Mon 12 Nov 2007

Amtrak War Hellride Part One

Posted by laup under Backwater, Meditations, Outbreak, Random Encounters
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I was just talking to a co-worker the other day. She had returned from a cruise with her mom on one of those “tropical” packages. Now me, being one of those people who reads of cruise ships in the news and the kinds of whacky stuff that afflicts cruise-goers, I was of course interested to hear what she had to say about her experiences. One always reads of cruise ships losing a balance thruster and veering to the side, nearly knocking passengers off the deck, of outbreaks of unsavory diseases from the food or sick passengers, or of large scale failure of the toilet system. While my co-worker didn’t describe anything on that level of awful, her experiences were suitably “cuckoo” enough for her to render the phrase, “The Cruise Dimension.”

Ahhh. I know her tale well from my own travel experiences. Many of the things she related to me could easily have applied in some way to my own travel adventure. I’m talking about the Amtrak War Hellride that K and I went on one fine summer for vacation several years back. A tale so sordid and unbelievable it will take two posts to tell it properly!

We decided to visit Portland, Oregon and take the train there. Take the overnight from Union Station in DC to Chicago, then switch to the Empire Builder and take the two-day trip to Oregon through the northernmost United States. The Empire Builder stops through Glacier Park, Montana in the summer, and moves through the Columbia River Gorge on the Washington side. What could go wrong? Sounds idyllic and romantic, right? Harmony joy train-ride, here we come!

For reasons of economy, we decide to travel in a Roomette, which is two seats facing each other with a fold out table in the middle. A bed folds out from the ceiling and the two chairs fold to create a bed. A little cramped, but up close and personal as this is supposed to be quality romantic time for K and myself. There’s air-conditioning/heating, light panels, and piped-in music. Whee!

See, there’s this movie Silver Streak, starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, where Mr. Wilder plays a book editor who gets involved in a caper involving an international forgery ring. It has a pretty girl, murder most foul, and lots of absurd situations. It’s a pretty good mix of laughs and action, and it’s one of my favorite movies. Yes, yes, I’m getting stars in my eyes thinking I’m going to go on a train ride and experience the coolness factor of the movie in some way, right? Wrong! K and I are going to get the life-threatening peril and abject stress-out terror of the action, but none of the scenic beauty or comedy of this movie. Which, in a way is more realistic than the undefined fantasy.

I’d been on trains before, back when I studied in Japan and took several long trips around the country. The train system there is nothing short of impressive, so I was expecting, well maybe not as good, but a similar experience. How bad could it be?

So K and I board the train and reach our appointed sardine can. Whoa, smaller than the Amtrak 3D picture made it out to be. This is, well, very small and cramped. We stash our luggage and anipals where they will fit on the sides and at our feet, pull out the miniaturized table that might hold two sodas if they’re close together, and sit down on the rather uncomfortable fossilized cushions that will be a bed later tonight. Already I’m thinking we should have gone for a larger cabin, this is ridiculous. After one day of this we’re going to be crawling the walls!

I pull out my MP3 player and plug in the adapter. Both electrical outlets are dead. Good thing I brought batteries! K tries to adjust the air unit. No luck, the hot/cold dial has no effect on the trickle of tepid air coming out the vent. I try the music jack and get static in my headphones on all channels. The light panels work, thankfully. K tries the shades, even though it’s a cloudy day. We find out that the shades don’t work very well at keeping light out, nor do they move out of the way easily to allow light in. They work in a kind of nebulous Twilight Zone area of “almost but not quite” useful I find annoying.

We settle in for the ride, me with music and K with one of her new books on knitting. She’s brought a number of projects to work on, while I’ve brought some writing and drawing materials along. We plan to be artistic during this long trip, as we figure the ride will be conducive to quiet meditation and relaxation. Wrong! The first thing I notice is that the train jolts and makes a lot of noise as it travels over the tracks. The tracks must be in really poor shape to make such constant, annoying noise, and the train’s mechanical elements must be in need of repair to have no muffling effect on the jolts and swerves the train is making. I scratch my head, as this isn’t high technology railway stuff here. With over a century of railroad behind it, Amtrak should be at a Harley Davidson motorcycle level of tried and true tested design by now. It doesn’t bode well that the maintenance and upkeep is so poor.

Since we can’t relax or concentrate, we watch the landscape go by and make snide comments about how crummy Amtrak is. One thing I notice is that while we do pass some areas of nice natural beauty, we also pass a lot of decrepit old places. We go by an automobile and truck graveyard filled with rusty and broken frames overgrown with vines. Abandoned homes, burnt out old shells of factories, run down neighborhoods, and busted stone foundations. This motif is repeated all along the entire trip, and I can’t help but feel I’m seeing a vision of the United States as a third world country. Where entire sections of the country’s infrastructure have been left to deteriorate and crumble in silence. It’s a depressing sight, and it makes the journey less of a sightseeing expedition and more of a nightmare premonition of things to come.

Hungry or thirsty? Each car has an attendant who maintains a station with fresh coffee and juice. You want food, you have to hit the concessions stand in one of the observations cars, where they charge you outrageous prices for a candy bar. You can get microwaveable items or a sandwich, as well as beer or other drinks. In order to reach the concessions watering hole, you have to brave the coach cars, filled with smelly and obnoxious people, which struck me as odd as they also stand in the way between you and the dining car.

I have to admit that the coffee is really good, and the juice at least keeps you hydrated, which is important because the crummy air system seems to suck the moisture out of you without making you comfortable in any way. The coffee and juice station is going to be the only bright spot in what will be a horrific experience for us.

Now, when it comes time for a meal, breakfast/lunch/dinner whatever, the event is announced over the loudspeaker, which blares into your cabin like a holy terror on wheels. You can’t turn it down, it has one volume – loud. As K and I find out, by the time you traverse the half dozen cars to reach the dining car, the coach passengers are already in line ahead of you being seated. You are guaranteed a seat and a meal, but the coach passengers have already started making a dent in the food selection, of which there is a limited amount, so you might order say, the pizza only to be refused because it’s just run out. Meanwhile, the drunken jerk from coach who kept singing while you were in line at the concession stand is eating a pizza right across from you.

You also have to sit with total strangers at random. This is supposed to give you a chance to socialize and meet new people, but I find it only introduces me to people I find annoying and repulsive. For breakfast, K and I found ourselves sitting across from two stragglers put together at random. A white, conservative old woman and a young conservative black woman dressed so that only her face was not covered. Neither one of them made particularly good conversation to begin with, but once they hit the issue of politics K and I felt we were in a nest of rattlesnakes.

Come to think of it, that about sums up the general feeling of this trip by train. Being in a nest of rattlesnakes, in constant fear of being bitten. Nice, huh? Go Amtrak!

The food tended to vary in quality, but was generally speaking on the level of slightly-better than cafeteria food. It’s sometimes good, but most of the time it’s a little better than average. Nothing to smack your lips over. Breakfast tends to be the best, as it’s really hard to screw up something like eggs and toast. The concession food was on the level of average, at times threatening to drop to poor but not quite that awful. You can always count on a Snickers bar or a bag of Doritos giving you a dependable experience, but what, you going to eat that for six days of train travel? Get ready for gastric gripe as that delicious cafeteria food flows through your intestines like gravy on an incline.

The toilets on the train are nothing short of grotesque. Trying to balance yourself above the pit of despair while the train rocks and jolts, even in the tight quarters, is an exercise in panic and fear. The showers are tight quarters also, and the water pressure pathetic, but at least it’s hot. I would rate the shower experience as passable.

The attendants vary in service from “you don’t exist and I am in hell” to fearfully helpful, as if they are about to enter hell and want their last acts to mean something. This does nothing to dispel “The Rattlesnake Dimension” of train travel. K and I brought lots of fives and ones to tip the attendants whenever they helped us. We wanted to show our appreciation and be polite, after all. In all cases, the attendants accepted our money as if we were handing them a lit stick of dynamite. That floored me. I couldn’t help but imagine that they were all being watched by Big Brother and for every dollar they receive, they get an electric shock when they go on break. Speaking of which, they often seemed on break, and I’m not sure if the “page attendant” button really works, because it never once worked.

Then night falls, and the nightmare really begins. Your not-so-fun train experience goes from pathetic and uncomfortable, to Night of The Demon. See, after the sun goes down, the train speeds up because there’s no reason to go slow in order for people to view the trashy landscape anymore. Seriously, it becomes so dark you can’t see any detail out the window. As the train speeds up, the noise and jolts of the train going over the run-down tracks increases dramatically. And since you can’t see anything, you start to lose a certain amount of perspective, so that when the train swerves, it feels like the car is about to fall over for just a split second. This ratchets up the fear factor of the trip to unimaginable heights. The train begins to honk its horn regularly, so at times a jolt or swerve of the train is accompanied by a loud blare as if you are about to go careening off the tracks into the depths of hell. Reading, knitting, writing? Ha ha ha ha ha! Romantic cuddling? More like clutching each other in fear while praying you make it through the night.

The attendant comes by and sets up your beds for the night, then disappears before you can ask any questions. Well, K and I are definitely tired now, but sleep is impossible. Let me say that again, sleep is impossible. Lying horizontal while the train swerves, bumps and clickity-clacks like the sound of the hooves of the four horseman of the apocalypse? Closing your eyes while you bob and weave in your bed, the rope netting keeping you snug in your pod capsule? Drifting to sleep when every sound tells you that this is the last ride of your entire life? What drugs are you on, because I want some! Good Lord, I wouldn’t wish this on my enemies, it’s beyond cruel. Every waking moment is spent in mindless terror, and every waking moment lasts an eternity. You sweat bullets wondering when the nightmare will end, and this goes on hour after hour until you literally pass out from exhaustion due to terror.

This is the first day of the trip.

About half an hour after you pass out from exhaustion, the sun starts to come up and the train slows down. Half an hour later, the loudspeaker begins announcing breakfast for the various car sections. K and I shamble to our feet and make our way to the food queue like newly minted members of the living dead. By the time we have acquired a shower and a new set of clothes, the train is rolling into Chicago. We disembark and settle into the station for the layover until our sardine slot on the Empire Builder is ready. The food in the restaurants is an order of magnitude better, the walking around stretches our legs, and we call the folks from a payphone to let them know we made it. There’s a special lounge for the purchasers of cabin space, which we take advantage of. Plenty of comfortable furniture to sit on, free snacks and drinks, television, and a kindly, helpful staff. What, did I just land on Mars? I want this to be our train experience! And oh my God, real functional toilets that don’t look like they came from the mind of some mad scientist.

And to boot, I get to wander around the station where the finale of Silver Streak takes place. It’s a slight kick, and recovers me a few hit points of damage from the war hellride.

The wait is interminable, but at long last we board our new sardine can on a superliner, a train car with two levels to accommodate additional passengers and baggage. There is no increase in floor space, however. The train rolls out and it all begins again. This time it’s going to be two days of hell before we get any relief. I still hold out the hope that this leg of the trip will be different, that last night’s ordeal was just a fluke. But, I’m afraid my hopes are dashed against the rocks. The experience ends up being repeated along the entire length and breadth of this trip. I sure hope I get a vacation to recover from my vacation.

Now that the trip is getting out into the heartland of the country, you’d think the scenery improves, right? Nope. Still passing by the junkyard detritus of America. The landscape lacks trees of any size, and is mostly rolling hills and overgrown fields. Pretty unimpressive. It’s nice when we pass homes where the occupants have settled outside to watch the train pass in their lawn chairs. I get a good feeling out of knowing that our passage is a positive event, even if those folks have no clue of the monstrous horror within the iron horse as it toots by. The stops are somewhat picturesque at times. We get to stretch our legs for a few minutes, while K takes pictures.

We’ve discovered that you can catch brief naps during the day before cramps force you to wake up and shift around in the fossil chair. A second night of fearful sleep has turned us ragged and grumpy, but the day naps help. It’s not as if there’s anything historical, scenic or wholesome out the window. We’ve figured out that you have to hoard food and drink from the concession stand, because they don’t restock it regularly, oh no. They let it run dry and don’t replace it until they reopen every morning. You haven’t lived until you’ve fought the mutants for the last bag of BBQ Utz for the night. The previous drunkard has disembarked, but has now been replaced by a new guy who insists on the staff opening the secret Bat-stash of beer so he can have one last ticket to paradise city. The coach class did a run on the hamburgers, so dinner is reduced to slop meat sauce on garbled mixture of protein material, or pig knuckles on a hot croissant served with radioactive Chernobyl sauce green beans.

Oh yeah, because we’re on the second story of a super-liner car, when the train speeds up for the night, the swerves at the top of the train are worse than for the single car. Imagine being at the top of a tree swaying in the wind and you’ll get the idea. Panic and fear receive a bonus to their roll, so the stress level amps up beyond any reason. K and I suck down the wine we smuggled aboard, hoping to pass out drunk and at least get a decent sleep at the expense of a hangover, but it fails. Something about the Terror Train makes getting drunk impossible, and you go straight to throbbing headache with dulled reflexes, which makes moving about something of a fun house in terms of trying to stay sane. Curse the fates all you want, you still have to stay awake in fear until you don’t. Suicide? What if that doesn’t work? Nothing else seems to work, and what if it makes things worse? Remember, panic and fear in “The Rattlesnake Dimension”. No hope, only fear.

Glacier Park, Montana actually turns out to be scenic. We coil and twist through the mountain range, and get grand views of forest and valley. The stops are nice. Unfortunately, the track switches and we get a beautiful view of a cliff wall from then on after. And since we didn’t come upon it until the evening, the sun soon sets and we can’t see even that. The train speeds up, and we’re barreling through twists and turns at breakneck speed with the horn of hell blaring the final crash at any moment. We run out of snacks and water/soda, which is a minor emergency as right now the last battle at the concession stand is being fought. But we’re too worn out right now to care. The only thing keeping us sane is each other’s company. We can’t do anything other than sit, stare, nap or talk. The train makes anything else practically impossible.

Another night of “stay awake or die” passes, and we wake to the train entering the Columbia River Gorge. Now this mother-scratcher is scenic! The place looks like it hasn’t been totally devastated by humans, nor is there the ever-present sign of decrepitude I kept seeing. Just picturesque beauty and nice, unobtrusive signs of human habitation. Despite a gnawing hunger and thirst, K and I are too tired to go to breakfast. Thank the Maker for the coffee and juice station. The only sign of humanity in the entire damn train. The end of this leg of the ordeal is in sight, and all we can do is think about how it will soon be over. The wait is excruciating agony, especially when the train has to stop for a brief service check in Vancouver. So close!

We arrive, and stumble off the train with our luggage looking like a pair of refugees. The station is a nice, small, old school structure downtown. We are so out of it, we don’t call a cab and walk six blocks to the rental car agency, stash our stuff in the trunk, and walk to an actual café where we grab a vegetarian meal. Everyone is smiling and gossiping, having a good time. It’s like we just walked into happy land, and we’re so stunned we can’t talk. We eat with the slow weariness of victims. A random person walks by us on the street and asks if we’re okay and need help. I start shaking from shock. It’s too much, the lack of panic and fear. I get a tasty burrito and coffee into my stomach and I start to respond. K and I are alive, and it’s real vacation time.

But four days later we must face the unthinkable again, only worse, for another three days. Hell just got an upgrade, but we wouldn’t know that until later.

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Wed 7 Nov 2007

Pterodactyl Egg: Fail

Posted by laup under Meditations, Outbreak, Playtime, Tell-a-vision, Weirdie
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The folks have been going through piles of old photos for organization, and I spotted one that reminded me of my attempts to raise a genuine, honest-to-goodness “dinosaur”.  My folks took a picture that is better left to the imagination.  But first, we must travel into the Wayback Machine.

I’m nine years old, hanging out with Pa at the local Seven-Eleven to pick up a newspaper.  I spot a clear plastic container with a nest and a large candy jawbreaker “egg” labeled as a “Pterodactyl Egg”.  I recall a small folded instructions sheet on how to raise your very own Pterodactyl, but I may be mis-remembering.  I convince Pa to buy me the thing, and back at home I read the instructions and get excited about raising my very own live Pterodactyl.  This is many, many years before the arrival of Jurassic Park on the mainstream.  But I’m nine years old, I don’t have to understand how on earth someone managed to mass produce real Pterodactyl eggs for home use.  I have to get busy raising my new pet!

My folks know better than to get in the way of my creative projects when I’m on a roll, so they let me make a nest of pillows and blankets in front of the televsion set.  Yup, I have to sit on that egg to warm it up and get that little Pterodactyl going.  Unfortunately, the instructions don’t say how long you have to sit on the egg for it to hatch.  But it shouldn’t take long, right?  In the meantime, I make myself a pair of Pterodactyl wings and a pointed headpiece so that my new pet will feel more at ease with his or her new family.  I can hardly wait!

The last of the late night programs finish up and the television programming goes off for the rest of the night.  For all you younger people out there, before the advent of “Borg Cable Boredom”, the half dozen local channels would go off the air around the late AMs to the National Anthem.  You would get static until they resumed operations several hours later.  If you’ve ever seen the movie Poltergeist, that’s where the scene with Carol Anne looking at a static television would come in.  Now it’s all shows all the time.  Anyway, it’s bedtime and I have to keep the egg warm, so I pile on the blankets and go to sleep right there, with my arms around the mound to keep the warmth coming.

Inevitably, I have to accompany the parental units on a grocery run or some other errand, so I worry about keeping the warmth up on the egg.  My folks assure me all will be well, so I leave the blanket pile on and when I come back I resume my “sitting” on the egg.  After a few days of this, I start to get impatient.  Where’s that darn dinosaur?*  What’s taking it so long.  I re-read the instructions and talk about it with my folks, who suggest it might not be a “real” egg, but a gag gift and just a hunk of candy.  Brain cells start to calculate, and I start questioning whether it’s actually possible for a candy egg to hatch a real live baby “dinosaur”.  Denial sets in, but my hopes are crumbling.

I decide I have to check the egg out.  While warm, the jawbreaker shell is still nice and tough.  I shake it and nothing rattles.  Okay, even though I might be killing my new pet, I’ve got to see if this thing is for real because I’m getting tired of sitting on the darn thing.  So I take Pa’s hammer and smash it open.  I figure if I come across the mangled remains of a “dinosaur” I can always go back to the store and get another.  Sure enough, hollow center, but no Pterodactyl.  I’m crushed.  All that time wasted trying to raise a unique pet for a crummy piece of candy.  And I hate jawbreakers too, so I’m not even going to get much in the way of sweets from the pieces.  What a rip-off!

Yup, that picture is of me sitting on my nest wearing my construction paper outfit.  Back to the present, I’m thinking about what the effect might have been on my brain stem, and I think about my fondness for Pterodactyls.  From the Japanese monster movie Rodan, to Pee Wee Herman’s puppet buddy, there’s an attraction there that runs very deep.  I’ve heard it said our failures motivate us, and in this case I believe the phrase applies.  When I think about that time, the memory of my matter-of-fact, childlike belief that I was really going to hatch a real live Pterodactyl from a piece of candy is still fresh.  It’s scary, because I have that feeling and the feeling of disappointment that came after to compare with.  Both feelings stare me in the face.  It’s like that time I saw the Batmobile in an earlier post.  There are moments in your life where reality as you know it threatens to take off into the fantastical and it’s only the disillusionment that brings you back to objective life.  We really are sometimes just a step away from other worlds where who knows what might happen.

I start thinking about that movie The Illusionist, where the young Eisenheim’s failure to disappear with his childhood love motivates him to master his gift and create a masterful trick.  The magician is the person who plays with those two worlds and brings forward magic.  Not necessarily magic in the sense of a power, such as the ability to fly or make a rainstorm, but a reminder of the vast mystery of life.  The kind of performance that kindles the imagination and makes you whole.  I’m thinking my misadventure with the Pterodactyl egg, while foolish, was also spontaneous and imaginative.  Coyote the trickster was sending a message to the future that day.

* I realize Pterodactyls are not considered true “dinosaurs” these days, but I’m not digging into that can of worms today.

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Mon 5 Nov 2007

The Grab Bag and Some Really Rotten Movies

Posted by laup under Meditations, Movie Madness, Outbreak, Playtime
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Speaking of prize tables, I headed out with K and the folks to the Civitan Garage Sale this weekend. We were hunting for goods to bring back, as well as the thrill of finding hidden treasure. It’s the last garage sale of the 2007 season, and the chilly weather kept some of the vendors away, but the turnout was good. Lots of folks of all sorts hobnobbing and finagling over items of dubious value. Pretty keen! The usual food nexus was there, with hot dogs, pizza, doughnuts and soda for the famished and thirsty participants. Like a good little mule, I had my backpack and plenty of ones and fives for the hard-core bargain extravaganza.

Depending on how you look at it, I either bought the most junk or had the best luck. K found a nice soft sweatshirt and a wall hanging of “uses for herbs” to put in the kitchen. Pa came away with a measly lamp finial and a small metal bird. Ma managed to buy a nice crystal for the window, and learned some cool information about the origin of “indian beads” (sometimes information is a find in and of itself). Me, I got my hands on a number of cheap VHS tapes of Subway, The Speed Racer Movie, two episodes of Far Out Space Nuts (I said, “lunch”, not “launch!”), and Raiders of Wu-Tang. Picked up a cute Little Golden book about a firehouse cat named Sam who saves the day, and a number of Big Little books of Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Sylvester and Tweety, and The Invaders (of all things!). Oh yeah, my Christmas holster is gettin’ loaded with plenty of six shooters this season!

I picked up a birthday gift for my boss to get bonus points on. And finally I picked up a battered 1974 Fischer Price Castle to revisit a little childhood nostalgia before giving it away to Goodwill, so I’m covered from multiple angles. See the power of the prize table? Everyone else was grumbling, even though they found something, and it could be argued that I didn’t so much as score as wiped out on junk. Spirits went back up after we visited Mario’s Pizza for lunch. I still say you can’t beat that square pizza and those delicious steak and cheeses. It’s a total power up, to the max. Enabled us to get home and go over the loot. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to explore all the sellers. I got bogged down in the glasswares and VHS tapes. I even missed out on the hot dogs, which always taste excellent somehow – probably because of the atmosphere. That’s how it goes.

I watched Raiders of Wu-Tang, and unfortunately it was one of those Kung Fu movies that really stinks. That wasn’t enough punishment, so I watched The Return of Captain Invincible. I’d mentioned this earlier, and now I wish I’d not ventured too close to this one. Good, grief. This movie is a warning to all reckless fools in search of bad movies that are good. No one I know had ever heard of this movie and now I know why. It’s unredeemingly awful. The movie tries to be a superhero version of Rocky Horror and fails miserably. The only tolerable moments are when Christopher Lee is on screen, and even then it’s eye-gouging misery to watch grown men and women humiliate themselves for public consumption in this manner. I still don’t know what happened in the movie, and I watched it! I get jumbled images of the President singing to his staff, a battle with vacuum cleaners, a fire breathing Volkswagen Bug, and numerous scenes with magnetic powers causing women’s clothes to pop off. Words fail me.

Which means I was ready to strike out a third time, of course. I watched the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man starring Nicolas Cage and while it was no Captain Invincible, it was amazingly awful. I haven’t seen so many mainstream actors and actresses throw their careers into the gutter in a single movie like this since Dungeons and Dragons. Unlike Captain Invincible, there are numerous moments of unintentional humor, as this clip attests. My favorite is the “get off the bike now” scene, where Molly Parker’s fine work on Six feet Under and Deadwood evaporates in less than three lines, and Nicolas Cage goes from Moonstruck magic to Evil Dead minus the funny on a dime. Truly, there are moments of terrible movie making that defy all rules of logic and this movie is full of them. I’ll never look at a bear suit the same way again.

Luckily, K was there with a resuscitator kit to bring me out of shock and confusion. Third season of House and the tried and true formula of jerk doctor solves mystery illness with loads of wacky wit and irascible shenanigans! Okay, much better. I think somebody needs to pilot the Netflix Queue for a while. Watching the detritus to fertilize my brain and make it a happy medium for good ideas.

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Wed 31 Oct 2007

The Freaks Come Out At Night

Posted by laup under Announcements, Outbreak, Playtime
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Happy Halloween and Celtic New Year. Since it’s hulla-boo-loo time, here’s a teaser page for you from my book.

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Mon 29 Oct 2007

Today’s Catch On The Menagerie

Posted by laup under Bath Lore, Cooking, Gardening, Meditations, Movie Madness, Outbreak, Playtime, The Book Mine
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Talk about doomsville city at the garden. We had a frost finally in late October, after having a record hot month. The majority of plants left all seem to have taken a major blow. Even the weeds are getting nervous. The bees are gone, and the general insect population seems to have cleared out. The birds are still around, but not to the degree they were a month ago. K and I were busy scavenging up what we could in the way of herbs, but hoo boy it was brutal out there in the trenches.

Tomatoes go bye-bye. The only thing left is the lettuce, which we harvested gratefully and had a small salad with our dinner, hooray! Pretty soon it’ll be time to dig up the horseradish, I can’t wait! Unfortunately, half my seeds haven’t dried out right, and have grown horrible molds. Still, not bad for my first try. I harvested the last of the basil, and some oregano for a Pizza of Doom I’m making for work. But it looks like the garden goodies have hit the bed and are passing out of time and space until next time folks.

Since it’s Halloweenie, I need my costume. I dug into my enormous bookshelf of tricks and pulled out a 1976 copy of Make-Up Monsters by Marcia Lynn Cox. Oh, I gots ideas galore thanks to this book. Hopefully, with the make-up stuff I have acquired, things will come out neat. Some of these, I haven’t tried out since I went trick or treating with my cousins or my elementary school friends. Oh yes, and I scored a pumpkin, though I’m guessing I’ll be my usual unskilled self and create a rather mundane jack-o-lantern. I don’t know. I just haven’t got the right touch for doing a pumpkin right. Maybe I need a kung fu master to show me what I’m missing. And of course the bowl is filled with candy for the screaming brats. Hopefully K won’t eat all the Mr. Goodbars.

My friend, Dr. C, called me up the other day and we rapped about what he’s been up to. I’m totally psyched for him to be doing what he’s doing. He’s been busting his buns through med school and his residency, and now he’s finally at the point where the powering up starts. Basically, he’s getting to write his own ticket for the hospital he’s going to be working at, and he’ll be living in a fabulous area for his family (and dog). I’m very happy for him, because there were some times where his life was pretty bleak and I was very worried for him.

That brings up another old friend from way back, someone whom I haven’t spoken with in a long time and only hear of through the astrosending, but I was thinking about a lot in the last week. Mainly in the terms of some spiritual connections we made back in the day, which still resonate with me now. Looks like she’ll be getting a website soon, which I’ll shamelessly plug here, but it’s not up yet. So get kraken, Xtine!

Going even further in the wayback machine on YouTube, I found someone posted a copy of The Frog Prince, with Kermit the Frog and Robin the Brave, plus Sweetums the Ogre before he was made safe for work consumption. Oh, wow, this takes me back a ways. I had this on vinyl, along with many other records, and played it often as a kid. But now it’s unavailable on DVD, and only rarely can you catch it on cable (when I was still mooching off my folks). That’s a shame, because the musical numbers are fantastic, and the story itself is both charming and wholesome. I still have the record, but it’s in rough shape. I’d love to get my paws on this one. Still, to see it on YouTube brings me to a deep place inside full of happy feelings and warm thoughts.

This weekend Lush came out with some new products, so K hinted that we ought to go to the nearest store and check them out. Since I was out of bath bombs and shampoo bars, I thought today is the day we replenish our ammunition or perish. Pricey luxury stuff, but its on my top list of bath goodies so we had to go. I stocked up on my usual array of nice things and she got herself some hair treatment prizes. K then proceeded to cut her hair, change it into a nice cerise color, and pamper it with wonderful hair-treatment goodness. Me, I’m set for the next alchemical treatment. I started using a new flavor of shampoo bar and so far its got good value. I was getting annoyed with the generic soup du jour of shampoo you can get at any supermarket, anywhere in crumbsville.

And I worked on my book. I finally decided on a teaser page to show you all. One that doesn’t reveal too much, but gives some good thoughts on what I’m about. I just have to turn it into a PDF and post it, which given the Halloweenie whackiness, might be a few days. I’m 70% through the revisions, so I’m getting closer to my current goal. I’ve accumulated a list of things that will have to be addressed in the polish stage, but I think most of it is minor work. It may be that my work will have only just begun after I finish my revisions, but it’s a major goal just the same. I’m still considering my cover. What color it will be, what the picture and text will consist of, and the spine. I’m not satisfied with my notes, so I predict I’ll have to spend more time on this when I’m not distracted.

I hung out with my gamer friends, and it was a blast. We watched the unimaginably horrible Universal Soldier: The Return and had a lot of fun mocking it. The game we played was a nice little gem called Arkham Horror, which is based on the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos. In a nutshell, it’s the 1930s, and alien horrors are coming into the town of Arkham as precursors to the outright monster apocalypse of a randomly generated Elder God of Evil. Players take the part of archetypes from the era (Flapper, Gangster, Archaeologist, etc.) and try to gain the knowledge and power to kill the monsters and defeat the ultimate bad monster before the town is destroyed.

It’s one of those games with tokens for every single thing in the game, and it’s a long game, but the mechanics seemed solid and the setting was hard not to get into. Everyone cooperates to stop the monsters instead of competing against each other. And the artwork and production values are very high. It was a blast walking around with my researcher and checking out all the various spooky places for clues and fighting off ghouls and alien fungi with my pistols.

I’ve been trying to record my dreams this October, but something about them has not wanted to be put down on paper. The messages from the unconscious haven’t wanted any photographs taken at their press conference, I suppose. As the Celtic New Year draws to a close, I’ve got a lot to ruminate on from this last year. A lot has happened, both in the external world and the internal.

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Wed 24 Oct 2007

So What About This Prize Table

Posted by laup under Meditations, Outbreak, Playtime
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Earlier I mentioned an enigmatic prize table. The prize table is a metaphysical concept expressed in real time and space as a collection of junk gifts. Whether or not there is an actual table is beside the point, what matters is the collection point. A box, a closet corner, whatever. Yes, you too can have your very own prize table. And the contents of the prize table are limited only by your cheapness and audacity.

The reason the prize table exists is because you need a source of readymade gifts for all occasions. Need to bring something over to a friend’s party? Forgot your nephew’s birthday? Co-worker you can’t stand coming back from the hospital and you have to look good in front of the office? No problem! With a fully stocked prize table, you just select whatever piece of junk you feel the twerp deserves, wrap it up, and voila! No fuss, no muss.

This isn’t to say you must always use the prize table. Save your valuable time and money for the moments and people that really matter to you. Some more generous souls may never need to call upon the power of the prize table at all. It’s just a slight reassurance in a Terminator robot-infested world to know you have a backup in the gift department. One must carry sacrifices at all times in case of ambush by chthonic beings and their minions!

So how do you stock the prize table? Well, estate sales are one way to populate the prize table. You’ll find things suitable for the prize table that don’t quite make the grade for your own personal use. Another source is gifts given to you by other people! Yes, you can take the horrible, tacky yellow rug from Aunt May and give it along to Uncle Buck. A further source of material is whatever you have gotten tired of and would like to get rid of. But keep in mind that the older and more broken down it looks, the less likely it will pass inspection. You must always tailor your choices by what you believe you can get away with.

That’s about all there is too it.  Start collecting your misfit toys now, because sooner or later you too might need the prize table!

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Tue 23 Oct 2007

Prepare Thyself For Overcrowding

Posted by laup under Meditations, Music Quest, Outbreak, Playtime
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This weekend, K and I made our way over to the Maryland Rennaisance Festival to go and see Albannach, the celtic battle music band mentioned earlier. We hadn’t been there since the time we went with Liephus and GuitarCJ, something like five years ago. It’s hard to believe I’ve been going to this thing, on and off, since 1993. As the larger than I remember crowds jostled us about and we stood in line for 20 minutes to grab a cafeteria-level packet of fish and chips, I reflected back to the first time I came here and how things have changed for me.

Mind you, this place is something of a local institution now. It’s run very efficiently and the number of “stuff” to play, buy, watch, and consume is enormous. The consistency of quality has remained at a high level the whole time, which is amazing. I’m hard pressed to think of too many other venues where people can dress up, get bombed, and generally be themselves in large numbers. It’s that last part, the “large numbers” one, that gets on my nerves. Both K and I felt we had outgrown this place, and perhaps the squalid crowd of drones and walk-ons is getting a little too authentic for our tastes.

Albannach was outstanding. Their energy and enthusiasm were at a high level, and the crowd was into it. I think the decision to place them on the Market Stage was probably not the best one. Although it probably can accomodate more people, it’s too flat and structured. I think there were several other stages they could have been placed on which would have allowed more freedom of movement and a better view. Listening to these people made you want to dance. I can only wonder what the drones sitting on the benches must have thought, surrounded by a mass of people dancing and blowing horns like maniacs.

There’s a place where you can buy coin medallions. You choose a design for each side, and the artisans use a large weight to stamp them into the metal. K bought herself a bronze coin with a black leather strap. The strap technology has improved since I first got mine, as she had a bead to adjust the front length with, and a tie to allow for a larger loop around the neck. She chose a tree-of-life on one side and a hummingbird on the other.

Seeing her wear it made me want to get mine out. Back in 1993 I bought one in silver with a black cord, with the face of medusa on one one side and the moon on the other. So when we got home I dug mine out and we compared, and wore our medallions together. I had to use some polish on mine, because I hadn’t worn it much since I put away my altar works back in the late nineties.

It turns out I spent the same amount of money on this visit as I did the first time, which brings back memories of when I got my medallion. K getting her medallion so that both of us have one feels like a meaningful coincidence, because I think this is the last time I’m going to go to the Maryland Rennfest. “The Carnival is Over”, to make a Dead Can Dance reference.

My first visit to the rennfest was a giddy and deeply meaningful adventure. I dressed as a fool, with a jester’s hat and bright colors. This last time, I looked like all the other drones, even though I could have dressed up like all the other walk-ons (having invested the requisite several hundred dollars for basic costume and accesories). K and I didn’t feel like standing in line for 20 minutes to get a drink, so we passed on the inebriation factor. That struck me as another change in the equation, as the drinking is one of the highlights. Oh well, the booze money went into the prize fund, and we bought some wonderful beeswax candles to burn while we do our various crafting activities at home.

What’s the next step in evolution for a young fool? Old dope? Looking back, it’s nice that this place has been a rock of dependability when so many other fun places turn sour. Good times. When I think back to the young man wearing the image of medusa and compare him to the person wearing it now, there is sorrow for me in leaving the place behind. I’m just uninterested in going back now, which has an unexplainable sense of the inevitable to it I never would have guessed at the start.

If it’s a story, it resolves. So what comes next, right? A door closes, a door opens. I bring my new Albannach CD home (I support artists I like with the cash on general principle) and K and I listen up. The stuff with the vocals blow, but the other two-thirds with the rumbling drums and the piercing bagpipe is pure chewing satisfaction. I’ll tell you what time it is! Time to get up and dance like a stupid fool. Because at the end of every story the fool shows up again to get you going on another madcap adventure.

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Fri 19 Oct 2007

Paying the Dues With Grumbling and Sniveling

Posted by laup under Meditations, Outbreak, Tell-a-vision
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I’m in a real slump right now when it comes to the television shows currently playing. The tube is going down the tubes, so to speak. It’s not that you can’t find something to watch. Just head off the main highway and drive the back roads until you encounter the fresh stuff sold at a fly-by-night farmer stand. Know what I mean, bean? But some days the mindless actions of the networks that ruin anything good, in all violation of the iron rule of making money, gets me down.

I cancelled my cable a few years back, because I’m sick of paying sixty bucks a month to watch two or three channels that sometimes have something entertaining on. Come on, TNT, I’ve got all the good James Bond movies on DVD and can watch them whenever I feel like. Are crummy “Bond marathons” the best you got? Cartoon network makes me ralph my cookies. I can get just about all my fave cartoons on DVD now (save for a few minor gems, like Marine Boy or Prince Planet), and adult swim can jump the shark already. All the good stuff will be there, eventually.

See, I’ve gotten into the habit of just waiting for the good stuff to come out on DVD. I don’t care about the television channels anymore because they don’t know how to manage good programming and they waste my time with 5 minutes of commercials for every 7 minutes of show. I remember when the big networks laughed at the idea that anyone would “pay” for television. Now you pay for television AND get commercials. That’s in addition to a general decline in quality of shows, with less risk taking and more franchises/re-imaginings. I can tune into my parent’s cable channel with the sound turned off and go, “oh, look, another cop show that rips off Hill Street Blues.”

I think the corporate seizing of “intellectual property” has choked off innovation. Networks are repeating themselves over and over, and nothing new is coming out. When a fresh idea comes about by accident, you get an instant glomming over to that new idea to exploit the show for cash and residual merchandizing. That’s why we get crummy programs that last two or three seasons way after the original idea was burned out.

Then there’s the Internet’s ability to grow a consensus rapidly about a show’s shortcomings. Maintaining a show’s image has become harder for networks because they can’t milk an audience as easily. The pressure on the actual creators of a show has only increased. The public relations of a show can reach ludicrous proportions, with outright lying and manipulation to keep people watching for that “one big twist” around the corner. Meanwhile, the show’s quality crumbles and crumbles.

The other day, my folks told me they’re canceling their cable. The cable company hiked the rates and they didn’t think it was worth what they are paying. I’m like, “Whoa, what are you going to watch late at night while you’re drifting off to bed?” They ask me about setting up a DVD/VCR upstairs and getting a Netflix account versus satellite versus Verizon Fi-OS. They want to watch the Best of Johnny Carson to start with, and then this list of other shows. I’m seriously doing a double take here. I don’t know what they’ll ultimately do, but I can’t help but feel it’s a sign that something is going on.

I’ve been hearing about ‘ala carte’ television for a while now, and it hasn’t happened yet. But I think the time for it can’t be far off. What happens when people can share ‘libraries’ of movies as easily as MP3s? Granted, I think that’s happening in some form or another now. I see it happening with younger folks on a limited basis. I certainly don’t mind loaning a friend, say my Buffy DVDs to watch their Star Trek DVDs. In other words, there’s a marketplace of entertainment taking shape where people exchange common interests and ideas and see what the best thing is for themselves. The television channels are all merging into a single experience – the preview channel.

Or look at this way. Most everybody I know in my various different social groups knows someone who has a tricked up home theater setup. You know, the Best Buy/Circuit City mega-destructoid system. How can you compete with people’s prime enjoyable experience of media being in their own living room, or the living room of their friend? Theaters can’t compete with the home ground advantage. It’s not that there won’t always be a place for neutral ground for dating purposes, for example. But it’s going to be a greatly reduced part of what people do to entertain themselves.

The networks are going to have to reinvent the way they do business, maybe actually generate some new material, because they are on the outskies. It’s going to be in production or nothing. You got fifty new shows? My friend has two hundred old ones in her library, and can tell me on a personal connection which ones are any good. Can your dullard entertainment reviewer on the payroll do that? Every social group will have like one or two people who watch what the “preview” companies put out, just to be able to tell us what’s going to be part of “must see” and what can go in the garbage compactor as “same old”.

So I’m glum that things right now are so boring and difficult and disappointing. But the times they are a-changin’. I’m not going to shed a tear over the cable companies or the networks. They had their chance, and, to quote Lord Summerisle, “Blew it.” I’ll be watching their demise on my friend’s super-system while we drink the beer I brought over.

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Thu 18 Oct 2007

The Thrill Of An Estate Sale

Posted by laup under Meditations, Outbreak, Playtime
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Nowadays, it seems like everybody and their posse are busting a move on what used to be my secret escape on weekends. Programs such as the Antiques Road Show are to blame, giving people the mostly false hope that all they have to do is go to some garage sale and they can find a forgotten sketch by Rembrandt and make fifty thousand dollars on something they paid ten bucks for. I figure my gig is up, and I’ll just have to consent myself with people enjoying the newly appointed fad for the next ten years. So now is the time when the truth can be told!

You start by looking in the Friday paper under Estate Sales, Garage Sales, and Auctions. We’ll stick with estate sales for the purposes of this post. Look for things that are close by where you live, of course. Read the descriptions, and if something reads the right way for you, then by all means drive the extra mile. But the point isn’t necessarily the prize, but the ability to hit 2 or 3 places to maximize your chances and to get as much fun as possible out of the experience. I go on Saturdays and Sundays, but there’s no reason you couldn’t do the duty on a Friday if you hustled, or took the day off.

Descriptions can be misleading, however, so always measure how the ad reads and feels to you. “Lots of collectibles” can mean “piles of unrelated stuff we couldn’t identify”, and “Vintage furniture” can mean “broken down junk we found in the attic”. Avoid any sale that requires you to stand in line and take a number, or charges you a fee. Those are the rackets, and you won’t find squat there, maybe the occasional high priced piece of tasteless furniture selling for hundreds of dollars because the owners really don’t want to part with it.

Take cash, forty bucks is optimal, but twenty will do fine. What, you thought you were going to be getting new furniture for your apartment? That will do you for the first one or two runs, but then what? This is a regular diversion, not a bargain hunt per se. Look to do this long term, for laughs. Carry your checkbook if you want, but I never carry more than a hundred, and that only on the days I “gots me that lovin’ feeling”. Also, make sure you have a vehicle that can handle a small piece of furniture or a few boxes of junk. Ideally, it’s fun for the entire family, but make sure you can bring back the loot. My Tardis go-cart hatchback, Micro Blue, does the trick nicely.

Crack out the road maps, Google Maps, whatever you need to find the place, and go. Carry some water or a coke with you, it can be thirsty work. Make plans to stop for lunch, or carry a picnic in the back. The last thing you need is a car full of crabby patties, or a grousing driver. This is an adventure into the dungeons! Load up on supplies accordingly.

Once you get to the location, there’s always the issue of parking. Sometimes it’s easy, other times it can be tricky. Some of the places I’ve been to have had the strangest access, from one way streets into a small cul-de-sac, to a tiny dirt hill with no place to turn around and nothing but cars behind you honking for their chance to risk running over the edge to let them pass. I’ve had neighbors scream at me for parking on a public street because my car was “an abomination”. 90 percent of the time it’s not much of an issue, but you will come across the strange ways, my friend, oh yes, you will come upon them.

There are a lot of estate sale companies managing the things these days, and you start to know them on a first name basis. You walk in the door and you go, “Oh, I didn’t know you guys were involved, how ya doing?” And “Oh, hello dear, yes it’s us. The ad messed up and didn’t get our logo, kind of a last minute thing.” My schtick has always been, be polite and keep it loose and easy with these outfits. Yes, you can bargain with them, but if you cop an attitude they will crack the whip faster than you can say “Captain Thunderpants.” And if you offend them, well do you really want to search a house while they give you the evil eye?

I’ve seen it happen. Guy tries to haggle a pile of nice metal tools in a toolbox, tries to diddle the price down to a dollar (hey, it can be done, and for less than that!) when it’s clearly marked five. The outfit says three, and the guy cops that attitude. Starts arguing with them about ripping people off, ratcheting the tension up in a line that’s already as tense as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I stifle a laugh. Dude! This a zero sum game, are you kidding me? Come back on Sunday when they won’t care! Snap goes the trap, and the giant clams have denied you! Guy leaves everything on the table and leaves in a defeated huff. I could only shake my head at the guy and sadly mourn his removal from the list of “almost unworthy to view the wares but if we must grant you access I suppose we must”.

Me, I used it to my advantage. Bought my stuff and didn’t haggle. I already knew the lampshade was a bargain (which surprised me, given the high prices of this outfit). I sympathized with them and chuckled at their well-played snap. Out of the blue, they say, “take that shelf, we can’t use it.” I’m like, “Whoa.” Genuine cherry wood three tier sub-shelf with original varnish and almost completely intact!? I’m there, dude. You roll the dice and sometimes you get a surprise. But you won’t get it by being a jerk. But hey, you wipe out, I’m taking your boots and leaving your corpse by the wayside. This ain’t no disco. I trust you get my point. Stay calm. You lose a lot, you sometimes make the play. That’s how it works.

Now, you should be aware of a certain kind of “estate sale” known as the “bogus estate sale.” I don’t run into them often, maybe three times in the past ten years, but you will encounter them. And when you do you will be outraged by the complete waste of time they are. The “bogus estate sale” is a tactic used by dishonest furniture dealers to sell their products under false pretenses. You’ll walk into a house, and there will be nothing in it except lots of high-priced furniture, often it’ll be covered in plastic wrap because it hasn’t even been completely unwrapped from the wholesaler. There will be a lot of “helpers” walking around asking you if they can help you, like its some kind of freakin’ store or you might walk off with their high-priced tacky junk.

Ohhh! It burns my bunions when I walk into one of those things. Just be aware they exist, and realize that no, you aren’t hallucinating. This is a scam, get out now before you waste any more time. Sometimes you’ll walk into an estate sale with nothing left, but there will still be that smell in the air, or some crud in the corners, like the Grinch has just passed through on one of his runs. The scam will be instantly recognizable by the “cleanliness” of the house and the abundance of nice furniture without the signs of anyone having actually lived in the house.

So, where’s the fun you ask? Well, there’s the excitement of not knowing what you will get, or what kind of situation you’ll find yourself in. After all the preparation and hassle of getting there, after the maneuvering of the obstacles, nothing beats the moment of truth: The moment you walk through the door. You get to explore someone else’s house and pick through their things. That’s what I call the sordid angle. And, every now and then, you come across and object that wants to come home with you. It’s like scratching lottery tickets. You’re hoping for the jackpot, but when you win that one-dollar, you feel like a million bucks. Dreams are what this is made of.

Sometimes you walk into a house and it’s full of nothing but junk. All of it is cheap and the right price, but you don’t want any of it. Other times you’ll walk into a house and it’s crowded to the gills with people fighting over piles and piles of towels, curtains, and used clothing. K once had to flee a pile of used clothes because two women were literally pushing her away to fight over who would get what scrap! Then there are the times you walk into a person’s house and you get insights into how they lived, but don’t come away with anything.

For example, I went through the books and diaries of a housewife who had passed on, and the husband had been moved to a nursing home. The woman had lived a life of constant worry over her religious devotion, her weight, and her attractiveness to her husband. She had gone from religious study, with tons of appropriate knick-knacks, to diet and nutrition with cookbooks and health regimens, and finally to ahem, more modern seventies books on “how to do it” and how to be both religious and uhm, “adventurous”. It culminated in a light interest in mysticism, with astrology books and “spiritual renewal” manuals.

The husband, meanwhile, had gone from mathematics with calculators and slide-rules for a navy engineering job of some sort, to fiddling with electronics and do-it-yourself household fixtures in the basement (I never saw so many transistors and vacuum tubes next to wiring and plumbing projects in my life), and ended up with an extreme interest in National Geographic and travel. There were countless artifacts from Asian vacations, from Thailand to New Guinea, and on into Hong Kong. It’s as if the guy had decided numbers and electricity didn’t measure up to going on expeditions to bring back the goods.

You sometimes come into the houses of specialists. People who devoted their entire waking lives to one thing. I once explored the home of a guy who had worked in the state department with literally, thousands of books in his home. Piles as high as a human being, one after the other up and down the stairs, on numerous shelves or on the floor, filling entire rooms, on every conceivable subject, though mostly having to do with economics, philosophy and ancient history.

There was the woman who had converted her entire enormous home into a yarn depository. It was like being in a store. Shelf after handcrafted shelf of patterns, balls of yarn, and knitting books. The workshop had every arsenal of knitting tool known to humanity, and it all looked used and lovingly attended to. K, being a knitting and spinning artist, had a nervous breakdown at the sight of it, and I almost never got her out of the labyrinths of knitty goodness. I think we spent over an hour lost in that place.

Then there are the houses that aren’t right. An ex-diplomat’s house filled with hard-to-find side passages, hidden attics, and labyrinthine basements. Regular old houses on joe-blow street that look normal on the outside, but are put together funny on the inside. Doors that go nowhere. Basements you can see but can’t get to anymore. Twisting and turning hallways that force you to always go in one direction, in a circle. And farmhouses that have layouts that allow women and men to live separate lives, with sewing and bridge club rooms with easy access to the root cellar and kitchen in one area, smoking/sitting rooms and workshops in the other, meeting only in the dining room around a large long farm table for meals.

I’m only scratching the surface, and I don’t want to make this into a manifesto. You get the idea. You usually walk into a generic place, but might find something interesting that teaches you about people. Oh yeah, the stuff. Anything’s possible. Most times, a place is cleaned out. I have a set range of things I’m looking for, mostly books and toys, and sometimes a good knick-knack for the prize table. I’ll have to explain the concept of the prize table in another post. I won’t turn down a bargain if I see it, and I’m not looking for furniture, though I might pick up a shelf or rug if the price is right. Everybody has their focus.

I was in a McMansion once, totally filled with bad taste in furniture. One thing that never fails to amaze me is how in the new big houses, say post 1980, the people who once lived in them always seem to have spent all their energy in obtaining the dream house, but never have the life-force left to actually fill it with what feeds the soul. The furniture is tacky, or out of a crummy catalog, and doesn’t look like anybody has ever used it. There’s very little clutter, just a lot of the basics such as shelf for entertainment electronics, couch to enjoy said electronics, and some accessory pieces like a lamp on a pedestal. No posters, maybe one lifeless piece of framed art, no colors in the wallpaper or bric a brac in a corner to indicate even the slightest interest in obtaining mementoes or fetishes for a healthy functioning psyche.

But I digress. House is a typical lifeless shell, when I get down to a single room in the basement, and pow. Apparently the housewife was a teacher, and clung to that part of her life tenaciously, and this was her space. She had a mobile shelf made of high quality wood and constructed to withstand long-term exposure for kids. I get it for five bucks. Holy moly. She has a box of wooden blocks of the kind you never see anymore. I pick it up for another five bucks. As a kid, I had the companion set of blocks to this set, so here I am, years later, completing the set of blocks. The one with the solid round pillars and the arches to go with the squares and rectangles of the other set. I’m out of my mind with disbelief. I buy a pile of kids books that are long out of print for a buck. Those will go on the prize table and will end up in the hands of my younger cousins, who might never get a chance to know some of the classics I grew up with. It’s a humbling experience.

Sometimes you walk out with one thing, but it’s a prize. I go into a huge old house where somebody (I can’t tell who) does a lot of cooking. The basement has every conceivable appliance, dish, pan and accessory you can imagine. Mixed in with someone else’s Matchbox Car collection of rare and expensive die-cast metal cars from the sixties and seventies. I can’t touch that stuff, it’s way too expensive for my tastes. So I look under all the tables and boxes in the basement, just to see what’s there, and I pull out a cast iron pot, complete with lid and handle. I’m stunned; this has got to be pre-fifties stuff. I can hardly lift it, but the outfit lets me have it for a buck. I hand it over to the folks, who know how to revive iron and care for it. We now have a large pot, the kind you might find in the wild west, capable of cooking a huge amount of food, say chicken and dumplings or beef stew on an open flame in the wilderness. That’s exactly what we end up using it for. Talk about cool.

You do a lot of dues paying in the form of wasted effort. A lot of times you go to three sales and they’re all a bust. For weeks you get zero return. But then the clouds part, and something gets revealed to you, making it all worthwhile. In some small way I’m paying my respects to these people who have passed on, by bearing witness to their passing and making out of the ritual a way for life to improve and move forward. Gotta drink to that!

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Wed 17 Oct 2007

Comic Book Heroes Are Obsolete

Posted by laup under Comic Books, Meditations, Outbreak
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Yup, it’s time for another dissatisfaction post. I got loads of issues with popular culture, and here comes the latest diatribe of destructoid doom! I’ve been out of the comics field for a while, when I gave up my comic box a ways back and decided I’d run out of patience with the endless storylines that never resolved, or the stupid inconsistencies that never made sense. The hero business gets mighty boring after a couple of years of waiting for things to happen that matter.

Graphic novels have allowed me to explore new avenues of coolness, and the independent comics out there, both in print and on the web, have kept the faith. There’s things out there that feed me. I should be happy. I’ll probably never buy DC or Marvel again though, and I look back at the old days of The Uncanny X-men, Alpha Flight, and Teen Titans with a fondness I know in my bones I’ll never know again. It’s like a right of passage for adolescents. One day, the power fantasies stop being fun, and the lack of fun overrides your faith in what the heroes mean to you.

I’m an apostate, then, in the comic sense of the word. I can still be marketed to. It’s called “the maturation of the industry”. Titles are darker and edgier now, to compete with the rich competition of Manga, and independent trade paperbacks. But last year, with the advent of the television show Heroes, something came to the surface that started to bother me. Good show, but I think there’s a fundamental flaw in hero comic books that has never been addressed, or if it has I’ve never run into it. I’m not sure exactly, that it can be addressed.

What I see a dearth of in comic books, particularly the mainstream ones, is the now familiar self-defeating cycle of, origin of hero, establishment of hero as righter of wrongs (or “doer of what they are supposed to do”), appearance of villain(s) to challenge hero, big dude fight to see who the big dog is, generic victory, return to “establishment” or “appearance” phase, repeat as long as sales are good. If sales are poor, instead of “victory”, hero gets rousing defeat and indefinite retirement until they can be retconned back into action to see if they are saleable again.

Funk dat! Get a new cycle, fool!

See, today’s mainstream heroes are commercial property. They can never resolve a story; they can only embody qualities dependent upon who is telling the most current version of their tale. The hero reaches a certain point, at which they never go anywhere but around the same carousel.

Look at Spider Man. K bought the complete spider man comic series (something like 400+ issues) on CD-ROM a few years back, and I managed to wander through it a little. This was during the time of the surge in popularity with Ultimate Spider Man and the Spider Man movies. What struck me was how the long-term spider-man saga in the comics was a never-ending cycle marked by certain points where an “idea”, like the black suit or the marriage of Mary Jane and Peter Parker, took hold as official changes. Meanwhile, the Ultimate Spider Man comics (a “re-invention” of the series for a modern day), and to a certain degree, the movies embodied a shocking revelation to me: You could tell the entire story of spider man (as it has been developed) very quickly because of this cycle.

In other words, the “story” of Spider Man has been in reality just one long narrative without end, in a way not dissimilar to many Dungeons and Dragons games where your Level 36 Fighter keeps going from one fight fest to the next because there’s nothing to do but fight more monsters and level up. In order for it to be a story, there has to be a resolution, an endgame. But that’s not possible because it’s an “intellectual property” that must provide “increasing profitability”.

Well, Spider Man has been around long enough now where the gig is up. The story has been told in all ways that count. You can try and “reboot” or “scorched earth” the character, but the problem is, you still tell the entire story in 11 volumes or less. You can tell the entire story in three movies and you are done, finished. That’s all there is. Talk about depressing! We’ve finally come to a point where the comic book characters have been with us long enough to cross three generations, long enough for a major paradigm shift.

If that leads to a gradual telling and retelling of the major heroes, so that Spider Man becomes a version of a modern day story akin to Gilgamesh, I’m cool with that. These stories are done, so it’s time to see what’s cooking on the pot now, in terms of what is fresh. Because that’s what I’m most interested in. I see it as a sign that something else is coming to the boil. This preoccupation with “realism” in what is really a psychic, non-real fact of inner existence means there is a need to move the hero into a different realm of development. I’m not sure fandom wants or can handle it, but I think it is happening already in the dark corners of the internets. At least I see the signs that perhaps we are ready to take another look at the hero, and our need for the still vulgar and underestimated comic book

See, the hero always appears in response to a need in society. Something is wrong, someone who can make the wrong right appears. The wrong is righted. That’s the hero’s journey in a nutshell. Departure, Initiation, Return. So if “realism” is the goal, then isn’t the next step to take the villain out of the picture by identifying what he/she/it signifies? Or to put it another way, if comics are an escapist power fantasy, why not depict the hero resolving the problem and kicking rear end?

Or to make it more clear, you will never see Superman putting a stop to the war crimes in Guantanamo, Batman defending lawfully protesting activists in New York City from police brutality, or Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four making testimony before congress on global warming. They can never be shown fighting even aliases of those kinds of problems, because it’s too controversial. They only ever fight, in dramatic fashion, some goofball named Galactus or Lex Luthor who represents a “generic threat” in terms of “every hero has their opposite”, thus Heroes are neutralized. It’s a means of neutering the heroic impulse and keeping the art form from reaching its creative, natural expression.

There’s a problem in that these kinds of heroes stand for a process in the psyche, and so how much you can take them out of their natural element and place them into more concrete realizations is problematic. The means of expression, even in a “democratic” society as ours are limited to narrow bands of discussion. But I think if comic book heroes are to mean something now, they have to start exploring the next step of creative evolution and start fighting the REAL “super” villains. An ordinary person by themselves can only do so much against centers of concentrated power, such as a sociopathic corporation. It requires a “super” human to appear and with the mask of unconscious identity fight crime where it really exists.

There are scenes in comic books where this threatens to make an appearance. I’m thinking of a scene from a particular story in The Defenders, where they are fighting a group of anti-African American extremists called The Sons of the Serpent. The SotS are ordinary humans with a funny common costume and some high tech weapons like ray guns. They are able to get the drop on The Defenders because of this high-tech advantage, and numbers. The ordinary boyfriend of Valkyrie springs forward as they are making a street demonstration and about to burn Valkyrie on an upside down cross.

The man’s heroism inspires the ordinary people on the street who are watching this show of violence. One guy says he’s got no love for black people, but you don’t burn them because you don’t like them. If that ordinary guy can do it, so can they. Time to take back the city for regular people! A riot ensues, and the onlookers overwhelm the SotS members, forcing them to flee.

During the melee, The Defenders regain the upper hand and regroup. One of the leaders of The Defenders, Nighthawk, discovers that the source of his vast wealth has been funding the SotS without his knowledge, and he freaks. It’s a rather poignant scene, complicated by a later scene that I’m not sure is a cop-out or a real statement on hate across all lines of people. But the point I take from this storyline is that heroes are supposed to inspire regular people to make changes. The hero is worthless if they do all the work all the time. They bring back that gold which is necessary for regular people to make a change in their own lives. Because it’s the public that matters, not the privileged world of heroes and villains fighting on their turf for supremacy. That smacks of aristocracy and elitism, not the power within every person to contribute to the group’s real benefit.

I’m not sure if the time has come, but the current iteration of comic book heroes has run its course. It is way past time to spawn or die, and I don’t think DC or Marvel can pull it off. If it happens, it will happen in the independent fields out there, in the wilderness of the Internets. Do it. The public needs to be inspired, because they have lost their way, and they shiver in fear because they don’t know what can be done now, in this darkest moment of greatest danger and greatest potential.

03/31/2012 Edit: Oops, the Defender’s name was Nighthawk, not Yellowjacket!

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