Seven years ago today, I was minding my own business when I found a Beak, and blah blah blah. If you don’t know this story by now, I’ve told a version of it almost every year since this site’s inception, and there are only so many ways to say, “There was just a Beak sitting there by itself.”

This year, though, I actually have some good news for the annual State of the Beak address. Not about the website, mind you; that’s still unknown and infrequently updated, and I’m honestly starting to like it that way. No, the good news is about, well, everything else. For example, though I may have given up on my New Year’s resolution to complete and sell a comic book, I have managed to design a couple shirts, and to sell a few dozen of them for a small profit. It’s not enough to make a proper living or anything, but it is proof of concept — I could scale this up and turn it into a sonofabitchin’ business. I now spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about wholesalers and invoices and all the things that people much more important than me think about. I might even turn out to be good at this.

On top of that, I’ve been repainting (and thoroughly renovating parts of) my apartment, learning to prepare and roll clove cigarettes at home, and printing up a special order of shirts for International Blasphemy Day, which you can see to the right of this text.

That’s all been within the last couple of weeks. And yesterday I replaced the DVD drive in my computer.

Oh, and the fucking G20 Summit is happening in Pittsburgh (you know, where I live) right fucking now. Protesters were stomping through my neighborhood last night and applying seriously flawed methods to an otherwise good cause, which is my polite way of saying some windows got broken. I should head down there and make sure the dinosaur is okay.

In short, I have been busy doing things I didn’t plan for, even as interesting times unfold right outside my window. Also there is a dinosaur. That, my friends, is exactly the sort of life I’ve been trying to encourage (and achieve). I set aside this one day every year to reflect on how I’ve been doing — perhaps a bad idea in the current, genuinely scary political climate. But the horrors of modern life will still be there tomorrow, and I’ll still be outraged. Glenn Beck will still be lying, Congress will still be spineless, and all your favorite things will still suck.

I’ve got mere months left before I leave Pittsburgh, and for once I can say with absolute confidence that the state of the Beak is strong.