Years ago, I was awash in gangsta rap and trying to impress people who didn’t like themselves, much less me. I was afforded a ton of opportunities, and I got to do a lot of things that I wonder now just what had to slide into place to get me those chances to do those things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One summer, I got to do a summer program, and I made a number of lifelong friends there. One changed my life in a small, but significant way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was well versed in indie comics, scouring a couple of indie comic book stores for titles that appealed to me. What I was unaware of at the time was the existence of zines, self-published tracts made by people with something, anything, to share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was in this summer program, and a young lady there shared hers with me, and I was taken aback. I don’t have it anymore, or at least I can’t find it, but I had worn it dog-eared from how many times I had read it. And it was just so new to me; she had writing and some drawings and was going through the usual teenage shit I was going through and lived in a completely different city and I was smitten. Smitten in the way that I felt this connection, I wanted to do the same thing and maybe someone else would find their same connection with my stuff that I did with hers. Also smitten in that she was short and had glasses, and I’ve always been a sucker for short women with glasses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So one day I’m bored and look up her name, and we have some mutual friends, oddly, and I’m wondering if I should reach out and tell her thank you, now that I’ve (finally) made a zine of my own. Would that be creepy? Would that be unwelcome? Should I let that sleeping dog lie?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Years ago, I was awash in gangsta rap and trying to impress people who didn’t like themselves, much less me. I was afforded a ton of opportunities, and I got to do a lot of things that I wonder now just what had to slide into place to get me those chances to do those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-original"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tallblackguy.com\/write\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tallblackguy.com\/write\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tallblackguy.com\/write\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tallblackguy.com\/write\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tallblackguy.com\/write\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.tallblackguy.com\/write\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":450,"href":"https:\/\/www.tallblackguy.com\/write\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448\/revisions\/450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tallblackguy.com\/write\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tallblackguy.com\/write\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tallblackguy.com\/write\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}