For the last six months I have been paying for subscriptions to both DC Infinite and Marvel Unlimited, which I scrutinize as I cast about for subscriptions to cut, in Grown-Up Mode, attacking various checklists. So of course, rather than actually cancel one or both (why did I think I needed two?) I decided to use them.
Wait, you didn’t come here for this; what is Day 7: Echoing Emptiness?
It’s the hollowness, the cathedral like stillness of my internal theater, when I clear out several daily hours of human connection–and conversation, as I step away from social media.
I grab my phone and reflexively flick and tic my way through the apps I’m allowing myself to check. I check my e-bookstore dashboards to see if I’ve sold books. I have, I sold a few for six dollars. The dopamine pop fans an ember in my brain that creams out for more fuel. No more sales, at the other services, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple Itunes, Smashwords, Google play… one after the other.
I’ll look at them again a few more times today.
I check my mail; my blog comments are hooked to my mail. So I can see I have none. So I’m not here to read, I’m here to write, which at least, is something. Conversational typing more in composition mode, but then, my FB essays were the same damn thing. I’m just a heroin addict on methadone.
Drama queen metaphor aside, my brain is writhing.
(Here I drift into memoire. TL;DR, cut loose from social media connections, the steady diet of dozens or hundreds of likes, and shares a day, I reel backward into the past.)
So I’m reading a few comic books, a few short stories, and listening to books, in and around the wizened nub of my freelance career. I wanna put quotes around that. Every time I try to use the word career I am struggling to avoid the air quotes.
I read the first four books of Flashpoint and marveled, (Hah hah, I DCed, really) at the degree to which comic book prose tolerates expository dialog. Flashpoint is a completely novel world, which has to be unloaded as a little staged action and a ton of maid and butler dialog; a ton of exposition.
Enjoyable. But I remember that kid in the seventies who ached for long comic book continuities, but could not achieve them. I collected comics for a few years, but was bad at getting to conventions or stores and so the comic book shared universes were these things I uncovered in bits and pieces like an archeologist, full of mysteries, omissions, holes. You had to intuit the shape of the bigger pictures.
It was frustrating and glorious. Going out into the world, looking for the missing puzzle pieces. The used bookstore. The rack at the drug store down the street from my elementary school on a hot day, the last of AC as I enter the store, spinning the rack, and finding the latest issue, without a gap, the number is sequential with what I was reading because distribution was so shitty that you could miss an issue.
I’m listening to a Spotify track as I take a shower, a playlist, early 70s, music made when I was seven, that I took deadly seriously at seventeen. Unironically. My kids regard anything older than five or six years as a quaint if adorable object. A reminder of youth. Hopelessly out of date.
Deja Vu, Almost Cut My Hair, recorded in a single take shortly after David Crosby’s girlfriend dies in a car wreck, was never a goofy charming thing. The thing to which Crosby feels he owes something, rebellion, bohemia, the antiwar effort, everything, was vividly alive in us, as an aspirational goal as that naive youthful idealism died, as I grew into an age to fully understand it.
I grew out my hair… but my mom kept bugging me to cut it, and I would because it was the end of the 70s and the Viet Nam war was ending and I liked my mother, so what the fuck. Path of least resistance. I was half-assed even at my own rebellion. Partially because my hair grew into this curvaceous, stupid-looking blow dried helmet, and I kept hoping that if it grew long enough, it would morph into Jimmy Page Led Zeppline mane….
But by the time I got out of my house, away from my mother, away from my dying home town, my black hair was receding badly, a Riff-Raff pony tail down the back, and shaving my head was a relief.
When I cut my hair I was writing derivative cyberpunk fiction. I was living in a real city. I was getting ready to get married and have kids. I was embarking on my graphic arts ‘career,’ and writing. My comic book collection was at home, the home now long gone, in a cardboard box.
And my mother died the first of this year. All that’s left of those homes I grew up in, the one they retired to for 23 years, is a glass case with a scattering of mementos. My father’s hip joint culled from his ashes. A necklace of my mothers. (Her rings all vanished shortly after she died.) Some little glass birds, that were her mothers.
And as I clear out the clutter of social media, instead of plunging ahead into my burgeoning, hah, writing career, instead I’m a nine year old walking, along, as we were allowed to, a mile to the drug store. Listening to a transistor radio. Bye, bye, Miss American Pie.
I go now for a walk in the 90 degree Delta COVID hothouse as the latest useless war devolves into it’s Saigon moment. I remember the original, of course.
It had a better soundtrack.
I’ll listen to that radio, that same radio, over the magic Uhura bluetooth headset yolked to my communicator linked to the global computer network, and then I’ll slog sweatily back home and read a comic from that year on my magic slate, a slick digital pad, glowing with hues so much more saturated, linework razorlike, sharper and cleaner, than the coarse screened four color ink of the original, flimsy, double stapled fragile paper things.
I want to tell you they cost twenty five cents, four for a dollar, like some WW2 vet blathering about how much boloney he could buy for a nickel during the great depression…
Aww, fuck, I got to a 1000 words. Sorry.
The past is flowing into my mental void, bottom line.
This wasn’t my intent.
