Greetings and Happy New Year! My descriptions this week are going to be relatively brief, compared to certain other weeks.  In my other life I’m a literature professor, and I have a big deadline coming up at the end of the month; so I’m going to keep the drawings coming, but I don’t have quite as much time as usual for describing the settings in which I have encountered the characters that you will encounter on this website.

Today’s drawing depicts a man I saw standing in front of a duplex in West Oakland. I you live in the Bay Area, you may remember that last weekend we had a couple of days of spring-like weather. This was accompanied by a frenzied rush on the part of a number of men to take off jackets and shirts and stroll, stand, or lounge shirtless. On front porches, on basketball courts, on street corners, and in front of convenience stores I spotted shirtless men sunning themselves and enjoying the closest we’d had to summer in a few weeks.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s drawing, which does not depict a shirtless man but does capture someone I encountered over the past weekend.

Ajuan Mance