April 20th, 2009: "An Important Contrast"

[Citi]

Hey gang. As you can see, Jason did an amazing job with the old Kandijar Hotel. It's an important contrast to the shape of the hotel in the "present" part of the storyline. As you may recall in "A Tale of Two Najeh's", the hotel in it's current form, looks pretty cheesy by comparison. Also, I do know that in the image the hotel is on the right, but from my perspective, the way I scripted it the truck Artur is in is coming up a road on the right of the hotel; and is therefore on Artur and the truck's left. I probably didn't get that entirely across to Jason in the script. My bad.

While I was in San Diego I ran into a gentleman here on an asylum application from Iraq. He's a christian, apparently they aren't fond of Christians there or something. Anyway, he was checking out my comic and pointed out, rightly that Kandijar is not in Iraq; is in fact in Afghanistan. I knew this. I told him, as I will tell you, that when discussing the Gulf War in conjunction with today's "War on whatever we're calling it this week" in the context of the Remedy storyline I didn't want the combat in Afghanistan to go unacknowledged. The way I have drafted the tale, even with my subtle and not so subtle morality subtext, the war in Afghanistan is of no relevance. Combat operations in Iraq, both past and present are what affect Artur and this storyline. Still I felt it would have been an injustice to ignore Afghanistan altogether.

And besides, people name hotels and restaurants after other, seemingly more exotic places all the time. Why right down the street from me there is a "Texas Roadhouse" restaurant (of which I saw none in Texas but several throughout other area's of the country; I'm not sure if that makes sense or not though) and a Gotham City dance club. So it's not completely out of the realm of possibility that there might be a Hotel Kandijar in Iraq. Right?

So I'm back in Connecticut. I don't have the energy to talk about my trip back just yet. 3000 miles in less than three days; I've been back since Thursday morning and I'm still whipped. I am going to post another blog in a day or two with a new map showing the whole trip and some more pictures and movies. I will say this much though, the trip back was pretty much uneventful; which was just fine with me.

My cat seems mildly interested to see me. He'd never let on if he was happy. That's just too much of a commitment. My sister has taken to letting him go outside and yesterday (which was one of those rare, incredible New England weather days where it was sunny and warm with a nice breeze so it never got too warm; a day that comes maybe nine or ten times a year and serves really for just tricking you into thinking it might be ok to live here all year round; it is not) he headed into the woods which are still completely free of green due to the incredibly long and brutal winter this year and could be seen sunning himself on a boulder the size of a dump truck. How he trucked his fat ass up there I don't know but he looked like a gray Lion King; a fat, gray Lion King.

As for news of the world or what's going on in entertainment; I've got nothing. I've been out of the loop all week and haven't really had a chance to catch up. Hopefully my next blog will have a bit more meat and a bit less of the blah blah blah.

Thanks for stopping by. More soon.