Comics are fun.

So, after a pretty long interregnum I have suddenly gotten back into superhero comics. In a big way.  Specifically, Marvel Comics.  I don't know if this is some slow-burning response to the Avengers movie reactivated by Iron Man 3 or what, but I recently spent like a day reading wikipedia articles and the back histories of tons Marvel characters and suddenly found myself interested in what was happening to the characters in Marvel comics RIGHT NOW, (or what's happening in Marvel Now, Ha!) and started reading articles trying to figure out was would be a good jumping on point, which lead to reading about Marvel Now and how that was basically set up by the Avengers Vs. X-Men crossover event.  So I went on Amazon, where they tend to mark comic volumes down twenty to forty percent, and ordered that in hardcover (there are more comics included if you order the hardcover, also the pages are bigger), and well as some other Marvel Now titles that looked interesting, artist and writers I liked or had heard good things about. 

Thinking back on it, I think one of the main motivators was some tumblr I had stumbled upon that posted pages and scenes from various Marvel comics, including stuff from All-New X-Men, one o the first additional volumes I got.  Huh? Cyclops is a villain?! The Original Team has been transported into the present, which means Jean Grey is back, and a boss?  Where when why? How can I figure out what is going on here? 

So that's why I wanted to read Avengers Vs. X-men.  I hadn't read superhero comics in 6 years, I realized, and I simply missed the characters.  I mean, the movies are nice, and those are new versions of the characters, not the one that I grew up with and watched grow and change, that grew and changed, apparently, without me.  I had originally given up on them because I decided, what with the Civil War, World War Hulk, the Initiative, Captain America dying, Spider-Man's arc with the revealing of his identity and then apparently (I later found out) the in-continuity retcon of his marriage, that in some sense the Marvel universe had passed me by.  The stories, the characters, as I had grown up with them, the themes I had associated with them, they were gone.  The people working on them now just did not value them or think of them in the same way I did.  The Civil War, in a sense, seemed to me to be a nice to conclusion to the Marvel Universe as I knew it. I could get off the merry-go-round.  There were other, outside personal stuff, going on as well: my comic shop closing, moving to a new state, suddenly not having any money.  But even with all that I could have easily started up again, found a new comic shop, bought just the main titles I liked, spent money on comics instead of beer (probably would have been a wise move).  But I didn't.  I just stopped. 

So I got Avengers Vs. X-men and within a couple of pages the Scarlet Witch is fighting MODOK across a double-page spread, drawn by Frank Cho, with the White House centered in the background, and I just started giggling.  What I was looking at was just so delirious and ridiculous that I finally rediscovered everything I had been missing, I don't think I had had a moment of just such pure FUN from a piece of entertainment in years.  I mean, MODOK!  MODOK as a concept is just so completely fucking mad that I find it impossible not to smile whenever he pops up or even gets mentioned in anything.  And the Scarlet Witch?  I mean, following everything that had been happening to her with Avengers Disassembled and House of M, having her back in action was like a weird kind of relief, like characters can bounce back!  They eventually all come back!  Also, in front of the White House.  Yes.  And come on! Double Page spreads!  Way to take advantage of that canvas, Cho!

Reading through the rest of the arc, seeing characters I had like and even loved, fighting and getting on the wrong side of everything, having Professor X die, Captain America matching up against Cyclops, of all people (One of my biggest problems with the X-Men movies is that they failed to give proper due to Cyclops.  In there actual X-Men comics themselves, as the original team leader, Cyclops is pretty much THE most important character, even more so that Professor X, or Jean Grey, who is dead half that time and needs to be brought back NOW, and definitely Wolverine, who though central to the Marvel Universe as a whole, has ultimately, in the context of the X-Men been basically a loose cannon, a great side character.  You're not properly adapting the X-Men unless Cyclops has a fairly large role.  Seeing that the comics had, with their mutant properties, evolved Cyclops to a point where he was basically leading all mutantkind and was thus a character with enough stature to be pitted against Captain America, [nice to see him back and running things again, by the way. Stay in your lab building stuff, Tony.] of all people, was a nice sign to me that the Marvel U was doing a good job now of building on what had come before, even if this meant Cyclops had completely lost his gourd.  Though that was actually kind of in character too, what with M-Day and Cyclops having evolved over time into being a bit of a dick.) made me realize something about comics, about all the deaths and retcons and stuff.  I learned to just stop worrying about that stuff and love it.  They're superheroes!  They are like Celtic gods, constantly fighting and dying and being reborn in the Cauldron of Plenty, or at least the equivalent of it in a world of science fiction and magic.  I mean, of course heroes in such a world would keep dying and coming back. of course they would keep having their allegiances shift and mutate over time, that's just the way of Heroic Cycles.  Death is just something that happens and gets conquered in the course of a story.  Right now, in comics, Peter Parker is dead.  Doctor Octopus switched bodies with him and Peter died while in Doctor Octopus' body.  But Doctor Octopus has all of Spider-Man's memories and is now trying to be a hero in his place, even though he is still a tool.  Now, that doesn't mean that Peter is gone forever!  This is an arc!  An arc where Peter is dead, but don't worry, he will still figure a way or this, and come back and be Spider-Man again, and then Doctor Octopus with go back to being dead again, and a new arc with come after that one.  These just fun stories about impossible people, why not have them  conquer death a couple of times along the way? It doesn't cheapen anything, and if it's really bad and ruins a character, well, it can always be retconned.  Say it's something Mephisto did or something.  Or MODOK.  Seriously, why complain about death not meaning anything in a world where there is MODOK? 

So, after reading all that I was hooked, and started ordering more and more volumes online, and also, I started trying to work my way forward, ordering volumes starting with where I left off and moving forward, starting with a the first deluxe volume of Mighty Avengers (whose first arc was drawn by Frank Cho. I think after that one panel I just wanted more Frank Cho.).  After reading that, I saw just how tied in it was to New Avengers, so I was reading, that, which meant I had to read Secret Invasion, and wow.  Secret Invasion was an insane thing to read, because it basically turned all those new Avengers comics into a single story, going back to the first issue and on through to the end of Scret Invasion.  I had left off right in the middle of a massive story!  One that stretched from Secret War and Avengers Disassembled through New Avengers and and on, and one that was sandwiched inside of another massive story that ran from Avengers Disassembled through to Avengers Vs. X-Men.  (Avengers Vs. X-Men really does seem to wrap up a ton of long running story arcs, both in the world of the Avengers and in the world of the X-Men.  It's kind of awesome.)  I was totally wrong to think that the stories I was reading were over and done with.  Now I have a new hobby, trying to get complete runs of collected additions of comics off Amazon for the least amount of money possible.  I have now spent like 4 hundred dollars on comic volumes on the internet, and everyday is like waiting for Christmas now. I have the entirety of Avengers comics heading up until the present coming to me in the mail, as well as a fair chunk of X-Men and Thor comics coming was well. 

It is fun. 

Mind Eraser

I made a most disquieting discovery earlier today.  I appear to have destroyed my dreams.

Like many people these days, as I go through my life I create so many thoughts and feelings and memories—all the time, in fact!—and soon find that I have nowhere at all to put them.  I can't hold them all in just my head; I quickly forget them.  So, as many other people have elected to do, I long ago decided to store much of my mind on an external brain.   As time has gone on, I had gotten in the habit of trying to organize my thoughts, and so I had bought many different external brains, and tried to sort out the different thoughts and feelings and memories into different exobrains and then transfer them back and forth until they would be orderly enough to find and recall easily.  And of course there was an enjoyment to the organizing of the exobrains as well because it allowed me to revisit the various thoughts and memories I had stored away as I recalled them into my main brain. 

A while back I was moving around a particular part of my mind, my fantasies: all the things I have imagined, wished for, or just made up for fun: the subjunctive section of my mind.  This was probably the most disorganized portion of my mind as it was, because the pieces of it that I was making the most use of, adapting and altering and adding further to, kept on getting brought to the surface and moved into new files, and the older fantasies just got stuck into small folders that sat anonymously among many others. 

As this is the part of my mind that I treasured the most, I tended to have it duplicated on a whole number of exobrains.  Or at least I thought I did.  I can't remember exactly how it happened now, but for some reason while sorting through a collection my fantasies on one of my exobrains, wanting to consolidate the location of all my oldest memories, I took the file containing all of my old fantasies, fantasies that I hadn't taken out and visited in a long time, and deleted it.  You see, I thought that those fantasies were at that moment safely stored on another exobrain, the newer, more spacious one that I was trying to turn into a kind of master copy of my mind.  I assumed all those old fantastical thoughts had been moved to the new master brain back when I purchased it.  No sooner had I deleted these old treasured parts of my mind than an eerie premonition rose over me that perhaps I had acted rashly. 

I booted up my master brain and was consternated to learn that in fact, those old fantasies were not on the master brain at all! 

Suddenly I remembered that when I first bought the supposed master brain, I had only bothered to paste in my most recent, in use memories, and not the ones that were buried down deep in a thicket with other files.  At the time however, I was not much worried.  I had long ago had a clunky, old-fashioned cyber brain, the kind you had to wear at all times and could not take off in order to remember anything that was on it, and I thought, at the time, that all those old fantasies were still on there, largely unchanged, waiting for me to reclaim them, for it was while wearing the cyber brain that most of those fantasies had first been set aside, in fact in which many had first been conceived of!  So they were not lost.  I just have to lug out that old cyberbrain and transfer it's memories to one of the newer exobrain models, and from there I could plug them into my mind anytime I wanted to revisit and remember them.

Well, today I finally, after months and months, after years since this had happened, went into the closet and hauled out the old cyberbrain and booted it up, exobrain at the ready, and found....nothing.  There was only one, measly half finished fantasy on there, one that I have since then drawn out and flowered into something much more complete and coherent. 

Where were all my other fantasies?  My dreams, my desires?  My changes to mistakes, my stories I told myself for false comfort, my wishes for better luck next time, my supposition of the fortunate outcome of future events? 

Gone. 

Gone gone gone. 

Throughly confused, I did the only logical thing, and checked my other memory files.  I scoured through them, and what did I come up with? 

Well, it turns out that when I originally bought my first nice new exobrain, and before I bought my second to last mental processing unit, I had been so frustrated with all the fantasies in my head I had moved all of them to that first exobrain, and left on my cyberbrain only that one fantasy that I had wanted to work on at the time.  I had hoped that my clearing out all the other fantasies, I would be able to finally focus only on this new fantasy, and maybe, perhaps, in this state of focus and concentration, fulfill it. 

I didn't, of course.  That didn't happen until much later, after I had bought my external processing unit (the one before the one I use now, I think) to amp up my intelligence. 

The fantasies upon that first exobrain had been the were the only versions in existence, and I had destroyed them ages ago.  They were never to be returned again.  All the fantasies I had ever had, from birth until just a few days ago, gone!  A whole aspect of myself was gone, had been gone. 

But then, I hadn't missed them, had I?  I had only been trying to retrieve them out of possessiveness, out of yearning.  I had looked around earlier today and realized that the fantasies I have had recently, well, they have been quite few, haven't they?  I haven't been dreaming like I used to, it was true.  I had hoped to have those older fantasies again, to possess them, if not to dream them again, at least to know that they were mine. 

But they are not mine any more, they have flown away, into wherever one's mind goes after it minds itself no more.  That part of me was, in a sense, dead.  I am partly dead. 

But is that really so bad?  After all, I have gone all this time without dreaming those dreams, fantasizing those fantasies.  Maybe they weren't really a part of my anyways, at least not a part of the me that is still here.  Why hold on to an old self, let it bog you down, hold you down to your failures and wishes?   No, better to start over, become a new person. 

A part of you is gone.  A part of me is gone.  Now I can become someone different.  Mind erasure is not so bad, I think.  It just gives you a new place to start from. 

Soooo, I did no running on Friday or today.  On Friday I woke up and found the muscles of my upper leg hurting something fierce, and that continued on through today.  Friday it was all I could do to keep from noticeably limping.  I figure it is best to err on the side of caution and let my legs heal from whatever is going on rather than possibly aggravate it.  Hopefully I can try jogging again tomorrow.   I guess I was more worn out after the short jog than I thought.  What was it, lack of stretching?  Ugh, I must be really out of shape.

"Yes, it's healthy, but God! At what cost?"

I went jogging today. Or at least, I attempted to go jogging.  Last night I went out and bought sweat pants and a sweatshirt in matching navy blue, costing me 15 bucks, a price that is steep enough fro me to serve as a sufficient motivating factor to actually put something to use.  So this morning I got up, put on the sweats, stepped out the door with nothing else besides my keys and started running down the back alley.  My plan was to run down the alley onto main street, cross through some backroads until I got to Veterans' Acres, the local park, keep to the bike trail until I got to the drinking fountain at the park's edge, a distance, Google Maps informs me, of some 2.4 miles, and then come back again.  Instead, by the time I got to the entrance of the bike trail, I was completely exhausted, overheated, with sweat coming out of my nose, barely able to keep walking.  This was a distance of nearly exactly one mile.  So I ran one mile and was out of it.  Awesome.

I kept walking on for a while and ran a little bit here and there until I got to the top of the hill by the power lines, about an additional half mile.  Then I turned around and about half walked half ran the rest of the distance back, so all told a round trip of about 3 miles with probably around half that distance, maybe more, actually running. (I spent more time walking but probably covered more distance running. Well, jogging.)  All told it took me about 40 minutes.

So yeah.  I thought I would cover a five mile jogging circuit, jogging all the way, and instead I did a three mile jogging circuit, not nearly jogging all the way.  When I got back, I felt exhausted and worn out and like there were just waves and waves of heat coming off my body that just wouldn't stop.  You know, when I do push ups or sit ups, it's troublesome, but kind of nice, because you get that rush of endorphins from it, you know. It makes you feel better and ready to move on to the next thing.  Not so with jogging.  Jogging just makes you feel terrible. 

Sigh. I am probably going to have to keep at it. I already spent fifteen bucks!

Dead Billy (part 6)

They walked over to the basement door, had a short argument over whether to open the window blinds or not, decided on not, then got situated.  Sean standing dead center on the doorframe, bat aloft, Gavin off to the left, gun in right hand, unlocking the door with his left hand across his body.  Putting the key back on the nail.  Sean stepping forward and twisting the handle, then kicking on the back-step, bat held high. 

The door bounced against Billy’s body, lying inert on the staircase. 

They traded several fleeting, nervous glances. 

‘He moved,’ said Gavin, laughing. ‘Fucker moved.’

Sean scooted forward and inched the door all the way open, Gavin aiming the gun into the gloom.  There was no trail of blood going up the steps.  The blood on Billy’s t-shirt and jeans was dried, almost as black as they were.  A layer of crust.  Moving sidewise along the far wall, gun up, Gavin moved down the staircase. 

Billy did not look like he was sleeping.  He was still pale, pale like someone who had bled to death, and there was none of the rise and fall, the subtle vitality the living had even when at rest.  The thing on the staircase may as well have been a chair.  But it was sprawled out and curled up on one side, one arm above its head, the other clutched against its chest, as if holding an invisible blanket or stuffed animal.  Like Billy was trying to get comfortable as sleep took him.  Gavin kicked at it, with his foot. 

It fell over onto its back and slid down the stairs, making a thuddering sound. 

‘Fuck!  Shit!  Fuck!’ cried Sean, running halfway down the stairs, bat aloft.

‘It’s all right!  It’s all right!’ Gavin followed after him.  Stopping just above the body, he turned and looked up.  Blinds or no blinds, sunlight was streaming down the steps through the open doorway, down into the basement.

‘No smoke,’ said Sean, cluing in. ‘Nothing is burning.’

Gavin shrugged.  He crouched down and gently placed  the barrel against Billy’s lips.  Parted them.  Moved it up, then down and around.  Billy’s teeth were cleaner and whiter then they had ever been, not yellow at all, and his canines looked like they had been replaced with a wolf’s. 

Sean gasped.  Gavin pulled up, fell against the wall and started laughing, nervous, high, giddy. 

‘Fuck.’  Sean said it matter-of-factly.  ‘Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck.’

‘Vampire,’ said Gavin, laughing between tears. ‘Billy’s a fucking vampire.’

‘I was really hoping he’d turn out to just be a zombie,’ said Sean.

‘Well, what do we do with him?’ said Gavin.

‘You mean, what do we do with a vampire?’

‘Do you think he can hear us?’

Gavin looked at Sean carefully.  ‘Hear us?’

‘Like, he’s paralyzed, but has vampire senses, and knows what’s going on around him.’

Gavin gave a kind of oh shit look.  Sean reached down and grasped the big hunting knife still sticking out of Billy’s chest.  ‘Billy!  I’m taking the knife out, OK?  Just like you asked.’  He yanked.  The knife came free with a crack and a tear, but the bleeding didn’t start up again.  The top six inches of the blade were coated in an enamel of dried blood.  Sean motioned with his head up the stairs.  ‘Just sit tight, Billy, we’ll be back.’

‘Well, the obvious question is, should we stake him?’ asked Gavin, after they had gone into the living room, locking the door behind them. 

‘Well, Billy’s our friend, vampire or not, and maybe we should hear what he has to say first.’

‘Has to say first!? What if he has vampire mind powers?’

‘What if staking doesn’t work?’

Gavin thought for a moment. ‘Shit.’

‘I mean, who knows what he’s capable of.’

‘Yeah, yeah.  I see where you’re coming from.  Staking might just make him angry.  And who knows what would happen if we tried cutting his head off.’

‘Let’s hear what he has to say first.’

So Sean went into his room and got a pair of old handcuffs, and they went back down, carried Billy over to the wall and handcuffed him to a thick length of pipe.  It was hard work, carrying him over.  Billy was bigger than them.  Sean was about 5’7”, and Gavin was maybe 5’10” standing straight, but Billy had been 6’3”.  It was a lanky 6’3”, but also a wiry and lean one. 

After locking the door again, they both left the house, wanting out of there for some of the daylight hours.

 Gavin rode the trains, dealt pot, stopped off in an authentic Chinese joint down the street from some high-rises, walked along Lake Michigan. 

Sean went to a diner, had breakfast and coffee, took in a matinee, then made a loop of his drug contacts, chatting, buying, selling, asking about Damien.  How’s Damien doing?  He all right?  He square?  Haven’t heard much about him lately.  Damien’s Damien. Oh, yeah, he fine.  Square, why wouldn’t he be square, man, unless you mean, like, clean.   What’s there to hear?  Then he went to a polish butcher shop, bought a pound of spare ribs and asked for a quart of pig’s blood.