ABEHM
A Brown Eyed Handsome Man

NOTE: I'm not using any templates, and my HTML coding skills are rudimentary at best. Therefore, there are no permalinks. If you look under ARCHIVES, to the right, you'll generally find an active link to a copy of the current day's page. If you want to link to something on this page, you should, instead, link to the archive copy, under this day's date. The stuff on this page changes; the archive copy should stay put.

The ARCHIVE heading itself is a link to a page where you can see what's become of my two previous blogs, MAJOR ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT'S WEBBLOG and DOC NEBULA'S EASTERN OREGON DUM DUM DEPRESSION BLOG.

Due to some publishing stuff that may or may not actually happen with some of my writing, I recently got a PAY PAL account, and since I got a PAY PAL account, and I'm currently unemployed and broke, and I think I'm a good writer and my writing should be worth money, I figured I'd stick a PAY PAL button on this site. Obviously, its use is entirely optional, but hey, if you feel I provided you with something of worth and you feel moved to make a donation, knock yourself out. I wanted one of those cool little 'don't forget to tip the website' buttons all the big kids seem to have, but I guess they aren't available as one of Pay Pal's free options. The button is at the top of my links list on the right of the blog itself. Go nuts.

And if you think I'm a soulless mercenary or just, you know, dreaming that anyone is gonna PAY me for this nonsense, you're probably right. There's a comment thread below. Go nuts there, too.

Early Woden’s Day, June 3, 2003

Typed ‘1993’ there for a second. How nice that would be. I’d still be in Syracuse and (I think) would have a gorgeous girlfriend… around 93’ I think I was still living with Kristy. We’d have somebody in the White House who could be trusted not to destroy my civil rights and gangbang the economy in the process. I’d be ten years younger. Life would just be better.

But nooooo… 2003. Here we are.

I’m moved in at Paul’s. And this weblog is for venting, and nobody’s using the goddam comment threads anyway, so I’ll say what I want.

First, my brother Paul has been great. He pretty much organized his buddies into a posse to come help me move… Monday night with a couple of pick up trucks, Tuesday (still feels like today to me, but actually yesterday) with a U-haul and a pick up truck. And here I am, settled mostly into his former bedroom in his very small apartment in Zephyrhills. (He got one of my old couches and the futon and is making his living room his personal space for the duration.)

So Paul’s been great. And I’m here because I didn’t want to spend $580 on rent this month in an apartment I was being evicted from at the end of the month anyway. And I have to keep reminding myself of that… I could still be sleeping in my apartment tonight. I shook the tree. I agitated my brother and sent out emergency email notices on Friday night and BAM!, he came through. Here I am.

So Paul’s been great. But. Jesus fucking Christ.

Okay. First, there’s no room here, and no storage space at all. All of my books and all of my comic books and quite a lot of other stuff are going to have to go into storage. I spent most of today putting garbage bags around most of that stuff so it can temporarily be stored on the back porch, up on cinderblocks. I’m hoping to get someone (one of Paul’s buddies; neither he nor I drive) to take me to a storage facility with all this shit, like, SOON. Within a couple of days. There’s just no room for it here.

That’s a pretty annoying thing, but it’s the most minor of annoyances. But wait. First let me say that one good thing did happen, or rather, I avoided one bad thing: I expected, since the Monday evening evacuation got screwed up (the guys driving in in both trucks got lost, my normally amazing mother having made one of her rare mistakes and told them ‘Bayshore’ when she meant ‘Westshore’, resulting in them going over to St. Pete when they missed the Westshore exit from 275). They took a couple of truck loads back with them, but had to come back the next day with a U-Haul for the rest of it, and I just knew Sondra would hear about it instantly if I moved out in the daytime and come screaming out to demand the June rent.

Well, that didn’t happen. We got away unscathed. That was a good thing.

But Oh My God do I miss my apartment.

Let’s work up to the big thing.

First, Paul smokes, heavily. And second, he owns a fairly large, overly friendly, very pretty dog named Chewie (Paul is a sort of geek; he thinks of himself as a geek, even though he doesn’t read much and doesn’t own a computer, and while I think he’s about half a geek and doesn’t have to be because he’s pretty good looking, he thinks he’s the whole thing) and I’m a cat person, if I have to have a goddam animal around at all. Third, Paul isn’t working right now and most of his friends work weird hours or not at all, and apparently, every night is Noisy Game Night at Casa Paul… from around 10 until 2 a.m.

Now, I’m not working either and I often stay up that late lately. But these guys are noisy, and honestly, it’s annoying. I’m going to have to play music in here every night until about 2 a.m. just so I don’t have to hear them.

This isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is still coming.

This apartment is a pit. I mean, the way it’s set up, I don’t mind. It’s small for two people, but when I saw it the first time last year, I thought ‘you know, this is a nice little apartment, I could be real happy here if it was just me living here’. However, taking a closer look at it now, I realize it’s in a shoddy building that has been poorly maintained for a long time and, well, it’s filthy.

And now we’re getting there.

My brother Paul is a genuinely great guy. But he is one of these people… unfortunately, they are not as rare as you’d think or any of the rest of us would wish… who has no natural slovenliness threshold. He will live in absolute filthy squalor, and he simply does not understand it when people ask him ‘holy mother of God how can you live in shit like that’?

Recently, when my cuz in law gave me a really graphic description of the filth Paul was living in, I kind of long distance instigated an intervention, and he’s cleaned up his act quite a bit. And thank God, the last time I was here the bathroom was a hellish lightless festering chamber of rot and crud you would not let a toddler into. It’s actually more or less clean right now.

But, well, this place is a pit. It’s the kind of place that is old and crumbling and the walls just accumulate grit and dust and the linoleum, I swear, is a hundred years old and visibly powders into crud when you walk on it. I swept this floor… I mean, I flailed this floor with a broom… when I got here (and Paul cleaned out the room for me before I got here) and I just had to sweep it again because I noticed some visible crud on it when I sat down to do my email tonight. This place is literally one of those places you don’t want to reall let anything of yours touch the floor, ever.

Look, I’m no Felix Unger. In fact, according to many of my former housemates, I’m quite a slob. But I have never in my life let any place I lived get this bad. I thought my apartment was pretty messy but holy shit. I swear if I could jump back in time 48 hours I would seriously think about writing a rent check for the rest of June and then going in and begging Sondra to renew my lease. (She might have. They might just have terminated me as a ploy to raise my rent more than they are legally allowed to, which is what they may have done to me two years ago.) And if she wouldn’t give me another lease, then I might have called my brother Pat and begged him to let me stay in his spare room while I put together some options. This place is a hole.

Oh, and I just had a discussion with Paul… got up to get a glass of milk and he was still awake. (His friends did leave promptly at 2, apparentlly.) Yes, every night is Noisy Game Night here, apparently. His friends all have families and he doesn’t drive, so they’re used to gathering here every night until one of his friends, Pat, goes to work at 2 a.m. I told Paul in no uncertain terms that while I was here and helping him with the rent (Paul recently got laid off his seasonal job, so having me move in was a big help to him as well as me) that was going to have to change. He’s not happy but wants to talk about it tomorrow. I imagine he doesn’t want to talk about it at all, but we are going to talk about it tomorrow. I realize there’s going to have to be a compromise… I don’t live alone any more. But a compromise is not Every Night’s A Party In The Next Goddam Room. These people need to go somewhere else once in a while.

The crud isn’t the worst of it, though, and neither is the fact that Paul is still, basically, one of these people who does not understand that when the trash can is full, you have to take the trash out to the curb, you can’t just find some way to precariously stack one more empty frozen pizza box on the top. He also simply does not understand that ashtrays should be emptied a few times a day. And his idea of cleaning a room is cleaning everything you can see. Since he was getting the futon and leaving his bed for me, he didn’t move the bed or clean under it. I moved the bed (as much as I could in this small space, unfortunately, I didn’t do it before I started setting up my electronics and space got very limited very quickly so I could really only get around the edges, I’m sure there’s a two foot strip in the center of the floor under the bed that I don’t even want to think about) and just around the edges I pulled out absolutely filthy accumulations of ancient papers, porn, and clothes you wouldn’t even want to try to salvage. I didn’t stir up any roaches, for which I’m thankful, but Jesus, it’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta under there, and I didn’t get anything like all of it.

Ah, did I mention the roaches?

This place is crawling with nasty little German cockroaches.

Paul says that recently he’s been trying to fight them with pesticides and not having much luck. I had the U-haul stop off at Wal-mart on the way here and we went in and got a lot of roach motels and some pesticide paste and I have practically papered this room with the stuff. And I haven’t seen much in the way of roaches in here but they are just all over the kitchen… in the cabinets, on the walls… I did not simply spend today garbage bagging my boxes of books simply because of the wet and damp, I did it in the hopes of keeping them from being infested with bugs during their hopefully brief stay here.

Right now I’m half regretting getting my computer out and set up…

Just saw a roach and sprayed it dead. It was right on the wall near me. Christ. That means they’re going to be moving into my computer’s CPU. Aaarggghhh.

Maybe in a few days this stuff will have had an effect and the roaches will have backed off. And I know… millions of people in the world would consider this hovel a paradise. But Jesus.

As I was saying… right now I’m half regretting getting my electronics out. I thought I’d need to be able to watch movies and especially use the computer to stay sane, but my God. If my stuff gets infested with these little bastards, you can’t get them out again. I don’t know. Would putting the things in a walk in freezer for a couple of days kill the fuckers?

I have to get a job. I have to get my own place. I can’t live here for very long.

I'm sleeping with the light on tonight.


No annoying bits of non-wisdom today. Roaches. I mean, brrrrr.
THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I’m not a likable guy. I’m not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It’s simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I’m not going to say that this time around, because I’ve realized that what this is basically saying is, ‘if you don’t like what I have to say, tough, I don’t want to hear it, don’t even bother to tell me, just go away’.

And that’s actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country… for a little while longer, anyway… and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I’m not sure that’s a right when you’re doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don’t feel like reading… and I’m really quick with the delete key… as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don’t like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance… these things are only worth my time and attention if they’re entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.


 

ALL DONATIONS GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED


WHO IS THIS IDIOT, ANYWAY?

ARCHIVES:

Friday 4/18/03

Saturday 4/19/03

Sunday 4/20/03

Sunday, later, 4/20/03

Monday, 4/21/03

Tuesday, 4/22/03

Wednesday, 4/23/03

Thursday, 4/24/03

Friday, 4/25/03

Monday, 4/28/03

Wednesday, 4/30/03

Friday, 5/2/03

Sunday, 5/4/03

Tuesday, 5/6/03

Thorsday, 5/8/03

Frey's Day, 5/9/03

Day of the Sun, 5/11/03

Moon's Day, 5/12/03

Tewes Day, 5/13/03

Woden's Day, 5/14/03

Thor's Day, 5/15/03

Frey's Day, 5/16/03

Satyr's Day, 5/17/03

Tewes's Day, 5/20/03

Woden's Day, 5/21/03

Frey's Day, 5/23/03

Satyr's Day, 5/24/03

Day of the Sun, 5/25/03

Tewes's Day, 5/27/03

Woden's Day, 5/28/03

Thor's Day, 5/29/03

Frey's Day, 5/30/03

Satyr's Day, 5/31/03

Day of the Sun/Moon’s Day, 6/1&2/03

OTHER FINE LOOKIN WEBLOGS:

Pen-Elayne on the Web

Inkgrrl

Blue Streak by Devra

Emily Jones

Dean's World

BROWN EYED HANDSOME ARTICLES OF NOTE:

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN, MARK EVANIER & ME: Robert Heinlein's Influence on Modern Day Superhero Comics

KILL THEM ALL AND LET NEO SORT THEM OUT: The Essential Immorality of The Matrix

HEINLEIN: The Man, The Myth, The Whackjob

BILL OF GOODS: The Words of A Heinlein Fan Like Nearly Every Other Heinlein Fan I've Ever Met, But More Polite

FIRST RAPE, THEN PILLAGE, THEN BURN: S.M. Stirling shows us terror... in a handful of alternate histories

DOING COMICS THE STAINLESS STEVE ENGLEHART WAY!by "John Jones" (that's me, D. Madigan), & Jeff Clem, with annotations by Steve Englehart

JOHN JONES: THREAT OR MENACE!

FUNERAL FOR A FRIENDSHIP

Why I Disliked Carol Kalish And Don't Care If Peter David Disagrees With Me

MARTIAN VISION, by John Jones, the Manhunter from Marathon, IL

BROWN EYED HANDSOME GEEK STUFF:

Doc Nebula's Phantasmagorical Fan Page!

THE OMNIVERSE TIMELINE

World Of Empire Fantasy Roleplaying Campaign

BROWN EYED HANDSOME FICTION (mostly):

NOVELS: [* = not yet written]

Universal Maintenance

Universal Agent*

Universal Law*

Time Watch

Endgame

Earthquest

Earthgame*

Warren's World

Warlord of Erberos

Return to Erberos*

ZAP FORCE #1: ROYAL BLOOD

Memoir:

In The Early Morning Rain

Short Stories:

Positive

Good Cop, Bad Cop

Leadership

Talkin' 'bout My Girl

No Good Angel

No Time Like The Present

Pursuit of Happiness

The Last One

Pursuit of Happiness

Return To Sender

Halo

Primogenitor

Alleged Humor:

Ask A Bastard!

On The Road Again

Meeting of the Mindless

Star Drek

THE ADVENTURES OF FATHER O'BRANNIGAN

Fan Fic:

The Captain and the Queen

A Day Unlike Any Other (Iron Mike & Guardian)

DOOM Unto Others! (Iron Mike & Guardian)

Starry, Starry Night(Iron Mike & Guardian)

A Friend In Need (Blackstar & Guardian)

All The Time In The World(Blackstar)

The End of the Innocence(Iron Mike & Guardian)

And Be One Traveler(Iron Mike & Guardian)

BROWN EYED HANDSOME COMICS SCRIPTS & PROPOSALS:

SERAPHIM 66

AMAZONIA by D.A. Madigan & Nancy Champion (7 pages final script)

AMAZONIA (Alternate Draft 1)

AMAZONIA (Alternate Draft 2)

AMAZONIA (World Timeline)

TEAM VENTURE by Darren Madigan and Mike Norton

FANTASTIC FOUR 2099, by D.A. Madigan!

BROWN EYED HANDSOME CARTOONS:

DOC NEBULA'S CARTOON FUN PAGE!

DOC NEBULA'S CARTOON FUN, PAGE 2!

DOC NEBULA'S CARTOON FUN, PAGE 3!

WEIRD WAR COMICS COVER ART.

ULTRASPEED!

Help Us, Batman...

JLA Membership drive

Don't Leave Us, Batman...!

Ever wondered what happened to the World's Finest Super-team?

Two heroes meet their editor...

At the movies with some legendary Silver Age sidekicks...

What really happened to Kandor...

Ever wondered how certain characters managed to get into the Legion of Superheroes?

A never before seen panel from the Golden Age of Comics...

BOOM!

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