squidbag

On Immigration

"You don't speak a word of Spanish."

I have, for the last couple of years now, been listening to a growing national tension about the vast influx of people from other countries illegally coming into the US to take jobs away from native-born US citizens, become a burden on the US health care & educational systems, commit crimes & run around (gasp!) not speaking English.  I'd like to make my unpopular position on this hot button issue clear, even to those of you in the cheap seats: I don't care fuck all about illegal immigration to the US.  Come on in.  Have some dip.  Other than the expedience in procedures for the government that comes from being able to register your citizens, I have never been able to really understand why immigration in a democracy should be legislated in the first place.  When ancient Rome had a problem with immigration, it was because of rampant rape & destruction, and so legislation was considered.  The Mexicans aren't trying to burn the American Southwest, though, so I'm not seeing it.  The vast majority of the people who come here are here to work, and without them - and EVERYONE is in agreement on this - the economy's in the toilet.   There has been nothing credible to substantiate that immigrants cause more crime than what is proportional, and they do not, despite the machinations of Lou Dobbs, bring leprosy here by the fleshful.

I just cannot get behind it.  I don't care if people don't speak English around me - though since that is the predominate language, I think they ought to try.  No legislation required - your life'll be easier if you pick up the tongue of the realm, that's all.  I tried to pick up some Spanish in Mexico, some Yiddish in the Diamond District, and some Latin at religious school.  The so-called "invasion" of other cultures doesn't really affect me, to my knowledge, I've never had a job snaked out from underneath me by an illegal immigrant, and I don't feel the country being chipped away by other languages, people and colors of skin surrounding me.  I find it hard, with what we spend on the war (and other poorly thought out endeavors, like tax cuts for the wealthy) that we cannot afford immigrants of any status within our health care system, screwy as it is.  I can't see how adding a subject or two to the curriculum is detrimental - difficult logistically, maybe - but not destructive.  As far as crime?  A criminal is a criminal.  Just as I fail to see how the Department of Homeland Security has made me any safer from terrorists, I don't see how these jackoff Minutemen or increased border patrols are making me any safer from criminals.

Now - perhaps there are some stats I'm missing, or a study I should see.  Maybe you've a personal story or a damning piece of evidence you'd like to me look at, so's I can reeavaluate my stance on illegal immigration.  Go ahead.  I could be wrong.  Until that happens, though, I'm going to continue to harbor 17 illegals in the trunk of my car.

Benchmarks Are Stupid

The Iraq argument - when there actually is one, and not just our clockwork President vetoing, whirring and saying "no" over and over again like a demented animatronic child - is that we cannot leave Iraq until certain benchmarks are reached.  These benchmarks would be indications that the country can stand up on its own without being propped up by any outside force.  A functional government, a working infrastructure, an active military, an absence of terrorist activity and infighting; these are some of the benchmarks Dubya's looking for (in addition to a white rabbit with a waistcoat and a pocketwatch) before he'll even consider pulling US troops out of Iraq, and why he won't go along with any funding bill with what he refers to as an "arbitrary" timeline for leaving contained within it.  The fact that he still believes that these benchmarks will be reached any time in the near future is a testament to the strength of his faith in the face of facts that completely contradict his point of view.  In the most recent confrontation over this - the one where the Dems kind of rolled over for him - he ended up getting his money with no timelines attached to it, because otherwise the short-memory world would have accused the Dems of "not supporting the troops," which apparently means something completely different when I say it than it does to most people.

Regardless, it's clear to me at this point that Iraq - if it's fixable at all, if it ever was - is not fixable by us.  Picture, if you will, a fragile vase, filled with flowers.  Saddam gets put in charge of the vase, and he moves it from the table, paints it some ugly color, and lets the flowers die.  Okay, he killed our flowers, but we've still got a pretty nice vase, and Saddam, by not letting anyone even go into that room, is keeping the vase intact.  Ugly, useless and unattainable, but intact.  Then the US military shows up, shoves Saddam out of the way, busts into the room and knocks the vase over, breaking it.  You could probably have glued it back together - though it might not have ever held water with any integrity - but now, as we just stay there and stay there, we're walking around on all the little shards of vase, pulverizing them into dust, something that cannot be reconstituted, and something no one can work with.  And we're pissing people off, so they're coming in to fight with the US, and stepping on the vase pieces, too.

The benchmarks are shit.  They're meaningless.  The Iraqi government is corrupt at the local level, if the shitty building projects and vanishing American money is any indication, and cannot cooperate at the national level, vacation or no vacation.  Oil production is nowhere near what was promised, and is substantially lower than before we invaded.  There are curfews, power outages, sporadic violence, and an armed foreign presence in the streets all the time, none of which fosters goodwill towards American soldiers.  Shit, the Green Zone gets mortared on a pretty regular basis, and this is in the country where one place is called the "Triangle of Death."  The Iraqi military cannot stand, and if they could, there are no medical facilities to help them - they end up in American Army hospitals when wounded.  Being a policeman there is like wearing a target, and the infighting between Sunnis and Shia is something we can never really understand.  Avoid certain terminologies all you like, but this country is fucked, it will take time to rebuild it, there is an ongoing civil war between different factions of people, and there will be an American presence in Iraq for decades.  Time to end the "war" as we know it, pull out the bulk of troops, the volunteers, the guardsmen, etc. and staff local bases with career military, people who signed up for this.  Think Cuba or Berlin.  It's going to be like that.

So stop fucking talking about benchmarks, like after the situation we've created, this country can hope to aspire to them in any reasonable and expedient way.  It's insulting to anyone who actually uses facts (and extended pottery metaphors) to evaluate a situation.

Abby's Cake Gallery & Stuff

Cake: Going the Distance

For those of you who don't actually come here (and read me elsewise) or for anyone not paying an adequate level of attention to how the sidebars change, here's notice: Added at the top of the photo albums is a new one of Abby eating her cake on her 1st birthday, and mostly trying to consume it by rubbing it into her face.  If you weren't here for this, we likely missed you, and if you were, we appreciate you.  Enjoy this and the other albums, and be sure to check the side columns now and again since I plug new links, webtoon links, other blogs and stuff into them fairly frequently.  You can also keep up with what I'm reading currently, or what movies I just saw.  Not everything gets a formal review.  Anyway, everyone enjoys little kid pics with cake on them.

10 Non-Movie Comic Moments

I was having a conversation with my newish co-workers last Monday that prompted this entry - sort of.  This one's been brewing a while, but that conversation tipped me over the edge and said, inside my brain, in a kind of leprechaun-through-a-bullhorn type voice, "Just write the fucking thing."  It was the conversation, in which, having discovered that I am a comic guy, I get quizzed about every recent comic book movie.  So here we are.  You all know that I think comics are a ballsier, more versatile medium than are movies, and that there are things in comics that you will never see in the movies.  Really fucking cool things, some of them.  Here are ten:

#1: The Saint of Killers Fights a Tank Brigade I despair that Garth Ennis' magnum epic, Preacher, will ever be made into a passable film.  At best, an HBO mini-series might do the trick, but even then, I would have misgivings.  In the "War In The Sun" arc, the title character Jesse Custer fills the Saint of Killers - the embodiment of death in the form of a never-miss gunslinger - in on the fact that God Himself is responsible for the deaths of the Saint's wife and daughter, and what the Saint has himself become is all because of the selfish machinations of the Lord.  The Saint is understandably angry, and takes it out on a tank brigade in Monument Valley, Arizona.  Turning and shouting, "FIGHT ME!!" he proceeds to destroy every living thing in sight with his sixguns, and then stand untouched by a small tactical nuke dropped from a plane.

#2: Magneto Humiliates and Threatens the President of the United States In the Ultimate X-Men title - I think it's the first arc - the Ultimate universe version of Magento drops in on the White House.  In the comics, Magneto's powers aren't limited to metal, you see, they can affect anything which is in thrall to magnetic force.  So, the poles.  Electrical currents, minerals - the list goes on and on.  I have published this panel before, but Maggie's foray into the nation's capitol ends with a defeated, naked, and fetal positioned Dubya licking Magento's boots and nearly crushed by his own limo on national TV.

#3: Spider Jerusalem Breaks up a Religion Convention  It is established early on that in the future "City" in which Spider Jerusalem lives, that the rate of religions created has exceeded one per hour.  To this end, a convention is held in the middle of the city so that anyone with a new or unique faith might shuck and jive some converts and spread their personal gospel.  Spider, a journalist, goes down there dressed as Christ with a wire beard and foil halo, clad in a sheet toga and his "Air Jesus" sneakers, and proceeds to kick ass, physically and verbally.  "Read my scripture!  Read my fucking scripture!" This last delivered to a bleeding prostrate victim while Spider exposes himself.  That's why Spider is my hero.

#4: Katchoo Exposes Freddy's "Shortcomings" In the first SIP three-issue limited, Katina Marie Choovanski catches up with Freddy Femur.  After Francine shows up at Katchoo's house in her underwear, car wrecked, confused, humiliated and sad after a disasterous encounter with her now ex-fiance, Katchoo kidnaps the fiance in question, Freddy, and hangs him naked in a storefront window wearing clown makeup and with a magnifying glass poised over his dick, displaying him for all to see.  That's why Katchoo is your hero.

#5: A Super-Powered Hitman Pukes on Batman Tommy Monaghan's a low-rent hitman who lives in Gotham City, and only kills really evil people, usually with powers.  It's a living.  Due an encounter with an alien life form who basically tried to kill him, Tommy's got X-ray vision and can read minds - nice assets when your whole job is sneaking up on and getting the better of other people.  After a date with some bad Indian food, and while chasing someone who's got a price on his head, Tommy encounters Gotham's Dark Knight.  His stomach in turmoil and exhausted from the chase, Tommy ralphs all over Batman, setting the tone for this series.

#6: Martian Manhunter's Negative Zone Ultimatum Racism exists among Martians.  When J'onn J'onz arrives here on Earth, he is the last of the green Martians.  Whereas green Martians tend to be more or less peace-loving normal folk, white Martians are pissy, pointy, and want to eat your brains.  When J'onn discovers that the whites are in the midst of a great plan to fuck up the planet, he meets them on a blazing battlefield (all Martians have a weakness to fire) and, having basically put them in checkmate, gives them a choice.  Existence in the Negative Zone - essentially isolated exile - or death by fire for all of them, J'onn included.  He actually stands his ground screaming "SUBMIT OR DIE!" while fires roar and grow all around him.  They submit, and once J'onn is rescued by the Atom, Batman and the Flash, he is wrapped in bandages and reassured by Batman that he is never alone, that the JLA are his family.

#7: Ozymandias Teleports a Psychic Alien Into New York City Attempting to encapsulate the plot of Watchmen into a paragraph, while possible, is not something I feel like doing.  Suffice it to say, in order to force peace between the alternate 1985 governments of the US & USSR, one of the main characters, Ozymandias, takes half an issue why he's teleporting a huge cloned alien psychic into the middle of New York, where it will die and the "resultant psychic feedback" will kill half of the city.  When confronted about stopping it, he responds with, "...I'm not a Republic serial villain.  I did it twenty minutes ago."  The 12th issue's first few pages detail the carnage that results from this, and the summation tells you how the world responds.

#8: X-Men's Days of Future Past In a bleak and not too far off future, the US has passed the Registration Act that's central to the movies, and the giant robot Sentinels have enforced cooperation by killing anyone who does not comply, be they mutant, super-powered human or otherwise.  It begins with a 40-ish Kitty walking through a graveyard which has the headstones of every popular Marvel character in it, and features the rather grim deaths of Wolverine, Storm, Magneto, Colossus, and Franklin Richards.  There is a cross-time mindswap between the older Kitty and her younger (present to us) counterpart, and this is done to prevent Senator Kelly's assassination by Mystique which is what touches off registration in the first place.  You can see how the average movie audience might not follow this.  Predates Terminator, by the way.

#9: The Fantastic Four Meet God In His Studio The Thing dies, but a spark of life remains in his body, kept there artificially by his best friend, Reed Richards.  In this Mark Waid-penned storyline, the remaining three use a device to break through into the realm of the afterlife, where they encounter Ben, who's being kept from his eternal reward by all this interference.  The four of them meet "god," who's never referred to that way, but knows everything about them, and has the power to make everything okay.  He fixes them up and sends them home.  "God" is represented as an artist in a simple studio, and looking very much like Jack Kirby, the co-creator of most of the Marvel Universe.  Makes sense; he's God to the average fanboy.

#10: Wonder Woman Offs Maxwell Lord Recent (sort of) event in the DC Universe, while on live television, and in order to save the life of Superman (don't ask) Wonder Woman twists backwards the noggin of Maxwell Lord, the mastermind behind the current crop of shit mucking up DC.  Before this, Maxwell had murdered Blue Beetle in cold blood, mobilized an army of robots, and rigged the world against the metahumans.  WW's always been a little quicker temper than Big Blue or the Dark Knight, and this was a kill or be killed kind of thing, so she broke the little fucker's neck.  Think you'll see that in the Wonder Woman movie?

One Year of Abby

(third picture of my daughter in less than a week - good thing she's cute, or I'd have no readership at all)

Today is Abby's 1st birthday, and we will be commemorating the occasion with cake and balloons and leaving work early and partying and houseguests.  We will not be going to Chuck E. Cheese.  At one year old, Abby has four real teeth, and one that's kind of off-stage waiting for it's cue to come on.  She's not walking yet, or standing on her own, preferring to crawl lightning fast from one place to another.  As I mentioned, we often refer to her as a "very small Ba" because "Ba" is still a favorite word of hers.  She is also, in my tradition of making up words for things about which I feel strongly, our "smidget."  She likes to play with anything that makes a cool noise, to remove ALL of the magnetic letters from the fridge, creating a kitchen minefield, and to be tickled.  She likes really goofy jokes, and her brother is the funniest guy in the world.  She likes to sit in the bath and slap the surface of the water while chewing on her brother's bath toys.  She ignores the more age-appropriate bath toys.  Actually, with all toys, she seems more interested in what he has than what she's got.  For the most part.  Shredding a magazine is a fun activity, as is dropping anything on the floor 100 times to test Daddy's patience.  Mostly, she likes to be talked to constantly.  I can narrate anything and hold her attention.  She likes to 'help' Max & me play video games.  She eats like a horse, and I often refer to her as "Baby Ravenous."  She's been on solids and real milk for a little while now, feeds herself (messily) by hand, and drinks from her cup.  She likes her rattly turtle socks at bedtime.  She had her first official word yesterday (I am so informed) in "bye-bye" complete with wave.  She's very snuggly & playful now, and during diaper changes will hide behind an additional (clean) diaper and play peek-a-boo.

There will be no discussion here about a year ago today, and that sort of thing.  I'm now just hoping she doesn't fall asleep halfway through the shindig.

Heroes

Last night was the season One ender of Heroes, one of the two shows I watch on TV, the other one being the Riches, now that Studio 60 has entered the fifth ring of Purgatorio...and is apparently returning Thursday, now that I visit the damned site.  Shit.  I hate television; I have far too much to do on Thursday to watch fucking television, and I will have to be dragged into the age of digital recording, because a backlog of TV would be the only thing worse than TV.

Anyway - Heroes.  The next few paragraphs will be SPOILERIFIC, presented in SPOILERAMA, and containing FACTS YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE SHOW YET.  All season long, the thing I enjoyed most about this show was that you could apply comic book logic and determine the outcome, loosely, of events.  The writing was good, the acting was solid, the plots were interesting and kept me watching, and of course, the idea of super-powered people stepping up to help their fellows is dear to my heart.  That wasn't it, though - it was like watching a comic book, and it helped that people involved in comics were deep, deep inside this show.  Isaac's art?  Well, that's Tim Sale, folks, and we love him from The Long Halloween, Superman for All Seasons, Daredevil:Yellow, and other stuff, too.  The show is steeped in comics mythology...

...to the point that one wonders if they just mined old comics for plotlines and twists.  Like the X-Men mythos, or "Rising Stars."  In "Five Years Gone" I see "Days of Future Past."  In Niki/Jessica, I see the Hulk's internal battle.  D.L. is Shadowcat and the Vision.  Claire is Wolverine, sans claws.  Hiro's dad is Stick.  Ted is Captain Atom with a leak in his suit.  Or Firestorm.  Sylar and Peter are Parasite and Rogue.  Isaac's not the first clarivoyant to dull his gift with drugs.  Mrs. Petrelli is every supervillain ever.  This last episode, where Peter takes advice from a man named Charles in a wheelchair?  Reaching?  Okay, I predict that Peter will be able to pull a Dr. Manhattan out of his hat, while Sylar will run to ground like Vermin did before the "Kraven's Last Hunt" storyline.  Hiro in the 17th century?  Iron Man & Doom in Arthurian England.  Anyone who followed all of that (especially if you didn't touch any of the links) is as big a geek as I am, and I have to issue some sort of other challenge, like a drinking game, or a game of "I Bet I Can Chop Your Right Hand Off" where I go first.

In spite of or because of the rampant and suspicious homages, I love this show.  And they know I'm watching - the final battle this season took place in Kirby Plaza for Jack's sake.  The characters manage to seem familiar to me as soon as I meet them, and the casting is great.  Aside from the relative (before this) unknowns who play the major roles, this one last episode had Shaft, Caligula, and Sulu.  What more do you want?

More.  Yeah.  Apparently, there's lots more on its way.

Big Week

Hi.

This is my third week on my new job, and we've been busy.  I don't know if the rate of activity we've had recently is typical, but I get the feeling that it is.  I have no idea what this week's workload will be like, but I expect there to be some smallish bumps in the road, since I'm going to start - with my jefe's approval - rocking the boat a little bit.  Should be fun.

Today is the 12th anniversary (I always have to resist the impulse to capitalize "anniversary") of C's & my Pseudo-Wedding in Palm Court, officiated by Mitchell L. Silverman and attended by many of you.  I documented this here two years ago, and I guess skipped over mentioning it here last year either because it was eleven, and that's ridiculous, or because I was distracted by other goings on.  Regardless, happy anniversary, honey, and I'd like to take this opportunity to remind all of you who were around in my life at the time, you've now known me for more than 12 years, which makes you old.  Not me, though.  I am forever young, like freakin' Peter Pan.

Thursday is Abby's 1st birthday.  She is one year old, which is a little hard to believe, but parenting is like that.  She is no longer little, although the compulsion to refer to her as a "very small Ba" appropriating one of her own words is still quite strong.  She laughs a lot now, but is steadfastly refusing to walk anywhere, preferring to crawl.  She crawls vey fast, especially when she's found something gross on the floor, or she wants to get inside the refrigerator.  When I reflect back to this time last year, in the week leading up to Abby being born - well, I'm glad I'm not back in that period of time.  We're planning on having a thing on Thursday with party decorations and food, so if you're local, show.  Yay, Abby!

Thursday is also Max's last day of Kindergarten.  We are assured that despite showing up only in February for the big K, Max will be moving on to 1st Grade with his peers.  He has made many good friends, and it'll be good for him to be able to keep them for a good long while.  (Hope hope hope) Max has also been recommended to be tested for a gifted program, which, while not shocking, is kind of shocking anyway.  I mean, wow, with the proudness and the testing and the hey hey hey.  I am in fact, the proud father of a five year old who sometimes follows instructions, is extremely polite, is quiet in movie theatres, is very smart, has a life of the mind the size of "ten hundred googleplex million thousand universes," and he's cute, too.  And he loves his sister.

This blog, Nashville is Talking, keeps including me on it's blogrolls, which is cool, since I am now a Nashville blogger, and obviously, a whore for attention.  Attend my digital thoughts, faceless masses!!

Our last bit of Pensacola business may be tying up, as our sometime accountant seems to be tying up loose ends from 2004 and 2005.  I'm also expecting a check from P'cola for some work I did in December of last year.  I have stuff for the party to make at work, and three other blog entries in progress.  C has agreed to help me do a first draft of the book I want to write, and while finances are still extremely tight, I find that matters less here than it did there.  "There's nothing that can't be done."

End of line.

Squidbag last year.

Dying from the Weed

You can tell someone recently explained to me how to embed video.  Thanks, hon.

Okay, so this Dearborn, Michigan cop stole some weed from the evidence room and he and his wife baked it into some brownies.  Then, the shit kicks in and they think they're dying.  Hilarity ensues;

This illustrates nicely, I think, the importance of experimenting at a younger age, when you don't end up with your head sewn to the carpet and calling 9-1-1.  A couple of things about this; I posted this video (as opposed to any of the other ones available) because the grin the anchor cracks when she comes back thrills me.  There are more complete videos of this on YouTube, where Ofc. (Dirty) Sanchez is asking about the Red Wings game, and thinking he and his wife are dead.  You also notice how this Fox affiliate I posted reads from exactly the same script as many of the other stations that reported this, and how they chopped up the actual phone call.  More insidious news manipulation that you would all know about already if you'd been listening to Diane.

"I think there's something in it."  Yeah, there's weed in it, fool.  Now get off the rug.  Who hallucinates a tie game in hockey?  Wouldn't you hallucinate your team winning?

Best Moment of My Week

On Wednesday night, I gave both Max and Abby baths.  Abby has been taking a nightly bath, which is a little excessive for an eleven-month-old, because she likes it.  She plays with the water, roams around the tub with a washcloth on her head, etc.  I got her out, dry and in pajamas, wrapped Max in his Justice League towel, and sat on the floor with both of them while I dried his hair, and Abby tried pulling his nose off.  Once he was dressed, we wrapped Abby up and put her in her sleeping chair (which I believe I've previously mentioned) and Max decided that he wanted to read her her evening story.  Right now, Goodnight Moon soothes her like nothing else, so we're sticking with that.

Before the bedtime classic could begin, though, there was some spitting of a plastic french fry that had to occur.  In an effort to get her to stop crying (she doesn't like being put down, and puts up what I would call mostly token resistance) I put a plastic crinkle cut fry in my mouth and made a funny face.  She giggled.  Then I - puh! - spit it out at her.  This, apparently, was the funniest thing since the invention of comedy.  Until Max did it.  Then it somehow became exponentially funnier.  I don't know how much baby laughter you've been exposed to, but there's something deeply satisfying and cleansing about it, especially when the baby in question throws back her head, opens wide to show all four teeth, and really gut laughs for you, shaking her whole tiny body.  Babies - or at least, mine - don't close their eyes when they laugh, either.  We did this for about 15 minutes before I called time on it and insisted the story start.

Max read all of Goodnight Moon, though there was some residual laughing going on, and then we went and read Sign of the Seahorse while Abby went to sleep.  With Max tucked into his tent/bed, secure with his comics and Garfield books, his cutlass and glow-in-the-dark football, I closed his door and said goodnight.

Nashvignettes

Some recent observations about the place where I now live again, after being away for 12 years, told in digestible form:

Nashville drivers used to be these aggressive people who would kill you over a lane change, jump in front of you in traffic, and drive 80 mph everywhere.  This was the environment in which I was trained to drive defensively.  It was not uncommon for folks to get out and have a chat with you about your driving once you got to a red light.  Man, I miss them.  Now, they're a group of cell-tethered obliviors (copyright 2007, the Squidbag) or diaper-laden octagenarians struggling to see over the steering wheel and doing 40 on I-65.  Occasionally, though, they will still let you know how they feel in traffic.  Last week, after a man in a Mustang cut off a very old man in a pickup next to me, I watched an 80-year-old guy get out at a red, walk over, stick his head in the driver's side window and scare holy fuck out of this younger guy, who peeled rubber off his radials when the light changed.

In the Adventure Science Center, upstairs there is an extensive human body exhibit, featuring brains that you can go inside of, water games that represent the circulatory system, and a big hit - a stairway and slide that represent the end of the digestive system, complete with a big FART! noise when you come out the end of the slide.  This last shares a wall with the men's room, and when the sound goes off, nothing else can be heard in that room.  This cannot be an accident.

Two weeks ago, Max's school; as I am walking the boy to class, a girl nearby, with her father, says quite spontaneously, "And Jesus spake unto them, saying - "  The father clipped her quick with a "Sarah - remember, not everyone believes the same things - you save that for home."  A knot I didn't know I had loosened in my chest as he said this.

Recently, at our grocery store, less than a block away, the kids and I are in front of the milk cooler, and Max asks for chocolate milk.  "We have chocolate syrup at home, I can just make that."  Realizing who I have become, I then said, "I can make a green pepper burger at home."  Max replied, "What?"  He was genuinely confused.  Reaching into the cooler, I explained, "Sometimes I joke for you, and sometimes I just do it for myself."  From behind the cooler, in the stock area, we heard this voice, accompanied by laughter, "And for the milk delivery guy."  So thank you, Milk Delivery Guy.

I now work in a part of north Nashville called Madison.  An intederminate number of my family members from whom I'm estranged live around here, and I spent a lot of time in this area when I was a great deal younger.  On my recent lunch breaks, I've been driving around seeing how well I can remember how to get places, and what new things there are.  The first time you see a memorial bench at the cemetery with your last name on it is a little chilling, and I keep driving past there.  I've also found the shop where I used to work (now a Sprint and a Batteries Plus), the house where I had chicken pox, the dirt road beside the tracks where I used to race the trains, and the place where my uncle had a fatal heart attack in his driveway.  Also, two comic stores.

I have MySpaced a few people I used to know; only one seems to be really interested in keeping in touch.  I have a few others in mind I might dig up - one's on my agenda, at least.  It is good to be near the Guys and Kat's family and Shannon, and I like most of my apartment neighbors, so far.  My co-workers are a mix, but no one is as bad as Jackie was.  One school I attended is unrecognizable, another looks exactly the same.  I ran into one person in a store late at night, and their reaction was a simple "holy shit," with no ensuing conversation.  It's both good and weird to be back here.  Mostly good.  Less familiar than I would have expected.