A few thoughts on a new-ish theme for an old, worked-over hero:

origin mythos partially intact:
Frank Miller’s Bruce Wayne as a boy falls down the well; something dark and sinister there imprints certain psycho-spiritual template, brings about changes in character and the eventual downfall of the system of securities around him–> leading to the death of his parents (seen much much later to be the work of the psychospiritual agent within him), alienation of his world, and his journeys to Africa, the Middle East, Russia, Central Asia, China, then over to California, evenually back to Gotham City..

(each of these journeys a sub-story, possibly through flashbacks or inter-episode events… e.g. confronting night-demons in the Middle East, psychotropic gladiatorial combat in African jungle (** where the combatants drink some hallucinogenic root/tea and have a dream-scape combat in the ether between consciousnesses) etc. –> all the while pursued, haunted, and driven by the psychospiritual agent within him… accruing knowledge about life, magic, fighting styles, “controlling his madness”, and more and more it dawns on him that he has another soul living within him)

Bruce Wayne, after a period of trying to subvert the internal-agent, begins to believe he must fight fire with fire. He embraces many of the dark arts he has learned, taking for his familiar a largish bat… consecrating the moment with vows for blood… he decides to use the blood of criminals to pay his end of the power-bargain. Becomes a semblence of Batman… but Batman as wizard. His fighting technique is a blend of martial arts and magic, sometimes simple spells to bolster a jump or apply mind-coercion… in the heat of battle it is hard to cast large spells so he uses simpler augmentations… but has several vials, potions, prepared items– changing the infamous “tool-belt” to a “reagent belt” or something.

Using spells and future-scrying, Bruce Wayne rebuilds his old fortune, finds and re-hires Alfred (family butler), and has several run-ins with criminals– however, oddly enough, many of the criminals start saying things, as if they were possessed, momentary-“puppets” of what Bruce/Batman believes is the force/creature within him, and he believes his strange war with his origins has been elevated to a new surreal level.

As in the first Bob Kane series, the initial classic enemy is Clayface.

ROBIN: As the fighting escalates, and the enemies become more surreal, powerful, and powered by extra-human gifts (a thing not lost on Bruce Wayne), Batman is approached by a strange humanoid, offering partnership: the Robin, who has a human-type side (Dick Grayson), but is really some hybrid like Bruce himself– seems to be overrun by a psychotic, avian-like soul given to hysterical laughter at times and a vicious cruelty that belies his short wiry stature… outfit more like a kingfisher, spiky hair, jewel-like body armor, features angular, mischevious evil faerie (Robin Goodfellow, kind of Gaiman’s interpretation of the Shakespeare creature). It is an odd trust at first, but Robin proves himself over and over again in helping and defending Batman, though Batman is often forced to hold Robin back from utter cruelties and tortures.

Later it becomes known that Batman’s arts have placed him firmly in the wizard category, and he has entered into a new and dangerous variation on the “familiar”-realm by adding Robin (with an animal nature) to his existing bat-familiar. Other wizards arise to put down the upstart and his violation-of-magical-nature, adding a new level of conflict to the rising tide of supervillians.

A bit after some great adventure and action, the idea begins to occur to Batman/Bruce Wayne that he actually is insane, and much of what he experiences on a daily basis is a psychotic episode. Robin delights in this idea when Batman confesses it to him, and there is no end to the lengths Robin goes to performing practical jokes or making up nicknames for the Batman. “Batty” “the Dark Plight” etc

So, it’s been a while. I might not have even tried this (this=Blogger), but I am a little Microsoft-Accessed-OUT at the moment, and left my inherited laptop machine scrying through its own innards, looking for viral infections and the like– if I am going to try to exercise regularly, I see no reason my computers shouldn’t suffer the disciplines of health too– and I fired up the old Linux box (psychonaut, I have told you all before) and *that* reminds me of posting. For some reason.

But I dissemble, as I disassemble… I have been itching to convert said Access database to MySQL and pump it over to psychonaut and then practice administering via the web. And all that involves getting some of the Linux chops back up, so…

And the itch goes further, I suppose… I have been mapping out writing-thoughts in my head, of late, and realize that writing, like drawing, is a perishable skill and must be maintained through practice. Of some sorts.

Which brings us to this, here, now: some sort of attempt at writing. An update, if you will.

I was, just this morning, writing out a bunch of lists, and as I am still in the blush of such an orderly mindset, I will give you, gentle reader, one of your very own:

1. Plane ride. But you’ve already heard.
2. Database for the parents. Which is interesting in a way, for it suggests some interesting workings of the mind. For example– and this has happened several times now– I will be totally stumped by some aspect, give up on it, and find that later– days, a week– I will be building something more complex, based on that very knowledge I abandoned which has surreptitiously become so clear to me as to be rendered transparent.
3. Continuing previous thought: catching myself in thought recursion + ReJon’s ideas about programming accenting certain of his human traits, contrary to popular misconception
4. Running 4 miles, right past Randall’s house, but I don’t know which one. I think it was the grey-blue one that I heard some Radiohead out of the other day. I run once every 2–3 days. Running sucks.
5. I made some puppet heads, shamelessly lifting techniques from Chris Sickels and Scott Radke. I am currently summoning up the time, energy, and mood to foam-out their bodies and put them in endearing or creepy poses.
6. bought the domain name psychicradio.org for a tighter coupling of site & comics.
7. continuation: I sliced up the panels of all the old and most the new comic pages and put a semi-random linkage walk-thru of them… go to psychicradio.org and see. Then tell me if it is interesting, groovy, frustrating, and/or inconsequential (those are your only options, so keep to them).
8. Went to the Comic-Con with the beautiful Iryna (who doesn’t have a web page anymore but should) and we had an insane comic-frenzy and a t-shirt buying competition and she bought us both H.P. Lovecraft plush Cthulu dolls. People of the world, please curb your envy.
9. From K.J. Hays: “the average comic con attendee was between the ages of 30 & 40″
10. Launched into an insane work-week, getting so much done that I almost forgot that I am a lazy-ish person. I have even had mild fantasies of re-stocking my old planner with new calender pages… not that I have any pressing engagements at present, but it’s like the baseball field… if I have the blank pages, the appointments will come.
11. Went to the library today, here’s what I got:
    • The Green Arrow, written by Kevin Smith
    • Y The Last Man. heard alot about it at Comic-Con
    • The Books of Magic: Girl in the Box. Liked Neil Gaiman’s issue, thought I would see how John Ney Reiber would do.
    • The Chronicles of Conan, Volume 2. a classic.
    • Bone. Jeff Smith. got to check it out.
    • The Batman Archives. After some heated conversations with comic-sage John Mark, I decided to get the full scoop, from the beginning. This has all the Bob Kane ones from Detective Comics. And what I find most interesting is that in the beginning (issues 1–5) Batman kills about 1 person per episode. Threw a jewel theif off a building. Kicked an Indian thug– who was unwise enough to stick his head out the window– and broke his neck. Poison-gassed another Indian thug.

So, I am trying to decide some things. Mostly, I am digging deep down inside myself to see if I have the patience and fortitude to actually draw some comics. My drawing is rusty, and though sometimes its cranky and twisted lines please me, more often than not I cannot draw what I see in my head. Not like I used to, when I was an avid penciller. As I said before: perishable. Since I have decided, by and large, to concentrate on the comic-images for artistic purposes, this seems a liability. So you see, some soul-searching is in order.

Alright, that’s about all I can muster for the day. I am going to try my hand at hand-coding some Queries, and as that is a boring task, I will spare you the numbing journey.

Good weekends to you all.

But anyway, vertical to lateral, breath is waste too. I mean, let’s face it– we exhale what we don’t need, can’t process; the airy garbage; waste production of healthy respiration. I do tend to forget that.

A cross is formed, a crossroads, an intersection, a juncture where two similar, but different, worlds meet for a moment and then move apart, more different every increment away from the axis… and here, on the transverse of plumbing, out comes poetry, each immortal word a perpendicular puff of invisible waste.

That said, I feel like I should remind my parents that all the best stuff will be gone by now, as local custom has the Tag Sale starting at 8:00 AM… one-and-a-half hours of goods gone now, and more being lost every minute. Not that I want anything, really– I have enough stuff, weighs me down. But I think of the books. I cannot resist a book. A book is light, but better: a book makes you, yourself, lighter. Buoys the consciousness, give you more float, makes angelic– indivisible, invisible, immutable, immortal, eternal, illocale, and agile. When my plane [of life] crashes in the sea [aquatic chaos of Babylonian remark] it will be books that act as my life-preserver, and on a raft of their paper and leather and cardstock and ink I will wait out the danger and the storm and land on the rocky shores of land.
…
Getting time to get gone, now… I had wanted to write about the scarecrow I saw yesterday, real-life-crow-scaring-human-effigy, as non-Disney and non-comic as you can get. The remarkable thing about it– beyond its reality, that is– was the pose in which the creators had fixed the poor devil: arms sort of outstretched, not to the side in classic-scarecrow pose, but out in front, and up towards the sky… the head was thrown back and seemed to be staring upwards, and the entire assemblage was one of shock, a holy-shit-what’s-coming-at-me type shock, like something in the sky, or even the sky itself, was beyond comprehension and left the crow-scarer in frozen and anguished overload-of-disbelief.
.…..
OK, off to the collapsable tables of the Great Unused, now…

Have yourselves a beautiful day.

Mild overhaul in progress. I would laugh at the multi-strata resonance of that comment, but it has been too long, too many times, and I know that a shuffle of design on a website is part of a systemic thing, no less; but perhaps not in the directions you might think.

reading Underworld and The Body Artist by mr. Don Delillo is a strange yet ecstatic process: it hits you, hard, like a leaden, wet whallop, but afterwards you realize that that contact actually involved thousands of little sharp needles, leaving cruel, painful patterns of welts and penetrations all over you, through which new life– vegetable and meat, pollen and bacteria, fungus and face– enters you and mingles. I remember reading Ken Kesey once, talking about the power of literature to actually alter one’s consciousness, like a drug I suppose was the unstated comparison– seems rather obvious in retrospect but was actually kinda subtle at the time, and anyway, the point is, how much I have known this, that I cannot read something that doesn’t really, drastically, alter me at some level, a molecular rearrangement, a quantum shuffle, a cut-the-deck magic trick and ohmygod! there buried lies a face-card.

What I mean is, at the edge of exploring comics– little paneled worlds of color and thick line and strange significance– I all of a sudden see the amazing, unique, magical powers of words (again).

So make room, make room calls a voice, and I try; shuffle the instructions to move the little bits of light around, make room make room for more words, more words. Somewhere up there I slip in a sliver of my profession, a few images of easy navigation to get to comics and the like, however…

…just not today. A long drive, a revisitation-if only for an hour or two. There too I will make room, clear a small storage space of I-can’t-remember-what, empty the attic of that clutter of history, and move on.

I was at the zoo the other day and was enjoying myself thoroughly until one of the zookeepers happened upon me and mistook me for an escaped marmosaur. He chased me around for half an hour with a butterfly net before I deceived him into approaching and delivered a hard roundhouse kung fu kick to his face. I ruined his good looks.

After the zoo adventure we stopped by Pirate’s to have a few beers, then spilled our bodily fluids into the tip jar and ran off in a mad fashion, digging through our garments as we did in search of obscene human features which we could wave about. At that point we were too far gone for further recollection: All I know is that the next morning I left a trail of puddling fluid behind me wherever I went which smelled like novelty pudding, the origin of which I could not find by any probing. It still remains a mystery.

But to the present: Another school year at UCSD has ended, a year which I should have had nothing to do with and yet hell, I find myself here again. There will be a break from my duties, during which time I will no longer be exposed to the youth-laden oxygen to which I have become accustomed. I worry what changes, physiologically, this might bring. As much as I try to carry myself otherwise, the truth of the matter is that I am an old man, and I must assume that this truth will make itself ever more apparent in the coming days. The only word to describe my death is ‘imminent.’ I suppose that is the case for us all.

In the meantime, expect more updates from me soon. I will try to include photographs, probably of assorted leafs and fences, but I can and will make no promises. I hope you do not hold this against me. My center is fragile: Your good will means everything to me.

PS. If you were not already aware, I have taken a high recommendation to apply to be on the next season of the hit television show Survivor, where seven ghastly castaways vie to see who is the best and also to win the prize. My violence would make perfect television, and so long as I deprive the American public of this I am living in some manner of sin. But I do not mean to shame myself.

Secondly, logic is not a set of rules which govern human behavior. Humans may have logically conflicting goals.

.: In truth, it feels like today was set adrift, floating still close to the shores of Reality (I can see it from here!) but moving at a very different pace, a meandering lazy current. I have a pervasive feeling of disconnection, like some better part of me is laughing and knowing that that which my senses is describing to me is not quite real, but let’s go along with it for the pure hell of it.
.: I keep looking up, out the darkened window, and expecting to see the hummingbird mother, tucked into her nest… but I don’t see her, or them– they have disappeared…

Tucker had recounted for me how the eggs did hatch, and for a day there were two impossibly small hummingbird babies, black and stunted, curled amidst the breast-feathers that the mother had patiently woven over the last number of weeks. But then, by the time I returned from New York, they were gone. I fear the worst.

Dark outside, and inside the silence that follows the angst-scream of Sunny Day Real Estate when the CD is finally stopped. Trying to find an anchor.

.: you are kindly requested to remove any obstacles that might exist to the procurement of my liberty.

.: as the most cherished lips on the planet say, “Whatever…”, rolling it out of the soft cavern and off the tongue like a wet marble, but tonight its meaning orbits nearer to “whichever”: which ever direction, paths upon paths, bifurcation through the mountains and snowy woods.

it has been a great day, taking me by complete surprise.

so i focus in on the abdomen, another “We represent the concerned!” all the way from Psychic Radio, page 1; but this is a cast-off, a failed experiment, replaced by its better… but never mind that, now; just let your eyes slide earthward. The stomache, the grund, soft intestinal pockets and tan-t’ien, Odysseus lashed to pole, small buttons hiding the pubic hair that traces up to the navel, no copper discs can really conceal. Look to the future, you’ll know exactly what I mean… exactly.

“So you see– so you see– so you see– a certain L-O-quence can arise– dig?- drumming on the meanest state– and here I mean voc-ab-u-lary- of existence.

“qua-quo-quell-cope, honest abe, honest abe.

“It’s an enthusiastic endeavor. Like– you know– you know– youknow– En-theos… god within, yeah?

“I mean, here we have hipocrisy, your run-of-the-mill spiral veil, your typical vortex machine loosely coupled to any hanging sexual appendage in suckling fellatio action. Now I don’t mean like sex and in real sex but sex as in what-you’re-not-supposed-to-say-or-do type sex.

“We can expose it, we can shed light on it, we tickle it into the light, make it laugh, jiggle, unseat it from pleasure giving, from its insultated embrace…

“and what do we get? What do we find?

“Intoxicated by the call of truth we are lead only to another machine. It’s the tape that’s speaking.:

.: so it comes down to moments: small capsules of decision, little microcosms of life, all miniaturized, all bearing the profound depths of revelation. When these moments, like dense space-time bubbles, float around you in chaotic inversions of gravity, you’ve got to be careful! You are entering a potential feedback loop, and the effects of your actions can quickly– exponentially– mount and drown you in your own eternal return; ever-weightier echoes of your own decision. Sitting in bed yesterday morning, listening to South Park’s mixture of birdsong and concrete-saws, watching the shafts of golden light stream through the eucalyptus and banana-trees, I had to decide– do I get up and put all my complaining into action and go running? Or do I sink into the pillow and sleeping bag nest I have made and abandon myself to early-morning reverie?

The weight of the thing– of the lack of the decision to just do it, as Nike has told me over and over– is apparent to me. I have been an avid doer for most my life, but these periods of relative inactivity have left me with an inertia nearly impossible to overcome. The less I choose to leave my cozy, canyon-home’s luxurious sanctuary at a sweat-breaking run, the less possible the entire enterprise even remotely seems. Angel, from Cages, says in his spoken-word-jazz-act that it is easy to become a potato, to lie on the ground and grow roots and become fixed in position and result. That courage comes from lighting a candle and going to explore the areas of darkness; and most people will never do that, as lighting the candle means, almost inevitably, that wax will fall and burn your hand.

So yesterday morning, my moment of truth, comes– and I actually, for 2-and-a-half minutes, sunk back into my nest and closed my eyes. But two different mantras stung me (as mantras aren’t usually wont to do). One was from the afore-mentioned Angel– “Pain is part of the process of revelation.” And the other from a source far more profane, a quote from Matthew McConaughey that graced the cover-story of my trial issue of Men’s Health: “Just tie your shoes”.

Body creaking, gravity pulling me down, I was out the door in a minute and inhaling the scent of jasmine in painful gulps.

.: So we all know that I have lost more than a single day, withered as they have become in the shadows of the vast and unsightly MMW. I have been busier since so-called “graduation” than I was ever before, and I profess I do not fully understand it. However, with the exception of a few blinding moments of insanity, I have managed to keep my shit together, and things are inexorably rolling towards their conclusion. Out of touch and off-track, I sink into the canyon and try to find the fur-and-bone remains of the poor squirrels, hunted as they are by our resident hawk. There is a muddy wash at the base of the canyon, filled with the most unimaginable junk, washed there in all the mad rains of the season– it makes me think of my friend Gabriel’s new plan to become a UCSD ascetic and sleep in the canyons behind the Geisel library. In the midst of the campus, his canyon will be no more wild than mine, and I hope he realizes that instead of the hares and hawks he will be most frequently accompanied by rotting paper cups and billowing plastic bags. So it goes.

I drink now the broth of a Thai soup (courtesy of a ramen-like brick of noodles and a safety-pack of spices and oils… how I feel that someone out there is looking out for me, anticipates my needs) and shovel some cous-cous into my mouth and chuckle at the faux-finish of my multi-cultural meal. As an important voice whispers to me, I reflect on my own capacity for self-delusion, and must conclude that it either is nil or so great as to be completely successful, and therefore impervious to the prodding of my meager mind. Then I sip some more broth and dismiss the whole thing anyway, because I think that if my body changes without my active control (as I speak I am getting fatter and I breathe hard when I run too far), so too must my mind. Where’s the mirror for my soul?

My greatest enemy is tedium.

In conclusion, I have been re-reading one of my favorite comics Cages by Dave Mckean; it is hard, I want my work to look so much like his, and that isn’t common for me. But it puts me on the right track… I got to step outside. I mean it, I know it, I have been reminded of it, and I will do it.

I know this makes little sense. That’s not writing, that’s typing, as Mr. Capote might say; so be it. I am the monkey, pounding on the keys, and I promise you I will do it until Shakespeare emerges.

Goodnight.