End-of-the-World Announcement

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Next month, Kate and I are leaving the country. Specifically, we are moving to Doha, Qatar. I have been struggling in vain this week to compose an entry full of flowery, rambling prose to describe how I feel about this, but words fail me. 

I am beyond excited; I live for adventure, and you cannot tell me this isn’t an adventure. 

I am beyond scared; I’ve never left the mainland US before. What kind of foreign-culture-language-shock is waiting for me in the Persian Gulf? 

And I’m a little sad; over the past four years, I’ve built up a life, with good in-person friends, Monkeys with Typewriters—a support group for those afflicted with active imaginations, and Nicole—our roommate who only moved in this past September, yet is someone I can’t imagine not having around. 

Since Kate and I got together for good in 2004, we’ve moved three times; but with her, I’m always home. And in a month, we’ll be physically overseas. And we’ll be home. 

A whole new world is out there for us to explore, and I, for one, can’t wait. 

On the Subject of Today’s Shooting

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I don’t want to get shot dead, at random, in a parking lot, or at a movie theater, or in church, or in a mall, or at a school, or anywhere for that matter, by someone who just wants to shoot bullets at a lot of people for reasons that have nothing at all to do with me. Off the top of my head, I can think of more than two dozen people who felt this EXACT way when they woke up this morning. 

And the funny thing is, it doesn’t matter whether or not I’m a gun owner*, or whether or not I have a concealed-carry permit** what my stance is on gun control***; if a mass shooter decides to open fire on a place where I happen to be, it means that he or she acquired a gun and used it. It doesn’t matter how it was acquired, or what the laws were. It just means that someone got a gun and fired it a lot. 

This scares the shit out of me. 

* I am. 

** I do. 

*** I’m not telling. 

Not Another Dream Movie

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I dreamed the ideal college/teen movie the other day. Well, maybe not ideal—the pretty, most popular girl in school made friends with the sensitive, nerdy boy without hiding it from her peers in order to preserve her social status. And her peers were cool with it. And the nerdy boy didn’t fall in love with the popular girl. So maybe that’s not right. 

However, all of the characters had to pool their individual, surprisingly useful talents with the cool, rebellious professor (nailed that one) to save a historic, nostalgic building that the unfeeling, corporate board of directors wanted to tear down for “progress.” So I guess the subconscious brain got that right. 

Also there was a wacky moment that involved hiding in a cupboard … I’m sure marijuana was involved in that. So I guess the subconscious brain got that right too. 

Clearly Nerdy Boy is based on me, the evidence being that he’d spent some time doing amateur IT work on Popular Girl’s computer, joked with her about blackmail, and, on his way out the door, told her, “I’ll be back with an anonymous typewritten letter and some demands.” 

Alas, my brain promptly forgot most of it upon awakening, as brains tend to do. 

A Brief Tale with Many Layers

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I was strolling along on the sidewalk, minding my own business, when, suddenly, an onion. A red onion rolled down the hill. An onion with no apparent origin, for I alone stood on the entire length of the sidewalk. 

Was this a celestial onion? An onion of the gods? Was the onion passing through my story, or was I passing through the onion’s? So many questions. So many tears (because onions make you cry, see?). 

It’s about Time

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This morning, I’d been showing my roommate a newspaper from Christmas Day, 1998, and at some point, I realized that a day that, to me, was one from just a few years back was actually her thirteenth birthday. 

My niece was two years from being born, while two of my dearest friends in the world then had a two-year-old daughter. The former spends her time making swords and fashion accessories out of duct tape, and the latter is an incredible young lady with graduation over the horizon. I’m sure to my parents, I’d left for college just a few months ago. 

This isn’t one of those “I feel old” posts, but rather just a way of reflecting how time passes differently, depending on what fraction of your life it is. For my roommate, it’s half, for my niece it’s just over 115 percent. For me, it’s only a third of it. 

Fit for a Straightjacket

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In June of 2010, I weighed two hundred and fifty-four pounds. I couldn’t do ten pushups, and a walk up a flight of stairs winded me. I got that big for a number of reasons. For starters, after leaving the New Jersey/New York area, I went from walking a minimum of two miles a day (usually super-fast, because I was often running late) to driving and sitting at a desk. Later, when I got really depressed, I began eating for comfort. When I was on anti-depressants, I ate too much because that’s what anti-depressants do. I literally embezzled money from grocery-shopping trips (i.e. getting cash back from my debit card at the registers) to buy donuts in secret. I was, and still am a little, totally ashamed. 

I seem to have swung in the opposite direction. I now weigh one hundred and ninety-one pounds, have 20 percent body fat (which I’m assured is pretty good, but the Internet tells me that it’s either average, borderline ideal, or really bad; that’s the Internet for you), and do fairly intense cardio four or five days a week. My wife and I have splurged on a personal trainer, and, about half the time, I bike to my appointments, which is about six-and-a-half miles one way, mostly uphill. For the most part, I eat better and less. And I’ve realized lately that I’m skipping lunches in secret. 

And that brings me to today. At my training session, I almost passed out. That’s not the bad part. The bad part is, I tried to pretend that it wasn’t happening. My trainer isn’t dumb, so he called it off before I could hurt myself. It didn’t have to go that way. During my morning ride, before which I had a banana to eat, I felt lightheaded a few times, but I didn’t stop. 

Why not? 

Because I look in the mirror everyday and see the fat guy from over two years ago. Apparently I’m the only one who sees it. However, my friends and family told me, even at my biggest, that I wasn’t fat, because they were trying to spare my feelings. How am I supposed to believe them when they tell me that today? 

On top of that, I have newly developed, low-grade asthma that winds me whenever I work out. I also have a lot of friends who are really, really, really fit, including marathon-runners, long-distance cyclists, and swimmers who make Aquaman say, “Take it down a notch, dude.” I don’t want to run a marathon. I’m perfectly fine running twenty to twenty-five kilometers over the course of a whole week. I just want to be healthy. And I am healthy. 

But that’s not what the guy in the mirror tells me. He uses as a weapon the fact that I had a (delicious) cheeseburger and a chocolate shake (also delicious) for lunch yesterday. He blames my difficulty breathing on my laziness. He says that the weight I’ve put on since I’ve started swimming a lot is me being irresponsible. That the fact that I have a naturally large frame is only an excuse. He’s a lot louder when I’m under a lot of stress, and there has been a great deal of that in my life. So whenever he talks to me like that, I respond by exercising. 

But today, when I got really dizzy and began seeing spots during a routine workout, I put myself in danger. I think have a problem. I can’t stop exercising, because it’s good for me. And yet, I need to know when it’s enough, that I don’t need to push myself quite so hard. 

But the guy in the mirror doesn’t believe that. 

Sister Act

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I haven’t had any contact with one of my sisters for a year to the day. What weirds me out is that I don’t feel all that bad about it. I’m not sure what kind of person that makes me. 

You have a friend or relative like this. They’re the ones who say political opinions you find objectionable, and then defend their point-of-view in the nastiest way possible, using every fallacy in the book, and then pouncing on any admissions you make on the occasions they have a point and using this as a means of negating your entire argument. When you fight back against what they’re saying, they accuse you of trying to silence their opinions. In short, they are bullies. 

I hate bullies. My Evil Sister is a bully. She is the kind of person who imagines herself telling “the truth to power” or some self-aggrandizing bullshit like that. I don’t even know if she believes what she says; it’s almost as if she is daring people to argue with her. Every time I would see a status update or a comment on one of mine, I would clench up a little. There came a point, however, when I decided that I needed to stop. 

You see, thanks to the bravery and encouragement of my wife, I’ve learned to break off contact with people who make me uncomfortable. In the Facebook era of being “friends” with even with that lab partner from junior high, this is kind of difficult. But the fact is, it doesn’t matter your history—if you don’t like a person anymore, they’re not your friend. I cannot tell you how utterly liberating this is.  

When I began doing this back in 2005, it was extremely difficult, so much so that I had to justify to myself why. The guy in question was my best friend throughout high school. In the past when I behaved like a drunk as a bipolar, going to highs, wherein I was a selfish-but-charming douchebag, to lows, where I was a self-pitying Eeyore, he stuck around because he knew I’d even out and be the person he enjoyed. And yet, as I got older, I couldn’t stand to be around him anymore. And then I was advised, by my wife and by my therapist that I didn’t have to. 

My usual method on Facebook is this: I block offensive status updates in an attempt to ignore them. When the offender rudely attacks me for something I say on my wall, I defriend them. Evil Sister had hit the first stage, which is where I had intended to keep her (she is my immediate family and shouldn’t be disowned). However, thanks to the miracle of that wonderful Facebook sidebar that allows you to see who comments on stuff, I discovered something she said that was too much. 

On September 11, 2001, a band of terrorists bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, using an otherwise innocuous device—i.e. the passenger airplane—as a weapon. Most Americans are still processing what this has meant to us and to our world. 

Yes, I was there. But that doesn’t make my memories superior to others. On September 11, 2011, a friend in Albuquerque reflected movingly on his first trip to the USS Arizona in Hawaii, when he discovered that it was more than just a tourist destination—it was a tomb—and how that paralleled a reaming he received from a friend for requesting a jar of WTC ashes as a memorial. Another friend wrote an essay, entitled “My Narrative,” about the fear and isolation she’d felt in Colorado as the news barely trickled in over the sound of evacuations. I wrote a piece about how something as ordinary as a statue had been taken from me, using it as a metaphor for how my day-to-day life had been changed. 

Evil Sister for her part, accused everyone—everyone—who shared their “narratives,” (she used the word narratives very specifically) of trying to exploit the occasion to make it all about them—“it doesn’t matter how close you were.” This was a pretty direct, passive-aggressive swipe at me. It was a passive-aggressive swipe against her friend who wrote “My Narrative*.” It was an indirect swipe against my wife, who frequently spends months in Afghanistan, her job being to prevent this from ever happening again. It’s a swipe against the friend I was visiting that very day, a New York firefighter who lost literally dozens of the colleagues who ran into a burning skyscraper when the rest of us ran away from it. When I responded, in the gentlest terms possible (“I am disappointed and saddened that you feel this way, and that this is how you chose to express it.”), her response to me was predictable, but infuriating (“Oh, I forgot, you’re the only one who’s allowed to have an opinion.”). I informed her privately that I would not speak to her unless she apologizes, and that I don’t anticipate this ever happening. She (as I was told later) cussed me out behind my back and told me that I “always had to be right,” and told me that she didn’t care if she never heard from me again**. 

And so, after a year of stubborn silence, I’ve concluded that the only thing I’m pissed off about is how my family, who understandably don’t want to take sides, talks about the incident as if both of us are at fault. We are not equal here. I’m not perfect, but I am not an asshole. I do not treat people with disrespect and venom, nor do I expect my negativity to go unchallenged.  

I don’t miss my sister. I miss what she used to be—my favorite play partner when I was a child. I also miss the teenage version of the friend I mentioned earlier who now thinks that women who use birth control are sluts. Time has marched on, and so have I. 

But I still feel uneasy. I feel like I could have handled this differently. I wonder if maybe I am the asshole. I won’t discuss this with the people who witnessed this, because I don’t want to put them in an awkward position, so I feel alone. And yet, as I said, I don’t like bullies. I’ve dismissed at least five old friends, including my one-time best friend, for saying less. 

My life, as a result, has much less negativity than it used to. It’s also missing my sister. I’m very confused. And I will be for a long, long time. 

* On this particular friend’s birthday, Evil Sister complained in her status about how she hates it when, on friends’ birthdays, her feed gets clogged up by birthday wishes. As maid of honor at this friend’s wedding, Evil Sister accused her of being a “bridezilla,” because this friend wanted to go to a tanning booth to get rid of some of those lines that had built up over the summer, which would have ruined the aesthetic of her strapless dress. Evil Sister is not a very good person, is what I’m trying to say. 

** There are a lot of complications, of course, regarding the parallel and perpendicular relationships my parents have with their siblings, as well as my relationship with my niece. I won’t go into these, because I have rambled long enough. 

Who Watches the Patrons of the Arts?

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I highly doubt any artists are going to agree with me on this, but I don’t think for one minute that Before Watchmen is the worst thing ever, nor do I think that anyone is actually getting screwed by it. 

Full disclosure: I am an artist who co-created a comic book that, to this day, I receive no credit for. I am currently doing some work-for-hire cartooning, using a character I co-created for a marketing company that periodically thanks me for the drawings, but owns every single one of them. The folks involved in the former are ethically justified in blowing me off (despite my feelings being really hurt by their behavior, words, and attitudes); and the latter is doing me a huge, unnecessary act of kindness with their behavior, words, and attitudes. 

Two things set me off about this topic today. The first was some stupid hyperbolic rant on the Internet. 

The second is that the marketing company I work for has informed me that they’re going to institute a huge change of direction for their brand. They’re asking for alterations to the character that I may not be able to pull off. And, that being the case, an option they may have to take is to replace me. This would make me [understatement in 3 … 2 … 1 …]very, very sad[end understatement]. If they did have to replace me, they are under no obligation to utter my name, ever again, even though I breathed life into this guy and am in no small part responsible for their blog’s success.  

And here’s something that might surprise you to hear me say: I don’t have a problem with that. Yes, it would piss me off a little, but ultimately they’re not wrong. Because PPC Hero is the property of Hanapin Marketing. Period. 

Likewise, Spider-Man is Marvel Comics’ property. The Avengers are the property of Disney/Marvel. Superman is DC Comics’ property. These characters are commodities that have been traded for money. Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Joe Siegel, and Jerry Schuster brought with them to the table amazing creativity and, especially in the case of Jack Kirby, a willingness to draw and draw and draw.* And then, they sold the fruits of their labor to corporations and publishers. 

Now, Jack Kirby is to Babe Ruth resurrected as super-serum-juiced cyber-deity as I am to the Pee-Wee League player consigned to right field where he can’t do any damage; but we’re both baseball. More accurately, we’re both artisans. Hell, I put the same amount of concentration, skill, and dedication into editing as I do into PPC Hero or the occasional logo design or portrait that I also get paid for. Because they’re jobs. The only thing I’m owed for these jobs is the money the client and I agreed to. 

If we’re talking about giving work-for-hire artists credit where credit is due, then where’s the demand for recognition for the musicians who wrote and performed that goddamned ad jingle or TV theme you can’t shake from your head? Where’s the cries for justice for the designer of that car you drive? Come to think of it, who created the original featureless pants-or-dress-wearing people who tell you which restroom to use? 

Who developed the iconic font that is as much a part of Watchmen as Dr. Manhattan’s penis? Is he or she getting residuals? Just curious. 

And this brings me back to Sorcerer Alan Moore of the Holy Gnostic Order of the Wooly Hill People. 

When Watchmen was published, DC (allegedly) made a promise to Moore that it would not use the characters again. Dan Didio is breaking that promise. And I say, “So?” DC paid Moore. He cashed the checks. They don’t owe him anything else. He wants to pitch a fit and tear up the checks that Warner Brothers sends him for the botched movie adaptations made of his work, that only means more money for their shareholders. And most importantly, Alan Moore worked for DC; DC doesn’t work for Alan Moore. 

Look, as much as I hate that pompous fuck-bag, I won’t deny the amount of skill he put into his original, sprung-from-his-mind creations like From Hell (with the help, of course, of countless Jack the Ripper researchers), or Swamp Thing (with the help of Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, of course), or The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (with the help of Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Jules Verne, et al), or … 

Okay, fine. That’s hardly fair. It’s not like he’s pretending to have made up the Whitechapel Murders or Masonry or these awesome literary figures. But he and Dave Gibbons did make up the Watchmen … Except they didn’t. The names and certain details have been changed, but the characters are from Carlton Comics. This is hardly news, by the way, so don’t think I’m trying to shock my reader with this clever information or anything. On the other hand, I’m still waiting for the Bearded One on to go on one of his self-righteous screeds on how much Steve Ditko deserves credit/apologies for how Moore’s paranoid, trench-coat-fedora-and-full-face-mask-wearing detective, Rorsach kind of tarnished the artistic intentions of Ditko’s paranoid, trench-coat-fedora-and-full-face-mask-wearing detective, the Question, with the former’s homophobic racist sociopathology.**  

In The Killing Joke, the Joker shoots Batgirl through the spine and strips her naked so he can torture her father, Commissioner Gordon, who is also stripped naked after having been beaten. The conclusion of this involves the Joker telling Batman a joke and both of them laughing their asses off, while ambulances haul off the broken minds and bodies of the Gordons. (Hilarious.) I don’t recall Moore asking the permission of Bill Finger or Bob Kane (or, in the case of Batgirl, Sheldon Moldoff) to do this to his characters. Hell, in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Mr. Hyde rapes the Invisible Man to death. I throw up in my mouth every time I think about it (twice, because Robert Louis Stevenson isn’t around to join in). And then there’s Lost Girls … I wonder what L. Frank Baum thinks about what Dorothy Gale is up to these days. 

So, try as I might, I don’t give a flying fuck about Moore and his disgust and his lectures on how to respect the works people like him have expended so much energy on. I will not, for one minute, disparage the amount of talent and skill and literature he has brought to my favorite entertainment medium. As loathe as I am to admit it, he is kind of a genius. His pedestal and soapbox are still, however, built on the backs of Steve Ditko and H.G. Wells and Bill Finger and those I mentioned above, as well as those I haven’t even thought of. Also, it’s in a glass house.  

Before Watchmen is a bad idea. Really, the only thing that it has going for it, businesswise, is the controversy (thanks, Moore and all of his followers!). Although … J.M. Straczynski. Len Wein. Adam Hughes. J.G. Jones. Darwyn Cooke. Amanda “leave that Palmiotti schmuck and make art with Jeremiah Murphy until the end of time” Conner. Hm. 

I’ll let Dave Gibbons, co-creator of the Watchmen, show us out: “May these new additions have the success they desire.” 

* Don’t, for one minute, think that I am not utterly appalled by the way these writers and artists, except for maybe Stan Lee, have been treated over the years. National Allied Publishers and Warner Brothers deserve a special room in hell for what they did to Siegel and Schuster, who invented the modern superhero. I respect that a contract is a contract, but some things are just morally wrong. 

** If such a credit/apology exists, I would love to see it so I can mark this off of my list of grievances. 

Random Accessed Memory

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I used to be a high-school student. Time has marched on since then, as has been known to happen. 

During that time, around my sophomore year, roughly twenty-one years ago, my communications teacher introduced his students to an allegedly foolproof method of memorizing passages of text, which goes like this: 1) Say the first line out loud. 2) Repeat the first line, and then say the second line. 3) Repeat the first line, and then repeat the second line, and say the third line out loud. 4) Keep doing this until you run out of lines. 

To demonstrate, he led the classroom in the recitation, using his tedious method, of a strange little poem, that goes a little like this: 

A big fat hen; 

A couple of ducks; 

Three brown bears; 

Four running hares; 

Five fit fiddlers; 

Six simple Simons, sitting on a stump; 

Seven Sicilian sailors, sailing the Seven Seas; 

Eight egotistical egotists, egotistically echoing egotistical ecstasies; 

Nine Nubian nudes, nimbly nibbling gnats, knuckles, and nicotine; 

I slit the sheet, and on the slitted sheet I slit I slit. 

I’ll be damned if maybe he wasn’t just a little bit right. 

Yesterday Never Knows

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Long ago, I was cleaning out the rain gutter crowning my old home back in New Mexico. Because I was a teenager, I was really fucking stupid. Rather than employing a ladder or a solid surface of any kind, I chose to stand on one of those green, wide-lidded mini-dumpster things we called a herbie because beats the hell out of me. Naturally, every part of it that could collapse or roll waited just long enough for me to get comfortable before pitching me backward onto the dirt of my backyard. 

I wish I could say that I was lucky I didn’t land on concrete, but I can’t. This was desert clay, which, when dry, resembles dust-covered iron. This is the kind of firm that young concrete dreams of growing up to be. Because that didn’t suck enough, random chunks of sandstone jutted out of the surface here and there. You know, for garnish. 

And so, one moment, I was performing one of those tedious chores that are a consequence of living under your parents’ house, your parents’ rules; and the next, every single molecule of oxygen that wasn’t already tied up in hemoglobin fled my body. Blunt pain rattled my spine, and my heart stopped doing what it was it did out of confusion, as my lungs had evidently forgotten to breathe properly. I couldn’t move—less because of said pain and more because of the very tangible fear that I wouldn’t be able to. 

And that, dear readers, is exactly how I felt when I saw her picture last week. 

Her eyes were still mocha and enormous, with thick, dark lashes. Her hair was still an impossible blend of gold and platinum. And the way she smiled still inspired me to do the same. It reminded me how inhumanly gorgeous she was, making even overalls look sexy. And how she was confident enough to be visibly bored every time some boy came over to feign interest in her conversation, a fist clenched around a beer and a thumb hooked on a belt loop—yet only those who were really paying attention could make out the mournfulness hiding there. 

I remembered my reaction upon seeing her for the first time on the other side of a spirited party. (“That girl is way out of my league.”) I remembered my reaction when she waded through that crowd for the sole purpose of finding out who I was. (“Wait. Me?”) I remembered my reaction when she and her sister sought me out at a different, equally spirited party the next night. (“Seriously. Me?”) And I remembered my reaction to the fact that I had started to flirt with her. (“Okay. Clearly not me.”) 

But that’s not what knocked the wind out of me when I saw that picture last week. What did was the fact that I’d forgotten how deeply we were in love with each other. 

It’s been nearly fourteen years since I learned her name, and about thirteen since we last communicated. Over that time, I’ve convinced myself that I made all of these feelings up. We were simply two people with nothing in common, whose hunger for any kind of attention led us to comfort each other during the intense transitions we were subjecting ourselves to. Hell, we’d never even kissed; we were afraid to, because we couldn’t possibly be falling for someone we’d known for a handful of days. 

Except we were fooling ourselves. And for too long, I’ve been fooling myself. The intimacy of our letters and phone calls was real, and it was exquisite. It really was love. Eventually, I found my footing in New York City, she found her footing where she was, and we didn’t need each other anymore. 

And time passed. 

I don’t know how she remembers me. Was I a fling? An overreaction? A friend? A mistake? A pen-pal? An ex-boyfriend, even? I doubt I’ll ever know. That doesn’t matter, though, because somewhere, she is smiling.