A tentative bookend

Standing atop that selfsame lookout post

from yesteryear,

near the edge of this big cliff

off to nowhere,

from where this all began.

But lightly now.

(What burdens? Why bother?)

Softly.

Previously engineering... something I can't quite remember now.

Currently -- and quite comfortably -- sitting back with my beach chair up on Moab, with a book to read, and none to write.

A thousand miles to go in any direction, true that, but still aiming at post #500!

After the Somme

We're no longer sitting

behind our foxholes,

yet our hands do not touch.

These trenches have gone

silent for aeons now,

but you just don't seem to mind it too much.

And you sent me your verses in Latin

the day the world started speaking in tongues.

You told me if the truth ain't broken why fix it,

but tomorrow, those Telstar pulses will take

too

damn

long.

They will tell of me, the nowhere kid,

whereas we'll be sure to paint you as the nonesuch,

But don't you mind tomorrow, dear, don't mind the smoke,

'cause in the end we'll figure out where we belong.

The Adventures of the Batwoman, pg. 131

I have been re-rewriting my 132-page "The Adventures of the Batwoman" comic script these past few months, just for kicks.

It was a very crude script from 2005 that I'd left pretty much unfinished until now.

This is the next-to-last page (pg. 131), which I've just finished and that I'm particularly proud of:

----------------

PAGE 131.

Panel 1.

Sunset: At the courtyard outside Eclipso’s fortress, Batman and the Batwoman talk, as in the background the remaining superheroes wrap up their business for the day. Batwoman looks unsettled, uneasy, not sure what to expect from the grim, tight-lipped Batman.

BATMAN: I was talking to the elder Green Lantern and… the Justice Society has recently begun their Super-Squad training program…

BATMAN: It’s the same program they have Power Girl and Sylvester Permberton in…

CAPTION: --says the Batman brooding under the last rays of the sun, a psychopomp of sorts, sentenced to guard the borders of the night like a herald of things to come--

BATMAN: Lantern wants you in, Kathy.

CAPTION: --a Faustian bargain if any, thinks Kathy Kane AKA the Batwoman, expecting a barter or trade-off that never comes.

Panel 2.

The Batwoman takes off her mask, holds it in her hand and stares at the Batman right in the eye. She’s holding back her tears.

BATWOMAN: I thought you didn’t approve of me.

BATWOMAN: I mean for chrissakes, isn’t my costume too bright? Or don’t I punch too lightly? Do I keep myself in your top-notch übermensch physical condition?

BATWOMAN: Don’t I smile all too often?

CAPTION: She puts on her best brave face and stares Batman in the eye: if there’s any emotion on his, the mirrored eyepieces from his cowl do not let it show.

Panel 3.

A half-smiling Batman (!) puts his hand on her shoulder, in an older brother kind of way. Batwoman smiles nervously.

BATMAN: Kathy. Batwoman. I recommended you myself.

BATWOMAN: Well, I… Well to be quite frank with you, I was positive you were going to throttle me for that parachute stunt, and now you come from out of the blue and offer me club membership?

BATMAN: I’ll throttle you during debriefing. Then it’s on to the JSA with you.

CAPTION: But there is a catch to this game, of course: That curve ball you never see coming, that car coming up your blind side.

Panel 4.

Continuing: Holding back her tears, she stares deeply into Batman’s eyes. This is a very touching, tender moment for Kathy.

BATWOMAN: Batman, I…

CAPTION: That last syllable lingers in the air for the months to come.

Panel 5.

Cut to: A flashback panel of the Batwoman, in a tattered uniform, hanging from a rope as if it were a trapeze, in the rocky runnels of the League of Assassins’ headquarters in Tibet (from #04).

CAPTION: The bat has completed its cycle. A circle has been closed and a purpose in life fulfilled.

CAPTION: And now it’s time to fly home.

Panel 6.

Cut to: Kathy Kane, dressed in a circus outfit, hangs from a trapeze under the big top, above applauses from the crowded bleachers below. Kathy in this shot is positioned exactly like in the previous panel, so as draw a parallel between both.

CAPTION: She will follow her heart.

CAPTION: She will go back to the circus.

CAPTION: She will know peace and joy.

Panel 7.

Cut to: Kathy Kane lies dead in the darkness on the sawdust of an empty circus tent. There’s blood coming from her side, and also a dagger smeared in blood (the discarded murder weapon).

CAPTION: She will die within the year, murdered, caught in the crossfire of a bloody game of vengeance between Ra’s Al Ghul and the Sensei for control of the League of Assassins.

Galactus beckons, tomorrow beckons...

Say, there's 2012 up ahead. Isn't the world supposed to end or something?

Typical: I finally get a girlfriend, the world ends.

Tamagotchi

I have never really told anyone about this, but I've always wanted a Tamagotchi...

Waiting for the rain

The sky is overcast up there far in the distance past the Interstate where you can’t touch the clouds, always out of reach, thick damp gray like cotton candy soaked in whitewash hovering above green hills on the horizon line like a bad omen open for divination, about to unload, discharge, pour down its truths elsewhere.

It’s closer to sunny here though, with large empty patches overhead, torn free from thinning mist-like cloud banks scattered all over by the wind. Those empty patches project intermittent circles of light down on the ground, over the tall buildings, wading erratically along jammed thoroughfares. Moving shadows are cast without rhyme or reason and go mostly unnoticed by the thronging crowds. Some of them brought along their umbrellas, just in case, when they left home for work.

There’s an overall melancholy in the air today, not really a sorrowful mood but instead a general slowness to everything, for action, attitude, buffering the self against volition or initiative: There should be lightning soon over there and with it the smell of ozone, the smell of wet, and the growing pervasive feeling one should have stayed home reading a book instead. But then, almost no one reads books anymore, so it’s a feeling devoid of purpose.

I remember one particular rainy afternoon at my grandmother’s house many years ago, going over the old books in the cabinet above her ancient armoire and coming up with, among several others, a copy of Through the Looking Glass that belonged either to my mother or to her siblings, complete with the ghostly Tenniel illustrations. I remember sitting down on the white plush couch with my back to the open window and the dark gray sky above, and devouring that book with a glass of chocolate milk, maybe cookies or freshly-baked cake as well.

I’m not the one to say that back then was necessarily better in any absolute sense, it did have its highs and lows just as everything else does except on rainy days candyglazing the past seems so much more tempting, easier to do and to come by, either by fantasy or force.

My ode to yesteryear

Thursday, November 17, 2011.
9:15am EST. Right now on my MSN Messenger contact list:

Ten persons online, seven of whom are girls: Five of whom I've slept with and the other two I swear on a stack of bibles I really, really, really tried to take home on any given Friday or Saturday night but they were just too mean to begin with.

Ahhh for the days of yore, right?

Hehh. I can't go home again but heck if I can't brag a little.

Again with the Bride of Frankenstein

Out of all the Universal monsters I'd say Dr. Frankenstein's Monster was always my least-favorite. There's just something about the big, slow, dim-witted hulking strogman motiff that has simply never appealed to me.

But then-- and this has happened many times over in the last what, three years or so-- you sit down to watch either of James Whale's Frankensteins, the first one or the Bride sequel, and man there's Karloff stumbling, wobbling, the big lummox, under all that makeup you'd swear it was a sickly green past the b&w... you stand corrected.

I mean sure, Bela Lugosi kicks major ass as Dracula-- that ethereal European accent from god-knows-where is just to die for, and just the way he walks about the set with that cape-- not even Batman does that to a cape. But then you're watching the Bride of Frankestein and the Bride hisses at the Monster, casts him aside, and he turns to Pretorius and says, We belong dead!--- Wanna see Bela Lugosi do it. No Dracula, no Wolfman, no Mummy, no Invisible Man, no Phantom of the Opera, no Creature of the Black Lagoon (a runner-up favorite, by the way, and overly under-rated).

The Bride of Frankenstein just has got to be one of my favorite movies ever: From that madcap first scene with Lord Byron you surely don't see coming to Elsa Lanchester's being onscreen as the Bride for what? Five minutes tops? But that makes an impression to last an eternity With all her goddamned chilling hissing-- Terrific movie, terrific movie.

The 11/11/11 post

Just for the hell of it, right? Just to make sure we got this down to paper.

I was eight on 8/8/88 + it rained only on one-half of this playground in the building I lived with my parents. That was pretty cool, because I’d often wondered until then whatever happened at the tail-end of raining, where wet stopped to give way to dry, the border, the transitional medium.

I was 19 on 9/9/99 and Jimmy and I were already in College and for some reason we were not working that day, or maybe we both were in-between jobs. So we went out to the comics shop and I bought a DC Comics compilation of sci-fi stories from the 1940s to the 1980s. There was one story in that collection that would eventually sort-of, kinda inspire me on the tattoo I’d get years, years later.

Then if you look up the post on this blog for 10/10/10 you’ll read of the e-mail I’d sent Cybill, strictly a friend then, and one in a rather cumbersome position at that (again, then), to thank for her company on the Bon Jovi concert we’d gone to together a few days earliers. Which sort of speaks volumes, I guess, on asserting that these days are fast indeed.

I’m 31 on 11/11/11 and I’m working from home. No, scratch that. I’m at home pretending I’m working but in fact I’m not doing much of anything simply because I’m way disappointed and upset with my dead-end job. Also because I’m kind of queasy today. Too many trips to the boy’s room this morning. It’s a good thing I stayed at home. From instant messaging Cybill’s asking if I’m feeling better. Yep, I type back. Then I ask her is she’s coming over tonight and she says of course she is.

‘A’ is for Abraxas, ‘B’ is for bullshit

Bryce had been telling us over sushi he’d do it with poultry his magic I mean and in the back of my head I kept zoning out, much to Cybill’s chagrin, because all I could think of was that zombie movie with Bill Pullman even though there’s like an ocean in-between the two crafts and I was probably just taking the easier way and allowing in stereotypes anyhow, preconceptions and prejudices. But suppose I go Buddhist, but to follow a fat deity? And I’m certainly not going Catholic only to molest little kids.
But see, there’s Bryce droning on and on of his craft and strange madcap rituals with chicken and all of a sudden my Bill Pullman figment phases out to this funny syndicated newspaper strip I must’ve read back in the mid-1990s I think it was Dilbert nononono, not that, it was from a Robotman strip, you know years before they made away with the Robotman and the strip was renamed Monty? And on that specific strip, memory hazes a bit right now sorry if I veer off somewhat from its actual content, but the Robotman was kind of chastising Monty on all the McNuggets he would eat and that some day the spirits of all the chicken slain would come back to haunt him? The sheer definition of Karma.
That’s the joke I was to tell Bryce but Cybill would probably throttle me because she’s sort of partial to Bryce after he gave her his old iPad before she went on PTO to South Africa so she could post the usual stuff on Facebook.

But point is Bryce does it with poultry and seashells, Jimmy does it by listening to old black men, long since departed, Cybill herself has a bracelet with Nazar charms dangling from it, allegedly to fend off the evil-eye, and her mother-in-law gave me this little medal of some Saint so I could keep it in my wallet because it’s supposed to be blessed or something and I’ve since had it misplaced, naturally unintentionally but that’s Magic for you.

vIvE lA rEsIsTaNcE! (2011 remix)

If you ask me what’s changed or even take a step back, coyly so as to inquire of what would it take for either the or a change to take place I’d do by best Bogart flicking the tail-end of a cigarette butt to some dark, damp gutter somewhere and tell ya nawww, changes nothing kid. Because it doesn’t, really, and it shouldn’t: We fight on, this side of the Earth still preaching out with your immaturity card but that’s not it, that’s just fighting dirty from their side, maybe your side too swear I’m not judging you but I won’t be the one to pull hair, just stick to those same old tactics proven wrong and ineffectual, perennially hoping, going for that mythical, self-styled proverbial dent in the mundane that I’m pretty sure that’s never to come but that’s not the point—

—and from the bible: When god was showing from the top of a mountain, I think it was either to Moses or Abraham or to any number of those guys, really, the Promised Land there below but there was this catch see, guy would only see it but never make to it and I don’t really remember the point inferred, because there’s always supposed to be a point in there somewhere.
But then in the back of my head, hah, I kind of imagine that same scene but now god’s showing it to the stage persona of Joe Strummer and you know Joe right? whasshesayin’? Joe’s telling god he’s not working for the clampdown.

Because me, really, when I look down there it’s often from behind plate-glass down to terrible vistas spreading out past the horizon bereft of free will dystopian in all their glory quasi-lovecraftian in nihilism and jumbled up situations twisted motivations and— oh right, time for another good old one from the bible even though you’ll probably flinch by the time we’re through with this but if you do, girl, it’s because you did not get the metaphor right. But there’s jesus christ, Boy-Wonder, there atop yet another mountain— if that’s a leitmotif like the Batman song in the cartoon, only geographical, I’m missing it too— and he’s talking to someone. Noooo you’ll never guess to whom. And look-ey my twentyfirstcentury brethren! Lo! I give you the Steve Jobs. The tempter. Tempting boy-jesus with an iPad. But do you think kid’s happy with running Windows? Oh he’s not. I can’t hear either of them from down here but I’m pretty sure jesus is complaining about his Internet Explorer freezing when he opens multiple tabs or something.

(but why is the son of god on windows in the first place, you’re asking. But nonononono that’s not the point.)

(I’ll tell you what the point is all about)

(shhh I think someone’s been browsing for porn when out alone fasting in the desert)

(but you can’t really jerk off when you’re hungry, can you?)

—Which brings me to the point in all this, from where the world turns: See, remember 1984? Not necessarily the book, there’s also the movie with the wicked Eurythmics soundtrack, that’ll do as well: Yeah, so. Remember when Winston kept getting fewer chocolate rations all the time?
Now that’s too mean even for a dystopic future: I won’t take my chocolate bar being taken away from me by the establishment. Sure, throw in free speech and sexual diversity for all I care, but me babe, I’m in for the chocolate.

Written with the Notepad app of Cybill’s iPhone while I waited for her to shower (9/9/2011)

"I think my period's due or something," said Deborah with a flick of her wrist, ashes to the carpet like ill tidings, like the cigarette in her hand negotiating its own way out of a Faustian bargain, any bargain, pick a bargain, always a catch in there somewhere, name your poison, nicotine or those sour, sour droplets for the stomach cramps once the barman manning the blister card starts yelling Last Rounds. She shrugged, still, shaking off the notion of a coping mechanism unsure even to herself, then took one last drag from that selfsame rationale before putting it out on Pieter's spew-colored ashtray. "But Carmichael's late nevertheless."
"Carmichael's an ass, Debs."
"Let it go, Pieter," Deborah responded without taking her eyes off the dying embers of her cigarette on her room-mate's ashtray.
"Well he IS an ass" --emphasis-- "and you shouldn't go on sleeping with him like that. Please tell me you make him wear a condom." Pieter's voice had been starting to sound more acidic than usual, she surmised, and correctly so, on the account of his not getting his fix of cock and balls ever since that pavement artist, god what was the creep's name, left him last July. Still, too many theories for the season alone and not enough butterflies fluttering over the dandelions at that tiny little garden near the Mall as with all the Summers before this one.

This one does not advance the plot but it's pretty cool anyhow

Okay there was this song in the back of my head sometime halfway through High School I'd say circa 1996 or thereabouts and I'd asked Dennis about it since he was the big kahuna, know-it-all, when it came to '80s tunes but fact is I could barely recall the melody, let alone the words. "I have no idea what you're talking about," he said to me, or something to that effect.

And now, mean right this second, here in this braindead future that 2011 has gone on to become I'm sitting at the office doing some crap job or whatever and very half-assedly so, and Pat Benatar is singing Sex as a Weapon in my headphones and... that's it. The song I was trying to recall in '96. Total recall. Right there. Right here. Right now.

Snoopy the author reaches nowhere

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times and it was also a dark, stormy night and from where I'm standing I can pretty much see Snoopy sitting atop his red-roofed doghouse typing well into the late hours without stopping but actually reaching nowhere.
I have this writer's block thing going at the present hence the idiotic start for this post and incidentally maybe she did do it because she had a writer's block. Food for thought there. Just don't attempt to pre-heat it in the oven. Hah!
Drum roll--- then new paragraph.

I'm supposed to be working right now. No scratch that: I am at work but truth be told I'm doing a terrific job in procrastinating and frantically pleading for my muse to present herself and give me some great top-notch writing but in lieu of Calliope all I got is some mid-1980s synthpop going on the iPod.
Was that an intentional double entendre? Oh it was and it so sucked!!
OK, once more--- drum roll--- then new paragraph.

Gonna begin reading a new book today, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and it kind of scares me a little. Well not scare but thing is there's a couple of books of his I'd read a while back--- those were V. and The Crying of Lot 49--- and if you want me to be completely honest with you I have no idea what I got from those two books. Pynchon's works scare me witless because I have no idea what's going on most of the time, and the times I do get what's going on I simply don't understand it. Kind of prone to obscure, unclear referencing, that guy. Well, like myself with the Sylvia Plath jokes really.
Yeah, now I guess I've just compared my writing to Thomas Pynchon's. This post of mine is most certainly not going too well: Drum roll--- then new paragraph.

Ohh I’ve just thought of something else too: Superhero costumes.
Here’s a very good reason as to why comic book superhero costumes are skintight: They’re compression suits. You know? Like those suits athletes use to improve performance? That’s it, right there. Positively brilliant.


And that’s it for today: Drum roll--- and out.