What is it about that Parker fellow?

Ho-lee crap, Sunny Day Real Estate's made it to the overhead at Chapterhouse, and I feel like such a dweeb for having missed most of their oeuvre.

So, I have a lot of posts on here about the depiction of sex, gender, etc. in comics, and ways I feel the industry falls short of my rather lofty social expectations. Well, then this guy comes along and throws up a post that makes me quite, quite happy on many levels.

Responsibility and repercussions seem to have long-standing resonance in the comic book collector world, seemingly without regard to genre. That said, those are subjects I feel that just about any of these genres could explore admirably. Spider-Man's flubs and social misalignment stand as the primary example of this, yet perhaps other, less central matters could explore these topics, in smaller details in the margins and corners.

One element few people wish to touch in post-human stories without absurd amounts of pathos are responsibilities around the extraordinary abilities. How does the way Superman flies differ from Wonder Woman? Can we get some little side notes on the ways that Peter Parker satisfies his predatory Spider instincts in the bedroom, like the way his fingers stick to skin, or the unorthodox positions his flexibility allows? How do characters who convert back and forth between solid and energy forms feel about having guts one moment, and a nuclear fusion/fission reaction the next? How much does Wolverine really use his eyes when he can smell what you ate on your sixteenth birthday in your sweat, and what does it mean when he decides to look at you? I really would like to see a little more of how individual and alien the lives of post-humans are to humanity, in those little ways that each of us differ.

Although Marvel's scientific experiments gone awry exemplified the element of trauma in the awakening of post-humanity in an individual, even Superman carries an element of this phenomenon in the revelation of his extraterrestrial heritage. A boy grows up in a middle-of-nowhere town that, to this day, probably gets one bar on a cell phone, worrying about things like fixing the tractor and that godforsaken social studies test, when he starts ripping steel in half and shooting fire out of his eyes if he gets a half-mast from Lana Lang's thong strap peeking out from her Dungarees. Eventually, Pa takes him into the cellar and shows him this contraption that seriously can-not have come from anywhere we know, lighting up in the dark in increasingly subtle ways and incongruous color schemes that make no sense under a yellow sun. Something lights up, and a defeated, terrified scientist fellow appears like Leia out of R2D2, with a voice ringing with that despair that comes from wishing that you just weren't right. This man, this weird ghost-man, has these little gestures and features that drill right into the boy's heart while he listens to this mysteriously familiar guy address himself as the kid's birth father. The dude's already staring into the proverbial void while preparing to fire his child out into the physical one. The end of Krypton must have been absolutely gruesome. He's left, this confused tween boy, with the usual maddening drug trip of puberty, the confusion of coming from a completely inaccessible origin, and heretofore unexplainable abilities and physiological functions that he has to learn to manage on the fly (pun totally not intended, but kept in.) That sounds pretty traumatic to me.

In what ways does post-humanity process this trauma? How does the nature of the trauma creep up for these people? Does Cyclops of the X-Men rub the back of his head before getting on a plane after falling out of one and hitting his head as a child? Does Luke Cage's unbreakable skin ever itch, and how does it register touch? How does Carol Danvers feel about her body, even having a body, when her consciousness and form have drifted up and down the vibrational wavelength?

Comics do cover trauma, yet often times the characters seem to feel sorry for themselves until someone comes along for them to hit, and in hitting this someone, they find the strength in themselves to project their problems onto some stupid thug with pimped out riot gear and feel contentment in mauling their fellow man over what's "right," or saving some morons from a burning building to renew their basic sense of humanity. Savagery and compassion are to superheroes what boredom and disappointment are to us; part of the deal. If we take into account that a superhero will, most likely, save someone in trouble, then what would pose to them the real challenge of living their "everyday" lives and permitting themselves to feel their woundedness? What can a superhuman accomplish with a little humility, flexibility and ingenuity?

The Confessional of Doubt

My faith wavers. I try to think of the world as I used to and it just doesn't fucking work, anymore. Every emotion comes with four of five contradictory ones, and I have to sift through to figure out which one will serve me best in order to have a discussion with anyone. My mind's filled with reactive, self-aggrandizing doubt. My body communicates something of which I'm not aware and it unnerves me. I don't know if my instincts act in truth, or if I just want an excuse to keep lying around, unable to display basic fucking human affection without repressed narcissism swirling around the corners.

I miss invisibility, and I have no idea what the hell I'm supposed to be doing other than babysitting middle-aged men and their infantile power fantasies, deluding myself into thinking that this job is something I find fulfilling, psychoanalyzing loved ones while trying to sound as right as possible and fucking up any communication, doing everything in my power to make sure I have neither home nor resources, accepting advice only based upon the delivery of it, and whittling away the hours in front of a screen, watching everything else do something instead of me. I don't even fucking know what security is, and by that admission I've done a great job at maintaining a persona of centered spiritual wisdom. Said persona remains just a well-painted but shitty papier-mache mask that's starting to smell and peel.

How can I pull my weight in a relationship when I can't even pull my weight on my own? How can I balance this idiotically overwrought sensitivity with an underdeveloped sense of center and a vicious, pompous misanthropy? How do I get over myself and start fucking living with the rest of the species? I feel weight and irritation, and all I know how to do is treat it like some kind of necessary trial to burn off this unpayable debt I owe the world. I keep wondering if I have something wrong with me, if I've invented something wrong with me so that I won't have to deal with the world, if I have such overweening pride that I choose to defend against any intrusion into my life. I don't feel like I've rested at all, and I don't know what to do, any more.

I wish that my love didn't come with these conflicting insecurities and doubts. I hate it. I want my heart clear and true. I want some fucking clarity. I want what others seem to get from me, but I cannot seem to give myself. I feel drowned, cannibalized and thoroughly vexed. I want to be in the world just as much as I want it utterly devastated, and while I hear and understand the Great Big Tree o' Love and Light branching through the layers and levels of existence, I mostly feel despair at its distance from my ego, and an unceasing urge to submerge my senses in the grime and despair of it. I speak of optimism and hope to disguise my dearth in both categories.

I just wish I could be like Batman and throw off my identity, devoting myself wholly to a cause that comes from Within and Beyond instead of grasping at vaporous phantoms only to uncover a venomous trap I'd laid long before, without my knowledge. I keep trying, and I keep feeling this sharp pull in the opposite direction. I just want some mercy from myself. I just want to know what I have to do to make this life work. If it's right in front of me, just... can I maybe get the eyes to see it, or maybe some little happy glowing signposts so that I can figure out how to devote myself best to that path? I haven't been the best fellow, and I haven't always acted in the most conscientious manner, but I really try to keep myself feeling okay with what I'm doing, and I try to keep my eyes open for what you say, but I fuck up, as humanity does, and as we've built ourselves to do. I neither want to sit next to the Divine, nor do I want to languish in cold, dark Hel; I want, in my deepest heart, to find my Work. I want to find that Work that consumes every fiber of my being, that nourishes both my being and the Great Being. May I ask for these things? May I demonstrate my adoration through my work? I would really appreciate and feel honored for the chance to help.

The Ballad of Greg Feely

The active function, every so often, exceeds its grasp and begins to scramble.

Lately I feel a sense of panic that arises during the seasons involving bureaucracy. It's such an obfuscation, deemed necessary through some irrelevance. I'm sure that if we still cling to these functions that they serve some kind of utility, but to me the tax season, and especially income tax itself, seems an elaborate obfuscation of a clumsy larger entity to insert itself into the everyday life of people who ordinarily wouldn't give a flying fuck. Now, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind the well-managed socialism that seems prevalent in Scandinavian countries, but from what information has crossed my path involving these countries, the whole of it seems pretty well-managed and oriented toward the benefit of all citizens.

See, if the government spent less time trying to arrange all of this financial dickery with corporations and special interest groups, instead spending its time on things like health care, education and jobs, then my cynicism would decrease and I'd be a lot happier with this stupid state of affairs. Nevertheless, Corporatism and the big magic spell that concept has cast over our country and perhaps the world has diverted a lot of time, energy and resources into the most ridiculous pursuits for the sake of feeding useless neuroses and fears.

Maybe it's just me, but most of what we perceive as conspiracy seems a simultaneous paranoid fear reaction, polarized into archetypes of Rich, Fearful Old Man in an Ivory Tower and Anarchistic, Fearful Individualist Outside the City Gates. We're all damned afraid and we're all ready to point our fingers at someone for being The Problem, especially lately. So, that said, what the fuck are any of us doing to unfurl the rest of our fingers, extend our hands and say, "Okay, I was being a dick, and you have a point. We're both nervous and agitated for different reasons, and if you're willing to help me with my shit, I'll help you with yours, and then we'll be a better species for it"?

I understand the value of seeking the source of our shit so that it doesn't have to be so unpleasant, but I also appreciate the value of seeing our shit for what it is and spreading it on our gardens instead of letting it rot in a lab as we test it endlessly for why it smells so bad. We have guts, germs, blood, fat, crap, and all manners of juices squirting up and down our being, and in fact our entire physical manifestation comes from inventive collections of germs into ambulatory bags of carbon reactions, absorbing and emitting all sorts of things. The reactions of our consciousness to this process, this basic, natural process of acting as a living being, have been rather prohibitive, especially given to an imbalance in our current conception of dualism, where one polarity has the attribution of greater value in relation to the other ("Good always triumphs over Evil"). If shit smells bad, it must be bad, and thus the act of handling our crap becomes not a part of a greater spectrum, but a banished universe of horror.

What of our fears drain our resources from our living, fructifying process? How might we choose to utilize this drain in a constructive manner? In what ways can we permit the entire living process into our hearts, and how might we best suffer in order to manifest the desires not of our ego or our consciousness, but of our very Soul?

The Snarling Well Hvergelmir

Since I just don't give enough of a fuck to load up my iTunes with all manner of music, I'm starting to get sick of everything media related. I can feel the sun dig in its heels and tear up at the prospect of diving into Pisces, after spending a month in the unfeeling chaos of the void reminiscent of Aquarius. It's like locking someone in a dark room for a month with nothing but their neuroses to keep them company, then tearing them out only to submerge them in the ocean of the screaming dead. Boy, I'm a chipper one!

Look, I could take the piss and pretend that I like wearing long vests and babble about all the good people you meet amongst the dead, but it's still fucking jarring, especially when you aren't some goobery medium convinced that the universe speaks in linear sentences and coherent faces, only discernible by those with "special powers" or some bullshit like that.

I've been stuck playing Dante's Inferno a whole bunch during my less productively oriented moments. I keep going and going through the game, scrambling through all of the various puzzles and the like, smacking monsters about the face and generally going through all of this gory catharsis, but then my ears key in to the pervasive shrieks and gargles of pain that constantly waft through the environments, all vicious and stomach-turning.

There's some point where I begin to question what the game's really doing. Some passive-aggressive sort might dither about the level of violence in the game, but seriously: it's a game dealing with the Crusades and the Renaissance vision of Hell. On some level, the game actually makes Hell the infected anal sore of the cosmos instead of a cheesy black metal album cover, but on another, certain circles could have stood to have been examined in more excruciating notions of hypocrisy or have had some form of elucidation. The City of Dis, the circle relating to Heresy, kind of left me cold. I mean, D&D undead wizard things with goofy magic staffs, under the name of Pagans? Come the fuck on. Pagans gave the Church fucking Christmas in December, Mother Mary (cognate with the Latin mare, meaning sea), incarnating and resurrecting godhood, and... hold on a sec... HELL! Oh, but why no Pale Queen in the Darkness? Why offer us as the only powerful women of Hell some stupid giant half-naked "Egyptian" with a Glasgow smile climbing a massive cocktower and Dante's sylphid paramore in a pathetic virgin/whore complex? Maybe I'm just too into this kind of thing, but it'd be nice to see the nasty soddering done where the Christian dualist ethos tried to nestle its way into the black womb of Hel, where the cosmogony starts to fall apart and point to its own failures at unifying humanity with Creation, or in fact where it pulls humanity away from Creation so forcefully that one might take a look at the devilishly fabricated dreck such as national origin or creed and vomit on the face of God upon realizing how such associations lead us into the sterility of binary thought.

I demand games of a higher caliber and sophistication of thought than this. It needn't be so goddamn rare. It's fucking lame, and I'm sick of excuses as to the perpetuation of this crap. I want Kratos to fight Atalanta. I want to see vicious, corrupt industrialists with ovaries that commoners swear shoot buckshot and sulfuric acid. I want more of Amanda Waller and Helena Cain. I want to see women antagonists capable of such intricate and brilliant cruelty that none dare consider them some misunderstood soul deserving of empathy, and none would venture to consider themselves lucky to run afoul of them. I want the anti-Lilith, not some blustering gasbag with a mouth full of talk kept closed by a smug smirk holding back the urge to wretch all over her shoulder-padded jacket at her sheer ineptitude at being anything other than a mild frustration and vague sexual interest to a protagonist. If anything, a higher caliber of female villain might hopefully stir some more interesting female heroes.

I want too much from the world of media. The expression of the collective dream has become a vapid, derivative waste. We've become so quick to excuse diversions of our attention toward the manipulations of our time and resources, if only to fuel the self-flagellation that diverts our psychic and emotional ability to heal. We're placid miscarriages still dangling from the rotting placenta of retrospective, in desperate need of resuscitation and a fucking belly button. I want to remember blood, pain, vigor and victory. We deserve life, in all its teeth, venom and horns.

Downcast Malocchio, Coughing Up Benediction

"What do you want?" "Information..." "Well, you won't get it!" "By hook or by crook, we will."

I started reading the Invisibles again. It's been yeeeears since I've picked it up, despite its importance in my life. The fresh perspective, post-Batdeath, post-Crisis, post-ASS, post-LSD communicates so much more. It's a good, stable reminder of why I got into this crap in the first place. I can read Tom O'Bedlam unafraid of becoming a crazy homeless man. I can read King Mob as a walking erect penis dressed in a novelty condom instead of a role model, while still acknowledging his help in keeping me from leaping off of whatever I deemed fatal enough.

Pretty soon, information will become the next resource we mine. We'll scratch at the freshly-mined furrows of our brains, weeping as some entrepreneur sets nanites to start picking up whatever memories can earn enough to buy that big stupid boat or fucked-up jacket to replace the utter disinterest of the genitals. Some day we'll be staring at the Mechanoid Frontier, where machines self-evolve into maddened ecosystems beyond our control, and we'll have all manner of brave sorts on Robot Safari to get more of that precious information. Geez, I dunno if this'll end up a vibrant dream or a terrifying nightmare. Sometimes you just hope that some of that information will burst the blockade set up to "make it" in the average corporate stooge, and maybe pull the stick out the ass of the snide intellectual.

As much as I exist Right the Fuck Now, often to both my benediction and my detriment, I think about the future an awful lot. Deep down, there's this little Utopian voice yip-yipping away at how cool everything will be once it's all said and done, but then the Dystopian voice chimes up at the grotesque sacrifices that need to be made to make that future. It's sometimes hard to keep track of all of the colliding multiverses within the imagination and their feasibility in response to physical existence and the patterns found therein. How aggressively do we want to drag these things into the realm of physical experience? With development comes some act of violence on something.

So much hinges on our own concepts as a species, but how much control do we ourselves have over the concepts that we find unsound or offensive? How do we address the perspective in our darkest corners who tends to the blackness so that we don't drown in filth and despair? How do we open a discourse to the internal scapegoat we've cast into the wilderness to bear our maledictions, our blame? What wisdom does this wretched creature bring? How do we control our impulses and self-righteousness when it says something that might be right?

Creating Grimalkin Lane

Today, Gunderic Mollusk and co embark on a new adventure: trying to create a comic book publishing company from scratch. So far, it's just an idea.

It all started from the most innocuous of moments. To preface, My stepmother, a self-made woman who came to America to create opportunities for herself, gave me one of the most compassionate interventions that I've ever experienced. I'd clouded myself in the realms of the spiritual, escaping into magic for magic's sake as my reason for being, in hopes it would give me an answer. She more or less laid it out that if I didn't make a change in my life, I was doomed. I honored her words, yet shelved them for the rest of the trip. The door blew open to our home in South Philly while I had my childhood friend from Delaware, his mistress and her cousin over for carousing and musing, catching up, et cetera, without anyone noticing. My roommate enters, and of course his cat-preservation instincts kick in fiercely, prompting my erstwhile compatriot to hit the road. It made for an awkward evening, yet the confluence of events overwhelmed me. Being the teetering emotional Tower card I am, I've let no one, not even myself, in on exactly how deeply my existential woes had cut into my being. I fainted a few times, and eventually my roommate, in his infinite compassion, helped me to the bed.

Dare I say it, it was a great time to hit a "ripple" from a previous psychonautical experience. I hadn't listened to my inner promptings up to this point; I merely reported them. I hadn't listened to the voice that told me that if I continued to ignore this drive for purpose, I would self-destruct. My stepmother... really hit it on the nose. Her primary quote was as follows: "Without financial independence, you can't achieve mental independence." I realized that, even though I don't much care for the ways money works, or the process of making it, I can put it aside for a goal that I find enriching. In my head, I've had little musings about post-human stories trapped in superhero conventions, superhero stories trapped in self-referential neurosis, and all manner of these things, but I haven't written a blessed thing outside of tables of correspondences and thousands of rewritten character histories, changed names, and an endlessly complex interpretation of supernatural abilities. If I get keyed into anything organizational, be it cleaning, folding laundry, doing the dishes, putting paperwork in order, and anything along those lines, I'm methodically unstoppable until I hit a wall. I need to use this to create this company. I want Philadelphia to have a comics scene. I want to make a home-grown pile of wierdo comics for people who like both forms of media under the name Avatar, who like canceled TV shows, who want to take control of the effect of the superhero medium and create marketing for compassion, sincerity and the evolution of mankind. I want to see Lance Evaporator onesies on babies who'll make the new economy that'll permit free energy. I want to see Gunderic Mollusk patches on the beat-up jeans of art school vixens who innovate art therapy programs that prove that society needs autistic, bipolar and schizophrenic kids, and it needs to find some better ways of translating their viewpoints aside from pills, pressure and paper trails. Yeah, I want to change the world. I want to make comic books. I want comic books to change the world. This is how I will do it.

Skanda lies bleeding, pierced by his own spear

We air the grievance publicly, yet not really. The catharsis occurs through this internet medium, and thus, our own identity as an individual becomes more complicated, bringing the notion of individuality to a possible conundrum in which the matters, as filtered to create this toy persona, express even less than the little we understand from actively living. The extent to which we take these personally comes from awkward moments, seeing the pictured body of a person manifest in close spatial proximity, wondering if, perhaps, you really know anything about the person inhabiting the body pictured, or if somehow through some internet quibble you've said or done anything to set this person against you, precluding their conversing with you. How does one understand collective value with so many proxies and conditions? How much do we allow these conditions to pre-emptively deny experience? That said, it's the due of the manic/depressive and the psychotic to sense few, if any, social barriers. Remember when those folks just did shrooms with the local fauna and had jobs set up for them? Remember when choosing that path didn't have the same social stigma and terror behind it?

I suppose it's my dharma this round to feel connected to the world, still. Maybe next round I'll do the renunciate dance, or at least I'll tell myself that to get over sadhu-envy. I feel like I have pressure to adhere to civilized structure, as I've few faculties to remove myself from it. Do I create those myself, and if so, what do I choose to ignore in order to maintain a certain level of being "psyched out" of doing anything?

Knowledge ends up little more than odd cues more or less resembling sentimentality's stodgy, logical cousin in the perspective of the observing conscious medium. Sometimes, it pay to remember that wisdom and ignorance are a polarity, and stupidity has its own virtues. The collective will have an infinite amount of opposing values. How do we understand the revulsion we have toward opposing values within ourselves? How many of us have devolved to the bumper sticker displays of our conviction and conscience? Do we need to laud our ignorance, or use our charity to justify our hardened hearts? What happened to compassion? I mean, really? What happened to sincerity? So far, I hear the word and the only whisper I get is "oh yeah, like Fugazi." Is Fugazi really the last bastion of sincerity in the world? I mean, I don't even really like listening to Fugazi. Why are we always seeing an attack, or making up fake enemies we can't see? Wouldn't we rather look at that, faint, dying little pulsing heart at the bottom of the tree, weakly beating like a child dying of leukemia, trying to keep us all together, trying to unite us as One? Why must we fight the Adversary around us instead of heal the Unity in ourselves? When did the heroes stop building and creating? Where's our next Hammurabi*? Where's our next Alexander*? Where's the next Lorenzo di Medici*?

*- I'm well aware these guys were dicks. Just sayin', we could use some major constructive cultural shifts into realms imagined.