mindpollution.org

200 posts later, I finally have a chance to catch my breath.

No, I haven’t been held hostage by a shadowy government agency determined to mine the secrets hidden inside my subconscious mind. And no, I didn’t have an unfortunate accident that resulted in temporary amnesia and forced me to rediscover what’s really important in life through a series of comical misunderstandings. I’ve just been very busy with ComicMix, as the 200-plus posts tied to my name should indicate.

To be honest, I’m enjoying ComicMix so much that I keep losing track of time and, unfortunately, neglecting to keep people in the loop via this digital soapbox of mine. Heck, I’m getting so caught up in it that I occasionally forget to eat lunch, pick up Jessica at the train station after work or, since I’m working from home now, put on pants. When I’m really on a roll with work, I occasionally forget all three — which makes for a very chilly ride in the car.

So what else has been happening lately? Well, I had all sorts of plans for how to play catch-up with everyone out there — all sorts of clever list arrangements and timelines and interlinking event details — but in the end, I decided to go with something I call “Endings and Beginnings”… Consider it a theme list, folks.

First, the beginnings:

1. I began working full-time for ComicMix this month — that’s the big one. Don’t worry, the list gets more interesting as we go along.

2. Jessica started work for Newsweek as part of a six-month contract to assist with their online video production. This one is especially interesting, because it means that we’ve made a complete 180-degree turn from our situation one year ago, in which I was heading out for work each morning and she was working from home. She hated working from home, but I love it — mainly because I don’t have to wear pants (which we touched on earlier in this post), and I get to hang out with my cats all day. My cats are excellent office mates, and lick themselves in strange places far less often than some of my past coworkers. Go figure.

3. I bought one of those Bluetooth hands-free ear clips, and I am now exploring the depths of my own hypocrisy. I’ve been adamantly refusing to buy one for years due to my firm belief that: A) when people use them in public, I’m never sure if they’re having phone conversations or trying to reason with the voices in their heads telling them to give a Colombian Necktie to the next person who looks at them funny; B) my previous phone wasn’t capable of using them anyway, so it was a moot point; C) the only reason bills like the one that outlawed talking on your cell phone while driving ever passed in New York State was due to legislators investing heavily in hands-free technology producers prior to the vote. Looking back on these reasons now, I realize that I have a truly weird sense of principles.

Basically, though, I’ve realized that it’s just easier to type or drive while talking when you have one of them. Heck, now that I’m Bluetooth-enabled, it’s much easier to do all three at once. Keep an eye out for me on the road, folks — I’m that guy.

4. I recently began reading Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, as well as Go Gators, An Oral History of Florida’s Pursuit of Gridiron Glory, by various authors. I’ve intended to read some of Mailer’s work for nearly a decade now, and started reading The Naked and the Dead at least a dozen times. For some reason, I can never seem to get past the first 60 pages or so, and always end up putting it down to read later. Well, “read later” eventually turns into “pick it up a year down the road and realize that you don’t remember where you left off” and the cycle continues. I found a paperback copy of American Deam in a used bookstore’s 25-cent bin a while ago, so the grand experiment begins anew.

As for the Gridiron Glory book, well, that’s just because there’s no college football on television these days.

5. I began re-watching the first season of the recent Doctor Who series (with Christopher Eccleston) from the start, after finding a cheap Season One DVD set. In doing so, I’ve also made a Doctor Who fan out of Jessica — which thrills me to no end. I originally turned her on to the series by making her watch the Season Three episode “Blink,” which features a different Doctor and actually very little of The Doctor at all, but some of the best writing of the series. Personally, I like the current Doctor, David Tennant, far more than Eccleston, as I always felt Eccleston was too alien and distant. This week, we reached the Season One Finale, and having watched all three seasons I’m reminded of how well the Doctor Who crew pull off the season-ending, “nothing will ever be the same again” episodes these days.

6. I also began watching Codemonkeys. It amuses me immensely.

7. I started making my way through The Greatest American Hero: Season Two, but I’m only able to catch an episode here and there due to Jessica’s extreme dislike for the show. And by “extreme dislike,” I mean that she hates the show with the fire of a thousand suns and feels just as negatively about a show featuring William Katt in a superhero costume as I feel about, well, anything involving Larry the Cable Guy. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate Larry the Cable Guy? Seriously, folks, I’m quite sure that every time he opens his mouth, America’s collective IQ drops 1/10 of a point. I’m willing to bet heavily on it.

Getting back to Greatest American Hero, if you have a chance to check out the DVDs of this series, do so simply to witness the raw beauty of 1980s special-effects for television. At one point during a recent episode, I actually paused the disc and re-watched a scene 6 times just to confirm that yes, when the scene called for William Katt’s slim, blond-haired character to fly out of an airplane, they did indeed put a blond wig on a stuntman with a massive head of curly black hair and a thick Tom Selleck mustache. You really don’t even need to pause it, because it’s that jarring. One moment, William Katt is leaping out of the plane in his red superhero suit, and the next moment, there’s some heavyset, mustached guy wearing the same superhero suit, but sporting a blond afro wig strapped over his skydiving helmet. The worst part of it all is that the shot is angled in such a way that the mustache guy is coming right at you. Soon the camera switches to an overhead view, and it becomes painfully obvious that the so-far-from-William-Katt-it’s-frightening stuntman is also wearing a parachute backpack overthe suit, with the standard set of between-the-leg and over-the-shoulder straps and harnesses.

Oh, Stephen J. Cannell, what fun you had at our expense.

Now for the part of this post where I go over some of the recent “endings” in my life:

1. I ended my job search. This is only noteworthy because, within 4 days of accepting the position with ComicMix, I received 7 job offers. In the two months prior to taking the ComicMix position, when I was hunting for jobs 22 out of 24 hours each day, I received approximately 3 or 4 offers. Funny how that works — funny in that “shaking your fist at the sky and screaming ‘Why must you taunt me so???’” sort of way.

2. I finished selling off nearly $400 of comics in my massive “I don’t want to move these to another apartment” sale. Among the notable departures from my collection was a full run of the second volume of The Ultimates, one of the only series in Marvel Comics’ “take old characters and reimagine them in today’s world” line of titles tat ever really clicked with me. What did I learn from this blowout sale? People in Germany love comics (I sold at least a dozen to German buyers), and no one ever bids on an item until the last five minutes of the auction.

3. I finally concluded Forever, the Pete Hamill novel I’ve been reading for the last month or so. Don’t let the time it took me to finish it dissuade you from the book, as it’s actually quite a good book, and I think the long time it took me to complete it was as much a function of my subconscious desire to prolong the story as it was a function of my busy schedule. Here’s the quick and dirty summary of the story: It’s about an Irishman who travels to Manhattan when the island is still being settled and, through a series of events, becomes immortal — but only as long as he never leaves the island. It’s a great read that, as much as I hate to admit it, really put a dent in my disgust for Manhattan.

4. I finally got around to playing, and finishing, Silent Hill 2 on the Playstation 2. I’ve heard from a number of reliable gamers that this was the best of the series — and the game that best summed up the appeal of the Silent Hill franchise. Despite the evolution of videogame technology since the time when Silent Hill 2 hit shelves, I was really impressed. In fact, it was one of those games that I started playing with the lights off, but eventually told Jessica I needed to switch them back on “so I could see better.” Really, though, I was just trying to keep from wetting myself. Good times, good times.

That’s about it for now, though. It’s nearly 2 AM here and time to get some sleep. Lately I’ve been telling myself that it will be entirely feasible to post here more often and, in fact, it couldn’t hurt to shed some light on what I’m up to in the ComicMix scene most days. Now that I have the big recap out of the way, the daily catch-up posts should be no problem, right? We’ll see how it goes.