squidbag

Paranoia Is a Myth

What mental disorder do you have? Your Result: Paranoia   You are constantly thinking about what others may be saying about you behind your back.  You may also feel people have conspiracies against you, or they are out to get you.  In crowds you may feel like everybody is watching to closely.
ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder)
Manic Depressive
OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)
GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder)
What mental disorder do you have?

See?  I knew you fuckers thought I was a paranoid!  I'm not really, though it depends entirely upon what you may have heard.  I am a conspiracy buff, but don't value my place in the world highly enough to assume that any of them have me as a fulcrum or target.  Anyway, the mark of a truly paranoid person is when they start going around quoting dead rock stars, heroin addicts, suicides, crazed Englishmen, or the works of Robert Anton Wilson.

"Just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after you." - Kurt Cobain

"A Paranoid is just a person in possession of all the facts." - Warren Ellis or Woody Allen or William Burroughs, I don't know...

"There is no such thing as Paranoia. It's all true." - Hunter S. Thompson

"Paranoia is only the leading edge of the discovery that everything in the world is connected." - Robert Anton Wilson

I Have Thrash Neck

That's right.  I'm sitting here with tight and sore muscles all around the base of my neck and throughout my shoulders, because I have thrash neck.  From a concert I went to last night, about twenty-four hours ago now.  Shannon Hamlett and I went to see Evanescence, and so they are the band I will sue for my thrash neck, which at the age of nineteen I almost certainly would not have had.  Opening up for Evanescence (which I need practice typing so I will do it again - Evanescence) were Finger Eleven and Chevelle.  Chevelle makes a better impression live than on their website, but the impression does not linger.  I may give them some mp3 space, I haven't decided.  I was unimpressed with Finger Eleven.  Both bands kind of felt to me like they had some sort of Rock N' Roll Playbook and they could just run plays from it and that would be okay.  I knew the stage raps, I knew where to move my head.  I could predict the lighting cues, and I haven't been to an arena show in six years.  Anyway, if we get to vote for Rock Goddesses, I will this year be voting for Amy Lee of Evanescence, since she is one already.  She has major presence, she kicks ass, and I have never heard so many proposals of marriage - from both genders - directed at a stage performer as I did on Wednesday night.

Shannon clued me into something interesting at shows now - cell phones are the new lighters.  Which is not to say they serve the same function - you try and blaze your smoke with your celly and you'll be sorry - but they get held up and swayed during the same portions of shows lighters once occupied.  I can't really decide how I feel about this.  The lighter always felt kind of chee(z)y and fake to me anyway, so it's being replaced by a digital counterpart is certainly no tragedy.

Yes - swayed.

Friday entries (which this is, since most of you will read it tomorrow morning) kind of have a lot of shit crammed into them, so this one will be no different.  I am waiting to see if the Senate Dems are going to blink on this - and I suspect that they will have to.  This has been quite the week; Max and I are reading the Wonderful Wizard of Oz - both for the first time - and let me tell you, I was a little disappointed to find out that Adebisi's not in it.  Plenty of death, though, for those bored by the film version of this "timeless masterpiece."  I do not think that L. Frank would survive as a children's novelist today.  First off, thirteen chapters in, and not a single "booger" joke as yet, and secondly, his style is erratic at best.  Chapter twelve has more events in it than the Old Testament, and then chapter thirteen is over in like, six pages.  Additionally, there are long descriptions of commonplace occurrances counterpointed by quick skims over major events.  Regardless, Max likes it, for the most part, so it looks like I'll be reading thirteen more of these.

I'm convinced Abby is trying to whistle.  I whistle at her, because she thinks it's funny and it distracts during diper changes, sometimes a tune, often not.  Okay, most often themes from 70's cartoon shows.  Anyway, she has a definite "razz" face she makes when she does her raspberry, and this isn't it.  She puckers and blows.  I have to watch my step here, or she might end up with a beard.  She also chases me around the house (or anyplace she can cruise) while laughing, which is pretty cute.  I take a few little mincey geisha steps, she giggles and closes the gap.  Repeat.  Hours of fun.

I recommend that you all watch the Riches, currently the only show I am watching on TV.  Eddie Izzard is brilliant, Minnie Driver's Minnie Driver, and everyone else is pretty good, too.

Finally, I feel as though I am about to be offered at least two jobs, maybe three.  If I had that Louis Armstrong voodoo candle, I would light it.

IBM's New Prototype

IBM announced on Monday that it has perfected a prototype of a new optical transceiver (a word which is begging to replaced by "chipset" any minute now) that can move information around at one hundred sixty billion bits per second, meaning you could download an entire feature film (what the rest of us Americans call "movies") in about one second.  Unless it's Shoah or one of the Lord of the Rings flicks, of course.  Shoah would take about five seconds I guess, so if you're in a really big hurry, you won't be able to comprehensively learn about Holocaust survivors.

To get a sense of the exceptionally tiny size that the developers were able to achieve in manufacturing the prototype, they initially released some comparison photos (as above) picturing the new transceiver next to what would appear to be a sharpened piece of wood, partially painted and dipped in some darkened substance, possibly slate or graphite.  Research done by the Squidbag revealed this to be a "pencil," an archaic device used for making markings on paper, which can still be found beneath the analog news in boxes on the street.  A pencil's operator held the unit in his hand with the sharpened part pointed downward, and with an appropriate amount of muscular force combined with minimal acceleration, made a mark on the substrate.  If the mark should go awry, the pencil came equipped with a bludge of pinkish rubber on the opposing blunt end, for further screwing up the paper when mistakes were made.  Indeed, primitive adages centered on this item.  Additional references to the pencil can be found here and here.

Realizing the confusion they'd inadvertently created, IBM's subsequent press releases contained photos picturing the new prototype next to a dime, which is coin equal to one tenth of an American dollar - whatever that means anymore.

Seven Thousand

This, according to the database of my collection that I maintain at Comics Price Guide.com, is my 7000th comic book.  Amazing Spider-Man #539, featuring the return of his black costume, tying the look in with the movie out this summer.  He's back in the black because Aunt May got shot by the Kingpin's men (even though Fisk is in prison on Ryker's right now) and she's in a coma, and because he's a little darker in tone following the events of Marvel's little Civil War.  Spidey's an outlaw these days.  This is likely a good thing, since Spidey is (and stories about him are) better under pressure.

7000 probably seems low to some of you, especially if you've ever helped me move my comics from one house to another.  I don't think it's an entirely accurate number, either - there are some trades in that number, some collections, and some stuff I have that's not in there - foreign language comics, really random stuff that the CPG people have no listings for...but it's close.  I figure it's a good, close number.  Since the age of six, when my dad got me Defenders #92 and the Incredible Hulk #254 at a 7 Eleven, I have been collecting.  I stopped in 1992, when I decided I was too old for comics, sold most of them and bought a truck.  I started again in 1993 when Doomsday killed Superman.  I went into the Great Escape in Nashville to get the Superman stuff, and found one other thing that piqued my interest while I was there, Strangers In Paradise #1.  SIP's ending in May of this year, incidentally.

Between 1993 and 2007, I have bought, searched, added, sold, and hunted down various comics.  At this point, I have replaced a large percentage of what I sold in '92, and the good stuff I kept from my original collection is the financial backbone of my current collection. I have met Warren Ellis, David Mack, Terry Moore, Stan Lee, Harry Lampert, Garth Ennis and many, many others.  I have been to two cons.  Only two, one in 2000, and another in 2002.  I would like to go back.  I have hosted countless "comics nights" and I give comics as gifts as often as I can get away with it.  I know I'm responsible for introducing a large number of people to comics, and some of them got the bug, one way or another.  Use the comments field to represent, if you're in that number.

Some fun math, to round this out:

Approximate worth of my collection (according to CPG.com): $29,647.43

DC Comic worth the most money: Jonah Hex #1 (1977) $112.50

Marvel Comic worth the most money: Amazing Spider-Man #300 (1988) $120.00

What do I have the most of?: X-Men, beyond a doubt.  Not counting anything but the 'Uncanny X-Men' title (leaving out Wolverine titles, "Astonishing," "New" & "X-Treme" and all limited series), they alone are 245 issues strong, and worth a little over two grand all by themselves.

Approximate amount I've spent on bags and boards and boxes in the past 13 years: $1050

Approximate amount of time it would take to re-read everything: 29 straight days (based on a reading time of 6 minutes per issue, which is fairly realistic for an average monthly superhero comic.)

It's midnight, more or less.  Guess what I'm going to go do now instead of sleeping?

Every Now & Again...

Every now and again there's this other category of stuff that comes up on the Squidbag.  I know that most of you think that this is just a ill-phrased, profanity-laden repository for four things:

1. My kvetching about stuff I can't seem to affect,
2. Rants about religion and people of faith,
3. Busting on authority figures & anyone with whom I disagree, and
4. Talking about comics, because no one listens in real life.

But it's not true.  Not true at all.  There is another category that seems to bubble up to the surface of primordial ooze pit every once in a while, and not really as often as I'd like.  See, since I've had children (I didn't actually have them, of course, a tougher person than I am handled that chore - twice) I suddenly have very strong opinions about other people's parenting, as evidenced here, here, and well, a lot of places, once I went looking.

It seems like every few months or so one of these stories about people who should never have had children killing one of their children crops up and bothers me for about a week, often longer.  The last one I remember with great clarity (and not referenced above) was the foolish idiot people who decided to bring up their baby girl on a vegetarian diet with no supplements.  She died, of course.  There was an English couple, last year, I guess, who just failed to get help until it was too late.  Their baby also died.  These people offend me on the deepest level.  Children, to answer Mr. Hicks, are special because they are innocent, a quality which quickly vanishes, and so like any vanishing resource, should be appreciated before it's gone entirely; they are special because they represent potentiality in greater amounts than those more advanced in years, and they are special because they have to be looked after, they go from being able to do absolutely nothing to being fully functional folk in a short time, but they need everything before they get there.  In the final analysis, of course, you can only do the best you can.  Be patient, read more chapters, go to the zoo more often.

Which is why stories like this one bother me so fucking much.  Apparently, these people had diagnosed their little girl with bipolar disorder and ADHD before she was four, and then medicated her so heavily that she died a slow, painful death, "on the floor of her parents' bedroom wearing only a pink pull-up diaper and gold-stud earrings, on top of a pile of clothes, magazines and a stuffed brown bear."  Have a nice weekend.  Police, relatives, social workers, people at the school, neighbors - everyone knew there was a fucking problem - read what they have to say - and the little girl died anyway.  Why?  Part of it is the insular, litigious culture in which we live where you'd better have a seriously firm grip on your accusation before you go poking into other people's business, and this has made us all gun shy.  If you think you can't open your mouth, remember Kitty Genovese.

Part of it, though, is that she had monumentally shitty parents.  The father looks like a major fucking demon, like some rat-faced troglodyte baddy printed in a Steranko or Bernie Wrightson comic book or an arcane woodcut - he's got a face I'd like to introduce to tools.  And the mother apparently rolled over for his requests - "drug 'em up, honey, and let's put them to bed at 5pm!"  They're horrible people who projected their mental illness onto a four-year-old, and killed her and I hope something lays eggs and eats them from the inside out.

Attached to this, of course, is the ongoing argument about earlier and earlier diagnosis of various disorders in children, and when various people think it's acceptable to start medicating your kids.  I hear stories from both sides of the spectrum on this, with varying degrees of success, and of course, I have my own opinions.  I know this in my guts though: listless, robot children whose parents use drugs to mollify them and shape them into something they can deal with are being deprived of a genuine childhood, and in some cases, life.

Now, used to be, here on the Squidbag, we could have a rollicking debate over in the comments field.  These days, the vitriol's been thinned a bit, and the detractors and really angry or nasty people tend to email me instead.  I'm going to ask two questions, and see what you think on this, and encourage you not to email, but instead, be public:

1. Should other people at least take an interest in children being raised around them?  Does it take a village, or is it none of anyone else's goddamn business?  How does the system fail, like it did for Rebecca, and what prevents this from happening all the time?  A parent's right to raise a child any old way they see fit is sacrosanct - up to a point.  What is that point, do you think?

2. Early diagnosis of supposed problems and 2 and a half million kids on anti-psychotics.  Not a sentence, not even a question.  Does every kid have a touch of ADHD and bipolar disorder?  Isn't childhood a form of insanity that you grow out of, some more than others?  Should a developing mind even be judged according to these criteria, much less medicated without extreme care?  Again, this works fine for some children, but the horror stories are rampant, and I'd like to hear opinions.

Wow, two numbered lists in one post.  Here's the Squidbag from a year ago today.

Gametime?

I used to play chess.

I learned when I was younger, and then played computer programs a lot.  I had a great uncle who taught me some really useful things about the game, and I started reading up on it a little.  Before long, I had learned real moves and gambits, countergambits, whole historical games.  I started reasoning that any situation that required strategy could be treated as either a chess game or a limited portion of the board, if there were not enough real-life players to stock a whole board.  In my teens, I played several games with my best friend Jonathan.  I used to win a lot and lose a lot, and more than once we played to stalemate.  We actually had games that would go on for days at a time, with serious time being devoted to moves.  When he went away to school in 1993, we played over the phone without boards, he making a pocket list of moves coordinate-style, me using graph paper and arrows to represent progress.  Different solutions to the same problem.  JB remembers phone calls with nothing but moves in them from this period, I believe, as he was Jon's roomie first year.  When he came home for Xmas break that year and we worked the night shift together, we would play spoken games that required immense concentration but would make the night pass effortlessly.

When Jon died in January of 1994, I, like a lot of people, had a rough time with it.  One night, while drunk out of my skull and wandering in trainyard in the rain, (very dramatic, I know) I took my nice oak box with the folding board on the outside and the handmade stone pieces that we bought together and used to play with, and threw it onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train.  I left the white king on Jon's headstone; I don't know where it ended up.  Again - very dramatic.  I was 19 and emotionally crushed.  I haven't really been able to play since then.  I took over a  game in Madison in 2000 with a street guy, beat him quickly and then had to leave just as fast.  I can watch a game with fascination, and make moves in my head.  I have advised on games, as asked when I happen to be passing by.  I walk past "boards in progress" in furniture stores and such, and I make the next logical move.  That's about it.

I set up a board in Pensacola in 2005 for about a month, and never made a move on it, eventually just taking it back down.  Now, Max pipes up today with, "You used to play chess, right?  And you used to be really good, Mommy says, so I want to play with you.  You have to play with me, 'cause I'm your son."

So I have to.  I want to.  It's going to be hard, I think.

Dreamtalk - Again

I talk about my dreams here a fair bit, I suppose - one of my earliest posts was about my dreams - and I am informed by many sources that this is obnoxious.  Not dreaming, of course; without that we'd all be deranged.  No, just talking about it.  It seems to me, though, that a blog, in and of itself, is exhibitionist enough to have already established that level of obnoxiousness, so if I want to discuss my dreams, it shouldn't change much of anything, really.  The tone is set, the bar pre-lowered.  Therefore:

Normally, my dreams are pretty cohesive little stories - about what you'd expect from someone who watches as many movies and reads as many comics as I do.  In the past couple of weeks, though, I start awake with just images or snatches of conversations left over from the dream itself, and most of these are recurrent.  Some of the weird dream stuff here includes spools of magnetic tape, like you'd find in a VHS, cut free and jaggedly, and falling, like a tickertape parade, while it bunches up around your feet.  Mexican people talking about how much they hate Mexicans.  You talk to them, and it becomes clear that these are America-born Mexicans hating on Mexico-born Mexicans, and I don't know if my brain made these people up or heard them somewhere.  Donuts made by purple chickens becoming the hot new food item.  Paris Hilton going to prison for fraud.  A man with a satellite receiver disk on his head that orients toward whoever is speaking.  (This is not the previously mentioned Satellite Man.)  The idea that someone is making a film of all this, but won't give any direction, and no one seems to have seen a script, but famous actors (Benicio Del Toro, Jennifer Garner, Reese Witherspoon, Matthew Perry, Edward Norton) keep turning up for walk-on roles.  They get frustrated because it's unclear what it is they're supposed to be doing.  Typically, they leave in a huff, which kind of sucks.  Toothpaste that never runs out.  Money that must be stolen, never given or earned.  Secret holes underground which house Bilderbergers and the bloodline of Christ, co-mingling with the mole people and the Morlocks.

Also, my dreams are in color (like I see it) about 90% of the time.  One notable exception of late has been sepia dreams wherein I am haunted by a duo of ghosts; Johnny Cash (surrounded by a ring of fire, of course) and Mitch Hedberg, complete with pipe and sunglasses.  Traveling together, they seem to only sort of get along, and they function as sort of the angel-and-devil over the shoulder of my conscience.  If you are sitting and thinking, "which of them is which," well, so am I.

I'm going now.

Just a Week In March

Friday morning.  We've spent our first kind of low-key, non-fixing up the house week here in Nashville, and it happens to have been one where C and Abby were out of town, so it was just me and the boy all week long.  The temperature went up about mid-week, exposing the fact that A/C in the apartment still needs work (a note to the landlord has been delivered already), but now it's on it's way back down, mostly due to the rain.  This is a blattering, sporadic Tennessee rain that makes the whole day a bit grey, as opposed to the oppressive torrential downpour followed by baking sun that  exemplifies the Florida variety.  To each his own.  The dogwoods are in full bloom, and the white one near my car keeps dropping little bits of itself all over.

Yesterday on the way into Max's school, we saw a kid, about Max's age, in a floppy rain hat fall and whack his knee on the curb.  We stopped and asked if he was okay, and he hiked up his pantsleg in case he'd skinned it.  He hadn't, but it was red and swollen, so we walked him to the nurse for the old ice treatment.  On the way, he asked me if I was divorced.

ME: No, why?

KID: My parents are divorced.

ME: Mine, too.

MAX: What's 'divorced?'

ME: It's when people who are married don't want to be married anymore.

KID: And they're mad at each other, and they fight all the time, and then, they don't live together.

MAX: (to kid) Do you stay with your mom or your dad?

KID: My mom right now, my dad on the weekend.

MAX: Who do you like better?

By which point, we had made the nurse's office, so he didn't answer.  I was amused and sad at the same time.  Amused, because five-year-olds just don't give a fuck; "Who do you like better," indeed.  Sad, because I remember that part - no matter how hard parents try, some of their animosity bleeds out into their kid's life - and his folks didn't seem to be trying very hard.  I dropped Max off at class, and went to pay off the lunch lady.  After that, I went and had breakfast out, so I could catch some undistracted reading time.  I realized when I got up that I had eaten my entire breakfast under a picture of a train wreck, which I found odd, to say the least.

Max's Wednesday swimming lesson was interesting, because he was the only one in his group to show up for it.  Because of that, his instructor worked with just him, and they made great progress.  Max was actually swimming a fairly organized lap there towards the end.  He's been able to swim, spastically, for awhile now.  Lessons are an excuse to get him into the pool, and a method for cutting down the spasticity.  (The spasticity of our city...)  So far, he really likes his lessons.  Neither of us liked the substitute lifeguard, though.  Most of the Y lifeguards are teenagers, all buffed out and bored.  As long as you're not doing something really stupid, they don't care if you fracture a rule or two.  Our lifeguard Wednesday though, was an older guy in a T-shirt, who looked exactly like Kasier Wilhelm.  When Max was in the pool with a paddle board, he came over to me:

KAISER: (indicating Max) He yours?

ME: Yep.

KAISER: He's not supposed to have that board in the pool.

ME: Okay.

KAISER: (and I hate when people do this, after I assent) It's just that he's not supposed to have it unless he's having a lesson, or swimming laps.

ME:  He's having a lesson in about 30 seconds.  There's his teacher, right there.

KAISER: It's just that he's not supposed to have it right now.

ME:  Tell you what - why don't you tell him?

KAISER:  What, your son?

ME:  Yeah, he's right there, he listens fine, just explain that to him and have him give you the board.

KAISER:  Well, uh, uh (looks around)...I guess it's okay, you know, with the lesson happening.

MAX: Do I have to give up the board?

ME: No.

Before we left, he protected at least five other people from fun.  Sort of the Bush Administration approach to lifeguarding - a blanket restriction on anything that doesn't fit inside a very specific box.

Tonight we plan to go to the movies.  The free time has been nice, but my home seems empty, so I'm ready to have the other half of my family back.  The noise in my head seems to have quieted a lot since moving here.  I think it's being able to make decisions without a cloud overhead of other people's reactions.  The freedom to move about without wondering whose toes you might step on in the dark.  The basic social isolation has vanished, what with friends and opportunities and neighbors who actually speak - and productivity seems much less onerous than before.  I got 28 resumes out yesterday, for instance.  That's right, I have actually begun looking for a job now.

Which probably means no two-entry days anymore.

I know your hearts are breaking.

Arbitrary?

Beware the fucking ides, people.  I always get cranky right around the ides.

I keep hearing conservative GOPers blasting their counterparts across the aisle for demanding an "arbitrary" timeline for pulling out of Iraq.  This literally makes my head pound, because it is illogical to the point of being criminal.  The current "arbitrary" timeline being offered (complete with what I am sure are "arbitrary" benchmarks for whatever the new definition of "success in Iraq" turns out to be) is a compromise between the far left's inclination to get the fuck out now, and the far right's inclination to maintain a military presence in Iraq from now...on, like it's Cuba or Germany.  It is no more arbitrary than say, the arbitrary finish date the conservatives seem to have going on.  Anyone know what that is, by the way?  If we're not leaving now, when are we leaving?  After the country spirals out into civil war, but before we spill over into Iran?  Or is it after that?  Is the War on Terror really meant to be a three front, decades-long slog through the Middle East during which we throw our weight around until the sabre rattling in the scabbard breaks off, stabs us repeatedly and bleeds us to death?  Leaving now - yes, while things are still a gargantuan mess - is no more arbitrary than fleeing a burning house before it becomes fully involved and immolates you.  It might be you who started the fire, and you should make definite and deliberate attempts to put that sucker out, but you have to have enough of a fucking brain in your head to know when a point is reached that if you stay, you and your loved ones will be burned to death.  Homeless and dead, I have been led to believe, is worse than just homeless.  And it would be different if the captains of this abortion of a war were the ones to go down with the ship - there's a kind of retarded, bloody-minded honor in that.  But they aren't.  It's tens of thousands of lives from the US and Iraq, and hundreds of billions of dollars coming from sources other than the richest people in the country, since they got the damned tax break.  Smarter folks than me have enumerated what could have been done with that money, and the potential of lives is inestimatable.

Arbitrary defines this objection, this argument, this resistance to attempt to not fix, because that's impossible, just not to continue to fuck it up even more...okay, I'm not enjoying this one anymore.

Sweat'em 'Til They Talk

"Mohammed says responsible for 9/11 attacks."

Bypassing for a moment the general strangeness of this headline - which could be compared to "Christ takes credit for abortion doctor shooting," or "Buddha held in animal liberation scandal," - I would choose to focus instead on this question: What good is it?  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who looks a bit like Ron Jeremy, I suddenly realize), the supposed number two man in Al-Qaeda, and the man whose name Monkeyface famously butchered while trying to make us feel better about how the War on Terror was proceeding, has fessed up to planning, orchestrating, and generally masterminding the attacks of 9/11.  Also, the WTC bombing in 1993, a couple of the failed shoe bomb attacks, and the nightclub in Bali.  While I am inclined to believe that he is directly or indirectly connected to all of these things and should likely be covered in pig's blood, staked for the crows and made to watch Ann Coulter interviews while having everyone who lost anything on 9/11 take a turn with a sledgehammer and his nuts (on the first day) - I also have a lingering doubt in anything the government tells me.  This is a government that hides everything, gives up none of the truth, betrays anyone it believes to be an enemy - in this country or not - believes itself to be above the law, lies constantly, and seems to have all the moral fiber of a rabid boar.  This man has been in secret CIA prisons and such for four years, being sweated and drilled and broken down by professionals - they probably sent him on hunting trips with Cheney for chrissakes, to be shot in the face until he gave them what they wanted.  At this point, he would probably admit to the attempted rape and murder of the Easter Bunny - but you just don't know, do you?

I wish I felt like this was justice being done.