Party Like It's 1995

Do you remember 1995? I do and I'm grateful to my friend 'B' for reminding me. She sent me this wonderful guidebook to mutant culture circa 1995 and it really stirs the memory...my memories of 1995 are blurry but upbeat, I was only 29 and life was good. Leafing through this book reminds me that if life was good, then it can be good again.

Don't these look like sidebar labels? Back in 1995 we called them "stickers".




The book contains a how-to for email ID theft circa 1995 and an article that warns that the growth of cyberspace was bringing a "vast array of jerks, idiots and nincompoops" and advises the reader to be wary of "drooling perverts who try to virtually molest Net-surfing teenagers".

Who knew?


Well, I need to sort out my old Magic: the Gathering cards. Seriously. I'd forgotten that I have a small fortune in them. Another friend (name also starts with B) reminded me- he sold his for $500. I used to deal Magic- I should be able to clear my rent, easy. Why didn't I think of that before? And my comic collection...holy shit.
That will be my project for early 2008, circumstance permitting: Sort the comics.


My project for 2007 is to get postmarks on some books. See ya at the Post Office!

I'm In The Cut-Out Bins

I found this on the Intertube while I was trying to find copies of some old comics that I wrote. Note: I was able to find myself by googling (w/") "Dark Fantasies Comics" , which was the name of my publisher. The books are being sold in bulk lots on eBay, 10 books for 4 bucks...sigh...anyway, it's a weird feeling reading a review that mentions oneself by name.

This spinoff from Dark Fantasies tells the strange (and sometimes hard to follow) tale of an immortal woman/goddess/angel and her immortal husband/god/demon who is trying to kill her—or maybe just trap her on an astral plane. Allan Coberly’s story is more than a little convoluted, and he isn’t helped much by Ben Fogletto’s art or sense of page layout, which makes word balloon placement haphazard at best. If you’re a fan of Dark Fantasy Productions, though, then you’ve probably already cracked the verbal/visual code and shouldn’t have any trouble figuring out just who or what a “destiny angel” is, and why anyone would want to destroy such a gorgeous and powerful celestial babe as she.

It's an honest and fair review, although the site lists publication as 1986- it was 1996. And there was no "code" that I was aware of- it was just a mess. A train wreck of monumental insignificance.

I wrote the script and I had a hard time following the art... I remember getting a test copy of the book in the mail. It followed my script for a while and then it changed... my lead character was wet, nearly naked and carrying a gun. What the?...in the margin you can see my angry scrawl :" She doesn't bathe with firearms!"

What the hell?

"Holy Mackerel?" Nobody says that.

I called the publisher, who was also a close friend of mine.

"Man, have you seen the art for #1? It's totally off-script! It doesn't look like the thumbs at all! What happened to my dialogue?"

"Well, you have to live with it. I need you to re-write #2 and #3 and take out all the occult references and sex scenes."

"Uh...it's a vampire comic- for 'mature readers'- haven't you read it? You paid me to write about lesbian vampires and that is what you got."

"Well, now I'm paying you to re-write it without the vampires and lesbians. If you don't, I will."

"Why the change?"

"My wife won't let me publish the tittie vampire books anymore."

"What? You have a wife? Since last month?"

"Yeah, I met her at a Star Trek convention- I was drinking with her and her fiance, and he got hammered and went into their suite to pass out. While he was conked out in the next room , I fucked her and the next day she dumped him. Now she is pregnant , so we had to get married."

"Dude. Please tell me you just made all of that up."

"No, it's true. Her name is xxxxxx. Now she has my last name."

"Uh...um...Dude. You probably shouldn't be making lifetime commitments with someone who will fuck around while they are engaged. Like, with her man sleeping next door and all. It's a bad sign. "

"Screw you. Just rewrite the book, I'll pay you again."

"Uh...OK. Why, though?"

"She is a Jehovah's Witness and the vampire stuff is Satan worship and the nude parts are pornography, which is also Satanic. Or something."

"Uh...lessee...you met this Jehovah's Witness chick at a Star Trek Con, got drunk with her and her man; ditched the dude, knocked her up in a hotel - now you are married and she thinks you are a Satanic pornographer? I didn't know Jeeho's even drank, much less do Con parties...
You are making this up, aren't you?"

"No. She went back to her faith after we got married. No more vampires. No more boobies. It has to be rated PG or G now."

"Um...so, like what do you want? I suddenly have a hundred pages to rewrite."

"I dunno. Whatever. Just follow the art. Keep it clean."

"Great. How soon?"

"Now."

Anyway, the new wife was OK with the gun and the not-quite naked woman. In fact, she didn't bat a lash when I inserted a deux ex machina gunfight that killed some of the characters that were important to the first version of the story but meaningless in the second version.

Hmmm...scantily-clad women and gun violence is OK, vampires and sexuality is not... so I wrote a lot of scenes like these below, lots of guns and bathing- feel free to insert your own captions.

Let's make it a contest:
I'll send a prize to the best entry- in other words, if you enter, you'll probably win. A cash prize!
Anyone still awake?
Here are a couple pages with the original dialogue removed. Fill in the blanks any way you want.

These scenes are from issue #3, which was never published. I never wrote another comic book but I'd like to someday ...who knows? Can you draw?

UPDATE: Contest ends like, whenever. Number of winners dependent on how many bags of cash I can scrounge up.

Dear John

John Hodgman has hurt my feelings. Deeply.

He didn't bother to notify me that he has a "blog". Mr. Hodgman is an expert in organic and electronic message-sending , so I can only take this oversight on his part as the emotionally devastating personal attack that it so clearly is.

I have feelings, you know. Or you would if you were really the expert you claim to be. John.



Back at the end of 2005, I recorded a radio interview with Mr. Hodgman and his book-tour partners , David Rees and Jonathon Coulton.

We were upstairs at the bookshop where the traveling trio was giving a performance and I (who, like most people at that time, had no idea who this "Hodgman" character was) started leafing through his book. Hodgman and Rees were embroiled in an incoherent imbroglio with the store owner about the number of backstage lavatories and something about a contract rider... jesus, these dudes are worse than a thousand guitarists, I thought, thumbing Hodgman's tome as the argument gradually lurched into an interview.

Hmmm... HMM! I reached over and clicked the voice recorder off.

"Cut."

"Wha... huh?" Hodgman looked puzzled. Rees and Coulton looked for a bar.

"You stole my idea."

"I did what?", asked the Man Who Would Be PC.

"You stole my idea. I invented the idea of being an expert on everything. I even have a blog about it. I make stuff up and people believe it. I am the expert expert. You are stealing my fame."

Hodgman tried using facts , copyright notices and expert opinions to prove that I was wrong, which only served to make my case because, as we both knew, an expert is someone who makes stuff up.
And he, said I, was making stuff up . The internet just wasn't big enough for two experts. What could be done?

Secrecy ensued. Whispers were shouted.

We reached an agreement. A magical ritual was devised.
I would give Hodgman 15 minutes of my Fame, and in return , he would deface a copy of his book, crossing out his name and replacing it with my own. After a suitable period of time ( six to eight weeks was our verbal agreement) had elapsed, the Fame I had loaned to Hodgman would return to me seven-fold, giving me nearly two hours return for my 15 minute investment.

That was in 2005.

I see Hodgman everywhere.
He lies to John Stewart on TV.
He's a celebrity punching-bag for some trendy kid named Mac.
He's even showing up on the Internet.

OK. He's had his fifteen minutes. Where is my two hours?

We had a deal.

So I dug out the book that we had used to seal our negotiations.

To my shock and horror, his name had mysteriously appeared where mine used to be. It was a Dorian Grey moment of clarity.



I should have known better than to make deals with a gentleman who is an expert on "common short and long cons" (pg. 148)

I'm not famous and my book is ruined. Some deal.

Cheerful despite it all

I fully intended to spend the day in a goddamn bad mood, I truly did, but sometimes things just don't work out quite the way a feller wants them to. Sometimes stuff goes wrong, even simple things like waking up in a mean-tempered cussin' kind of mood.

I don't reckon this'll make any sense to most of y'all, but on some days- and it ain't often, so don't think I'm askin' for much- some days I just want to be pissed-off. I want to wake up angry and I don't particularly go lookin' to get cheered up, if you see what I'm sayin'.

You might think: "well shit, how hard is that to do? This world ain't nothing but a winking stinkhole and if it wasn't for the rainbows and unicorns in my medicine cabinet I'd be exercising my 2nd Amendment rights until someone stopped me or I ran out of ammo. What's so damned special 'bout bein' mad as hell?"

Well, what makes it special for me is I failed at it and I'm the kind of guy who just don't sit too comfortable with failure. I wish I could say that the reason I don't sit so well with failin' is on account of being accustomed to success, but I can't rightly say that. I just ain't fond of failing , is all I can say.

So anyway, I'm waiting for the bus this morning, just enjoying the sun and reading a book like I always do, and a nice old lady carrying a umbrella starts asking me questions about the bus service.

Now, me and the old lady both know that there ain't a goddamn bit of sense in talking about the bus since there ain't nothin' you can do but wait no matter how much talking gets done, but she just wants to talk because she didn't think to bring a book. It's a sunny day and she's carrying an umbrella , so I speculate to myself that this lady isn't so hot in the thinking department. I'm too much a gentleman to tell her that ,though.

"It'll be here soon," is what I say, which is true, even if I don't exactly know what minute it'll arrive.

She starts describing the weather conditions to me, like we are talking on the phone and I'm somewhere else, somewhere that's always dark and wet and I don't have a fucking clue in my clammy heart what a blue sky looks like. Which is kinda true, but she doesn't know that.

It is beautiful.
I agree with her and keep reading.

In the book, Marvin Molar has snapped. He's tied a rope to the boat's wheel and grabbed a hatchet.

"Oh, what a nice cat", says my wrinkly new pal, pointing across the street. "Here kitty! Here kitty!"

What I feel like saying is :" Lady, that's my fucking cat and it's the second dumbest animal on this planet and if it even thinks you are calling it, it'll probably run over here and get flattened by the goddamn bus we were just talking about. The shock of seeing it will probably kill you and if it doesn't , I might."

"He's a sweetie," is what I say, but I send a look at my cat that says: "Get near the kerb and I'm gonna spank you with a broom." He gets the message and slinks off.

Meanwhile, Marvin has walked in on Hester while she's fucking the Greek. I feel Marvin's anger rising from the pages- its much hotter than mine- and I'm almost envious of the purity of Marvin's rage. Almost.

"Is this the downtown bus?"

"Yes. Right on time."

I don't know if it's on time or not, but I'm trying to be reassuring. All hell is about to break loose in my book and I don't want the old lady to be spooked any more than she has to be, which is sayin' not spooked at all.

The lady boards the bus and hands the driver a twenty. I don't have to be a mind-reader to figure out what he's thinking. He's thinking: "This isn't a fucking taxi."

I'm on the steps below her and I'm thinking that I've got my nose about eighteen inches from a pair of adult diapers. I'm so convinced of this thought that I feel safe in calling it knowledge, which isn't always as great a thing as it's cracked up to be.

But I don't say that. Instead I swipe my bus pass through the meter a second time and smile at both her and the driver.
Such a nice young man.
Everyone smiles back at me. The whole bus is smiling.

In the book, Hester is smiling too. Marvin hits her in the mouth with the hatchet.


It cheers me up and makes me fail at being pissed-off, which would make me angry if I wasn't in such a good mood.

Marvin spins on a fingertip and waits for the Coast Guard.

I go to work and wait for five o'clock.

Treasures

By the end of my mother's nomadic and often estranged life she owned only what she could fit into her car.
Among those items were a handful of books, some of which I recall from childhood.

Knowing what little I do about my mother's missing years, it's remarkable that she was able to
keep anything at all. All I have are a few books , her journals and some photos, but to me they are treasures.

This (below) was published in 1965 and is a cautionary tale about the consequences of war for war's sake. For the Twin and I, this was a bedtime story. As I grew and began to understand the forces at work in the then-raging Viet Nam war, I looked back at this tiny tome and saw war as the tragic, fatal foolishness that it is. Today, it's just as relevant as ever, perhaps more so.




This book (below), again illustrated by the amazing Edward Gorey, explores how we learn and why we don't. We don't learn because we don't want to.
I didn't know what it was about when I was a child but I wanted to.





This (below) is more recent. It's a 1993 publication and I didn't read it until after my mother's death. Again, it's even more relevant now than it was then.

WE ARE ALL IN THE DUMPS
FOR DIAMONDS ARE TRUMPS
THE KITTENS ARE GONE TO ST. PAUL'S
THE BABY IS BIT
THE MOON'S IN A FIT
AND THE HOUSES ARE BUILT WITHOUT WALLS

It is very difficult for me to look through my mother's things. There are many treasures in there but there are some traps too.
That is why I didn't go to work today and I posted these scans instead.
I couldn't and I had too, respectively.

Contest # 1,000

Here's a contest: Be the first to guess how many posts have been published on this blog.

What you win depends on how you play.

Runners-up can print their own consolation prizes from the handy template above.

Can't See the Forest

Cool. A NYT travelogue of Flannery O'Connor landmarks. I love her stories but I don't think I've read her correspondence - for instance , I didn't know she was nearly incapacitated with illness, or that she wrote for three hours each day...interesting stuff.

This is a good description of notable O'Connor characters ( I have helpfully added the story titles w/ links) :

O’Connor’s characters shimmer between heaven and hell, acting out allegorical dramas of sin and redemption. There’s Hazel Motes('Wiseblood'), the sunken-eyed Army veteran who tries to reject God by preaching “the Church of Christ Without Christ, where the blind don’t see, the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” Hulga Hopewell ('Good Country People'), the deluded intellectual who loses her wooden leg to a thieving Bible salesman she had assumed was as dumb as a stump. The pious Mrs. Turpin('Revelation'), whose heart pours out thank-yous to Jesus for not having made her black or white trash or ugly. Mrs. Freeman, the universal busybody: “Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings.”
( Also GCP, here's the entire short story-ed.)

The writer of the article lacks O'Connor's eye. The next paragraph continues with this:

People like these can’t be real, and yet they breathe on the page.

Later, the writer is describing his own travels through the 'modern' American South-(emphasis mine):

Strip malls have long since filled the gap between town and farm, and you now find Andalusia by driving past a Wal-Mart, a Chik-fil-A and a Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, where a man shot his wife and killed himself a few days before I arrived. You pass a billboard for Sister Nina, a fortune teller who reads palms in a home office cluttered with votive candles and pictures of Catholic saints. (To judge from one consultation, she is capable of divining that a visitor is a bearer of dark sorrows, but not exactly skilled at pinpointing what those sorrows might be.)

These are the kind of characters and stories that O'Connor wrote about- the author of the travelogue denies their existence in one paragraph and describes them in the next.
He's surrounded by the modern version of O'Connor's world and he doesn't recognize it.

People like that can be real- they are real- and they are all around you: at work; in stores; at school; in mirrors- they are everywhere- if you know how to look.

Matter

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

As a child, one of my first enduring loves was for dinosaurs; paleontology to be more precise- I loved my trilobites just as much as my allosaurus ; can't have archaeoptyrx without having 'T.Rex' first (archaEopTyRX, see?), and did you know that some scientists used to speculate that Rex actually had a form of rudimentary plumage, although I think it that idea has been abandoned...

For a period, I refused to watch movies that featured dinosaurs alongside humans- hogwash! I would declare, full of childish indignation- everyone knows the dinosaurs were extinct for millions of years before homo sapiens walked the earth...sheesh. Insufferable fucker, I was.
Was?
At least nowadays I can enjoy movies where dinosaurs eat people without ruining it for everyone else by shouting out how there is no way you would ever see a mastodon and a pterodactyl together in "real life".

When I was ten, I read A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller ; it profoundly changed my thinking, suddenly it dawned on my young mind that not only was man trying to destroy himself, he was going to fail, and he was going to use that failure as inspiration to try harder at the next attempt at self-destruction and so on...

But, as I would cheerily point out, none of it really matters anyway because the sun will eventually explode and destroy the solar system, which will slooowlly be sucked into a black hole at the center of the universe, which will then contract for eons upon eons , crushed by gravity until it eventually vomits forth another universe which will very likely be inhabited by organisms just as wretched as humans could ever wish to be.

I started reading books that were beyond my years or just plain weird: Ellison, Burgess, wildlife guides, Burroughs, atlases,Vonnegut, almanacs, Batman comics,Heller, Illuminatus, various tombstones etc.... nowadays, I doubt that our schools would encourage or even allow such reading by grade-schoolers, but back then it didn't matter.

Often, I didn't even have to attend class.

Did you know that galaxies die? They do.

It's hard to study while galaxies are dying.
As a child, it's hard to explain this to adults without scaring them.
When I got older I had more and more classes that didn't exactly involve attendance, it was easier for every one that way.
It saved a lot of explaining.

I knew the system was bullshit and I played it so that I wouldn't have to do much of anything. I'd just write a few papers about books I would've read anyway, get the teachers all worked up and by the time they discovered what a truly fucked-up child I was- that they'd basically been conned out of giving me 'real' homework and into giving me plum assignments- I'd be whisked away to another school, soon to be standing in front of yet another group of unfamiliar children, explaining how it's better to read the glossary first when you read A Clockwork Orange, otherwise they might find it confusing.


So.

Long ago there were dinosaurs, then they died (and all the smart people knew it was a meteor, even then) and eventually they turned into oil, which we turn into gasoline -which was being rationed back then because OPEC wanted to punish the US for it's support of Israel in whatever war was raging in the Middle East at that time -Yom Kippur, I think, as if it matters.
Yeah, 1973...fuck, it really does seem like yesterday. Like last hour.

Jesus, back then I was too busy watching the nightly 'Nam body counts to understand the nuances of Middle East politics.
(I still don't understand those nuances, perhaps because there are no nuances to understand)

Plus, I was 8 years old and didn't understand a lot of things that I currently don't understand - I just have a better understanding of my lack of understanding now , is all.



Anyhow, the dinosaurs are gone and surely aren't coming back during my wholly insignificant lifetime, besides, like I said, the whole Universe is constantly going BOOM! crush BOOM! anyway, so why bother with anything- every thing's doomed to extinction, subject to be extinguished all at once or over billions of years- what difference does it make?

My 5th grade teacher asked me where I learned to be so nihilistic.

Nowhere. Duh.

I used the same line in 6th grade, in response to the same question.

By the time I was 12, I had used science and reason to soundly establish my own insignificance as well as that of everyone and everything around me. A sort of cosmic resignation sank into my spirit-didn't break it, mind you; though it might seem that way from the outside. In truth, I think I really enjoyed the awesome power of negation that comes with knowing more than is good for oneself.

Suck it up, keep on truckin' yadda yadda 'cos it don't mean shit nohow, right?

Even though I clearly understood, -understand, rather - just how empty, pointless, pathetic and unremarkable my puny existence is, I still didn't lose interest...I can't stop the stars from exploding, but it would be cool to watch one blow up.




















I have been asked, more than once, why I bother carrying on if I feel that life is so hopeless...these inquiries miss the point, misinterpreting my meaning- I never said life is hopeless.

I don't believe life is hopeless- if it was, I would be dead right now because right now all I have is hope.

I am. Therefore. Life is not hopeless.
Sum ergo whatever...

Life, however, is pointless, especially when viewed on a cosmic scale.
Can't argue with that.
We don't mean diddley-squat.
Boom!
Back to dust, wait for gravity to start forming new planets, don't hold your breath 'cos this might take a long time, Rocketman...

I honestly don't care if life is pointless. I'm a lifetime supporter of pointless causes, a pillar of pointlessness in my community, an ardent champion of Things That Don't Mean Shit-which, by my childhood definition, is everything and everyone, past present and future. I'm passionately pointless and pointlessly passionate.

For no reason.
I can't justify it.
I don't have to- I don't even pretend that any of it means anything.
Why should I?

I know it's useless, that nothing I do will ever mean anything, that my old fantasies are absurd and that there might not be any new dreams to replace them with... but so what?

I don't have the willpower necessary to give up living.
I'm too lazy to do nothing.
It's hard work, this doing of nothing. Just thinking about it wears me out.

I might as well try to do something. If nothing matters, it can't hurt to try.