagram.
Here’s some shit for ya: this is the church I went to for 15 years, where my dad was a reverend when I was little. So, yeah, religion was a thing we were all into for quite some time. Weird, I know.
This is window of my childhood bedroom and the sealed up door I was obsessed with on account of knowing it was magic.
Aaaaaaand here’s us playing scrabble on various nights. My ma was surprisingly horrible at it and Josh was upset that two of his tiles were grapes and he couldn’t play the word “fonky” despite saying it repeatedly. There was 100% more yelling and laughing than should ever occur during such a mild mannered game.
And that’s it for now. Up next- the road trip from San Francisco down to LA and across to Arizona.