So. Yesterday, Scott (Paul’s intermittently annoying, extremely sexually active, buddy) shows up around four in the afternoon, I guess just to hang out, oddly enough, with me, since Paul was at work and Scott knew that. We chatted desultorily for a while on a variety of subjects. Now, I have pronouncedly mixed feelings about Scott, who on the one hand, likes to gloat about all the sex he is having at any given time with various fairly hot women, and he likes to do it to me and Paul, two people he happens to know haven’t been laid in several years, and I think that’s aggravating of him. And he’s Paul’s major pothead buddy; if Scott didn’t come around as often as he did to smoke dope with my baby brother, my baby brother might not smoke quite so much dope.

On the other hand, since moving to Zephyrhills I have found all of four people it is possible to have anything resembling an intelligent conversation with: Paul, my cousin Chad, his lovely wife Mel, and Scott. And even a semi-intelligent conversation (one can’t really have truly intelligent conversations with Scott, among other things, he’s a huge Star Trek fan, and well, there you go) is something I treasure, so, well, Scott ain’t all THAT bad.

Anyway, after bullshitting back and forth and here and there about various things for an hour or so, Scott allowed as to how he was going to apply at Wal-mart and asked if I’d like to go up there with him so I could check on my own application which has been in for a couple of months now. I didn’t much want to… I’d been trying to finish a story for the Website Which Must Not Be Named when Scott showed up and as always when I’m writing something and get interrupted, I really just wanted to get back to it… but it seemed like a good idea, and oddly, I got the feeling that Scott was just lonely and wanted company, and let me tell you, the times in my life when anyone has wanted MY company have been so few that, well, I wasn’t going to blow him off. So off we went.

Now, Wal-mart has a new computerized application process and towards the end of it they throw like 70 statements at you of varying degrees of complexity that you are supposed to mark with how much you agree or disagree with them. (There are like six degrees of disagreement, from ‘very mildly’ up to ‘total’, and similarly six degrees of agreement, so it’s a fairly sophisticated tool.)

Wal-mart, judging from the number of questions regarding one’s feelings towards marijuana use, stealing, and safety regulations, has pretty well developed corporate obsessions regarding those matters, and they threw in a few statements designed to find out just how much of a non-conformist, loner, or generally anti-social person an applicant might be, and you’d best believe that I lied like a drunken Welshman on nearly every one of those questions other than the ones on safety regulations (I never have any trouble complying with any law that keeps me safer, especially as most of them in some way allow me to do less work).

Now, mind you, I don’t do drugs and I never have (I don’t even drink, nor have I ever, which I know makes me a truly singular individual), so I didn’t have to lie about the personal use questions, but I honestly don’t think someone’s personal habits are any of their employer’s business if those personal habits don’t interfere with their job performance. When I was much younger I was all in favor of employers conducting random drug tests but now I’m older and more enlightened and I find them entirely onerous. Employers should be concerned with one thing: whether or not an employee is doing their job adequately. If they aren’t, well, take appropriate action. If they are, shut the hell up. All of which means, if an employee comes to work high as a kite on goofballs, it should only matter if that has a discernibly negative impact on their job performance. Otherwise, the employer has no legitimate interest.

Obviously, I did not accurately establish my attitude in this regard when responding to the employment application quiz, because I’m not retarded.

Also, to statements like “I consider myself a loner, not at all a joiner”, I put down ‘strongly disagree’. This is a vile and abhorrent canard and doubtless I will burn in hell for it, but if there is an employer anywhere in the world that wants to hire someone who voluntarily identifies themselves as anti-social (which in our culture today is more and more becoming synonymous with ‘dangerously psychotic’ in everyday usage) I’ve never heard of them and I doubt they are Wal-mart.

So, anyway, I did that and who knows. Maybe if my carefully deceitful answers ring up a high enough score I’ll get a call sometime soon.

On the ride up there I asked Scott why he was applying at Wal-mart, since no more than six weeks ago he got a job he liked fairly well as a cook at Cracker Barrel. He gave an exasperated moan and said there was ‘way too much drama’ at his current job. Knowing Scott, I immediately said “so you’ve been sleeping with all the women who work there?” and he explained that no, he’d only been sleeping with one of the women who worked there, and she and he had had a clear understanding that they were only ‘friends with benefits’ (his term with her, apparently; with me, he uses the more pungent terminology ‘fuck buddies’), but she had caught him talking to (i.e., openly flirting with and/or blatantly trying to pick up) another chick there, and she’d thrown a massive hissy fit, and it had percolated throughout the ranks there, to the point where Scott had had several people, including several managers, come up to him at work for the past several days and call him a two timer.

So I said, “well, jesus, Scott, if there’s too much drama at Cracker Barrel after you’ve worked there six weeks, how long do you think you’ll stick around at Wal-mart? I mean, they got hotties working there, too.” To which he kind of looked sheepish but didn’t answer.

Me, I hope to god if I get hired at Wal-mart, or wherever, they put me on a shift and in a department and give me a job where I don’t have to interact with very many people and none of them are cute women. During the hour or so I spent near the Layaway Counter, as Scott and then I filled out our respective applications on the one terminal they had, I observed several quite attractive rather younger female employees engaging in rather typically clique-oriented flirtatious behavior with several younger male employees, and that’s exactly the sort of behavior that drives me crazy and makes me miserable in every work environment I’ve ever been in, because it never ever includes me. When every good looking chick in your locale is flirting like crazy with every guy who works there except you, it does not enhance your morale in any appreciable way, trust me.

Other than that there isn’t a whole lot to talk about here. I watched the second episode of Skin last night and it wasn’t bad. I’m into one of my cycles where I can’t sleep for more than four or five hours at a time again, and it sucks. I’m reading a book called Bitter Scent by Michael Bar-Zohad which is this fascinating non-fiction account of a scandal involving the L’Oreal Cosmetics Company and their employment of several former French Nazi collaborators and their illegal compliance with the Arab Boycott of Israel, something I’d never heard of prior to reading this, but which is apparently very real and very odious.

Paul and I want to buy a pumpkin to make a jack o’lantern out of later this week, but whether we will or not remains to be seen. Money is part of the issue, although we can probably spare the $4 or so. Getting a ride to Wal-Mart before Halloween makes the matter moot is the more important factor.

In email knews, some blogger named Neilalien has posted links to a few of my articles more or less regarding Dr. Strange (Neilalien is a big Dr. Strange fan), which is nice, so I sent him an email thanking him and he sent me a pleasant one back.

Over on my blogroll you will find a link to Vanessa’s Blog, because she was kind enough to blogroll me. She seems pretty cool, from what I’ve read on her blog; give her a shot.

I sent an email to David Fiore that may tax even David’s legendary and seemingly limitless patience, because honestly, all this nonsense he keeps spouting on his blog about how the Marvel Silver Age was essentially an exercise in Calvinist liberalism is bad enough, but lately he’s been seriously dissing Steve Englehart’s run on Captain America while praising the creatively penurious run of Mark Gruenwald, and some things simply will not stand. David also has a tendency towards slight Carol Kalish-isms in his debating technique, i.e., if you make an effective and telling point in response to something particularly wrong headed he’s spouted off with, he’ll ignore your comment entirely, accuse you of being evasive while he’s doing exactly that himself, and try to distract you with maddening allegations of your own complicity in the very things you hate the most, stating that it’s BECAUSE you hate them that they came to prominence and therefore it’s all your fault that Batman is an ass nowadays.

I suppose this is how academics debate things, but I find it infuriating. However, as I admitted in my email to David, he and I simply come at fictional constructs from two entirely dichotomous perceptual points, and I have absolutely no respect for his.

Basically, to me, fiction that I enjoy takes me to a place I want to visit, and often times, a place I find actually preferential to the rather seamy, shoddy reality I am, most of the time, consigned to inhabit. To me, successful fiction creates a world that I want to believe in, and the fiction I enjoyed as a child is always set in worlds that I love and that, to me, are very real places, populated by characters that I emotionally regard as very real people, some of whom are nearly as beloved to me as actual flesh and blood members of my real world family.

I know, that’s completely nuts, but I don’t care. To me, the Silver Age superhero universes of Marvel and DC Comics are real places, full of real people, some of whom I regard as being very much my buddies. You want to think I’m crazy, that’s fine, but it’s an emotional thing. My childhood, for reasons having nothing to do with my excellent parenting by my truly superior mother, was not an overwhelmingly happy time. There are good memories from the real world, but for the most part, the best times I had growing up took place vicariously, in imaginary worlds created by people like Robert A. Heinlein, Andre Norton, Lester Dent, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Gardner Fox, Cary Bates, and especially Steve Englehart and Steve Gerber.

To me, those fictional settings… the Ganymede being colonized by Bill Lermer, the ruined New York City being explored by a Star Man’s Son, the steaming jungles and gritty cityscapes prowled through by Doc Savage and his Amazing Five, the illustrious halls of Avengers Mansion and the Fantastic Four’s penthouse headquarters in the Baxter Building, the Fortress of Solitude and the Bat Cave and the JLA’s satellite sanctuary and Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum… these are real places, and the characters who live there are real people, and often, they are real people I like and admire and enjoy vicariously interacting with.

Now, Dave takes a far more academic view of these beloved fantasy playgrounds of mine. He regards the Marvel and DC Universe as being interesting thematic constructs filled with various intriguing symbols and concepts, all of which are simply grist for some doctoral treatise in which he evaluates them entirely in terms of whether or not they fit into some abstruse religio-social theorem he is exploring on how the Calvinist notion of divine grace and invisible sainthood aligns with the instant conferment of superhuman abilities and the notional construct of the secret identity. And this is fascinating stuff, but I find it obnoxious and annoying and even offensive, because he’s treating people I love and the world they live in as if all they are is… you know… stories. Fiction. Commercial artifacts created for purposes of entertainment and making a buck.

Obviously, Dave is right and I am wrong and I don’t care. When he starts talking about Spider-Man and Captain America as invisible saints in a state of grace, I stare at him as if he’s speaking to me in Oompa-Loompa. To me, that bilge he’s spouting is just so much nonsense, but fine, I’ll tolerate this bullshit as long as it doesn’t say anything really egregiously offensive.

However, when Dave starts calmly and unequivocally stating that the Marvel Universe has always been essentially a model of Calvinist Liberalism and that therefore Steve Englehart’s utterly brilliant Nomad story arc on Captain America was mistaken and inappropriate, while Mark Gruenwald’s groaningly tedious, wretchedly wooden, and just in general godawful, bad, and terrible by any sane standards run on Cap was far better written than Englehart’s because, you know, it adhered more closely to some obscure 19th Century religious philosophy that only Dave and five other people with very pointy heads have the vaguest idea regarding the one time proselytization of, well, that’s when I start getting upset.

And then, you know, when I engage Dave in debate on these subjects and he starts accusing me of being responsible for everything I hate in the post Silver Age superhero continuum, and insisting that all the Marvel superheroes are fascists anyway, well, it’s time for me to stop reading Dave’s nonsense.

So I said all that to Dave in the email and, well, as previously noted, I may well have taxed even Dave’s limitless patience somewhat with it.

Oh, yes, I also said this:

Dave is obsessed with religion. I don’t know if he IS actually religious in any personal sense, but his whole academic career seems to revolve around studying various aspects of contrasting religious metaphysical viewpoints and then trying to apply those particular structures of ecclesiastical thought to various pop culture artifacts he enjoys, like comic books.

Dave is far more knowledgeable on religion than I am. If you read Dave’s blog you will encounter, several times in nearly every extremely long sentence, various terms like ‘invisible sainthood’ and ‘gnosis’ and ‘transubstantiation’ and ‘divine grace’ and I don’t know what the fuck all else, and honestly, it’s like wading through some medieval goddam Latin tract by Thomas Aquinas except unfortunately someone translated it, just barely, into English, so you can’t just give up on it in disgust halfway through.

Now, I loathe religion. I really do. I think religion is, at base, simply a social control mechanism that operates through the primary psychological mechanism of invoking superstitious terror in people. It is an effective social control mechanism, perhaps the ONLY effective one for primitive tribal and proto-national units, and as such, it was, until very recently in human history, a necessary (if utterly reprehensible) evil.

Now, a couple of things here: I’m by nature an absolute non-conformist and I do not work well within any kind of authoritative rules structure that is imposed from outside on me without my explicit consent, which would never be given under any conceivable circumstances, because I just don’t like other people making up rules for me to behave by.

Therefore, I do not like social control mechanisms.

Second, I’m not wild about the concept of ‘faith’ and I loathe with every fiber of my being the very idea of coercing people into behaving in a certain way by terrorizing them, and I think this is especially odious when you use superstition to do it. And while it’s true that religion did indeed start out as a social control mechanism (and to an extent remains one today) that primary (and at one time necessary) purpose for religion has since, in my opinion, been almost entirely superceded by religion’s secondary purpose: The Care And Feeding Of Shamans.

I don’t respect coercive social control mechanisms. I really don’t respect coercive social control mechanisms that work by invoking superstitious terror. And I absolutely do not respect established authority hierarchies whose main or even sole purpose is to enrich an otherwise entirely non-productive shaman class.

Now, add that in with the fact that I regard the Marvel Universe of the Silver Age as being a real place, full of real people, and you can maybe understand why, when someone comes along, even someone as generally pleasant and intelligent as David Fiore, and they insist on analyzing and redefining the Marvel Universe in religious terms that I find repellent and abhorrent, and then they further use this thoroughly obnoxious process of analysis to state unconditionally that the greatest writer who has ever worked in superhero comics was an incompetent and wrong headed boob, while one of the worst writers and editors who has ever completely screwed up a whole lot of my favorite characters for lengthy periods was, in fact, some sort of brilliant and astonishing interpretive genius, well.

When that happens, it’s time, and past time, for me to stop reading that nonsense before I just plain have an aneurysm right in front of my computer.

Now, Dave is a swell guy. He is. He’s intelligent, he’s forthright, he’s kind and pleasant, he’s articulate, he’s a great many things I respect and admire. He’s supported me with his comments on this blog and by mentioning me often on his own blog and I appreciate that. But he regards Captain America as nothing more than an interesting archetype and symbol of various different elements of social and religious metaphysical doctrine, and that’s simply repellent and intolerable to me.

To my mind, Dave is treating the Marvel Universe, and everyone who lives in it, and everyone who loves it, for that matter, with enormous disrespect when he insists on completely disregarding the larger than life heroism that is its most essential element (dismissing it, with a derisive snort, as ‘fascism’), while obsessing on various obscure academic metaphysical arcanities (which probably isn’t a word, but should be) that absolutely no one except he himself and six other people, all of whom have The Faery Queen and The Canterbury Tales memorized in their entirety, care about even remotely.

The Marvel Universe is not about Calvinist liberalism or invisible sainthood or uninvoked grace or genetic transubstantiation or any of that obnoxious, incoherent and unintelligible bullshit.

It’s about heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys, and the idea that it is possible for someone to gain great power and employ that power unselfishly, even heroically, for the good of others. That’s an idea we simply don’t see very much these days anywhere, in our reality or in our fictions, and it’s one that today’s kids can go through entire years of their life without ever encountering… which makes me very sad.

So until and unless Dave stops talking about one of my favorite imaginary vacation spots, and my favorite imaginary friends who live there, as if they are merely fictional artifacts that exist only to prove or disprove some annoyingly abstruse academic theory of his, I’m not going to read his stuff any more. Which, I suppose, certainly excuses him from reading mine.

Okay. This has been a very long and rambling blog entry of little or no interest to anyone whatsoever besides me, but every once in a while I just have to do one of those. Let me close by thanking once more everyone who has posted supportive comments over the last couple of days, by which I specifically mean Scott Ryan, Vanessa, Scott Shepherd, Mike Sawin, and Dave Fiore, all of whom I deeply appreciate.

I’m very tired right now, but I have to stay up until 11 because NYPD Blue is on tonight. Or on the other hand I could just trust the VCR to record it for me, which is a pretty major act of trust, given my VCR.

Oh, yeah, Eliza Dushku’s new show starts up this Thursday opposite Survivor, which means I’ll have to try to record one of them while watching the other, which without cable is always a challenge, and since one is on CBS and the other is on FOX, and those are the channels that come in the lousiest when you don’t have cable, I anticipate a frustration filled Thursday night.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

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.