wildcat

Even with work yesterday, this weekend has been fairly chill. I bought this comic the other day, and once again Superman's maiming some apparently helpless super-heroes from one thousand years into the future, mostly because they keep calling him Superboy:

(Cover pencils by John Byrne; inks by Karl Kesel; colours by Tom Ziuko)

..which is weird, considering the green-skinned blond is Brainiac 5, who has a twelfth level computer mind, but failed to notice Superman's age, stature, and musculature. And it probably doesn't help matters that Brainy is, in fact, the descendent of one of Superman's big foes.

I'm going to try and track down the follow-up comic that this one was continued in, where Superman beats up on...um...himself as a teenager. From a simulated parallel universe. Because he can.

Feeling a little paint-by-numbers this evening, unfilled, emptied out, white. You know: Mondays. Can you imagine, what if that's the fundamental interconnection of humanity? Mondays? Can look at somebody on the bus and both say, "Monday," at once, in unison, and it's not telepathic or anything. It's just Monday, stupid Monday. Stupid inexorable sadness of pencils.

This is Monday: the moon has not blown up yet. Stay tuned for updates.

This is Monday: senseless things happen, people hurt each other's feelings, it's far too easy to get rumbled over other people's issues, psychoses, and neurotic displays. Better to be one of those women, like in the museum, the Michelango. The coming-and-going. The waving, back and forth, of one's hand, as if to say: enh. This'll pass. Definite finite parameters of time involved in this case.

This is Monday: one wishes one could bring a parasol to work with one.

This is Monday: there are too many colons, and I need a colonic.

1. The words You Should Probably Go to Bed flash in neon mauve, which is the colour of my brain, thanks, over my head. Flickering. One gets tired of one's life always revolving around standing up promptly at seven o'clock, turning off the alarm, shuffling back to the bed, falling down, bargaining with one's self for ten to twenty minutes before standing, making sure one has pajama bottoms on to avoid flashing potential early morning neighbours, getting towel, going to the bathroom, showering like a man showers before his appointment with death row, which is to say with bad breath; consequently, the allure of staying up is too much; too much to denounce.

2. When one is resurrecting one's stunted babies, one must avoid the old pitfalls right from the outset. In other words: In Media Res is the way to go, honey, and it's best done on full cylinders.

3. I will probably be an extremely sarcastic professor one day. I helped Christian grade some papers this evening at the Moka House with a mocha that I didn't order (I asked for a hot chocolate, but one mustn't complain, yes), and I can only imagine what my workshops will be like, one day. As the frog would say, You should be nicer to people.

4. If all goes according to plans, I will be teaching a small, volunteer-type poetry workshop once or twice.

5. Must write cover letter for story, must write cover letter for story, must write cover letter for story, must write cover letter for story, must write cover letter for story, must write cover letter for story--

6. The stunted baby has potential. I think I know how to begin. I know the names, the places, the sexy events.

7. One wishes that one's hips could gyrate like that.

So, I tracked down a copy of the second part to the comic where Superman beats up the Legion, in which Superman takes some time out of his busy schedule to fight himself as a teenager:

Admittedly, his own boyhood self is the one to actually pick the fight, so there you go. I'm not even sure that I can explain, coherently, what's going on in this story without resorting to flow charts, but it's fun and a bit goofy.

Keep in mind that Superman's got a history of Self-abuse and Inner Child Issues:

...the book was lost, not unlike his virginity, during a moment of youthful
indiscretion. In the first place, he'd been forced to order the book from some
place Other, possibly Wales, although he was never very certain which
Wales had provided the book. But, remarkably, after a four year absence there
was another copy of the book on the topmost shelf of a top-drawer secondhand
book shop which had of course always been there, but he'd never looked - it
would appear, up there. It was not the precise printing of his former
copy, of course, but one's virginity is never found in exactly the same
condition. There's occasionally marginalia scrawled all over the virginity in
someone else's handwriting (one should hope) and under certain
circumstances there may be water damage.

Your eyes are bees to be smoked out, Monsieur;
I apologize for my lack of correspondence.
I'm sure you while away the hours with lovely Jeanne.
She always loved a coincidence, but they only burned her once.
You, well, your skin is parchment that goes up over and over
with muscles of straw. Maybe you lunch upon cantaloupes
and consult the Oracles. You tell us what to type while we lie back
and close our eyes. Automatic. Oh, Monsieur, you do go on!
We are but automatons, I suppose, while you burn. Do you burn?
Does she burn? Do you dance with scalps going up,
whispering the great arsonist epics to her,
the chemical formulae,
footprints left behind in ash like waltzing instructions?

1. I need to sit down with the typewriter and type up a letter to Joy. She's sent me one so far and I need to return the favour. This mostly requires me to track down her current address. It's hard to find time to sit down because my libraries are full of tears. I miss having coffee with her and Matt, watching Sambuca skate the thin edge between happiness and madness.

2. I made it about fifty pages into Jasper Fforde's The Big Over Easy and just wasn't impressed. I enjoy the Thursday Next novels more, it felt belaboured and unfocused. The characters didn't click. I feel like I need to say: I can't waste my time on this. I've got to make it through a short story anthology edited by Daniel Handler - I'm sorry, I mean, Lemony Snicket - next, which has a very long title and an irritating dedication (yes, Mister Snicket, because inducing guilt is the best way to inspire readership), and stories which feel - at times - phoned in, even from the writers in the collection that I quite enjoy otherwise. It's too full of the knowing wink-winks of McSweeney's worst corners.

3. People fail to grasp the non sequitor t-shirt: it's not that I collect insulators, but I collect insulators.

4. I have to reinvent myself from being a mediocre poet & short fictionalist into something more substantial, as those poetry workshops up at PC will be happening next month and I've been diagnosed with an acute case of Imposter Syndrome. Actually, strike that, I want to write poems again because.

5. I'm feeling a little disconnected from the Poets, much as Joy feels disconnected from the indigo children - they mostly jeer at me, you know what Adrienne Rich can be like, and comment that my pesto sauces are not anapestic enough. I'm slipping into italics too easily, because of them. Most of the Poets I haven't seen in a while. Allen died in the Nineteen Nineties, it's like that. Most nakedness these days feels naked, rather than nude.

Well, I bought a new mobile phone today. It has a camera in it, because apparently you can't actually buy them without cameras anymore. The old one, god rest its cluttered soul, has basically begun to have repeated seizures after six years of use, as one does. The new phone is mostly great, but the text messaging seems to be disabled for some unknown reason, so I have to be a big boy and call customer service tomorrow and figure out what the problem is, especially as texting is part of my package and such. I feel as though the attempt to upgrade to more modern technology has, as usual, foiled me completely because of that weird telekinetic glitching thing I do.

Meanwhile, because I'm too gay to function, I'm really enjoying the new Madonna album.

Anyway: this has been another missive from soulless consumer hell. Please insert one token for further data transmission.

I think I found this comic for about four bucks some time ago. The opening is shocking splash page of a disassembled woman's parts, submerged in styrofoam and packaged in a "Build-a-Friend" cardboard box, while a yellow hand grips the box and someone just off-panel shouts, "Lila...LILA!" The narrative caption decrees: "OMAC - One-Man Army Corps...is the story of a young man in the world that's coming!! In that strange place, the common objects of today...may become the terrors that we never bargained for...like the one below!" You have to love the unabashed orgasm of exclamation points. And, in the fresh world of 1974, just a few years after Liberation, well -- the image! The horror that underscores it.

Now, OMAC arrives on the scene, apparently recognizing his long-lost love, Lila, as the disembodied simulation in the box. And, in the name of the "Global Peace Agency," OMAC blows up the heartless corporate factory, it's workers, and the hundreds of pre-packaged robot women...

The deal is that our hero, OMAC, is actually a carefully selected candidate named Buddy Blank, who is chosen to undergo transformation into your standard mohawked future-gladiator to help the GPA take down threats to the world and democracy and futuristic ideals. The GPA's agents, generally, walk around in loud outfits and blank orange face-masks. Buddy happens to work for a company called Pseudo-People Incorporated, dedicated to building synthetic people for all manner of day-to-day tasks. The GPA, sadly, has discovered that the company is actually using their robots as weapons - delivering sexy women robots to their targets and then blowing them up.

Yes, Unwitting Kamikaze Robot Concubines.

Meanwhile, good little worker bee Buddy befriends a girl named Lila - we know this going to go bad, what with the "start at the ending" structure. He discovers what's really happening and that Lila is merely a walking bomb when - suddenly! - he's engulfed by an inferno of strange energy! "I've heard some talk about it!...electronic surgery!...a computer hormone operation done by remote control!!" And, well, enter: OMAC. With his head full of instructions and his body full of power provided by his "brother," a giant satellite hovering over Earth called Brother Eye: "I shall always help you. We are linked by the eye symbol on your chest...we are like brothers..."

This is a truly weird Jack Kirby comic, mixing creepy body horror with the flashy science fiction future. Kirby delivers an essay on the soon-to-be-letters page ending the adventure and I snagged on this:

"Any hatful of concepts in practice today would flip out the fabled Captain Nemo and turn Doctor Frankenstein into a depressed catatonic. Fritz would drop the good doctor like a hot potato and seek employment as a 'sweep-up' in some Biological Research Institute.

I've bought a balloon and a Mickey Mouse hat for my granddaughter at Disneyland and watched the androids of tomorrow being born among the autitronic robots that speak their pieces by computer tape. It is easy to conceive that a few more dollars could cause these things to move and mingle with the audience without a ripple of consternation. Are we so far from an army of two legged wire and plastic that is programmed to win victories?"
-- Jack Kirby, OMAC #1, 1974.

Outside, cats grapple with each other in the dark. Also, men laugh loud, giggle, the whooping laughter of drunks. Tuesday night. That distant and particular hum of a bus going down the street.

My brain feels stimulated; I feel stimulated. I went out for dinner to that Vietnamese place on Fort Street with Steph. We hadn't seen each other in a while, but it was gratifying to eat together, and talk, and pontificate. We've made plans for it to be a regular thing, with writing - starting next week. Film reviews to start. We're both aching for some creative projects and some focus so I forsee good things developing. I enjoy talking about art with her. We reminisced a little about the "good old days," when Joy and Matt were still in town, and talked about how well things seem to be going for them. Us? We have our pits but we're crawling out of them.

Tomorrow I'm going to get up early and type a letter to Joy on the old Remington 1931. Then I have to go to work, but it's only four hours and I can go to the comic shop afterward for the week's haul. There's a dinner party planned at Dan's house in the evening. I have every intention of having a wonderful day after today's sketchy circumstances.

I'm going to go write a story now.

Breezing in from the Outland, rainy season, and most of my thoughts reduced to insignificant "point-form" extrapolations because of (1) too much wine last night, (2) a "cursed week" of unfortunate circumstances beyond my control, and (3) not enough rest. I sat in a coffee shop this morning for half an hour to drink hot chocolate and burn off psychosis before it grew too much to handle. Either way, I'm home now and I have a couple hours to fill up with pitiful bodily concerns (shaving, food preparation and consumption, personal grooming, clothing) before I blast off for work again, rocket-man.

Yesterday, I woke up exactly six minutes after I was supposed to be out the door for work.

I have, on the other hand, reached an elastic moment of zen tranquility because without spontaneous combustion and/or a firing squad, there's not much more ridiculous and frustrating that this week can be. Instead, I coast along.

I got a postcard in the mail addressed to someone else yesterday, and must deliver it soon. Tuesday, in fact. I will deliver it on Tuesday.

1. Last night's menu: Roasted peppers stuffed with feta cheese, rice, and shrimp, smothered in garlic havarti, with steamed vegetables. A bottle of Riesling and a bottle of Chardonnay. Dessert was "inside out apple crumble," provided by Christian.

2. This week, issue #5 of Matt Fraction's Casanova comic came out, with a damning criticism of the King Kong remake as part of its underpinning. I love, dearly, how Fraction devotes the text pages at the end of each issue to the process of scripting the book. I completely missed #4 coming out, whenever it did, and it would appear that no remaining copies of it exist on this particular Earth.

3. I have one gothic story thing on the go, will work on it tonight when I get home from work at the end of time. Also have a couple other unconnected images/ideas to plunder and torture for emotional and artistic significance.

(Cover to Casanova #4 - the one I can't find - by Gabriel Bá - Casanova tries to kidnap the new Buddha)

Atomic Threat interviews Matt Fraction about Casanova.

Frankenstein atop one of the flesh-eating mares of Planet Mars, as portrayed by Doug Mahnke.

I want to write horror stories, but the "digging up one's dead father" thing may have faltered somewhere around page 5. This means I'm taking it back to formula.

I took a book out from work today.

Meet Me at Infinity, by James Tiptree Junior. This is a collection of Tiptree's science fiction and nonfiction pieces.

There is a set of awards named after Tiptree. Ironically, Tiptree was apparently named after a jar of marmalade; "James Tiptree Junior" was a pseudonym for Alice Bradley Sheldon, and the Tiptree Awards is focused on works and authors which use science fiction to expand and explore gender. She worked as a psychologist and had a career with the CIA for a while. She started writing under the male pseudonym in 1967 and it wasn't until 1977 that anyone found out the truth.

Her wikipedia entry.

"Our fellow passenger was Major Grogan, who thirty years before had been the first white man to go from the Cape to Cairo. It took him three years, one whole year in the marshes of the Sudd; his two companions died. It is said he ate them; I think so. He looked like a sensible man."

The collection includes a story called "The Colour of Neanderthal Eyes" that I'm looking forward to reading, and an essay called "A Woman Writing Science Fiction." There's actually quite a lot in here, and I plan to spelunk through it over the next week or so to help get my brain started up again.

That was supposed to be a quote from Tom Robbins concerning Leonard Cohen, but somewhere along I lost my way.

But don't you understand? ee cummings wrote the introduction to the 1946 collection of George Herriman's mid-1920s comic strip, Krazy Kat. DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND? That's like Salvador Dali creating the cover art for Jackie Gleason's album sometime in the 1960s.

Do you ever have that sudden, shocking sensation that you're turning into Emily Dickinson? Not Angie, Emily. I've become concerned over my use of the em dash.

Last night's dinner was an unpretentious little red wine with pumpkin stew; pumpkin bread and various cheeses for appetizers.

I sat in the laundromat and waited for the clothes to finish drying, tried to write Joy a letter, failed, put the notebook away, read some of Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days collection, watched people fight with the coin machine (clearly, I'm afraid, marked Out of Order in - let's face it - flashing lights), then emptied my freshly laundered trousers & underwear into the bin for walking home.

I dressed at my leisure and then walked downtown to have lunch at a sushi restaurant. It was not bad; it was, I'd say, good but not perfect. The miso wasn't too salty. I wrote Joy a letter in my head while I chopstuck rice into my mouth and swallowed; after that I walked to the Blenz on Broughton to do the proper thing.

I drank an entire hot chocolate without spilling any on my fresh pants. I expect I'll be a real boy sometime next week, at this rate.

I wrote a proper letter to Joy without too much trouble, finally having a table top to write upon and (furthermore) no crush of people at all sides, seething, driving off the creative impulse. I wrote.

Then I rode a bus home and now I'm preparing to do a few things. The cleansing of a computer; the establishment of an opening paragraph for something. No more misery! Only bright things, people, lightning, comic books, brilliant angels, muses, Pagan blood rituals, et cetera.

Two different girls cancelled dinner dates with me, this week.

Mostly, I'm listening to people lighting firecrackers in the distant night; bang-bang at irregular intervals, which is all right.

Adjust the dimmer switch, kick back the rugs (stolen from Finkleman's Forty-Fives - truly, I was a CBC geek as a small boy), and roll up the sleeves: the first step is always the music. Even with the music there's still the firecrackers, but one must accomodate a little irrational exploding now and then. After that, fingers to action!

I have to say, today included a rather random plummet through one's own personal history.

On the other hand, I now have a copy of Jose Saramago's Blindness to skip through.

Today's two...no, wait...three sentence post was brought to you by the Toast Marketing Board.

Tonight is the night that I have to start the novella, so consequently the apartment's tidy, I've done the dishes, and I'm about to make pancakes because. You know. Brain food. I've been feeling a little off for most of the day and the city is frozen in my feet at the moment, but one must soldier on. And fireworks, there are fireworks, but that's a glistening background noise for the proceedings.

I promise longer entries soon, but 1000 words a day (at least) requires this foreign concept called discipline.