I used to go to Bob’s Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I’d have a milk shake and sit and think. There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.—David Lynch, Catching The Big Fish

What is a vacation and why do we go on one?

Last week I was sitting by myself in an IHOP in Cambridge, MA, eating a $5 breakfast special. Here I was, on vacation in a great big city, on a beautiful college campus, with tons of exotic sights to see…and all I wanted to do was sit in this mundane little restaurant and drink coffee and think and doodle in my sketchbook.

Idling without guilt.

It was delicious.

In the early 1890s, GK Chesterton wrote that there were 3 types of leisure:

The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being allowed to do anything. And the third (and perhaps most rare and precious) is being allowed to do nothing.

This weekend, I encourage you to not feel pressured to fill your holiday with activities. Go someplace mundane where the coffee flows and let your mind wander. Savor it.

Meet me at the back-shack, baby
You’ll bring your little ukelele
Oh take up reel! make it all right
Let’s make a song on the 8-track tonight

- Mirah & Ginger - “Oh! September”

[audio:http://www.kpunk.com/media/audio/mirahginger_ohseptember.mp3] [MP3]

“pack up the patch cords…”

vacation is over. this is a comic i drew on the 11 hour drive back home. now we have nice tans and clear heads to tackle the second half of the year, which is bound to be insane…

the only bad thing to happen on vacation: my powerbook crashed (!!) and now i’m worried, worried, worried that i’ve lost all my photos/music from the past two or three years… (the book, however, is safe on a flash drive.) so learn a lesson and back up your hard drives, youngsters!

“…he seemed to have lost the ability not only to see color, but to imagine or remember it, even to dream of it. Nevertheless, like an amnesiac, he in some way remained conscious of having lost color, after a lifetime of chromatic vision, and complained of his world feeling impoverished, grotesque, abnormal — his art, his food, even his wife looked ‘leaden’ to him.”

- Oliver Sacks, The Island Of The Colorblind

Greetings from South Carolina. The past few days I’ve done nothing but swim, tan, play the ukulele, walk the beach, eat and read. I’m in paradise.

I foolishly thought I’d be able to leave the book behind, but I forgot how the ocean waves have a way of clearing your mind of junk and leaving it free to do the good thinking. So, I’ve resumed working in my sketchbook. This afternoon I drew a boy battling the waves with his raft. It was perfect.

Other highlights: last night Meghan made her famous shrimp boil, and this morning I finished Elmore Leonard’s spectacular GET SHORTY.

It’s supposed to be 90 degrees up in Cleveland…hope everyone’s staying cool.