A Fairy Tale

Long before science and reason replaced alchemy and faith, there was a sizable coastal village named Tempus. A port town, Tempus boasted a population of nearly a thousand, almost one per cent of them literate, and saw a few thousand sailors, traders, and opportunists pass through its wide streets every day. Tempus was flush with cash, but not only because of its proximity to the sea. No, the town’s coffers were filled mainly with the money from tourists who had come to see the Great Spire.

No one was sure when the Great Spire was built, or who had built it. Many believed that the town grew around the spire, though the town’s intellectuals were certain that the reverse was true. The assumption was that the spire, really a tall, thin tower that rose nearly three-hundred feet into the sky, was built as a lookout post before the dense surrounding forest had been cleared and Tempus’ port could be viewed from street level. The one window at the top of the Great Spire facing the sea seemed to certify this fact. However, as impressive and mysterious the Great Spire was, tourists did not come to see the structure itself. No, tourists came to see the inhabitant of the tower, a trapped princess whose name was, fittingly enough, Princess.

It seemed people were less sure about how Princess had been captured in the tower, or by whom, than they were about the Great Spire’s origin. Even the eldest citizen of Tempus couldn’t remember a time that Princess wasn’t trapped in the Great Spire, languidly staring out of the only window at its uppermost point and ignoring throngs of sight-seers below. No one thought to ask her why she was there, or who had put her there, or why she still appeared as young as ever though she had been in her prison for at least thirty years, possibly longer. The people of Tempus didn’t care, they were glad to have something in the town that was worth seeing. As long as Princess remained in the Great Spire, Tempus would be one of the wealthiest port towns in the land.

One day, a knight in shining armor came to Tempus and strode purposefully to the base of the Great Spire. The crowd parted as he approached and murmured about the knight in hushed tones. The knight pushed up his helmet’s visor and peered up at Princess, who held her gaze to some point on the horizon as always. His features revealed, the knight appeared a handsome, rugged sort, no stranger to violence or romance. The knight then did something that no one had ever done before: he called out to Princess.

“What ho, fair maiden,” said the knight in a booming voice that caused the nearest people to reel in surprise, “are you all right?”

The crowd began to buzz with excitement as Princess looked down for the first time in anyone’s memory. Some gawkers hung their heads in shame for having made such spectacle of Princess’ plight. If she felt condemnatory, she didn’t let on in mannerisms or speech. In a loud but feminine voice that no one had heard before, Princess called down: “I’m fine. Just bored.”

Emboldened by this response, the knight called out to Princess again, “Why are you in the Great Spire? Can you come and go at will?”

Princess shook her head, her brunette locks bobbing lightly around her face. “I was trapped here some time ago, the only door out is locked. By virtue of a magic spell I can never age nor die of hunger while I am kept in this tower. But my life is a waking death. I would love to get out of here.”

The knight grinned broadly at what he perceived to be a challenge. “Fair princess, I will extract you from your lofty prison, for I am Knight Aurumate, and rescuing captured maidens is what I do.”

Princess laughed a hearty, sarcastic laugh that ended with an unbecoming snort. “You can not rescue me, good knight, for I am locked up here as tight as a beetle’s asshole. The spiral staircase leading to my room is fraught with dangers, including an immortal skeleton warrior, a three-headed dragon who breathes fire, ice, and acid from its corresponding heads, and a mystical chasm that looks like it can be leaped but which is always just wide enough to be impassable. And, if you get through those trials–which no one ever has–you will have to answer three riddles from the four-sided pyramid outside my door. The penalty for answering incorrectly is instant death, though I can’t confirm that since none have ever reached the four-sided pyramid.”

Knight Aurumate’s grin widened even more so that it looked almost like a hysterical grimace. “Nonetheless, fair princess, I shall best these trials and arrive at your door in short order for your rescue. Is there any aid you can give me, your humble servant?”

Princess perked up a bit. No one had tried to rescue her in ages, for so long that she’d entirely given up on the possibility. But this brave knight, this handsome Knight Aurumate seemed like he could fit the bill. And what would be the harm in trying? She began to feel something she had not felt since before she was imprisoned: Princess felt hope. And, braced by this hope, Princess touched the charm that hung on a thin necklace, an iron key. After stroking the cool metal for a few moments, she abruptly snatched it off her neck and tossed it down to the knight.

“This key will open the door to my room, dear knight.” said Princess, “That is my only copy, so you had better make good on your promise!” Knight Aurumate bowed graciously at the waist and went to open the door at the base of the Great Spire. It pushed open easily, which caused the amassing crowd to issue a collective gasp: no one had ever tried that before. Knight Aurumate turned to the crowd and gave a friendly wave, then slipped into the doorway and vanished into the darkness. The door of the Great Spire stayed open, but none of Tempus’ citizens would go near the doorway.

No one could see it, but Knight Aurumate defeated the immortal skeleton warrior near the bottom of the tower’s spiral staircase. A little further up, he sliced the necks of the three-headed dragon before any of them could exhale. Almost immediately after that, he came to the mystical chasm which looked to be a couple of feet wide but was deceptively wider. Knight Aurumate crossed the chasm with ease. After a few more stairs, he found himself at the four-sided pyramid, a waist-high glowing structure just outside the heavy iron door which held Princess captive in the Great Spire. The four-sided pyramid asked three riddles–very difficult ones, mind you, ones that you’ve never heard and which you certainly couldn’t answer–and Knight Aurumate answered them correctly. The four-sided pyramid stopped glowing and seemed to power down, allowing the knight to approach the door unmolested.

Knight Aurumate proudly strode to the door. “I am here, fair maiden, to rescue you!” He fumbled for the key in his satchel and went to open the lock. However, he couldn’t find a keyhole in its usual place under the door handle. Knight Aurumate looked on the hinged side of the door, but there was no keyhole there, either. He searched the entire face of the door looking for a lock while Princess urged him to hurry from behind the iron slab. Knight Aurumate felt all over the door, then began feeling in the jambs for some sort of secret latch or hole. After several minutes, he despaired and called out to Princess: “Maiden, I am at the door but I cannot find the keyhole. How do I unlock the door?”

“Oh,” replied Princess, thoughtfully, “you can’t. It’s locked from the inside.”

Artists are Fucking Assholes

In producing a variety of pointless creative ventures, I’ve had the opportunity to work and interact with many different artists. I do this for two reasons: one, because my craft and ambition are severely lacking, and two, so I can split the forthcoming derision and jeers with another person. Frankly, I’m more prone to blame the whole thing on them: “I didn’t want to make a Ku Klux Klan robe out of Tyvek home insulation! It was all her idea!” Whatever the case, I’ve known many artists that are proficient in a variety of media, and by and large I can say that most artists you’ll meet are fucking assholes.

Interestingly, artists seem to align their poor behavior along their chosen form of expression, meaning that a musician will be a different kind of an asshole than a writer, though they both be assholes. Here’s a short list of the kinds of experiences I’ve had with certain kinds of artists (or arteestes, as many prefer to be called):

Musicians

The rare times you’ll see a musician wearing a wristwatch, know that it is just for show: no musician can actually tell time. People that make music are habitually late to everything, and seem to operate on their own internal clocks. Perhaps musicians can’t understand numbers except where they define a time signature, because they appear to have a fuzzy concept on money and value as well. A music maker will either work themselves to the bone for a pittance, or fart around and waste time yet expect a bundle of cash for it. Whatever they’re paid, most musicians will spend their money on drugs and booze anyway. Musicians like free liquor, well-worn concert t-shirts, and people that take their inane chatter seriously. Musicians dislike sunlight and fiscal responsibility.

Painters and Sculptors

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and if you happen to talk to the artist who made a particular piece, you will probably hear all of them. No painting or sculpture can ever be bad, in the creator’s eyes, merely misunderstood. And they’ll have no compunction about explaining it to you until you understand or acquiesce. These types of artists don’t ascribe to normal social conventions like tact or bathing, and consider their implementation to be a kind of oppression. Despite the fact that they work in visual mediums, a lot of these artists look like slobs. Painters and sculptors like weird caffeinated drinks, expensive art supplies, and unventilated gallery shows. Painters and sculptors dislike supermarket cheese and commercial art.

Actors

Some artists pursue art because they want to share beauty with the world, or because they believe they have something important to convey. The only reason people go into acting is to escape their shitty childhoods. A profession where people are paid to lie, acting should be very emotionally taxing, and yet off stage or behind the camera actors are usually more mercurial and prone to hissy fits than anyone else. There may be genetic reasons behind why so many actors are sucseptible to bouts of sickness which cause them to cancel on their engagements at the last minute. Actors like attention, melodrama, and wearing scarves. Actors dislike monogamy and other actors.

Filmmakers

Being the youngest of all media discussed in this essay, you’d think that most filmmakers would be humble and mindful of past masters. To the contrary, no artist wants accolades for reinventing the wheel more than the person behind the camera with the megaphone. In another life, these people might be fascist dictators; in this reality, they are curt taskmasters who, when they need their shoelaces tied, will employ thirty-two assistants, one for each eyelet on their shoes. Directors and producers are some of the most loathed people in existence (mostly by the people they work with), ranking slightly above proctologists but well below trained ninja assassins. Filmmakers like trespassing, yelling, and making people stand still for long periods of time. Filmmakers dislike disobedience and editing film.

Writers

Never call a writer a “writer,” instead call him or her an “author,” unless you like being haughtily corrected. Writers tend to regard deadlines with suspicion and will usually miss their target dates out of spite. People who write will never say “hide” when they can say “obfuscate,” will correct your use of a semicolon, and often mispronounce words that they’ve read but never heard spoken. They are also fat and have stupid names like Reggie. Writers like solitude, comfortable chairs, and the letter “e.” Writers dislike paper cuts and criticism.

Let’s Dispel Some New York Myths

New York: The City that Never Sweeps. Amid the piles of refuse and swarms of man-eating rats, there are enduring myths that have carried from one generation to the next like old wives’ tales. Not necessarily myths like the origin of the word “knickerbocker” or how the Dutch fleeced local Indians with a trunk of beads and some pelts, I’m talking about the lies we tell ourselves which make living in a city of nine million people remotely palatable. We don’t have to live with the lies any longer, only the soul-crushing misery of being anonymous yet surrounded at all times.

Living in New York City, I don’t need to have a car.

You hear this one mainly from young professionals who live in crowded neighborhoods where discovering a secure parking spot is less probable than finding a winning lottery ticket. Let’s be real now: living in New York City, it isn’t reasonable to have a car, whether you want one or not. And while it is relatively easy to travel around the city on mass transit, it is goddamned near impossible to get any further than Yonkers or Jersey City without some planning. So let’s not act like New York has done you some kind of favor by making it prohibitive for you to own a car. Whether it’s via sky-high insurance rates or draconian alternate side of the street parking rules, the choice has been taken away from you, and your exuberance over this fact is reminiscent of Stockholm Syndrome.

Only in New York City.

This is often uttered by passers-by having witnessed something abominable, like a homeless guy shitting into a coffee can at a crowded intersection or some lunatic being hog-tied by cops after sexually assaulting random women on Forty-Second Street. These things don’t happen only in New York City, in fact you can see incidences like these happening in rural America all the time on television shows like COPS and World’s Wildest Sexually Assaulting Lunatics. But the real issue here isn’t that it’s erroneous to claim certain sickening events as being indigenous to New York, but that we really shouldn’t accept this kind of shit anywhere. The attitude is that the city is too crowded, we’re too busy, there’s too much visual stimulation to worry about some guy having a stroke with his eyes bugging out in Washington Square Park. The full phrase should go, “Only in New York City would we watch some toothless, piss-soaked maniac heckle grade school girls and do absolutely nothing about it.”

If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.

Okay, so this is actually a song lyric, but it does also appear to be a popular delusion among New York City dwellers. The idea of New York being a boundless city of endless opportunity is a pervasive one that goes back almost to its very inception. And perhaps it was true, at one time. Now, there may be just as many opportunities as there were in 1911, but there are about fifty times as many people competing for them. And lord help you if you want to make it in the arts in New York City, you’ve never seen more disaffected live crowds or dismissive art patrons in your life. You’ll be breaking your neck to churn out high-quality canvases and meanwhile some undergrad art student will become the local darling for spray painting bird stencils on old blocks of wood or something. If you enjoy being a small fish in a big pond, then New York City is for you. Not just for the dearth of opportunity but because it will really excite your masochistic side.

My apartment is very cozy.

No, your apartment is not very cozy. It’s very small. You’ve stuffed it with high-end electronics and expensive cooking utensils that you’ve no idea how to use, but it hasn’t made the space any larger. If anything, you’re just whittling away at the little real estate you’ve got with kitschy throw pillows and oversized, shitty paintings your friends did. There are people in third world countries who’ve got more living space than you do, and despite the fact that they have to poop in a hole in the ground, at least that doesn’t unexpectedly back up and splash toilet water everywhere once a week. If you weren’t captivated by the encompassing New York lie that makes you eat shit and like it, you’d probably rebel. But as it is, you’re so shell shocked from having to stand elbow to elbow with smelly people during your commute home every evening, the two-hundred square feet of space you’re renting for an exorbitant sum seems like a relief. Just imagine what kind of car you could get with the rent that you pay.

It Occurs to Me that Perhaps Pornography is Not the Altruistic Venture I’ve Made It Out to Be

My mother is an extremely intelligent, capable person. Most people warm to her immediately and she lives a life rich with activity and intellectual pursuits. It’s no wonder, then, that I have grown up expecting women I meet to be equally smart and able, or at least approach it. I have a few male friends who are provincial and barely literate, but I expect more from women. I realize this promotes a kind of double-standard in my world, and I already wrote a piece about it. I think the answer is to drop my retarded male friends and stick with a more intelligent set in general, whether they have ovaries or not.

Like pretty much every other guy, I look at pornography. I don’t view it compulsively and I don’t have a voluminous knowledge of it, but I do use porn for masturbating and have done for over twenty years now. I’ve never thought to reconcile the fact that I hold such respect for women in my life and female figures that I admire, but I have no compunctions about abusing myself to some moaning, saline-heavy broad writhing around in a kiddie pool full of baby oil. My general, abstract idea was that if a person decides to make money with their body, that’s their business. I don’t believe in a moral absolute where exchanging money for fucking is inherently wrong. I have never exchanged money to fuck, but I was okay with it in principle. I’ve certainly spent money on pornography through the years, so I figure it’s all in the same bag.

Recently, I have had cause to review my thinking on prostitution and pornography, and I see how silly it was. I created a scenario where a person would come from a loving, supportive family, grow up with a completely healthy and confident sexual identity, go on to college and grad school, graduate with honors, and then for some weird fucking reason decide that they’d like to have a career selling their nether regions rather than, say, anything else at all. Upon reasoning it out, I saw that I’d created a this fallacy, this ludicrous scenario where the women to whom I pounded my pud were willing supplicants to the most lucrative industry on the planet. As if I was, in fact, doing them a favor by examining their close-up crotches like an armchair gynecologist. Frankly, my legions of brainwashed readers, I feel a little ashamed.

I’m sure there are some rational people who make a completely cogent decision to exchange their bodies for money. But the people who exit the industry wealthy and unscathed are so few so as to be completely negligible: most people who get into porn are a mess. And these are people protected by a union; I’m sure prostitutes have it far worse. It’s difficult for me to separate my excuse for pornography from the facts: probably by unconscious design, I’ve never sought out any specific information on porn stars or the industry, save for what filters into mainstream news. I don’t condemn pornography and prostitution, but there’s got to be a better way for me to get my nut off. Luckily for me, I love to read: http://www.literotica.com/stories/index.php (not safe for work)

Babs, They Did You Dirty

Batman is often projected as an inconsolable loner, someone so emotionally distant and single-minded in his crusade that no one can ever get close to him. Funny thing, really, since Batman works with a gang of no fewer than half a dozen superheroes at any given time. Suffice to say, if you slip on a pair of tights and a domino mask in Batman’s town, you’ll be working for him soon enough whether you like it or not. It’s a wonder that criminals even attempt to cause mischief in Gotham, it being the best-patrolled city in the fictional DC Universe.

Batman’s cadre of muscular weirdos are organized via a high-tech Bluetooth (or maybe Bat-tooth) system of intelligence gathering and dissemination. This system is controlled by the enigmatic Oracle, who we, the readers, know is Barbara Gordon, daughter of Commissioner James Gordon and one-time Batgirl. Barbara “Babs” Gordon was the first Batgirl, she whose fiery tresses streamed from beneath her cowl and whose reversible skirt could turn into a cape. All that changed with the publication of Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, a Batman story where the Joker shoots Babs in the spine and photographs her naked in an attempt to drive her father insane. That doesn’t work: Commissioner Gordon is seemingly none the worse for the wear after enduring a surrealistic ordeal at the hands of the Joker, Batman captures the Clown Prince of Crime who presumably gets carted off to Arkham Asylum. Everything is as it was before, ready for the next installment of Batman where he’ll probably slap Killer Croc around while Robin hops about making whimsical puns.

Except for Barbara Gordon. She wound up crippled for life.

I have to thank the brilliant and wonderfully talented Sarah Velez for opening my eyes to this inconsistency. Because, for people whose lives are too full of joy to scrutinize such things, characters become critically damaged and bounce back to a full recovery on a regular basis in comic books. In fact, superheroes routinely die and come back to life. There are very few permanent changes to the status quo in comics: whatever given facts you know about a character are almost always immutable in the long run. To make this point even more cruelly, within the Batman universe alone there have been so many miraculous recoveries and lives after death that Barbara Gordon sticks out like a sore, wheelchair-bound thumb. Batman, himself, had his back broken and still resturned to full power to kick the crap out of a pretender to his throne. Yet Babs sits behind an array of computer screens, sending intel to any garish acrobat that skirts the rooftops of Gotham with an earpiece in.

I didn’t notice this inconsistency at first because, well, by and large I never gave a shit about Batgirl. Similarly, I never cared about Ace the Bat-Hound or Bat Mite or any of the other ancillary characters that padded out Batman Family. It just seems uncreative, really, to hit paydirt with Batman and then saddle anything that has a pulse with a pointy-eared cowl and a bat silhouette across its chest. It’s ironic, because if Batman was real–which is to say if dogs wore bedroom slippers and people walked on their hands–there certainly would be scores of Bat-wannabes. But as long as I am believing that there is a reality where citizens condone a maniac shooting zip lines along the roofs of Gotham City, I prefer to believe that he’s the only one doing it.

I would be remiss to sell Batgirl short, however. Batgirl is one of the most recognized characters in Batman’s many media incarnations. And unlike quickie characters like Bat Woman (the original one, not the post-Crisis lady), Barbara Gordon has a rich back story and a tight DNA connection to one of the main people in Batman: Commissioner James Gordon. So while I was never a huge Batgirl fan, I never mocked her stories like I did, say, Alfred Pennyworth’s. I took it for granted that she hung around, and suffered the occasional romantic tension between she and Robin whenever that cropped up.

But the bigger reason I didn’t notice how fucked up it is that Barbara Gordon has been left in a wheelchair is because her newer incarnation as Oracle is so awesome. Using her as a conduit for information has made Batman almost totally unstoppable: through Oracle, he has access to city plans, blueprints, surveillance camera feeds, and just about anything else that can be divined via computer. I think Batman is the first hero to make such use of the information superhighway, and it would be difficult now to imagine him doing his work otherwise. Oracle is so awesome, she’s even spawned her own successful and long-running comic book series, Birds of Prey where she’s the point person for a team of lady heroes. The comic birthed an awful television series that died after thirteen episodes, but I don’t blame Oracle for that.

Oracle has become something of a handi-capable idol to comic book fans everywhere, making her miraculous recovery an even more remote possibility. That, claims DC, is reason enough not to return Babs to her walking state, particularly since a few other waifs have adopted the Batgirl name (if not the precise mantle) with reasonably good effect. And for handicapped fans, I’m glad for them. But it’s still fucked up. There’s no reason an entirely new character couldn’t have been introduced, or even dredged up from days of forgotten comics lore, who could have become Oracle. Alan Moore himself was shocked that DC decided to keep Barbara in a wheelchair: he never intended The Killing Joke to be canonical, and even if it did become part of Batman’s continuity, he assumed she would be repaired and walking around right as rain like every other fucking hero in comics. But that didn’t happen. The Flash died and came back to life twenty years later, but Barbara Gordon still rolls around on dubs.

I think it all boils down to misogyny, personally. While there have been plenty of female heroes who have been battered and broken only to make a full recovery, it’s safe to say that they’d never leave Green Arrow in a wheelchair. Hell, they’d never leave Jimmy Olsen in a wheelchair, and he’s not even a superhero (well, most of the time he isn’t). But Batgirl, being a kind of second-string female in a very macho comic where a grown man horses around with a teenage boy, she’s okay to make an example of. It’s fucked up, and despite that I think Oracle is a great and integral character to the Batman universe, I can’t read the comic anymore without thinking about the disservice that’s been done to this fictional person.

If you’re the type of person who doesn’t click hotlinks, then please visit Sarah Velez’s website at http://sarahhorrocks.wordpress.com/. She’s really talented.

Let’s Agree to Disagree

For almost five billion revolutions
Our planet has spun ’round
Give or take a few thousand years
(My watch was not yet wound)

Cosmic forces spewed red-hot goo
And, at first, it did expand
Then, over time, cooled and shrank
Into that on which we stand

That’s how it passed, I do not lie
Though others claim as such
They feel our whole existence
Came from bristles of God’s brush

If that is how you’d like the tale
I’ll be happy to adapt it:
God painted Earth with thermal law
The Big Bang was His palette

When Fortune Cookies Actually Contained Fortunes

Once upon a time in America, Chinese food was considered exotic. It was served on porcelain dishes with metal flatware in opulently-decorated restaurants. Golden dragons, keyhole doorways, and ornate tapestries could be seen in these Chinese restaurants, which were staffed by attentive waiters in gold and red waistcoats, the runners with a bleached white towel draped over their forearms. The restaurant owner would stop by your table and broadly smile as he asked how everyone was enjoying their meal. If you ordered Moo Shu, a waiter would expertly make the first serving for you at table side, using only two spoons and a slathering of plum sauce.

And fortune cookies did, at one time, contain fortunes. Not meaningless platitudes like, “Your joy is infectious,” or “Dream big, act bigger,” but actual, honest-to-goodness fortunes like, “You will come into money,” or “The one you love will return your affections.” I never did see a negative fortune. I never saw a fortune cookie where the slip inside read, “You will soon be diagnosed with a fatal illness.” I think I might have placed more stock in them as a device for knowing the future if they’d ever dispensed an unpleasant prognosis. “Your adopted mother is sleeping with your boyfriend.” If you fold that into one in five cookies, eventually you’re bound to hit paydirt.

Last night, my girlfriend and I had the extreme pleasure to visit New Ruan’s Restuarant in Bensonhurst with our friends Joe G. and the Radical Donna Fran. They know of my penchant for classic Chinese restaurants and mentioned this place to me last year when they spent a short while living in the area. Let me tell you, it did not disappoint, not in decor or service or sickly-sweet American-Chinese food which is a different taste altogether from what I call “chicken feet Chinese food.” It’s like McDonald’s: if you want McDonald’s, you don’t want a hamburger, you want that gummy, lukewarm patty churned out in the back room from McDonald’s own Play-Doh machine. Same goes for Chinese food: if you want the real deal dim sum and a broiled fish with the eyes still in it, then go to Chinatown. But if you want bright red spare ribs that make your fingers sticky and a wonton soup with bok choy in it, then you must check out New Ruan’s.

It isn’t very big, but New Ruan’s makes good on every foot of available space by hanging red paper lanterns from the ceiling and displaying an awesome faux brass mural of some berserk ancient Chinese whatsitz that looks kind of like a bunch of children swarming another child in a rickshaw. Or something. When the dapper Chinese waiter with pomade in his hair strolled up and started filling empty glasses with ice-choked water from a metal pitcher, I knew I was in the right place. I ordered the most vital dish to test when gauging American-Chinese food: shrimp toast. In a decent neighborhood with a large Reformed Jew contingent, the shrimp toast will be made of actual shrimp; in a take out dive, it will be made of shrimp paste. I am glad to say that New Ruan’s did not disappoint, ladies and gentlemen: the toast is shrimped.

Everything I had was good in context of the restaurant and the price was exactly as expected for an authentically inauthentic experience of that caliber. I’d recommend it to anyone of a similar bent who misses a time when eating Chinese food was a special experience, and not something churned out in a space the size of a broom closet with no regard for style. The waving porcelain cat on the counter is cool, but it’s not fucking with a golden dragon beckoning customers to taste the secrets of the Orient. Bring back the days of bow tied waiters and pu pu platters!

A Bedtime Story

Edna Sharp woke each morning at five thirty, without the aid of an alarm clock. She would sit up in bed and swing her legs over the right side, dipping her naked feet into strategically placed slippers. Edna would then plod off to the miniscule bathroom of her tiny studio apartment, take care of her morning business, and emerge from the bathroom door at a quarter to six. After getting dressed, preparing her lunch for the day, then making and eating her daily breakfast of two pieces of buttered whole wheat toast and a grapefruit, she’d leave her house at six AM and walk the half block to Queens Boulevard, where she could catch the number seven train into Manhattan.

Edna arrived at the subway platform anytime between five or ten after six, but whenever she arrived the train would always just be pulling into the station. She’d enter the same car every morning–fourth from the front–through the middle doors and sit down in the first seat to her left, which was always empty. The subway car itself would largely be empty that early in the morning, and due to her strict schedule, Miss Sharp would often see the same people at that time every day. After sitting down, she’d retrieve her latest pulp paperback from a battered tote bag and read until the seven train reached its last stop, Times Square.

In over twenty years of work, Edna had never, not once ever, been late. It was no wonder, really, since she arrived at Times Square every morning around seven o’clock, but work didn’t begin until eight-thirty. This hour before work was Edna’s most treasured time: in warmer weather, she’d park herself in one of the plazas on Broadway and peer at all the commuters and tourists exiting from their respective subway holes from over the top of her opened book. When it was cold, Edna liked to sit in a little coffee shop on Eighth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street and read her book while sipping tea. Very rarely, she would get a cheese danish; even more rarely, she would get a cheese danish with strawberry jam. During Edna’s morning excursion, anything could happen. It was the only time she might deviate from an otherwise iron-clad schedule.

At ten to eight, Edna would start walking to her job at the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. She enjoyed this walk but didn’t dally at it. Edna reached the front door of the building promptly at eight and then the door of the gift shop she managed by five after eight. Her job was to unlock the door, turn on the lights, and begin setting up the shop for a business day. Other employees would begin arriving at eight twenty and keep coming until about a quarter to nine. Miss Sharp couldn’t understand lateness–she had never been late, why were others continually lagging behind?–but she rarely took the employees to task for it. As long as they showed up by nine, she didn’t complain. Edna realized she was more pragmatic and ordered than most, and took it for granted that she would be on time while others would not.

At twelve o’clock, Edna took her lunch. Despite this being a free hour, she did one of two things every day: on warm, sunny days, Edna Sharp sat behind the library in Bryant Park and ate an egg sandwich on whole wheat bread with a cream soda purchased from the nearest hot dog cart. During inclement weather, she ate the same lunch in the employee break room. She would finish eating in about twenty minutes and spent the rest of her lunch hour reading. Regardless of where she had her lunch, she’d be back to work by one o’clock, on the dot. Miss Sharp didn’t even wear a wristwatch, and she didn’t need to. Edna was in a groove.

Edna’s workday ended at four o’clock, though she often stayed for twenty or thirty minutes longer for one reason or another. After giving her most trusted employee instructions for closing the gift shop, Edna left the library and walked the three short blocks to Grand Central Terminal where she would catch the number seven train home. She could have easily taken the subway entrance right on the corner of Fifth Avenue, the seven train stopped there, too. But Edna liked to take a look at Grand Central, look at the reversed canopy of constellations and walk by the Oyster Bar before going home to Queens. Depending on the day, she reached the subway platform a little before five o’clock. Despite being so close to evening rush hour, Edna always got a seat riding home.

Edna arrived at home at or close to five-thirty every day. A creature of habit, Miss Sharp would then do some variation of a handful of possibilities, depending on the season and her mood: if it was warm and sunny, she might take a walk around the neighborhood until six o’clock. If it was cold and dark, she’d go right home and tidy up, or sift through her mail, or boil several eggs in preparation for a week’s worth of egg salad sandwiches. Regardless, she would get home by six o’clock, and began preparing supper: either a can of vegetable soup with crackers or a leafy, green salad and a tablespoon of Thousand Island dressing. By seven PM, Edna had finished dinner and, after cleaning the dishes, she’d slip into her bedclothes and slippers, sit in her padded chair, and finish the book she’d been reading all day–or begin a new book, if that was warranted. At nine o’clock, Edna Sharp would brush her teeth and then sit down on the right side of her bed, kick her slippers off directly beneath her feet, and lie down. Edna continued to read until half past nine, when she fell asleep.

Edna Sharp’s dreams were not the stuff of surreal fantasy. Commonly, Edna dreamed about her workday schedule, egg salad sandwich and all, rarely with any variation. Sometimes she dreamed she was reading the most incredible book in the world while laying in bed, then Edna would awake with a start and become disappointed in the growing realization that her dream book didn’t exist–and worse, she couldn’t remember any details about it. A good dream might be where Edna found unclaimed money while lunching in Bryant Park, which actually happened one time. Not very often, Miss Sharp dreamed of her youth: of lost loves, of academic achievements and failures, of running around barefoot in the warm sun, trampling cool blades of grass underfoot. Though she often remembered them very well, Edna didn’t place too much importance on her dreams. They were, after all, just dreams. Everyone has them.

And when New York City dreamed, well, New York City dreamed of Edna Sharp.

When I Think About How Much Shit I Have, It Drives Me Up a Wall

I think I may be obsessed. Since I was very young, I’ve never been satisfied to know a little bit about a wide variety of subjects. To the contrary, I’ve made it my business to learn as much as possible about a few things that interest me, and I’m largely dismissive of everything else. Mind you, I’m not obsessed with anything useful like achievement or money, no I have to be a self-appointed advocate for early 80s hip-hop records and the history of the New York City subway. Which, I tell people, I am not really obsessed with. There are people far more obsessed than I who can name various train parts by their contract number, I explain. That’s about when the corners of that person’s eyes crinkle softly as they weakly smile at me and nod as if to say, “You’re not a weirdo. Keep telling yourself that.”

Most of the fun in learning about something comes from seeking out the morsels of information that build your comprehension. I wonder how that’s changed for newer generations, since so much of that knowledge is freely and instantly available. I pieced together my understanding of hardcore punk rock by scanning liner notes and reading countless books about the era, then hunting down various records I had to listen to (then listening to them, which I suppose takes just as long now as it did then). Now, you can download a torrent of every hardcore 7″ record and become an expert overnight. There’s nothing really wrong with it, I suppose. It changes your understanding of a given subject, but that’s to be expected. It’s your understanding.

I do come from a time when one would have to compile a collection of stuff in order to be considered knowledgeable about something. You could quote baseball stats, sure, if you’d bought and memorized a baseball almanac. But you wouldn’t really know what these players of yesteryear looked like if you didn’t have their corresponding baseball cards. And you wouldn’t know a lot of anecdotes without reading a shitload of other books about baseball and personally looking at pertinent artifacts. Next thing you know, you’ve got a milk crate full of dirty baseballs and five bookshelves worth of baseball crap.

At age thirty, I found myself in possession of several thousand compact discs, about two thousand vinyl records, two dozen shoe boxes full of cassette tapes. My girlfriend at the time built a special wall unit and several boxes in an attempt to contain it all. And still, it grew. I had about five hundred VHS tapes, some recorded from television, most of them commercially available. I owned around three thousand books. It was getting dire. It seemed like no matter how much I tried to reduce my wares, they grew exponentially. I just couldn’t stand idly by knowing that a rare record repressing was available and I didn’t have it. The sick thing is that, many times, I got more joy out of owning something than I did in using it.

I used to have this recurring dream: the house I was living in burned down, everyone got out safely. As I stood across the street in underwear and a t-shirt, watching firefighters hose the smoldering rubble, I felt this exhilarating sense of freedom. I thought of all those books, all those compact discs, all of that crap from the 1939 New York World’s Fair burning to cinders and I did not feel any loss. I felt unencumbered, not only from losing the physical property but because I could no longer be defined by the shit that I own. I would no longer wear my interests on my sleeve, or on my bookshelf, or on my custom compact disc racks, or anywhere that was obvious. I could reinvent myself however I chose.

A couple of years ago, I got rid of most of my vinyl records and almost all of my cassettes. I put all of my compact discs in plastic sleeves and threw away the jewel cases. I tossed about a third of my books and tamed my burgeoning DVD collection with another book of plastic sleeves. And you know what? It was one of the best decisions I ever made. But when I think about all of the shit I still have, it drives me up a wall. And I still have to curb my tendency to pile more shit on top of the existing nonsense. I think it’s time to throw away another five-hundred pounds of pointless garbage again. But not my Garbage Pail Kids collection! Never that.

Identity Crisis Leaves You Feeling a Little Fucked Up

I’ve often wondered why so many superheroes bother with secret identities. An otherwise normal human in a silly get up, I can understand. If everyone knew Bruce Wayne was actually Batman, he’d probably get laughed out of every Wayne Enterprises board meeting and snickered at by the local newspaper vendor, never mind the hate mail he’d receive from Arkham Asylum. But a guy like Superman, why does he bother holding down a day job at the Daily Planet? Does he need the money or something? Seems like he could save himself a lot of aggravation if he’d just go Superman full-time and leave his personal relationships behind. It’s not like Supes would be hard up for loving, you know. The guy could be banging multi-tentacled outer space supermodels if that was his preference.

But my assumption that Superman would want to be screwing interstellar hotties helps define why I am a sweaty, smelly, gruff man-ogre and not a sensitive, progressive humanist, because when I think of Superman, it’s of him punching Mongul through an oil tanker and not of him sharing a smooch with Lois Lane. That human connection is ostensibly why Superman hangs around to protect Metropolis and Earth in the first place. So the Clark Kent alter ago, as unbelievable as it may be, is necessary, both as a reason for Superman to bother fighting space crimes and to protect his loved ones from warranted super villain attacks. Same goes for folks like Hal Jordan/Green Lantern, Ray Palmer/the Atom, and Ralph Dibny/the Elongated Man.

I really liked the Elongated Man when I was younger, far more than Plastic Man and Jimmy Olsen as Elastic Lad (I swear the three of them teamed up to become the Rubber Band in the 1980s, though I have never seen any evidence other than my own faulty memory). The Elongated Man is, first and foremost, a detective, while Plastic Man and Olsen are pretty much hapless dopes who are lucky to have a super power because otherwise they’d be long dead. I also liked that he was happily married to his wife, Sue, and that he went public with his super identity. So I was very pleased to find that, upon reading the trade collection of Identity Crisis, that this public life was immediately exploited in the very first pages of the comic when Sue Dibny is murdered. I mean, I’m not pleased that Sue Dibny was murdered, just that Ralph’s option to absolve himself of a secret identity was going to be a plot point.

Following Sue’s death, events ramp up pretty quickly as members of the Justice League scatter across everywhere to solve the mystery of how she was killed. A select few, voiced mainly by the venerable Green Arrow, go to find Dr. Light who they believe is responsible for killing Ralph’s wife because–brace yourself–they performed a magic lobotomy on him after he stole aboard the Justice League’s secret clubhouse years earlier and raped Sue Dibny. And with that, it’s like the whole happy world of the Superfriends and the Batman TV show with Adam West just falls apart, every issue of Power Pack and Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen is deemed irrelevant as we learn that the superheroes tasked with protecting mere humans are no less vindictive and spiteful than we are on a daily basis. And that, for the citizens of Fictional Comic Book Land, is a scary prospect.

Comic book stories have tackled the issue before, but it is implied that the only reason certain people are allowed to prance around in leotards while others are incarcerated or worse is because the former stands in defense of the status quo, while the other hopes to destroy it. Moreso, the former group of heroes are expected to act above and beyond the common mores because there’s a lot more at stake when you can shoot lightning from your eyeballs or talk to marine animals or whatever. I mean, if I found out that my friend had the ability to freeze things with his mind, and he was using it solely to keep his beer cold, I’d be a little leery of getting on his bad side. Lord knows I like my beer cold, too.

What was my point? Oh yeah. With great power comes great responsibility. In a reality where being attacked by laser-spewing planet eaters is the norm, one would hope that the superhuman strike force being deployed won’t be swayed by creature comforts or a threat against their pet Fluffy. From superheroes we expect self-sacrifice, adherence to a strict moral code, and for fuck’s sake we can’t let them kill people. Seriously. Once Green Lantern gets that blood lust he’ll be snipping our heads off with giant emerald pinking shears. In Identity Crisis, we see very fallible heroes who justify some pretty fucked up acts in the name of protecting their secret identities and, by extension, their loved ones.

So yeah, I recommend this collection to anyone already pretty aware of the DC Universe, and who doesn’t mind watching the fictional characters they may have once looked up to act like heart-wrenching douchebags. There is one nagging inconsistency about this whole mess that I feel I have to mention: if the Justice League feels okay with performing ethereal brain surgery on friend and foe alike (Seriously. Read the book.), then why the fuck haven’t they killed the Joker? If any DC villain (that isn’t an immortal of some kind) ever deserved death, it’s him. The Harlequin of Hate has killed so many and caused so much misery, what is the purpose of keeping him around? Besides for product licensing, I mean.