In a dream this morning, Irene and I were working for the same company, though I had no idea what it was or what we did there. We were getting ready to leave for the day, but before we did, I had to find my jacket.

When I finally did, it was one of my leather ones, but sadly, it was covered with a white mold. I looked further and found a second one of my leather jackets, and that one was also covered with mold. As I began wiping away the mold, someone walked by out in the hallway, and I when I turned I was startled to see that it was John Verpoorten. He was hectoring some poor freelancer for being late with an assignment.

“But … he’s dead,” I said to Irene. (In the real world, John, who’d been the production manager at Marvel Comics, died in 1977.)

Irene explained to me that it had become the fashion nowadays for people to disguise themselves as John. Everybody was doing it. Only those of us who’d known John could see through the disguise.

The bogus John moved on, and Irene and I moved out into the hall. Paul Levitz was there, who in the real world I’ve known since the early ’70s, as this photo proves. This Paul was the Paul of today, though, and I suddenly realized that the office we were in belonged to DC Comics, and that I had just started working on staff there.

I asked Paul whether I’d now have to salute him, and jokingly raised my fingers to my forehead. (Paul had edited some of my comic-book stories when I freelanced for DC, but unlike Irene, I was never on staff, so this was the first time he’d officially be my boss.) He said that it wouldn’t be necessary.

And then I woke.

A drenching storm passed through here this afternoon, and once it had passed, Irene and I stepped outside to check whether any trees or large branches had come down, as sometimes happens when it gets wet and windy.

We didn’t get far, because here’s who we found no more than a dozen feet from our back deck.

Until I knelt to snap its picture, its neck protruded and all four feet were out, so I was obviously making it nervous, even though I tried to stay down at its level and made no threatening gestures. I retreated and watched from a distance until it was comfortable enough to start moving again.

This has been our best year ever for encountering turtles in the wild. (Well, not counting all those we came across in Tokyo’s ponds last year.) I think I’ve spotted at least six this summer, each at a different spot on our property or the adjacent road.

Since in my previous post I shared a photograph of the happy couple on our wedding day, I thought I should let the world see what 32 years has done to us.

Due to a dreaded deadline doom, we celebrated close to home in a subdued, though still joyous, way.

(Subdued compared to our celebration of the 25th anniversary, anyway, which began with a backyard party for 125 people and ended in the Galapagos Islands!)

We had dinner in Inwood at a local, non-chain, family restaurant, played 18 holes of miniature golf, and then wore ourselves out with several energetic rounds of air hockey, the last of which always leaves us laughing hysterically.

Then it was a night spent going through old photo albums, and remembering all the twists and turns, both good and bad, which brought us here, still smiling.

This photo, taken 32 years ago today, is what I see each time I open my wallet.

I look forward to seeing what our next 32 years together will bring!

I woke in the middle of the night from a dream in which I was one of four young boys in an urban environment helping someone move.

We were loading boxes into a moving van, and at one point the owner drove his car up a ramp at the rear and on into the van. When he came back outside and began folding up the ramp, it slipped, and ended up hitting him in the head multiple times. There was blood everywhere.

At this point, I suddenly realized, like one of those characters in novels who suddenly become aware that they’re in a novel, that I was one of the four kids from The Wire—only I had no idea which one I was.

I knew, though, that my odds of success in life or even of just survival weren’t very good, so I struggled to figure out my identity. Was I Michael, or Dukie, or … ?

Then I was awake. I was extremely unsettled, and it took me awhile to fall back to sleep, which is unusual for me.

The amazing Dial B for Blog has just posted an extensive tribute to Gaspar Saladino, the man responsible for some of the best logos, cover lettering, and advertising in comic books.

At DC Comics, he designed the logos for Swamp Thing, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and more, while over at Marvel he did the same for The Avengers, Captain America, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, and others.

Even those whose interests run more to science fiction than to comics might still be interested in what the site calls “The Gaspar SCI-FI Cloud,” which plucks distinctive lettering from a variety of science-fictional covers to form a tag cloud of sorts.

Click here to go to the first part of the 12-part series.

One night this week, I heard a neighbor setting off fireworks, and so I walked out into the darkness and down the road to peer into the valley to catch a free show. I watched until the mosquitoes wore me down, and then headed home, not using my flashlight, because I hoped to catch a glimpse of the glowworm which Irene and I had discovered a couple of summers back. We’d been amazed to finally see one in reality after knowing them only from a lifetime of hearing that song, and I hoped to duplicate the sight, but even though we’d caught glimpses of it multiple occasions that summer, we didn’t see it again last summer, and haven’t seen it so far this summer.

As I stepped off the road and onto our driveway, flashlight still off, I caught a glimpse something circular to one side, something which I at first interpreted as having to be a metallic object reflecting the lights from my house. But as I studied it, I realized that this was no reflection. Something was actually glowing!

I could make out a bright, ragged circle a foot in diameter, with other further random bits and pieces of glowing material heading off a dozen feet or so into the woods. The night was so dark that I couldn’t make out exactly what was glowing, so I turned on my flashlight. I was surprised to see that all that was present was wood. (more…)

Yesterday, while heading home from a visit to the New York offices of the SCI FI Channel at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, I happened to pass the International Center of Photography. I’d often walked by the building before, since my Dad used to work at McGraw-Hill, which was just a few blocks further up the Avenue of the Americas, but I’d never been moved to visit.

But this time, I noticed that one of the current exhibitions was Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan, and since Irene and I had visited Japan last year, I was intrigued. So I took a later train home than I might have and instead toured the museum.

There were many interesting images on display, but the ones that interested me the most were by Tomoko Sawada. Check out the photograph below, from her series “School Days.”

There’s something hypnotizing about the image, but until I read the descriptive materials, I didn’t realize what made the picture so unusual. This particular aspect of the photo was perhaps affecting on me on a subconscious level.

Can you—without rushing off to Google the answer—figure out what I’m talking about?

I dreamt this morning that I was in large room which resembled a convention dealers room, but wasn’t. It’s really just a hotel ballroom filled with many rectangular tables. The part of the the room in which I’m sitting is quiet, but about a quarter of the room is separated from me by a low wall, and it sounds rowdy over there. A wild and crazy party seems to be going on, with laughter, loud music, drinking, dancing, and even a few fist fights. (Because, after all, what really good party doesn’t have at least a couple of those?)

Suddenly, Edward James Olmos walks up to me—or should I say, Admiral William Adama, because he’s in full Battlestar Galactica garb. He tells me that he’s tired of his people making that ruckus. He tells me that I have to shut the party down. He tells me that I have to pull the plug.

I stand on a chair and look over that wall, and there indeed is the crew of Battlestar Galactica, not the actors, but the characters, in their appropriate costumes and uniforms, whooping it up. I obey Adama. I shout out an announcement.

“Until the crew learns to behave,” I say, “there will be no electricity until further notice.”

I step down off the chair and pull a plug from a socket in the wall, killing the power. Suddenly, all is silence. When I turn around, Adama is gone, and so I sit down behind a table, and return to reading the comic book I’d been engrossed in when he’d arrived. I look at the credits on the splash page, and discover that it was written by director Agnès Varda.

Which, once I wake, actually seems to me to be the strangest part of the dream. I’d kill to read a comic book by Agnès Varda!

As I’ve shared earlier, my high-school friend Donna Grant has managed to mold herself into a successful novelist, along with her friend and collaborator Virginia DeBerry.

The August 25th issue of Publishers Weekly stunned me today with news of just how successful she truly is by including details of the deal her agent just closed for the team:

At Touchstone, Sulay Hernandez secured world rights to a new novel by Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant, Uptown, with a six-figure offer to [agent Victoria] Sanders. This saga will explore New York City’s black aristocracy through the story of an institutionally and politically entrenched Harlem family whose interests in valuable real estate holdings provoke resentment and in-fighting. DeBerry and Grant, who switched to Touchstone for Gotta Keep On Tryin’, published earlier this year, have another novel, What Doesn’t Kill You, coming from the publisher in January 2009.

Congratulations, ladies!