Satyr’s Day, May 31 2003

I’ve been sleeping better lately.

About three years ago, I moved an old sleeper sofa I’d been given by friends of my mom’s when I first moved into this apartment, into my bedroom. I just wanted more space in the living room, and got a couple of then-friends to help me move it. We had to take the door off the bedroom to do it, and I probably just should have had them put it out by the dumpster, but for whatever reason, we put it in my bedroom instead.

Sometime shortly thereafter, my mom and stepdad gave me the metal framed futon I’d been sleeping on while I stayed in their guest bedroom, back in summer and autumn of ’97, when I first moved down here. I threw out the small bed I’d been sleeping on and started sleeping on the futon.

The futon’s frame is very hard, and the futon mattress itself is thin, and I’m a big guy, so the futon didn’t seem that comfortable. To thicken it up, I pulled the foam rubber mattress out of the sleeper sofa and put it under the futon mattress.

Right around there, I think, my sleeping problems began, although I certainly never connected the two. But right around then, I started to have a hard time sleeping late, or sleeping much longer than four, six hours at a time. The thickened up sleeping platform seemed more comfortable than just the futon pad, so, like I said, I would never have associated it with that.

I started feeling much less comfortable while I was lying in bed. I sleep on my side and have a big stomach, and it started to feel uncomfortably pokey right around my ribs, regardless of which side I slept on. Recently, I’ve developed an odd, very light bruise just over my ribs on my right side. And of course, the sleeping problems became chronic. When it got unendurable I’d take some melatonin for a while to break the cycle; that would help, but only for a few days. Then it would start up again.

About a week ago, although it seemed very counter intuitive to me, I pulled the sleeper mattress out from under the futon pad… and although it didn’t feel very comfortable, I slept reasonably well that night.

I’ve slept well… okay, better… ever since. Going to bed quite late, I don’t sleep straight through or anything… that’s a lost dream of childhood, I believe… but I tend to drift off, sleep through until maybe six or seven… my usual wake up times when working… and then go back to sleep until 12:30 or so.

Much, much better.

To address the uncomfortably hard futon frame, I found a largeish… about 3’x4’… piece of stiff artist’s board (I salvaged it from a scrap pile at work last year; sometimes I like to draw large maps for my RPG). I slipped that under the futon, over in the corner against the wall where I tend to sleep. It’s helped enormously. Now I can’t feel the bumps and ridges of the futon frame through the pad any more.

So, if I were just not getting fucking EVICTED here, life would be swell…

I packed up much of yesterday, and have the paperbacks and some of the hardcovers in boxes. I have to finish packing the hardcovers, which means raiding dumpsters for more boxes. (There’s a cool dumpster next to the Citgo where they dump all their recyclable cardboard, including boxes that have simply been flattened out and are still perfectly usable. I got half a dozen boxes there last night and I’ll go back a little later today and get more.)

Then I need to pack up my videotapes and DVDs. Then the stuff in the coffee table I want to keep. Then the kitchen stuff, probably. Then the bedroom, or maybe the contents of the desk. Eventually, the bedroom, which will mean getting some Christmas ornaments my mom will kill me if I lose track of ready to be moved, and getting my clothes tossed into a large box (I seem to recall my brother having a lack of closet space, so I don’t know what I’m going to do with them out there) and especially packing up the computer in there… my first one, which is hopelessly obsolete, but I have hopes of someday salvaging the stuff on the hard drive onto a better machine. I have to clean out the small desk in there… mostly papers that can be thrown out, but God knows if there’s stuff I want to save; I’m a packrat for documents.

Last will be this computer here. I’ll probably be crating it up when people are here loading up the rest of the boxes, whenever that will be.

I’d like to see if I can get someone in my family to rent a Uhaul truck for me, or at least a trailer. If I can get out of here fast enough to stiff these pricks here on the June rent, I’d happily use that money for a van rental, and then I could salvage my computer desk and my bookshelves, which would be lovely. I don’t know if Paul has room at his place for my bookshelves, but we’ll see.

Details remain to be worked out. My family may not be able to rearrange their schedules to suit my convenience, and I may end up staying here several weeks… in which case, that $600 in the bank will be gone; I can’t put off writing a rent check that long. And honestly, I just want to get this part over with and start up with however my life is going to go out in the woods (the small city my brother lives in is considered the sticks compared to Tampa, although it’s actually quite sizable… it’s just that its population drops to rural township level in the summer, when the snowbirds go home).

I suppose I should apologize for boring people with this crap, but hey. I have no modesty about my word crafting ability; I’m sure I’m writing this well. And it’s my weblog, and if I bore my dozen or so readers long enough, you’ll all leave, and well, that’s just how the social continuum works.

Scott Shepherd, whom I simply cannot say nice enough things about, sent me a tape of the final episode of Buffy which arrived today. I just finished watching it. You’ll find my initial responses to it below. Bet you can’t wait for that.

People seem to think the word ‘geek’ is an insult, and that I’m being self denigrating when I describe myself as one. However, I like the word ‘geek’ and for the most part I enjoy being a geek. Geeks are often obnoxious and socially clueless, but we are never bullies, we don’t pick fights, and we’re generally only violent in our roleplaying fantasies. Normal, popular, socially astute folks tend to dislike and avoid us, and I understand that… there are many of my geek brethren I personally can’t stand for more than a few minutes at a time, which is why I avoid fantasy conventions. Nonetheless, geeks are imaginative, we generally have interesting senses of humor and retain our child’s sense of wonder well into adulthood, we read for pleasure (an increasingly rare trait in our modern continuum) and our loneliness usually makes us kind, if fumbling and inept in how we demonstrate it. I think those are good things to be. I often find a roomful of my fellow geeks really annoying, but for God’s sake, I’d rather hang out with a hundred geeks at a Star Trek con than a dozen successful professional athletes or advertising executives or Wall Street stockbrokers or Hollywood actors. Geeks may be assholes, I don’t deny that. But we’re rarely mean.

There can’t be only one

I guess it’s over.

One of the things that distinguishes superhero comics from real, valid science fiction is that in real, valid science fiction, the writer explores how the world would be changed by a particular technological or social or genetic advancement or modification. Bester’s The Demolished Man takes us to a world with a working telepath population, many of whom are police. Heinlein’s Let There Be Light explores what might happen if someone invented a cheap solar power screen that could actually generate a great deal of usable power. Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar is a brilliant extrapolation on the effects of human overcrowding. The list goes on and on. Where fantasy simply takes us to an entirely different world (usually one where magic works, and non-human humanoid races that can easily interbreed with humanity co-exist side by side on the same planet with us), science fiction shows us how the different world… generally a future world, but not always… came into being.

In superhero comics, this doesn’t happen. From the very beginning (Action Comics #1, the first appearance of Superman), the peculiar open ended melodramatic subgenre of superhero comics insisted on presenting us with a world exactly as it was outside their covers… with the exception of the presence of the superhuman lead character. He or she was the only different thing about the reality depicted inside those pages; the rest of the world was very recognizably (other than place names, to avoid lawsuits) the same as that lived in by the reader.

Over the many many decades superhero comics have existed, there have been experiments with doing consistent universes in which the presence of advanced technology and superhuman abilities has wreaked vast changes in those realities. Jim Shooter’s New Universe tried hard to do this in the 1980s. Alan Moore’s ABC comics depict rather interestingly different settings from our own, with just enough in common with our universe to let us know that this is some sort of Earth… just one where the presence of superhumanity had made changes. Futuristic stories like Frank Miller’s Dark Knight and the truly appalling Waid/Ross series Kingdom Come showed Earths that had been radically altered by the presence of DC’s superhuman community. To an extent, these are more true to science fiction’s ideals.

But for the most part, superhero comics eschew depicting huge changes to their surrounding social continuum, preferring to present a world which continues to mirror the world its readers experience every day… except, you know, with the Avengers and the X-Men in it. (DC has drawn a bit further away from this in recent years, with their startling decision to let Lex Luthor become President of the United States. One assumes in the DC Universe that advanced death ray satellites have long since fried everyone on the planet who ever even mused for two seconds about joining Al Qaeda… but I don’t read much DC so I don’t really know.)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is now and always has been a superhero comic book, it’s just a live action one in a different media. Joss Whedon is obviously a fan of superhero comics (albeit one of those who have gone over to the Dark Side of the Force, by which I mean, a card carrying charter member of the It’s Just A Frickin Story, Fanboy, Society) and from the start, he’s made certain we understood that Buffy was a superhero with many, many geekish superhero references. Xander calls her a superhero in the very first episode. She refers to herself ironically as Secret Identity Girl at the start of the fourth season. She’s wryly aware of just how many times she’s saved the world. She and Faith take comfort in the fact that when all else fails, at least they’re still hot chicks with super powers.

When I reached the end of the Series Finale (so kindly taped for and mailed to me by Scott ‘His is the superior intellect’ Shepherd, a true genetic superman if ever I’ve met one), I initially thought “Well, that’s a fuck of a place to leave us hanging… a world full of super powered chickie poos, many of which are completely hot, and we don’t get to see it?”

But I understood. Buffy, through her actions, and through Willow’s spell, had just changed the world… profoundly. And this is a superhero comic. Changing the world is not allowed. It’s against the rules. You can do it in your last issue, and leave the audience to imagine what will happen now… but you don’t do an ongoing series about it.

A world of God knows how many young, super-empowered girls. The scales shifting from the ages old, might makes right dominance of males over females to a brand new, might makes right dominance of at least some females over males. You can see Joss Whedon all over this. He’s been Mr. Female Empowerment for a long time.

I can see Joss Whedon all over it, too, because it’s sloppy and stupid, and he isn’t going to follow through on it, or pay any attention to it in the other show that shares this continuum.

Oh, yeah… remember Angel? Think there’s ever going to be any mention whatsoever of an army of super powered babes on that show? If you do, I call your attention to the fact that the sun went out in L.A. for weeks on end, and no one in Sunnydale noticed. A Lovecraftian demi-deity mind controlled the entire state of California, and nobody in Sunnydale noticed that, either. Buffy survived the end of the series, and Spike didn’t, and Angel ain’t datin’ anybody and they obviously still have a connection… but nothing’s going to happen there, either.

Still, mad props to Whedon & Crew for their masterful misdirection. I’ve read in eighty different places that James Marsters was going over to the Angel series in the fall and they had me fooled. Spike’s death came as a complete surprise, although a long ago email buddy of mine suggested a better way to do it… Buffy finally realizes she loves him and is about to tell him… and Drusilla steps out of the shadows and stakes him before Buffy can get the words out. Heh heh. That would have been mean.

Random responses while I was watching the episode:

*I had the idea for empowering the army of potentials somewhere around the fifth or sixth episode of this season. Where’s my Hollywood movie check?

**I was sad that Amanda died. Then I remembered she was the bratty Born Again on Freaks & Geeks and wasn’t so sad after all.

***Giles and Xander RPGing is wrong on so many levels. For Giles it’s simply wrong. Xander… needs to play in a better campaign. He’s welcome to come over to my brother’s place when I get set up, though. (However, I hear Nick Brendan is kind of an ass in real life, so I’m talking Xander, not the guy who plays him.)

****Spike’s death just seemed strange and weird. I mean, I wrote about Magic Items That Make No Sense at length in my review of Season 7 a few months back, and this amulet seems to be yet another one. Apparently it’s a device for drawing the sun down into an underground cavern full of vampires. Um. One can understand why some good wizard or goddess would make such a thing, I suppose. But why did Spike have to wear it? Was there any other reason except that, you know, it would kill him? Why couldn’t Andrew wear it? Or Buffy, for that matter? Creating a device like that, which only a vampire with a soul can wear, seems awfully stupid. I can understand it would only work for someone with a soul, and channeling the power might require superhuman levels of stamina… but why not give it to Buffy or Faith? This is simply a retarded plot device designed to do nothing but give Spike a heroic last stand. That’s very nice, but not particularly credible.

*****Speaking of retarded plot devices, what the hell does this seal thing do? First it bakes ubervamps when you bleed on it. Then it forms a portal into the Hellmouth, and the Hellmouth… amazingly enough… is a big cave full of ubervamps who all have swords. There’s no sense to this, no matter how hard or where you look.

******Speaking of ubervamps, these things have more fluctuations in their basic power level than an escaped Kandorian snorting Red Kryptonite dust. The first one seemed capable of winning a fist fight with the Hulk, and easily handled Buffy, until she garroted it with a handy piece of wire. Now a few million of them seem fairly easily smacked down by 20 or so potential Slayers, and a dozen of them are fought off by a bunch of humans (including Andrew), managing only to kill one ex-demon. Weird.

,p> *******Speaking of 20 or so Slayers, a bomb went off right in the faces of at least a dozen of these girls two weeks ago. I mean, a BIG ass bomb. Didn’t ANY of them die?

********Getting angry doesn’t heal a mortal wound. Unless, I guess, you’re Buffy.

There was stuff I liked about the episode. Little continuity touches.. the kind of thing Whedon puts in because they really don’t matter. Andrew’s shout out to his brother Tucker was nice. I liked the little sisters thing between Dawn and Buffy… ‘if you get killed I’m telling’. That was well done. The omission of heart rending good bye hugs and Friends-like ‘I love you’s as they all went off to what they thought would be their separate dooms, with Willow and Xander just squeezing Buffy’s hand silently as they separated. Deftly played. And the fact that all of this was taking place in Sunnydale High was about the only thing in the episode that resonated at all, that had any kind of what Whedon refers to as ‘levels’.

The destruction of all of Sunnydale… I’m not sure how I feel about that. Good ending for the series, I suppose. Hard to believe everyone had evacuated, though. Probably a few families with kids had hunkered down in their homes hoping for the best, and are now back there dead in the rubble, I’d think.

I enjoyed the way Robin surprised Faith in the end. That was also deftly done. And I have no problem with Whedon killing Spike and Anya, both of them have been much much too annoying for far, far too long.

I admit, my scheme to empower all the Potentials would have led to the First being sucked into a wizened stick figure as soon as it happened, because I had speculated that the First was the source of the Slayer’s power, and that’s why it was taking the opportunity presented to wipe out the entire Slayer line. This episode didn’t do that; in fact, this episode simply used one largely undefined deus ex machina… Willow’s magical powers… to tap into another largely undefined deux ex machina… the scythe… and rearrange reality to suit Buffy. That struck me as sloppy writing… ‘Willow can do this with the scythe because we SAY she can’… but still… it more or less worked.

There were things I liked about the episode, yes. But it wasn’t a good episode, nor was it worthy of the high standards this show had set in earlier seasons. It was, to some extent, better than the show had been for a while. But it was still , at absolute best, mediocre and tired and lame, and clearly, Buffy’s departure from my TV screen has been long overdue for quite some time.

I am, however, grateful that Whedon did not give in to the ghoulish temptation I’m sure he felt, to show us one last brief shot of Crazy-Buffy in her straightjacket, staring at nothingness in her padded cell. I would have found that to be unbearably smug on his part.

I’ll bet you he shot that scene, though, and other people talked him out of running it at the very end. (Or maybe he did it at the end credits. I didn’t watch the final ‘Mutant Enemy’ crawl… maybe I should.)

PANEL ONE:
CALVIN & HOBBES sitting next to each other, talking. Calvin is holding up one finger and has his ‘I just got a great idea’ grin on his face. Hobbes has his arms folded, back to Calvin, and is looking snooty.
C: Say, Hobbes. Why not devour the entire state of Connecticut?
H: No, thanks. All those fast moving commuter trains would play hobb with my digestion.
PANEL TWO:
HOBBES laughs uproariously in his tigerish fashion. CALVIN smoulders, with fume-lines of rage coming up from his hate-filled face.
H: Get it? GET IT? Play ‘HOBB’ with my digestion? A HA HA HO HA HO HA HEE! I’m soooooo fuckin’ funny…!
C: (small letters) rrrrrrrrrrrr
PANEL THREE:
CALVIN whips out Cobra Assault Cannon (state of the art bang-bang) and blasts Hobbes into small pile of smoking carbonized fragments. HOBBES screams as he is vaporized.
FX: FWZAAAATTTT!!
H: WEEEYAUUUGGGHHHHRRRR!!
PANEL FOUR:
Calvin sits there smiling evilly, with Cobra Assault Cannon across his lap. A wisp of smoke is drifting up from the CAC’s barrel, mingling with the smoke drifting up from Hobbes’ calcified ashes next to Calvin.
C: Too fuckin’ funny to live…

And your little dog, too

Kim from Dayton, a recent correspondent of mine, wrote in response to my movie postings yesterday to ask me what the hell my problem was with The Wizard of Oz. (She didn’t put it that way, though; Kim is a class act.)

Herewith presented is my emailed response to her, which I thought some few of you might find amusing, although more likely, it will simply make every WOO fan in the universe gather together in a frenzied mob outside my patio, waving pitchforks and torches while chanting ‘beezlenut rah rah BOIL that dust speck’.

But talk is cheap when you do it through a modem. Here, then, is what I think of nearly everybody’s childhood favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz:

It's a horrifyingly bad movie. It's a bad adaptation of a great kid's fantasy, it's a bad movie entirely in its own right, it's so goddam cloyingly cutesy it makes me want to vomit just thinking about it, it stars Judy Garland who could not act drunk if you poured a quart of schnappes into her through a siphon, the characters are all morons, the songs suck, it looks terrible, the dialogue blows, the acting is resolutely bad, it has dancing midgets, the winged monkeys look stupid, and the only character I found remotely appealing in the whole film melts when she gets hit with a bucket of water.
And, ultimately, what's the message of WOO? My favorite movie in the world, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, is, admittedly, very corny and has been broadcast about a billion too many times at Christmas. But at least its message is clear: one should count wealth by how many friends one has, and success by how much one has done to help others in his or her life. I may find that message a little simplistic, but it's pretty straightforward, and it's pretty positive.
WOO is beloved by millions, and I'm goddamned if I can figure out what the hell its message is. Real life sucks because it's not in color? If something is green we're allowed to kill it, either by dropping a cottage on it or by throwing a bucket of water at it? Good People Are Pretty and Bad People Are Ugly? Or, maybe, Midgets Can't Sing And We Shouldn't Let Them Dance On TV Either?
A film doesn't have to have a point to be good, I grant you, and many bad films have messages. But WOO is a really lousy film that is also, apparently, utterly pointless.
The only reason so many people like this film is they saw it for the first time when they were 5 years old and it scared the shit out of them. However, opinions one forms in response to extreme emotional stimulus while sitting in front of the TV wearing footie pajamas are generally not particularly intelligent or reasonable. WOO is just a lousy, lousy film. And if millions of people didn't adore it, it wouldn't bother me as much as it does. But when millions of people adore crap like this (and, you know, crap like FORREST GUMP) it makes me despair for our culture.
But then, I despair for our culture a lot.

Quick! Somebody stop me before I type again.

I used to go to sleep and leave the light on
hoping you'd come by and think that I was still upstairs awake
but two years go by and still my light's on
this is hard for me to do
but I've had all that I can take
it's the last song I'll ever write for you
it's the last time that I'll tell you just how much I really care
it's the last song I'll ever write for you
You come looking for the light and it won't be there
but I love you... yes I do

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I’m not a likable guy. I’m not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It’s simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I’m not going to say that this time around, because I’ve realized that what this is basically saying is, ‘if you don’t like what I have to say, tough, I don’t want to hear it, don’t even bother to tell me, just go away’.

And that’s actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country… for a little while longer, anyway… and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I’m not sure that’s a right when you’re doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don’t feel like reading… and I’m really quick with the delete key… as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don’t like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance… these things are only worth my time and attention if they’re entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.

A Brown Eyed Handsome Man