Author Archives: Jeremiah Murphy

The Golden Rule

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I’m going to go on a rant here for a minute, so bear with me. I’m not a very good Christian, but I’ve been thinking lately about things like the audacity of Joel Osteen and of Donald Trump autographing Bibles, and I’ve been thinking about the things that Jesus has actually said, and it’s got me a little riled up. You see, I’ve had this pet peeve for a while, and it recently exploded out of me when I saw a preview for a Netflix movie called Good Sam, the “Sam” being short for “Samaritan.”  

Here’s the thing that really bugs me about that: The Parable of the Good Samaritan is not the story of one guy being nice to another guy in need because he’s nice. It’s the story of a rabbi and a Levite, both high-ranking figures in Jewish society, leaving a man to die on the side of the road because they didn’t want to get their hands dirty. It’s about how you will find more humanity in a filthy, despised foreigner than in the people who lead us. And it’s true today. Close your eyes, being completely honest with yourself, and ask, who is more likely to stop and help someone dying on the side of the road: Franklin Graham? The Koch Brothers? Or a maligned migrant worker on his way to his tiny home after twelve hours at an illegal, dangerous job? Think about it, and you know the answer. Not only would the poor man stop and help, but he’d take the person in need home to dinner too, even if it means he has to sacrifice his own meager portion to feed them. 

Jesus is telling us in that tale to be nice to people, yes, but he’s mostly telling us not to rely on those in power. Because here’s the thing that we, as Americans, always forget: Jesus wasn’t in power. He wasn’t mainstream like he is today. He wasn’t the establishment. Jesus fought the establishment tooth and nail. He mocked the establishment and made it look foolish. He chased the establishment around with a whip. He challenged the establishment so much that they nailed him to a piece of wood for it. Jesus wasn’t telling people which bathroom to use, he was getting in rich people’s faces and telling them that amassing wealth is a sin against their fellow man.  

The question you have to ask yourself is this: Which Jesus are you going to believe? The one whose words can be twisted to back up your preconceived prejudices and hate, or the rebellious badass who tore up the gospels and freaked out the elites? And while you’re thinking about that, ask yourself this: Which Jesus do we need more today? 

A Difference of Opinion

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I used to listen to a lot of movie podcasts, but I really stopped because most of them are just really negative. I had one that I had been holding onto because it had some positivity to it, but I think I’m going to dump this one too, after what just happened. 

They were talking about a movie from my childhood which I don’t remember as being particularly good, but still a lot of fun. They identified two plot holes that they kept bringing up snarkily as evidence that the movie was badly written. But I decided to rent the movie because I remember loving it as a kid, and I have a high tolerance for plot holes (it’s just a movie, it’s not worth getting that bent out of shape about). Those plot holes were addressed within the first twenty minutes of the movie. They weren’t plot holes, they were just bad viewing comprehension on the critics’ part. And more importantly, by viewing one of these as plot holes, they literally missed the entire point of the movie. 

This is such a thing among Internet critics, complaining about plot holes as a way of justifying their opinion. It’s okay to have an opinion, and it’s okay not to have a solid reason for it. I’m tired of being told not to like something (and that there’s something wrong with me for liking it), and I’m tired of the reasons I’m told not to like something being so spectacularly wrong.  

I wish that seeing a thumbnail for a YouTube video proclaiming the failure of a property I’m really into wasn’t something I took so personally, but at least I can take comfort in knowing that my reasons for liking what I like (i.e. it connects with me) are sound, and some troll can’t take that away.  

In Memoriam

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For the past four months, I’ve been wondering what I was going to do on April 30. It would have been my fourteenth wedding anniversary. I’m not being maudlin, I’m not obsessing, I don’t want Kate back—I’m very happy with the way things are going for me right now. But fourteen years is literally one-third of my life, and I can’t pretend it never happened.  

We made it work for about thirteen years, and then she quit. I understand why she wanted to split up, even if I may never forgive her for how she went about it. Being divorced at this juncture is one of the best things to happen to me, but there was a period of time where she was the best thing to happen to me.  

With her I’ve lived in all sorts of interesting places. I’ve seen the world, in South America, Europe, and the Middle East. I’ve become a career editor. I quit smoking and drinking. I got into and out of shape. When I was with her, I felt like I reached my potential, and that’s got to count for something. And now that I’ve reached my potential, I’m out on my own, in a dynamic city with a really amazing roommate, and that’s exciting. 

In a month and a half, I’ll be signing the papers that mark this phase of my life completely over. Am I over it? I’m not. I’ll think of something I want to share with her, and I can’t. Or I’ll think about one of the ways she’s treated me during the split or deceived me during our last months together, and I’ll get a cold pit in my stomach. Fourteen years is a long time, and as much as I want to forget it, I never will.  

I’m going to celebrate my fourteenth anniversary, but not the fifteenth. And in a few years, April 30 will be simply be the day before one of my dearest friends’ birthday. 

The Times, They Are a’Changeling

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I’m going to run something by you. I’m curious what you think. There is this person in your life, and we’re going to call them Morgan. You don’t know Morgan. You’ve never met Morgan. You’ve never seen Morgan before in your life. And yet one day you get out of bed, log into social media, and half of your friends are friends with them. I mean, not just casual friends, but posting on each other’s timelines, teasing each other, sharing in-jokes. Everyone talks to you about them like they’re your friend. All evidence points to them having gone to school with you, but you don’t remember ever seeing them at school. They even married one of your exes. Morgan seems to have lived a life parallel to yours, and yet you’ve never touched.  

What’s the more likely explanation: that the state where you went to school is pretty small and the friendships forged there are tight, and all Morgan had to do was get in the good graces of one to get into the good graces of all? Or that Morgan is some kind of fairy or demon, quietly skirting the corners of your life, causing general mischief? Or that they’re a god looking to live a real human life, and so they borrowed yours and vastly improved on it? 

Asking for a friend. 

Open to Interpretation

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I used to come to film adaptations of my preferred properties the way that Alan Moore did, skeptical and full of righteous fury. And the RED happened. RED is the Bruce Willis movie that came out a few years ago, and it was based on a three-issue comic book by my man, Warren Ellis. It was intense, violent, hardcore, and pretty damned serious. And then they made a movie out of it. Like the book, the movie was about an old CIA assassin, Retired Extremely Dangerous, whose main concern was getting his pension checks, and he was brought out of retirement by scores of CIA assassins. And subsequently, a whole bunch of faceless men die creatively. But the movie version added John Malkovich as a wacky fellow retiree, as well as Helen Mirren and Brian Cox as star-crossed Cold War lovers. It was laid back and goofy, in that “Aren’t old people just so cute” kind of way, and I was furious. How dare they take such a simple, serious premise and turn it into something so fluffy? I screamed, I shouted, and I put a pox on the studio’s houses for allowing this to happen.  

And then they made a sequel, which further enraged me. But right before it came out, Warren Ellis got on his blog and implored his fans to go see RED 2 because he bought his daughter a horse with the royalties from the first movie, and it was really expensive to feed. Suddenly it became crystal clear that he had made his book, and he did the Warren Ellisiest job he could with it, but it was out in the world. If someone else saw it and made a different interpretation, that was their business, as long as Warren Ellis got paid, which he did, handsomely. His reputation wasn’t ruined by this silliness, just like Alan Moore’s reputation wasn’t ruined by that not-very-good Watchmen adaptation a few years back, or by the prequels comics DC did a few years later. (It’s okay to get mad about how badly DC screwed over Alan Moore financially and legally, though, but getting worked up over Zack Snyder’s gratuitous slowmo and costume alterations kinds of misses the point.) Adaptations are going to happen, and they will, by necessity, make some changes. One day, if I ever get over my crippling exhaustion with the black hole of the publication/marketing process, they might want to do adaptations of my works, and they will be so very different. And if I don’t like the changes, I will just remember that it’s not my interpretation anymore, and I’m getting paid. Unless they whitewash or straightwash the characters. Then I will say something. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing what fellow creative minds might make out of my genius ideas. And perhaps I will buy a horse with the royalty check. I will name her Peanut Butter and she will eat apples and carrots. 

Infinity and Beyond

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Pretty much as long as I’ve known Marcelino Soliz, we’ve been talking about a comic we wanted to write together. It featured superpowers, badasses, gods, mutants, a world that had been conquered by an evil queen played by 1991-era Rebecca De Mornay, her rebellious daughter, and characters named after a really obscure eighties-nineties pop group. The concept evolved over the years, rebooted and restyled, each iteration being a little less embarrassing than the last, but it’s always kept the same title, Infinity. 

And yet neither of us actually sat down and wrote anything.  

Around 2000, we came up with what I consider to be the ultimate version of the story, and the most blasphemous, and the one most anchored to myths, heroes, and what I’d learned in college. I decided then that now was the time to actually write something. Sure we had no artist, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. Dividing my time between work, my social life, and a comic I was being paid to illustrate, I developed ten issues and extensive, detailed notes for future issues. And then I put it down. My printouts and my notebooks got thrown into a box and started collecting dust.  

Fifteen years later, I’ve written six novels, one of them completing an unfinished idea I’d been working on for over a decade. I can do this. So one day a couple of weeks ago, I took the two-hour train and Uber ride to the storage locker where my belongings have languished since The Great Upheaval of December 2018 and found everything I’d written, and this week, I’ve started adapting my comic book scripts into prose (which is not nearly as easy as you’d think). When I finally do get a job, I’m going to lose a lot of my momentum, but I’m confident that, with my newfound literary tenacity, it’s only a matter of months before this nearly thirty-year-old dreams becomes a reality (though not in the form we’d originally hoped for).  

Wish me luck. 

Enter Sandman

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Want to hear something that’s going to make some people absolutely hate me? I have full control over my sleep. I can stay up as late as I want (within reason), wake up as early as I want (though it might take one or two snooze buttons for me to roll out of bed), and—and this is the one that’s going to annoy people—go to sleep within ten minutes of closing my eyes in bed. The other night I went to bed an hour early because I wanted to wake up an hour earlier, and I was out like a light, even though I’d had two glasses of iced tea with dinner. Also, I can sleep through anything, which helps because my roommate comes home late from school and has dinner, and there’s only a curtain separating the kitchen from my pillows. 

This didn’t used to be this way. I used to toss and turn for hours and rise from bed like a rotting zombie, but I changed somehow, I don’t know how, and I do not, for one minute, take this skill for granted. 

Rush to Judgement

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So I was thinking about something I heard on the radio the other day. Someone said, “It doesn’t matter what you want to do—you can have sex with two people, you can tie each other up, you can pee on each other, you can stick it wherever it will go, it’s a-ok as long as you have consent.”  

And I thought, “Yes! That! Exactly! What you do naked should not be a crime, as long as there are no victims! There’s no wrong here, just what makes people happy. All you have to do is consent!” I could take a transcript of what that man said to all of my socially liberal friends, and they would all agree, 100 percent. 

The man who said it was Rush Limbaugh, and when he said that, his voice was so full of revulsion and contempt that it was practically a physical thing. He wasn’t affirming the concept of consent, he was condemning it. 

People ask me why I have zero hope for the two sides coming together to heal this rift in our nation, and this is the perfect reason. We are literally speaking the same language, but we’re not speaking the same language at all. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe there’s a solution, but I’m not seeing it at all. 

Funny You Should Mention

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For a little over a year, I’ve been lamenting the loss of my humor. One of the side effects of finding the calm and emotional stability that I needed to function in the everyday world seemed to be that I ceased to be funny. I used to make people laugh, it was one of my sources of pride. I was sorry to see it go, but I had come to accept that this was who I was now. It was one of these Doctor Who-style regenerations I’m always going off about during my birthday. People would hear tales of me telling a joke, and the person they’d be hearing about would be as foreign to them as the hard-drinking Jeremiah is to anybody who met me after 2007. 

And then an interesting thing started happening. People started laughing again. It started as I was living in my parents’ place, when I’d made jokes and they went over well with Mom and Dad, but also with the long-distance friendships I was rekindling, and later, with the new roommate/long-lost friend I’d found. It really hit home when I made a comment about the menu in the pizza place that got my roommate’s friend guffawing so loudly I thought we were going to get kicked out, that maybe my humor hadn’t died, it was just resting.  

Over the past two months and a week I’ve been learning to live a brand new life, but maybe it’s also giving me a chance to welcome an old one back too. 

Ringing in the New

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It’s hard to look back on 2018 without being blinded by that pretty momentous thing that happened at the end of the year that pretty much obscured everything else. I can say this about it though, on December 13, I had exactly one friend I thought I could count on, but in the following weeks, I had dozens. And not for nothing, I was able to reunite with my former best friend who I’d been forced to remove from my life when she and Kate became enemies. I have yet to get back on my feet, but the past two weeks have been relaxing and uplifting in a way that shouldn’t be the case for someone who went through what I went through. 

As for the rest of the year, I finished five novels, I did a thing on Amazon you’re about to find out about a little later, I spent Christmas with my parents for the first time since I was in college, I saw glaciers, I worked at a job that I actually kind of liked and really started to warm up to my coworkers, I had a conversation with my estranged sister. It’s a pretty short list because all I really did with my time in 2018 was go to work and write. And I was content doing just that. It was a quiet, productive life, and I really liked it. And I’d still be doing that today had circumstances not happened the way they had. 

2019 is going to be a really big year for me, and I thank you, with all of my heart, for being here as it happens.