Midyear review

And so it´s come to pass that Michael Jackson has passed away and Farrah Fawcett has passed away and Robert McNamara has passed away, and even the Doctor who pulled me out of my mother like close to thirty years ago, has also passed away: They all made front page news, even the Doctor.

Time passes and another full minute elapses here between paragraphs: The hitherto-nonstopping typing, that frantic, manic, staccato-like burst of typewriter fire from the screenwriters from hell under Satan´s Writers Guild ceases for a minute or two.
They leave their desks unoccupied for the time being, go for a drink of water (boiling water, that is). If you approach their desks and look over their papers you will get to see the script they´ve been writing for the last six, seven months: They are halfway through this 2009 of theirs, let me tell you that.

My classes have since ended.
We went to this bar last Friday to sort of celebrate and people asked me why I wasn´t going to Europe with them. It´s not like a guy like you don´t have the money, some said. I said nothing, not really, and not really caring too much anyway. Great guys though. Great girls too. They actually thanked me for making class so much fun, and said last Thursday had been the greatest day ever because of that thing we pulled in the back of the class, when we started trying to associate each student to a famous person: From Poltergeist´s Carol Anne to Mad´s Alfred E. Newman, we did everything and everyone. Charlie Brown. Alf. Super-Vicky. Bette Davis, for crying out loud, for the hot chick with the big, deep eyes (Better Davis was my favorite but I don´t think people got that one). I got to be this local crooked politician, some bald one with thick eyebrows.
A couple of girls asked me if I was gay. They said it was because of the things I´d say and how I´d say them. I think it was because of my naming someone Bette Davis, even though to my defense I was actually thinking of the song instead of the actress per se.
“Naahh”, I told them anyway. “That´s like, really dumb.”

This other girl sort of took me from the away from the bar at about close to 2 in the morning: Caught me by the arm and said she was hellbent on taking me home. It got pretty clear I was going to get some at last, jesus christ, some vindication was sorely needed after all that time. “Okay,” I told her.
Thing is halfway to my place she started blabbing about her boyfriend and their being like six or six hundred years together despite all their differences and so on, while me, I was just praying to hell there were still enough condoms at the medicine cabinet. Not that you´re actually either thinking or assuming you´re gonna be needing like seventeen of them in one night for chrissakes, but you know: boys will be boys. Also, there but for the grace of god, and all that jazz.

A minor plot twist: She parks in front of my building and we talk for like three milliseconds. Kiss on the cheek. She never comes up.

There are four condoms back in the medicine cabinet. I make the point so as to check it like, first thing upon entering the apartment, even before peeing, even before brushing my teeth or taking a shower.
And there was another one to spare in my wallet but that one was sort of old and I don´t even think it was textured, you know? “Ribbed for her pleasure”.

Screenwriters from hell indeed: Halfway through the script and just you look how far we´ve come without a single plot.
2009 carries on...

All in all, this Sunday kind of sucked

So power was shut down this morning up until mid-afternoon, and water followed suit after noon. Some maintenance crap down the street, something like that.

Had nothing special to do, not really, so I slipped on some sneakers and went to see that god-awful Transformers movie: Knowing from the get-go it´d probably suck anyhow, but expecting to see some cool shots of F-22s in action-- which never really happened.

All in all, this Sunday kind of sucked...

It´s so much fun playing around with words (a poem)

Sometimes I dream of warm Summer nights spent
outdoors among shrubberies sparse and thin, tall
trees bare of fruit feeding the fire at our feet with a
dried-out windfall of dead bark and bough and leaf
and twig.

Yet the fire cracks still at our feet in this dream and
its din is like the gentle snoring of a bearded wise
giant sleeplessly knitting throughout Creation with
needles silver though complexion like dusty
parchment.

Up I step to yell at the old man,
“Dontcha yield old man Father Time let it rip,”
then watch him wake to swing his scythe sideways
from East to West, horizon to proximity,
shoreline to sky, and I see all the weekends from a
childhood idyllic merged over those later straycat
blackhole years inevitably misspent in College:

Everything boiled down to a past only half-forgotten
but mostly rendered in rags apocryphal.

Then just before the sand ebbs away washed from
eyes shut tight I find myself a lone castaway on the
left banks of night´s beach under this Southern Cross
of ours, seeing you coast by to righter shores safely tucked
beneath Winter´s gray coat just like sails set high bridging
this great divide-- and us half a continent asunder.

The Purge (a haiku)

Tonight undressing
all the chaos off my life,
from shoreline to sky.

Still life, with an M-16

The other night I dreamed I was at the park, at this large open field surrounded by tall trees. It was a sunny Spring morning and I was utterly alone.
I had an M-16 rifle with me, god knows why, and I was practicing shooting at this range of trees closing in around the grassy heath in the distance. "Y´know, this is so cool," I´d say upon every round I´d fire.


When I woke up, I logged online and started looking up old mid-1980s Vigilante comics for sale.

Wavelengths

All of a sudden all the girls seem have started wearing purple this Autumn, I´m thinking. Three years ago, it was May ´06 and I was at the mall having lunch with some friends from the office and there was this drop-dead gorgeous girl with her mother or something like that, and she had a periwinkle-blue sweater and when I came home that evening I sat down and actually wrote about that girl with the periwinkle-blue sweater even though I never got to talk to her, to know her name, or to see her again.

Maybe it´s just that I´m a little frustrated when it comes to girls right now, that I´m choosing the collective against the individual, not really being able to make a writer´s muse out a random shopping mall encounter this time around—or maybe it´s just that Autumn has indeed tilted to the lower-end of the spectrum this year, and that in order for things to work I should get my heart beating to shorter wavelengths.

Bizarre Love Triangle, ´09

She slips the jacket of my suit over her bare shoulders and the three-pronged arched necklace dangling from her collarbone twinkles under the soft lighting within the ballroom. The sweet smell of her perfume will linger on the jacket´s fabric as I wake up alone on a Sunday morning at my place, but content and fulfilled anyhow.
She smiles at me so gently and her upper lip curls up a tad at its midsection, forming a light cleft not unlike that of a cat´s, which trace is further made stronger by her slanting amber eyes and the almost feline way her wavy blonde hair cascades over her black dress and my own navy blue jacket, cut short and in layers.

She tells me of this new boyfriend of hers, also blond of course and about 5´10” tall or something (I´m 5´7” by the way— for your information). And he´s French, to boot, naturally lives in Paris and works for Air France, that´s why it´s so easy for him to dish her out air tickets to Canada or wherever every now and then.
I start thinking of it´s probably the first time I´ve ever thanked an ocean for existing but the very notion of the Atlantic spreading out eastwards between myself and my now-imaginary Calvin Klein underwear modeling-nemesis soothes me into the rest of the wedding reception. I smile back at her, ask if she´s any warmer.
A little, she says, then thanks me in a whisper as we find the way to out table.

I´m calculating, for the rest of the evening past the dinner and once all the non-octogenarian guests of the wedding have all swarmed to the dance floor, including ourselves, how long I actually have to make my move before the night is through.
I think of my globe-trotting rival, his being French and this wonderful, dream-come-true girl at my side hailing from Chile—and of their chance meeting down here under Brazilian skies—and this funny little analogy runs through the back of my head: Angels and demons clashing upon Earth, raining fire and brimstone over Man, who can do nothing and is inevitably caught sandwiched between some eternal manicheist ballet. But then the deejay shifts both the tempo and decade of his songs: Abba melts into New Order and nears the inevitable end of the 20th century with some crap in Spanish: Another decade and all the chariots will inevitably turn back into pumpkins.

I´m thinking of the Devil, yet again though, and something about time being too short and the Devil sending in his beast with wrath and stuff, and I almost mention her that, actually thinking for a moment I´m so cool because I´m really getting it from the Bible, from the goddamn Book of Revelations, but upon second thought I´m just probably recalling some song by Iron Maiden or whatnot. Then I make a mental note so as to go easy on the rock stations from now on, and fish my endless pool of lowbrow junk pop culture for a better analogy for the unfairness of the situation:

“So hey about this whole Air France thing,” I ask her as we leave the dancefloor for the bar and yet another round of sake with strawberries, “You ever seen that movie Aliens versus Predator with like, the two races of monster in it doing their battle on Earth? It´s god-awful but makes a guy wonder, I´ll give you that, for instance...”

Miracle Monday 2009

Today is the third Monday of May: In the Superman , it means it´s Miracle Monday, a day celebrating the victory of Superman over supreme, absolute evil twenty-one years ago.

Miracle Monday is a lost treasure to comicdom, a pocket book released by Warner Brothers in the wake of the Superman II movie back in ´81. It was the second of two books written by the leading Superman comic writer of the day, Elliot “S!” Maggin, and unless if you were lucky enough to be there, you just missed it by a landslide.
Today? Today Miracle Monday is one of those items an aficionado might go after on eBay late at night and dish out maybe 15 Dollars on it plus shipping? Hardly anything else, really.
And sadly.

The book, oddly enough very well-placed within comics continuity and therefore valid for the chronicles´ canon, tells the story of this girl who comes from the future to study the origin of her time period´s greatest holiday, then proverbially lost to the mists of time, just as Lex Luthor plans his most recent prison break.

At the same time, though, the Devil himself, yep, the one with the horns and hooves and the pitchfork-thing, in Hell, etc, sets his sight on Superman and plans on humiliating and crushing all he stands for once and for all.

All plots come together in a 1981 Metropolis, as the Man of Tomorrow is put to his greatest test ever—and this, mind you, is a Superman who had just reached maturity, peaked in all terms of character development you might be thinking of:
There he was, maybe ten years out of the (editor) Mort Weisinger years and all his multi-colored Kryptonites and Super-Monkeys, and well into the (later editor) Julius Schwartz´s days, with Clark Kent being a TV anchor, Superman´s romance with Lois Lane finally starting to blossom into something quite more physical—and guys like Steve Lombard and Morgan Edge were co-stars all the way for the mild-mannered Clark Kent´s time onscreen.
So this is Superman at his adulthood as a fictional character, there five, maybe six years before the John Byrne re-boot, with all the weight of the 20th century finally starting to burden down on his back.

Reading Maggin´s novel, you can almost see the wrinkles around Clark´s eyes in the back of your head: That´s a book your mind´s eye will have penciled by Curt Swan and inked by Murphy Anderson (or would that be Bob Oksner?) for you, and that´s quite a spectacle.

Sure, superhero-fights-the-devil stories are a dime a dozen: From the 1940s pre-Marvel Comics Hurricane strips to earlier this very year´s Batman: RIP by Grant Morrison—But Superman shinning at his very prime, just an inch from starting to slip downhill? Fighting the ultimate Evil in a battle he cannot even hope to win?
Like, “Superman meets the Exorcist”? Miracle Monday is that good!

So here´s a day for celebrating: Miracle Monday has been lost to the mists of time not only in the girl from the future´s timeline but in ours as well: Sure, you could dish out the 15 bucks on eBay but you´re very likely not going to: I mean, it was a movie-related gimmicky book after all wasn´t it? There´s even a Christopher Reeve on the cover, even though it has nothing to do with the movie.

There are always well-natured souls to put the whole book online for free, though:
http://superman.nu/thebook/mm_contents.php

That´s where I read it the first time around a few years back; it made me fall in love with the story so much, I ended up dishing out 15 bucks for the real thing online a few weeks ago: it was just as good as the first time around.


And the way Superman beats the Devil in the end...?
Batman, for all his carefully-laden traps and schemes and preparations, ended up brining down the Evil One with one black-gloved punch through the windshield of a helicopter in ´09.
But Superman there back in ´81...?

Really:
What chance does the personification of ultimate evil actually have against the entire 20th century embodied in that perfect someone of a kid´s fantasy´s wildest dreams come true?

It´s fun to watch, though. Or to read.


Happy Miracle Monday!

Stop me if you´ve heard this one before...

I.
“We need to talk to you now,” says this usually mild-mannered fellow at this Vendor who handles facilities administration for the company. It´s not the almost visible italics in his voice that give off his need for my immediate attention, but the two security guards in dark suits by his side. “Come with us.”

So I cross the large hall, passing the aisles with the cubicles with due escort until we get to this small, ill-lit (don´t ask) room that the security people keep their suits and fill out reports about god knows what, and probably browse for p*rn and stuff too.
They close the door behind me and I get the distinct feeling they are just about to kick the living crap out of myself.

“You´re the guy who handles that business c*ntinuity thing, right?,” asks the facilities administrator.
“It´s more of a part-time thing, see,” I smile. “Like, it´s all a bunch of spreadsheets and stuff. But how can I help you guys?”
“Building administration just called,” he tells me with a wavering voice. “Seems they just got this call from someone claiming that there´s a b*mb in this building.”
“You gotta be kidding, right?” I ask. He says no, it´s for real.


Then we get to repeat that last exchange about four times over until I´m actually convinced it´s no prank and we´re dealing with an actual b*mb threat situation.


I rest my hands on my waist, bow my head down and take a deep breath as I realize I´m the first person in the company to be actually informed of this—and that whatever happens next is a direct consequence of this very instant: Okay, first things first, I tell myself in the back of my head. Keep your cool and think things through.

Right off the bat, then, all the usual questions: Has the Police been called in yet? What did they say? How many people know of this? Are there talks of evacuation? And so on, and so forth. Gather information, stick to the basics.

Then I leave the room, call in by boss—who´s also, and very conveniently, the escalation point for all emergency situations like this. Getting him up to speed takes a little less time, since I did my homework and asked all the right questions.

Once we escalate the issue, though, we´ve just arrived halfway through this meeting between the site Director and the visiting CEO of this huge commercial prospect of ours from the US.
It´s then & there that I´m thrown what´s possibly the biggest curve ball I´ve ever been given in my life: “Whatever happens next, whatever you guys do,” he tells us, “Buy me at least twenty more minutes so I´m finished with this guy.”

I look at my boss, mister numero dos, and he looks at me, mister number four hundred and twenty-three, I guess, or thereabouts, both of us trying just to figure out what the hell to do next.
Then we remember that the clock is ticking in more ways than one, probably, and that we still got lots of ground to cover.


II.
The main difference between being 19 and 29 years old is, I guess, being confident enough that once some idiotic situation crashes in your party like that— say, a b*mb threat at work—you understand the whole mechanics of what´s really required of you.

Kids panic, that´s a given.
Kids panic mostly because they´ll get into their own heads and try as hard as they can to remember everything they´ve crammed up so far about how the best way to deal with the office being threatened with a b*mb and stuff, and coming up with nothing either specific or doable—panic´s the only way out.

Adults, on the other hand—and you have no idea how much I´ve been enjoying this whole “adult” thing lately—Adults will automatically trust their experience to provide them with all the adequate course of action they need. And that´s exactly where all the books and movies and flunking College classes then having bad breakups with girls and stuff come into play.
We are, after all, the sum of all our experiences.


III.
The rest of it, for the sake of a shorter post on a Sunday night, is best covered itemized:


>> We don´t spread the word so as not to panic people: Only about five or six persons in the company get to be aware of what´s going on.

>> We go over our contract SLAs with the Client, to be sure of the financial consequences of evacuating (Okay, I know that people come first, but let´s get a little practical too, right).

>> Building administration has touched base with the larger companies in the building and everyone decided it´s safer to wait for the Police before ordering an all-out evacuation.

>> We touch base with this other department from out Company, based on the fifth floor and to whom we have so little direct contact with, and it seems they also agree with the idea of not evacuating, of not doing anything drastic until the proper Authorities say-so.

>> Paranoia sinks in and of the few people involved, one or two start recalling “suspicious” events from earlier in the day, maybe that was when the b*mb was planted, that kind of crap.

>> The Police come in, eventually, and even though I never get to see them, they allegedly even brought in one of those b*mb-sniffing dogs.

>> Building administration confirms to the Police they´ve already swept all common areas of the building and came out empty-handed. Each Company in the building, including us, confirms the same thing for our respective interiors.

>> The Police dismisses the whole thing as a crank call and says no evacuation is needed, nor is another investigation of the premises. Then they leave.


By then we´re all breathing a lot lighter, it´s maybe an hour later into the gameplay, and not only we´ve given the Director his twenty minutes, but we´ve also managed to keep the crisis and bay with no harm to our people and our operations.

Right?
Wrong.

It got a little worse.


IV.
That´s when we get the word that our cousins on the fifth floor (remember them?) have just jumped the gun and made the call as to actually order their own evacuation. Swear to god: About a hundred people droning down the stairways, every one of them talking about the building being threatened by a b*mb, and stuff—and that was like, ten minutes after the Police´d cleared the stuation!

Once we get to their offices they´ve all vacated the place and even the Directors to whom we´d talked previously and agreed upon the no-evac option seem to have disappeared the planet. Not answering their mobiles, either.

We get close to freaking out, then: How long until the word spreads out to our two floors and all hell breaks loose?


V.
We do damage-control then, and we dot it fairly quick: we split our team between the third and fourth floor, each one braced by a Director, and we call in each Manager and Team Leader on site: Explain the whole situation to them and tell them to relay the full story to their respective teams—fifteen minutes later, tops, work´s still going on as in a regular day, except people are making jokes about how they almost got to leave earlier on a Friday over a crank call...

My boss looks at me and all things considered, despite our overeager cousins above, things could have gone a lot worse. We laugh but then before we´re able to go for a cup of coffee, I tell him only half-seriously how much I pity the guy who gets to notify Corporate Security at the US.
He says nothing for about half a minute, then looks at me and says, “You know, that´s a great point.” Then points me to the phone.

H.P. Lovecraft: Babe magnet?!

So. Three days into reading from H.P. Lovecraft´s at long last-- which translates into three days carrying that book around the bus, the mall, the office, and so on.

Oddly enough, three days into being stopped out cold by cute girls asking me, "May I see that book?" or "What are you reading?"-- at the bus, at the office, at the goddamn mall for chrissakes!

I´ve been pulling exactly the same routine now for years: From Jack Kerouac to Charles Dickens, from Kurt Vonnegut to Phillip Roth, and onwards, and I´d never been stopped at the mall by a total stranger. Kind of cute, too.

Do bear my being entirely blown away here please: If it´d happened with a Dave Eggers book, cool, makes lots of sense: Eggers has got that coffee house-flirting vibe going after all. Michael Chabon? Well, Chabon´s got it too I guess, paved the way for Eggers in that sense, and that was even before the Pulitzer. Even Gaiman, right? Neil Gaiman, in these weird, surprisingly wondrous post-Sandman years of his.
I guess I could pull off flirting with a Neil Gaiman novel after all, with a little ease and some luck to boot.


But really? Lovecraft? H. P. Lovecraft, with all his adjectives, and the haunted house-slash-tentacled beast thing going? Nineteen-twenties Lovecraft? Weird Tales-published Lovecraft?!

I´m sorry. Makes no sense to me.
I mean-- don´t get me wrong-- I´m three days into being absolutely in love with his work as well: I mean, Rats in the Wall? The Shunned House? Man, that´s so cool-- But to go from my newly-found love for pulpy-horror genre fiction to girls actually stopping me by at the mall to ask about it? Thrice over?!


I dunno: Is that what they mean by the "call" of Cthulhu?!
Jeez... where was Lovecraft when I was 16?!

Walpurgisnacht ´09

I.
________ once asked what I meant and at first I thought she was dodging the issue because she knew that it would, ultimately, boil down to why wouldn´t she go to bed with me. What I´ve since learned, standing here in the future through an X-ray hindsight able to pierce the strongest candyglaze is irrelevant now: Yeah well, maybe we did not go to bed, in the end, because I really wanted it less than I thought I did. But a future proves itself irrelevant every time it gets tangled up in digressions.
________´s reply, at the end of the day, metaphorically speaking since we were ones of the late-night variety back in that year, year and a half following the end of High School, was that it sure beat the hell out of staying home alone watching TV. “Also,” she´d added maybe a half minute afterwards, “If you don´t get to know people, how do you ever expect to know who´s the right one for you?”.

Distance, as in time as opposed to actual, factual space, has proven me ________ to be the queen of coming-of-age aphorisms: Her wisdom has since become my astrolabe, and the way she wore her hair still gives me this tiny little secret half-smile when watching a Rita Hayworth movie on late-night TV reruns.


II.
But I´m not thinking of Rita Hayworth right now and I´m not thinking of ________ either, not really. I´m thinking of Superman, and how Superman handles rejection.

Now mind you, this is the guy with serious Oedipian issue borne out of, from an infant´s perspective, being abandoned by her mother, who chose to stay & perish with her husband instead of jumping ship (jumping planet?) with him, little baby Kal-El.
So how did Superbaby handled his first rejection? He sublimed from the Freudian to the Jungian and found himself a schizoid spanning the opposite ends of the archetype spectrum draped against both sides of the newspaper headlines—and Lois? Ah Lois, Lois.

Ah those fictional characters and their Lois Lanes-es, Iris West-es, Linda Park-es, Silver St. Cloud-es. Ah ________ knowing from the get-go the real-world alternative to that and the promiscuity that inevitably ensued, and the inexcusable need for address books and the urge for hitting nightclubs all by yourself any given Saturday evening when TV got any more boring than usual.


III.
I have this recurring private joke all my own when it comes to finding that one true person: I´d ask about her birthday and she´d would reply, “April, 30th”.
I have this recurring private joke all my own with a punchline that´s got my meeting a girl who was born on Walpurgis night—which on itself is a whole other recurring joke to myself. Bottom line is, there´s a world where Clark Kent met Lois Lane on his first day at the office, then later on as if finding your own true love weren´t enough, he travelled back in time to Krypton before Krypton ended up as Kryptonite rain on Earth, and met poor, doomed Lyla Lerrol, and this world maybe is not our own.

But maybe it is.

Do you remember this one time we went out for a burger and a Coke, I think it was the first time we´d ever gone out together, like a date but before even kissing and stuff—I don´t recall why, not anymore, but I sort of told you Talullah, the name, just like that, right off the bat and what did you do? Jesus Christ, you sang me the lyrics to the Bugsy Malone song in a mock-Jodie Foster way that just killed me and almost made me choke on my onion rings and tex-mex.

The April, 30th joke came much later than that, many years later in fact, and was only in thinking of it that I actually remembered dreamed-up, picture-perfect ways of meeting your own comicbook-ey right person, regardless how rare, gets some much cooler once real.


IV.
On the night of April, 30th, the legend goes, all that ectoplasmic crap from a bad Discovery Channel haunted house mockumentary comes to Earth: Like ghosts and demons and witches, and well, we´ve seen Chernobog on Walt Disney´s Fantasia and we´ve read Goethe´s Faust—there it is, Walpurgis Night—also allegedly the last night on which Odin the allfather hung from a gallows-tree in his pursuit for power and knowledge.

It is Odin´s spirit then, that I´m addressing this Walpurgis Night just like playwright Edward Albee did in the climax to Who´s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (and the fact I don´t actually need Wikipedia for this passage is living proof that once in a blue moon, I can get cool and slick and trendy in a brainy kind-of way), and sort of letting it all out.


V.
I was down with the flu last Thursday, maybe with a fever, maybe not. Fact is, I went to bed and I had this really crazy dream: I was at this classroom which was an amalgam of all the classrooms I´ve ever been in, and there were lots of people coming in and out, people I´ve taken classes with, been enrolled with, etc—girls, boys, children, adults—and it was all so very funny because I quickly sided with the worst of them (comic books notwithstanding, I´ve always been much more a back-of-the-class bully than the wimpy opposite).
So there I was in my oneiric classroom tagging along the bullies and making fun of everybody, laughing my ass off, and during all the time I just couldn´t take my eyes off the door: At each new-old face that popped in my heart skipped a beat and I squinted my eyes just a little tighter—But you, you, to my eternal exasperation, never really came in.


VI.
I´ve since gotten over ________ and I´ve since gotten over you and I´ve since gotten over this number of girls that, in hindsight, is a little mind-boggling considering I´m the guy who takes girls out to dinner, to this cozy little restaurant that only gay people go to, and there´s this white, opaque glass plate over a little pool of water as a decoration, like an abstract statue dividing environments, the tables from the bar, and the first thing I tell those girls I´m out with is, Hey there´s the Fortress of Solitude—and I get to take about half of them to bed afterwards.

Yet regardless of whom I´ve gotten over, sometimes they (you, plural?) all feel like demons trapped inside a mountain, waiting for the right day, for the right night or time when the membrane separating their netherworld from the real-world gets thin enough—then it´s like this big acne on the face of the earth with Chernobog riding high atop a hell of broken hearts, then the pressure builds and scars just burst.

Address book RIP!!!

I.
Last weekend this girl I was after turned me down for maybe the second, third time. I flipped shut the mobile then bowed down my head for a minute or so.

When I was 19 years old, getting turned down by a girl would knock me off my feet for what, a couple of months? Now all it takes me it´s like 30 seconds to recover, and another 30 seconds to think of a way out:

I flipped the phone open and went for the address book: It took me two hours to start burning my elbows and knees and other parts of my anatomy against the carpet back at my place, which is conveniently located near a subway station (if you´re ever to understand the Uncle Charlie logistics of it). I mean two hours, think about it willya! That freaking address book sure means business!!


II.
This weekend that very same girl turned me down for the fourth, fifth time and what would Uncle Charlie do? I went for the address book not an eyeblink later, once over, once again, but this time only to find out I´d spent my last shot last weekend.

Then I despaired.

My address book has been rendered useless, which means come every Saturday I´m back to basics, swinging from up high with no safety net, no one to call to keep me company when either the nights get cold or the bed gets hot, or both.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.


III.
Of course there´s always plan C... or rather, plan D, because I ended up calling the guys and we went to this real cool restaurant and drank two bottles of champagne and this Japanese lady in her mid-40s was sitting by the table next to hours and she totally looked me over. “Dude, that woman just totally looked you over,” I was told. But she was kind of too fat, and to be quite honest with you I´m utterly unable to flirt while eating because I eat like a pig, it´s a fact, too fast and wolfing everything like a refugee from Darfur.

The guys gave me a ride to halfway to my place, then I sort of chose to go on foot to clear my head, etc, and stopped by the gas station and bought myself an ice-cream cone: It was close to midnight and the air was starting to get cold enough to sleep with a blanket. I zipped up my jacket and took another bite off the ice-cream, and headed home alone, with a spent address book.

Gods & monsters

“Here´s a hundred bucks, kid,” I slip the blond surfer boy sitting at the desk next to mine at the back of the classroom, two fifties, on Thursday evening. “Supposing you´re man enough to do it, I mean”.
He looks at the bills, then to the back of head of the guy sitting right in front of him: Wager is, a hundred bucks are his, supposing he kisses the other guy´s nape during class.
“You want me to kiss his goddamn neck?,” he says. “That´s like, totally gross!”
“Of course it´s totally gross, you imbecile,” I tell him with a smirk. “But unemployed kids aiming at a post-grad still have tuition to pay for, so let´s get on with it shall we?”
He looks at me, smiles. Looks at the guy next to him, smiles too. Pats the dude in front of him on the shoulder with a sorry man, but it´s money-- stands up a little timidly, tilts his head sideways and whams, kisses the guy´s nape. Everyone laughs everyone´s asses off, girls are grossed out, freaked out, I leave the classroom and almost trip down on the watercooler because the whole place becomes a riot, and I just want to go to the bathroom and laugh out as loud as I can.

When I get home later that night, Bride of Frankenstein is on TV, the original 1935 version, which is this kickass movie with a killer prologue.
I stab my fork at my microwave-heated dinner, whatever it is, as the wicked Dr. Pretorius tempts Dr. Frankenstein into doing nefarious things onscreen, then toasts to some “new world of gods and monsters!”.

“Kickass, Doc!,” I blurt out to the television, and return the toast with my fork.

Tora! Tora! Tora!

Little history lesson for you guys out there: So it´s December, 1941 and the Japs have just swooped low over Pearl Harbor and bomb-strafed the place to bits. What do guys like Superman and the Green Lantern do? Well, they pretty much get together with the likes of Wonder Woman, the Spectre, etc, the whole crazy bunch of them, and cross over the Pacific. “Hey fellers, now let´s go and lay Tokyo to waste” must have been the closest thing on their minds. Or something like that.
But they weren´t really counting on this Spear of Destiny thing, see, which Hitler´d just acquired back in Europe and pretty much covered all Axis-controlled territory with a magical force field that would put any there-present metahuman under his control.
So Superman, GL et al, all had to pretty much come back, and be content with only protecting the homefront “for the duration.” Whatever that meant.

Okay. Now back to me: I can´t seem to go out with any girl of Asian-descent, period. I don´t know whatever Nazi-spawned magicks Hitler must have cooked up like sixty years ago but it´s still going on strong: I got turned down not by one but I swear to god, TWO of those girls, and totally unrelated girls to boot, this past week alone.

I mean, have you ever gone out with an Asian girl?
I took one to dinner, a few weeks ago, and that was that. Period. "No miso shiru for you!!!" -------- (hey that joke was actually good!)

It´s incredible, I´ve never seen anything like that: Rebuked (twice) with such grace, such an ease, it almost made me believe of a forcefield up and running there around Midway. Tell you something, girlfriend, that Bushido thing´s a killer!



TEXTUAL NOTE:
At this current point in time, any reference by the author of this very blog to a historical person by the name of “Doolittle” would most likely be understood (by the author himself, no less!) as the guy who like, talks to animals and stuff...

...As opposed to say, the guy from 30 Rock who´s bomb-strafed the Jap mainland with Ben Affleck a few years ago, or something like that. I just want to meet cool, cute girls, regardless of race, credo, skin color or social condition, for chrissakes, not think up crappy posts on dead Sunday evenings...