Done For Now, As Usual

Gonna let this sit overnight and print it up before I make up my mind, but this is pretty close to done. That's two days in a row where I've eaten properly, worked on the novel, and worked on art. This is how I should be.

The Wet Season Is Here

I'm nowhere near done, but part of me wants to say this is good enough... The fun here is that so much of the final look is up to chance.

Padre Perdue

This piece had its origin last week when my dad and I were hiking in Muir Woods. Early on he pointed out a redwood burl to me; that's the far background, to be a rainy sky in the finished piece. Then when we reached the turnaround point, we went back down the path a ways and I snapped a photo of it. I pointed at the view and said, "I'll trim off the whole right side and put in a closeup of some circuit board and make it look like an industrial landscape." "Cool!" he said, and here we are, design finished and rendering started.

I love the way this process feels both like painting and printmaking -- working in light and shadow from a neutral background is a totally different thought process than line drawing, which is my most natural headspace, while rendering in flat shapes of five different tones is the kind of graphic limitation that makes for pleasing problems and solutions. Honestly, the main reason I had such a hard time getting into this project is that it's close to pure pleasure.

Got Cream, Dylan, the Jackson 5, Aretha Franklin, and Van Morrison on shuffle play -- very atypical mix for my tastes, but it suits the mood and light of the cloudy afternoon. I wanted to hear Tales of Brave Ulysses, and it came up first! According to the principles of shufflemancy (one of my minor occult disciplines), that's a very propitious omen.

Okay, I'd like to present the story of my father and I as a tale both cautionary and hopeful. Dads! You probably suck. Let's be honest; there is at least a slight majority of people in this country who hiss the word 'father' under their breath at the stubbing of a toe or the untimely sighting of a meter attendant. I'm not saying there are no good fathers. I know at least three of the poor bastards off the top of my head, and watching them being eaten a bite at a time scares the piss out of me.

In case you haven't noticed, my view of family relations is a bit fraught. I had a hard time with my folks growing up. My dad and I didn't have many problems, but the ones we had were whoppers. And now the poor bastard has to deal with my working on memoirs that are already starting to get an audience, even some press. He's gonna get an honest representation -- he thought my treatment of my mom has been forgiving, so there is hope of slack. Frankly, I'd just as soon he never reads or views this material. There's stuff he doesn't remember. He doesn't need to.

Here's the thing.

While I am still actively wrestling with my childhood, my dad and I now have a great relationship. We're among each other's closest friends, and every week we go for a hike and a hamburger. We can talk for hours, we can walk in comfortable silence, and we do plenty of both.

Much of our essential temperaments are identical, and it is not at all unusual for us to gesture or grunt in exactly the same way at exactly the same moment. We've been mistaken for brothers; that semi-irked me until I realized that I'm pretty young-looking myself, and now it gives me hope for the future.

The time we spend in nature has become one of the most important emotional supports in my life, and this gift of the living world is one he gave me in childhood. We camped every year, and when we did spend time together, it was usually fishing. When I was in the first grade, he took my brother and I, along with a friend of his and his friend's kid, on a hiking trip in the Trinity Alps. We got stuck in a cave in the rain for quite a while, but I loved it and still carry vivid images of it in my mind.

Van Dam, Duncan Mills, Bodega...

He and my mom always made a point of getting us a peek behind the scenes at zoos and museums. The memory of us sneaking in to hang out with Shamu, the orca, and how hard it was not to pet him -- he fucking was begging for contact, poor son of a bitch.

My dad spent twenty minutes teaching him to spit accurately. Honestly, Shamu really seemed to appreciate it.

During my childhood, my dad was a postal worker. He's one of the founders of the letter carrier's union; I helped assemble picket signs as a kid -- even then, I felt good about contributing to the movement. He's still politically active -- too smart to hope, too stubborn to stop, still gathering in those minor victories. People like him keep the fucking system from turning into a straight-up toilet.

He's a reader. Our house was filled with books, top to bottom, filled with art and music. He's a writer himself, and the love of words came to me in the atmosphere.

The conversation -- one of the great gifts I've been given is that of oral culture. I grew up in a sea of lawyers, artists, cranks, veterans, and all the mailmen, which is what we called letter carriers back then. I grew up in a stew where every ingredient was one of a kind, where there was no such thing as normal, where nobody was in the majority. And I got to listen and take it all in, all the voices, all the words. It was a writer's feast. I can talk country, court, or laboratory, and I learned it all at home.

When I look at my dad, I connect him with the good memories. I don't look at him and think of the bad times. So far as I'm concerned, he said he was sorry, he demonstrated sincere contrition, and he's been a steady positive presence in my life since he placed himself back in it. What I've been through hasn't been a conscious decision; he showed he cared, I knew he meant it, and that settled things so far as I'm concerned. The memories we've shared as adults are more significant to me than any sorrows in the past.

So. Bad dads.

There's such thing as a second chance, if you're willing to make it. Take it from me. It's not too late to get off the hook. Try being a decent human being.

It works.

A Good Year

Four pieces of art and the next Swill is done. Here's the current work in progress. I took this photograph on Tuesday, when my dad took me to Muir Woods. We get to do that. It actually is pretty nice to live in the SF Bay Area, and I always appreciate a reminder that it's a tourist destination. This is my place; I have a sense of land and territory. Madrone, bay, sequoia, dune grass and the salt of the Pacific and hills like the golden flanks of a woman with live oak and buckeye nestled in the clefts... This is where I'm from. Hundreds of years. I do have roots.

If there's a bit of concern in the air, I want to say flat-out that despite any difficulties I'm going through, my life is better than it ever has been. This last year has been the best so far, and part of the reason it's been so good is that it promises more. Yes, I've been pressed to extremes. It is good to be tested. But that isn't all that's happened this year.

Let me tell you all you need to know about love and romance. It's an endogenous drug that's more addictive than crack, it lasts six months, a year, a year and a half, and one person loses the high before the other person does. When someone falls out of love with you, they cut off your supply.

Here's the thing -- if you're in a long-term relationship, that get-high love can come back on you. And this year, the missus and I went through a phase that made our courtship look like nothin'.  Completely took me by surprise, and changed my attitude in a permanent way. Things have settled down a bit, but I  now have a secure sense that the charms of romance are far from absent in my life.

And this seems to be related to an overall sense of social abundance. One of the great delusions of my life has been that I am a solitary person, an outcast. The term 'loner' has been self-applied at times.

The technical term for this notion is 'crock of shit.'

I'll probably go into the interminable details at some point, but recently my counselor spoke of her sister's experience of the world. She's so well-loved that if she isn't greeted with spontaneous enthusiasm, she feels disconcerted. I heard that, and I realized that I'm in pretty much the same boat. The people who have a negative reaction to me are in a very small minority -- but they're the one's I've always cared about the most.

That ain't right; from now on, the people who love me get the majority of my attention and regard. And it is petty, it is base, but it pleases me to go into a bookstore and see faces and hear voices when I read names on shelves or on the covers of magazines. To know that I have occupied the thoughts of those who have occupied the thoughts of others. It makes me feel engaged in the world.

And this doesn't just go for the hominids. My social circle this year has gone well outside the species boundary. I've established contact with the crows in the neighborhood, as mentioned in a recent post, but more significantly, I've opened up to our dogs.

Laszlo was the one who did it. I'm an animal person, but I've had bad luck with the dogs in my life. If you don't know about it, the bond between a dog and a person is more like a marriage or a business partnership than anything else -- it's an emotional dependance as fundamental as furniture. I'm not going into it, but I have had some rough history.

According to the vet, Laszlo is half Springer spaniel, half Llasa Apso. He's my dog. It was his idea, but I was willing to work with him. He's swell, and we love each other. Yeah, I know he's gonna die before I do in all likelihood. I've had nightmares. I'm willing to eat that in order to have someone in my life who sees me as a simple, straightforward good. He sees me the way I try to see everybody else, and it's great. And my affection for him has spilled over to our other dog, Roxxie. She's a Jack Russell/rat terrier mix, and is sort of universally loathed. She's a barker, she's jealous, she doesn't take to people, she pees...

But she's really attached to me and the missus, and I've opened up to her. She's awful, but awful people need love too. It used to be that I wouldn't let her sit on my lap because she had a way of launching herself off me that left bruises. But I couldn't let Laszlo sit on me if I wouldn't let Roxxie sit on me, and you know what? She hasn't hurt me once since. I used to refuse to let her cuddle with me when the missus was out of town, and now that rejection seems a little abusive to me. And here's the thing -- the more I love her, the better she is. Even if her barking hurts the ears and soul.

I've also entered into a counseling relationship. It's an informal thing that is well off of the standard  therapeutic situation -- the woman in question is a registered, well-respected therapist, but.  The thing is, the deviations from a clinical relationship work very well for me. She's an old friend of the missus, for example. This is supposedly verboten, but you know what? She knows the misssus! I can get third-party confirmation on our relationship! I have been locked so tightly inside our relationship for so long that I had no idea what was going on between us. And if you'll cast your eyes back to the second paragraph of this post, you'll get an idea of how perspective has affected things. I was talking to a friend a while ago about the differences between religious and secular society, and he pointed out that when someone in religious society has mental or emotional difficulties, they speak to their clergyman and are regarded as devout, while in secular society, one sees a shrink and is regarded as crazy. Well, my counselor and I have a relationship that is more like the former example than the latter. Our relationship is not isolated from my general life, and our friendship is as much a factor in what goes on between us as anything else. I am catnip for shrinks, and the pleasure she takes in our sessions has been almost as important to me as her wise counsel.

As I've emerged into the public eye, I've had a lot of my old friends reach out to me, and this has been a great source of pleasure and comfort. To see people of significance to me thriving, to confirm that what we went through was not a crippling thing -- again, if you know, you know. And to measure myself against them and not feel wanting...

Here's one I haven't spoken of. My dad and I hike once a week. A few years back, he went on a solo backpacking trip and fucked up his back. (I'm the only person I know with a bad back from working; everyone else got theirs recreationally.) Our walks have grown more and more restricted over the time since then. But he had a spinal fusion done -- this is the operation I'm trying to avoid -- and while it was horrific to behold, he's now in better shape than he's been in for some time, and we are able to have some decent little adventures again. (I should start posting them -- the photo up top was from this week's trip. We got deep enough into Muir Woods so that we couldn't hear a single tourist accent. Not that we don't love and encourage them. It's just a benchmark.)

And here's the thing. You know what makes people happy? Other people. Honestly, there aren't a lot of pleasures that don't come down to other people in the end, and there are limits to such things. And over this last year, I've come to realize that I swim in a sea of friendship that is genuinely enviable. I've always had a feeling that I was a burden or difficulty to the people around me, and I'm starting to think that I was wrong about that.

(Rain on the roof in July -- it's been that way every year for a while now.)

I'm the kind of person who'd rather have one really close friend than be popular. The result of this is that I've cultivated a number of very close friendships, because that's how I relate to people. Even if I've only met you twice, if we meet a third time it's gonna be kind of an event, and folks tend to like this. It sounds like a slogan, I know, but this feels like real wealth to me.

And hey.  I'll tell you, after seeing myself interviewed and videotaped and so on? I'm kind of a magnificent son of a bitch. I had no idea.

I mean, this is really fresh -- just last week I realized that one of the reasons I feel like an outcast is that I constantly get these weird, intense stares from people that I've always interpreted as hostility. Now I'm considering the possibility that people just like looking at me sometimes, and I should take it as a compliment. It turns out that if I meet those intense stares with something other than baffled defensiveness, the smiles go off like flashbulbs. It's terrific, and I just found out about it. And since I'm happy in my love, feeling attractive doesn't make me vulnerable. Honestly, you cannot believe the improvement this is making in my internal furnishings.

And the confidence I feel in myself as a creator has never been stronger. I have been getting persistent strongly positive reactions from knowledgeable people for so long that I am no longer capable of justifying cringing humility. I don't want to get cocky, but. A certain amount of confidence is appropriate at this juncture -- if I do something, it gets out, and I work at a level fit for fucking Scientific American, the BBC, Warner Bros., MacMillan, Tor.com... If I stand at the right distance and squint, I can see a fuzzy Cultural Figure. I am tiny, but I cast a shadow. Even if I died now, there would still be some trace of me in the record. Again, petty and base, and again, genuinely satisfying and empowering. This is something I would choose for myself if I could; the amount of luck and privilege that went into it is staggering. But I took that luck and privilege and turned it into something. I did that and I am going to give myself credit for that.

Last week when I was particularly distressed over my current semi-paralysis, I went back and looked at the blog for this time last year to see where I was at. "I was in exactly the same state I'm in now," I said to my counselor. "And it was that way for every year except for my stint at Taos. So last year I was stuck halfway through the tenth draft of the novel and I couldn't go forward and I couldn't go back. This year I have a working draft -- I'm line-editing it, but I could sent it out now. And I've got solid outlines for the final two volumes. And I've started a whole new book, and I've got a chunk of it done, and that's taken me into performance, so I've actually got a new form under my belt as well. And I've had my second pro fiction publication. And the Scientific American thing and the Amazon page."

"So this is your idea of a slump," my counselor said.

There is a term the missus uses from time to time -- 'healing crisis.' The idea is that if you're really getting better, there are points in the recovery process that don't feel good. When I write frankly of my difficulties, I do so as a means of gaining ownership of them; that doesn't mean that they occupy the most significant portion of my life. I have been through extended periods of time when existence was a fundamentally bad thing. I don't like that. My life right now offers plentiful compensation for any discomfort I experience, and I honestly believe my best days are ahead of me.

So if I write something in my blog that makes you feel distressed or concerned for me, please. Take a moment and think of how lucky I actually am. Sure, I suffer a lot, but in a secure, happy life? That's just decoration. It's like a tattoo, only more effective. We all have to do something to fill the time. Some people play a lot of video poker, some creep through a welter of existential terror. It's all pretty much the same thing. There is always enough suffering to legitimize self-pity. What counts is the good part of life.

And my good part is plenty good enough for me. I love and am loved, I am held in regard, and most of my life is easy and pleasant, and I have every reason for optimism. The horrors have grown dull and familiar; I've rubbed all the flock off of mortality and so on, but many of the most rudimentary pleasures of life are still fresh to me. This could be interpreted badly, but as an experience? I feel as if my life has good story structure --- it's okay that things were awful then if they're wonderful now.

And they are. They really are. I feel as though I've just sailed into port. And the chances are good that if you're reading this, I think of you frequently, specifically, and fondly, and regard you as one of the wonderful things in my wonderful life.

I don't bullshit about these things. So there it is.

Disabled

Yesterday I told my counselor I've decided to actively pursue a disability check of some kind. She seemed... relieved? Satisfied? "So you really understand that you're not going to fit into a regular job again?" she asked. "You know you're going to have to make it on your own terms?"

"Yeah," I said. As if disability was one of my terms. Oh, well.

In a roundabout way, it was Samuel Crown's doing. You heard of Sam? He's an up-and-comer, working on a self-published series of action/horror novels, a pulp-meets-Vertigo-comics thing called I, Demon. Check it out. I met Crown at the Viable Paradise writer's group, and when I made noises about attending Taos Toolbox, he came along for that as well. More recently, he invited me to a writer's retreat in Dallas that he was hosting. Ain't gonna tell you who was there, because we spent most of our time bitching about the people we wished we'd invited. That's the drag about invitation only -- you wind up leaving out folks you miss. Take my word for it, though, this crew is already making noises and you will hear some of these names in the years to come.

When  I was in Dallas, my stomach went to hell on me and I spent much of the time puking. Lost a lot of blood; to tell the truth, I think it was somewhere around a half-gallon, and if I'd known that I might have gone into the hospital for a few liters of saline. I am not a big needle fan, but I have come to adore the IV drip of saline, nice and cool...

Anyway, I wasn't able to give Crown any help on his project. He went last, and I was in my hotel room letting the shower run over me as I sweated and shivered. So when he asked me to give his current novel a once-over, I felt a sense of obligation.

I've mostly given up on doing internet critiques -- I've found that they play into my neuroses in a very unfortunate way. I never quite get around to them, I think about them constantly, and I don't do anything else because I need to do them first. They jam my hopper and make me miserable. I need a solid, printed manuscript and a solid, living person to give it to at a specific time and date in order to function. I feel bad about this because I have access to a bunch of swell young writers I'd love to bully and hector, and whose input on my work would be specifically valuable, but there you go. Sometimes you're served a dish you can't eat, no matter how much you want to.

But I owed Crown. So I printed up his novel, and started reading.

Those are my reading glasses up there. I tried to bring out how horrible they are, but you really have to see them in person to get the full effect -- the coatings are scabby and iridescent to a degree that basically makes these spectacles framed cataracts, and note the missing arm.

When I started work, the smudge at the center of the right lens was so bad I had to cant my head to one side to read; the reading glasses were actually worse than nothing. So I switched to my bifocals and tipped my head back.

Then I went to see The Avengers with my dad, who likes a good smiting every once in a while. And the next morning when I woke up, my neck was destroyed. Muscles locked, spine begging to be popped, it took me days to get back to a functional state.

The increase in pain spiked my stress levels, and my stomach went acid, and I had a few touch-and-go hours on Friday night. And it made me realize that my stomach had gotten to be as bad as it was because I was used to ignoring pain. Since my stomach never hurts as much as my back, I dismiss it.

And now it bleeds.

And that made me realize that when I've dealt with the doctors and the insurance company and so on and so forth, I have persistently lowballed my pain estimates. You know, they say how bad on a scale of one-to-ten? When I've had a nurse walking me through those, they always add one or two to my estimates. I have known all along that the way I get treated is going to depend on how seriously my condition is taken, but in order to live with myself, I have to behave in a very scrupulous fashion. That frequently works to my detriment -- but being who I am is all I've got. It really is.

I am too vulnerable right now, and I have to ask for help. So I've started contacting lawyers to help me apply for some sort of disability income. I certainly have not given up hope of someday making money creatively -- it's happened before, and I'm a much better writer now than I was then.

But if I don't get some kind of slack, I'll wind up bouncing in and out of the fucking hospital. It's right there in front of me and I can't deny it. So I find myself in the position of spending the state's money on my relatively cheap and comfortable maintenance or on expensive and uncomfortable emergency measures.

I've asked around, and everyone I know approves of this decision. It's taken me ten fucking years to make it, and I have given it a hell of a lot of thought, and I wouldn't do it if it weren't for the fucking blood. Vomiting blood and hallucinating and sweating and shaking for hours and hours and hours is the kind of thing that motivates me a little, sort of, eventually.

Interestingly, a number of people have commented that this represents sort of a best-case scenario; a well-adjusted oaf would have gone either into the military or industry, and would have been a tremendous force for evil in the world.

Flavor chemistry would have been a very likely career for me -- I love cooking, and won a Bank of America award for laboratory sciences in high school. I could have destroyed civilization with new kinds of Skittles and Doritos...

But it didn't work out that way. It turns out that when I say I have to devote most of my energy to maintaining my mental health, I am not kidding. I am in a position where if I am unhappy for too long, my health fails spectacularly. Right now, before I am anything else, I am vulnerable and I need to care for myself if I'm not going to burden others. And I need help to do that.

Here's the thing. I know people who are more in need than I am. What if I get the help they failed to get? How can I put myself in the position of asking for the same kind of aid as homeless folks when I have a home, and a wonderful one?

Because that is the paradox. I'm so broke I wear my glasses literally to the point of opacity, it's been more than a decade since I've had a checkup, and I have no recreational spending habits. I do get treats from time to time, but they are given to me by others, not selected by myself. But because I'm with the missus, I have full media access through cable, I have a workspace that comes damned close to being a media lab -- everything I own is old, shabby, strictly from yard sales, but it is still nice and good. I can't help but feel that someone on disability should be living a life of unremitting poverty, and my life is poor but prosperous.

It's not my decision to make, though. It's up to the lawyers and the state.

And for the record? The missus decided to pony up the bucks for new lenses. I had my examination yesterday, and found out that my reading prescription was terrible -- my reading glasses weren't just worn out, they were shitty in the first place. For the past three years, I've been doing all my reading and editing with bad glasses, and I've wondered why I don't seem to enjoy it the way I used to. I have a feeling that this has a lot to do with my procrastination issues.

So in a couple of weeks, I have new reading glasses and will be able to return to the world of letters. This whole situation is not a disaster, and it's not the end point of my story. And who knows, given the speed with which these wheels turn, I may wind up being a pro writer again before the issue is settled.

All I can do is cast my fate to the winds...

Whedon's Vengeance!

It wasn't until I tried drawing a superhero that I really understood that the entire genre is weird fetish porn, and it's geared mostly to gay men. Every fight scene in every superhero comic is actually a sex scene, usually man-on-man, and drawing this was actually embarrassing once I realized what was going on. I felt like I was unexpectedly participating in someone else's sex life.

I had planned to draw a four-issue limited series of people in leotards, but once I realized how much time I would spend framing crotch-shots in a porno that would be marketed to an audience of children, I slowly backed away, shut the door, and pretended I never saw a god-damned thing. I might give it a try again if I can figure out how to de-porno superheroes, but that's one serious creative challenge.

I'm still gay-positive enough to be in the audience for superheroes, though, and romance is what made the Avengers so much fun. The whole old-fashioned forties-style meet-cute, witty banter, and rescue romance has made Iron Man and the Hulk my favorite fictional couple.

Take a good long look at the interactions between Stark and Pepper Potts and tell me I'm wrong. While sitting through the credits, I mentally wrote the Hulk and Iron Man into that David Sedaris story where he's dating Mike Tyson.

Spoiler alert! The Hulk was Tyson.

Oh, and I'm not going to bother scanning for specific spoilers below. If you are concerned about knowing too much about The Avengers, go to your right and click on something else instead.

So the missus and I spent weeks talking about seeing The Avengers. Before we got together as a couple, I'd loaned her comics, and have kept them available to her ever since. And we've watched Joss Whedon's TV shows a number of times, and spent much conversation on them. So The Avengers, a superhero movie directed by Joss Whedon, was a thing for us.

We planned and we planned, and the days drifted by, and then all of a sudden she went and saw the damned thing with her friend Ruby. And then she came back and started bugging me to go see it. "I want to talk about it with you while I still remember it!"

She has a sweet, gentle way of finding one of life's pleasures and coming at one with it, brandishing tasty foods or afternoons out as though they were weapons, thrusting them at one again and again until one screams for mercy. In this case, a remark that I'd made about not liking a particular theater spawned a flow of defense that wore me to a nubbin -- "The three-dee is excellent! It's very good!" is a statement I heard about eight times a day for about four days. So by the time I saw The Avengers, I had built up a good, solid store of resentment for it ahead of time.

Turned out what the missus had really wanted to talk about how cool the Hulk was. Well, the Hulk was cool. Really cool. Actually cool enough to be an acceptable excuse for four days of nagging -- I had to sympathize. I want to tell people how much I loved that rag-doll thing he did, and that sucker punch.

I'm not sure I could call it a good movie, but it was great fun. Let's get my bitching out of the way right off the bat.

I thought the plot didn't really make any sense or have any real meaning, so all the talkety-talk and lip-flapping was boring aside from the one-liners. I'm not saying I couldn't follow what was going on, but it didn't mean anything. Loki was the bad guy, and that's why everything happened, the end. That's just not a story, which is why I got so caught up in imagining the Hulk/Iron Man romance. Which is why I didn't mind that much.

Before seeing it, I'd asked the missus if it was a real Avengers story. "What do you mean?"

I'm supposed to say 'spoiler alert,' right? Spoiler alert!

I said, "They beat the crap out of each other, then figure out they should beat the crap out of someone else, and then they beat the crap out of said third party or parties."

"Yeah, it was a real Avengers story, all right."

She was right. And as a story, I found it unsatisfactory in the same way all Avengers stories are unsatisfactory. This was actually a sign of good, capable craftsmanship, of true and effective adaption on Wheddon's part -- which is why I have a hard time telling whether or not this was actually a good movie.

And in the whole superhero-as-porno issue, well, I may be able to enjoy watching a couple of guys in tight leather engaging in sweaty touching activities but I am heterosexual, and this movie doesn't have much for folks who like to see women's secondary sexual characteristics.

And of course, we wind up being presented with the eternal question posed by almost every superhero team ever. Half the group are weapons of mass destruction, and the other half are Cirque du Soleil performers, and seeing them in the same theater of combat is ridiculous. Cap, Natasha, and Bart should have headed for shelter with the rest of the non-combatants.

That said, I liked it a lot.

Best superhero action I've ever seen in a movie, and the best use of 3d in action sequences. Despite my bitching above, the fights felt like actual sequences of events and exchanges of blows rather than a series of staged shots, and the use of 3d to guide the viewer through scenes of battle was both meaningful and exciting. All of the cool visual tricks used to make the fights pop also helped the viewer understand what was going on.

I mean, damn. That is the kind of thing that should be standard, but isn't.

And while the Hulk is a fantastic fucking concept -- Oppenheimer becomes a were-H-bomb? That shit is gold! -- I've never actually liked many portrayals of the character that much. The take on him in the Busiek/Larsen Defenders was pretty funny, I'll admit -- he was like Namor's pesky kid brother.

But this one is absolutely my favorite, and he gets the best line in the movie, and it's one of the best superhero lines ever. (Oh, brother, I sound like I'm twelve and I always will be.) The Hulk is frightening, hilarious, and his ass-kickings deliver an entirely satisfying thrill of vicarious viciousness. The world breaks properly throughout.

This movie really felt like a comic book.
And it felt tightly crafted, thoroughly controlled. This may not be Whedon's artistic masterpiece, but as a working director he has never been this good. As a creator, sensing this progress in craftsmanship was a deep and genuine pleasure.

Look, it used to be that superhero comics provided the sympathetic reader with a type of action that could be found nowhere else. Now, that style of action is at its most effective in the movies, at the theater.

As much as I love comics, the type of appeal offered by mainstream superhero material strikes me as best realized as a movie like The Avengers. As I watched this movie, I felt a continual sense that this movie really got it -- and it might have made superhero comics creatively obsolete unless they dig past the explosions and into the personal kind of material that can't be done by a cast and crew of thousands.

(Mind you, you get me in another mood and I'll go on for hours about how superheros have long since dead-ended American comics and how creatively bankrupt they are, but that is my way.)

And the whole reason I write this piece? An eerie moment! Some sort of psychic phenomenon! (And this will not make sense to you unless you've seen the Avengers and sat through the credits to catch the Easter Egg.)

While watching the trailers, I was thinking about Marvel movies, and I thought of how badly they've screwed up the filming of the Galactus trilogy.

"They just couldn't let him have the purple outfit," I thought. "That's the whole problem with these Marvel movies. They have no love for the big ugly purple man. No love, and no respect. And you can't have comics without the big ugly purple man!"

I swear, this is true.


It's not often I'm so pleased to be wrong! Fucking Thanos? Oh, this is going to be crazy. I feel like an idiot for liking this one so much, and I want the next one already!

Story-Like Objects and the Totoro Nut

(For those just tuning in -- The Oaf is pompous. The Missus derives a certain mild entertainment from this. Joss Whedon is a television and film writer and director whose work combines action/adventure with soap opera. Buffy and Angel were interconnected, horror-based TV shows developed from a film; Firefly was a science-fiction TV show that led to the production of a movie, Serenity, that ended the storyline. Zoe, Wash, and Book were characters from Firefly and Serenity. Fred was a character from Angel, and she was not a guy. Chris Claremont is a comic book writer best known for his work on the superhero comic book The X-Men, and a clear influence on Whedon. Hayao Miyazake is a [wonderful] cartoonist and animator, and his movies Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro are favorites of mine. And by "Ugh!" the Missus means fighting and perspiring and people getting bitten and buried and hurled and bludgeoned and losing an eye and all such various forms of tsuris.)

The Missus: I think I might watch Serenity again.

The Oaf: Huh. I kind of assumed that I'd watch Serenity every time I went through a Firefly phase, but now that you present the option, I might skip it. It kind of left a sour taste in my mouth.

The Missus: I know what you mean. I was watching Buffy again, and I stopped when they got to the hyenas.

The Oaf: That's where we stalled out last time we tried watching it together.

The Missus: Well, who wants to keep watching all that... Ugh!

The Oaf: I hear you. When Whedon killed Book and Wash in Serenity, it was totally unnecessary.

The Missus: I think he did that for spite. He was saying, "Fuck you" to the people who run the movies.

The Oaf: Nah, I don't buy that. He was trying to make a big dramatic ending, and he did it the way Claremont would have, by killing someone. It's a product of the climate where he learned his storytelling chops.

The Missus: I guess. It still sucks, though. I didn't care that much about Book, but Wash...

The Oaf: That's because he and Zoe were in love. When he died, the audience lost that love. It was a cheap shot, and it didn't serve any dramatic purpose. It was like that shit that happened with Fred at the end of Angel; if it had been the result of a character failing or if it had somehow grown out of the situation, it would have meant something. That's what makes fiction different from real life. In real life, shit happens and it makes you feel, but in fiction, shit is made to happen and sometimes it feels like simple cruelty on the part of the creator. A lot of storytelling, especially cinematic storytelling, has been so systematized that it's more like filling out Mad Libs than any kind of creative process. That's how you get these things I think of as story-like objects, where the characters walk onstage at the right time and all the explosions happen where they're supposed to and it means fucking nothing. When Whedon throws out stuff like this and all the kung-fu vampire shit, it's just a form of packing material. I mean, I like his and all, but it's his affection for his characters that keeps me interested. The rest is filler, and sometimes it gets in the way. The man has comic-book cooties, I hate to say.

The Missus: You have bad guys in your book.

The Oaf: Yeah, and I literally tell the reader that all that stuff is bullshit and too much of it makes you feel stupid. But you're right. You're right. I weaseled with symbolism, poetry, and satire, but I weaseled some. That's one of my major creative goals, actually. To do something substantial that really feels wholesome. That's a tough nut to crack. That's why I've been watching Miyazake so hard the last ten years or so. There are some crappy people in Kiki's Delivery Service, but in Totoro, everyone just cares and wants the best for each other. The dramatic impetus comes from the woman being sick, and the way it's handled does seem like a natural source of difficulty rather than authorial cruelty. He got through a whole movie with nothing but good people in it. I want to do something like that someday. The difficulty is that it's such a simple problem.

The Missus: What do you mean?

The Oaf: All you have to do is write about people so well that the reader cares about them even if their problems aren't any kind of big special deal, or even if they don't have problems. That's all it takes. It's that easy.

The Missus: ...

The Oaf: That's all you have to do. That's all there is to it. It's simple.

The Missus: ...

The Oaf: ...