August 25, 2004
Deena is living at home until she gets through her training for Vanguard and it’s nice to talk to her in the morning and “solve life.” Today, over cereal, we talked about buyer’s remorse (she just bought a car) and one of the most important issues she will face, namely, Road Trips and how to judge a potential lifetime mate while on one. For one thing, you can’t marry anyone until you go on a roadtrip and discover how well you get along in a small space. If you can’t get along on a 200 mile trip, it’s not likely you’ll survive marriage. On a road trip it’s very easy to spot the little irritations (turn down the radio, I hate that kind of music!) you might miss and that will inevitably evolve into bigger problems (I’m not going to your parent’s this Christmas. I hate them!) and even life threatening issues (I really don’t like Mexican food, let’s just eat at Sonic.) Can you imagine being locked in a lifetime of that kind of crap? I can’t either.

Worked on sketches for Curly Bill getting soused in the Alhambra (Curly, not me). Good lighting effects. Mare Rosenbaum, our old editor, showed up at 5:30. Robert Ray and I were still in the office and we all had a good talk. She is back from Brazil, speaks passable Portuguese (like I would know) and her family is back in Philadelphia. She came out to get their Carefree condo ready to rent and just dropped in. Good to see her. We talked about the wild times in the beginning when things seemed a tad tentative if you know what I mean, and if you’ve read the business timeline, you know exactly what I mean.

Mare asked me about the status of the business and I said, “Well, we are still here. We’re coming up on our fifth anniversary.” She commented that is some sort of benchmark of solvency, but I had to say, “I don’t think there’s any such thing. There’s always a new crisis, bigger than the one you thought you just solved. Or, as Henry Kissinger put it, “All success does is give you admission to a bigger problem.” You’re either going forwards or backwards, and thanks to a number of people, Mare included, we are going forward.

“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”
—Niels Bohrs