The Miserable Annals Of The Earth

October 17, 2005

I HAVE LOTS OF FRIENDS THAT I CAN DING AT ANY TIME

Or SuperGirlfriend does, anyway. Our housewarming party on Saturday was a success, in that we had quite a few people show up; however, all of them were friends or relatives of my Very Significant Other, except for Bane. Of course, Bane is about the only other person I know in River City besides SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids, and taken pound for pound he's worth at least two or three lesser mortals, so that's fine.

SuperGirlfriend had fun; she got to sit and visit with a couple of her friends she hadn’t seen in a long time. Me, I grabbed Bane and we went to the back bedroom and played HeroClix with Super Dependable Teen, so I had a reasonably good time, too.

Here’s the thing: I suggested this housewarming party, because I’d never had one before, and this apartment is the nicest place I’ve ever lived in. I had no idea until earlier this week that SuperGirlfriend honestly couldn’t have cared less whether we had a housewarming party or not, as she’s had many, many of them before in other houses she’s lived in.

Now, if I’d known SuperGirlfriend was ambivalent about the whole thing, I’d never have suggested it, and I certainly would never have have so much as broached the subject if I’d known that, having put it on the agenda, SuperGirlfriend was going to treat it like an invasion of Europe in which every single participant had to be wearing plaid socks and carrying color coordinated bouquets.

I mean, I’m a guy. To me, ‘housewarming party’ means you get a bag of pretzels, you get a bag of chips, you get some soda and some beer, you set things out on a card table in the living room, people show up, and hopefully everyone has a reasonably good time. I had no idea that an already lovely, quite clean apartment was going to need so much work before a housewarming party, nor did I have any idea that a housewarming party required such an excessive amount of food prep work. SuperGirlfriend had me and the kids running around like carpetbaggers in Reconstruction Atlanta. The merest suggestion that things looked fine the way they were, or we might conceivably not quite absolutely need enough food to feed every single Katrina refugee on, would send her into a shrieking tizzy. And it was all my fault, because I wanted to have a damn housewarming party, and I had no idea I was going to find myself in the midst of a Twilight Zone episode in which my girlfriend was suddenly possessed by the demonic spirit of Martha Stewart.

I mean, everything ended up being wonderful, gorgeous, and tasty, and everyone had a good time, but it was quite a hurricane we went through on the way there.

Worse, I’ve been barely eluding some kind of viral throat thing for the past three weeks, and last Wednesday it finally got its hooks into me good. I spent a really miserable evening at work and wound up taking Thursday off, despite the fact that it won’t look good when they start sitting down and figuring out which of three dozen temps they want to hire for four or five open permanent slots in March. I was just so punked out, though… I would burst into a sweat and sway dizzily after climbing out of bed. There was no way I was going to get through a day of work. So I called in, and got through the worst of it, and went back to work on Friday with not much problem.

SuperGirlfriend picked up the same bug from me, a few days behind, and I can only assume she was masking most of the symptoms from us on Saturday when we had the party. She tried to pull the same crap on Sunday, because we had plans to take the SuperKids over to a nearby forest for something called ColorFest… but I saw through her little charade like glass and bullied her back into bed, which she badly needed. She slept most of the day, and even with that, wound up calling in sick at work today.

Even without ColorFest, the SuperKids and I had a good day. To get us all out of the house so SuperGirlfriend could sleep in peace, I took them out for a wander around our neighborhood. We hit a playground first so SuperAdorable Toddler could swing and teeter-totter and show off her upper body strength on the horizontal ladder, filling us all with awestruck envy. From there we went up to check the neighborhood candy store, a favorite shopping stop amongst all the SuperKids. It was treacherously closed, however, a really good ice cream store across the street was open, so we consoled ourselves with single scoop cones there, then headed on down the road to a local head shop named Electric Ladyland that the girls all enjoy, where they picked up a few little things and I got a BEST OF THE LOVIN’ SPOONFUL album (actual vinyl) for SuperGirlfriend, who is one of the few people I’ve met who still has a functional turntable. Then we went over to the local comics shop, where SuperDependable Teen and I both scored a HeroClix single out of their Unique Box (she got a Brother Blood, I got a Terrax), SuperDrama Teen picked up some manga compendium and a CD, and SuperAdorable Toddler got a Tinkerbell key chain and a cheap secondhand Lizzie McGuire video. I got a kick out of whipping out my Visa to pay for the whole haul; usually we live off SuperGirlfriend’s credit card, and it's a wonderful feeling, finally having a job where I can buy the kids stuff every once in a while. I nearly felt like a yuppie, and certainly would have if the little piece of plastic hadn’t been a miserable debit card instead of a lordly credit card like real grown ups with actual credit ratings have.

Moving on from all that, and in truly astonishing news, SuperGirlfriend’s ex husband actually apologized to her for something this week.

It was something he badly needed to apologize for; namely, last Friday, apparently, she and he got into it over the kids on the phone, and he told her flatly that his life had only started to get better when he finally realized just how much he really detested her. SuperGirlfriend told me she just sat there in the grocery store parking lot (where she’d gotten the call from him in which he felt it was appropriate to share that lovely sentiment) and cried after hanging up the phone. Now, this isn’t precisely a new low for him; if he has any particular genius, it’s in finding new ways to express himself to make S-G feel utterly terrible. However, when he spoke to her after saying goodnight on the phone to SuperAdorable Toddler later that night, he actually apologized for it, saying it was “a poor choice of words”.

So, that’s something… and it IS something; from what S-G has told me, an apology from this source is pretty much unprecedented, and would seem to be something of a major breakthrough on his part. So she and I are cautiously hopeful that perhaps something like a mature level of emotional tolerance could be in the offing… which would be a relief, since his refusal to have anything to do with me is really hard on the kids. Last weekend, for example, when he dropped the SuperKids off, I stayed inside the apartment and he stayed resolutely outside, as is his insistent choice and has been since I moved to River City in the first place. SuperAdorable Toddler was inside looking at her new bedroom and she gave me these huge puppy dog eyes and said, in a completely heartbreaking tone, “Please go outside and meet my daddy, please, please, I’ll be your best friend ever, pleeeeease go outside and meet my daddy”.

See, every night she’s with him, she calls SuperGirlfriend and me to say goodnight, and she almost always tries to get me to talk to him when I’m on the phone. And whenever he drops them off, she begs me to go outside and meet him. She doesn’t understand why we can’t all be friends, and S-G and I really can’t explain it that well, because we don’t want to use words like ‘psychotic’ in association with her dad when we’re talking to her. I’ve even (through a window) seen her go up to him and ask him to please come meet me, and I couldn’t hear what he said to her, but I could see him shaking his head, and, honestly, it just breaks my heart and infuriates me at the same time.

I mean, if he wants to be a jerk to me, fine; that’s a big boat with a lot of people in it already, and I can certainly understand how he isn’t going to like me. But he’s making it hard on his kids, especially on his five year old who worships the ground he walks on, and who simply cannot comprehend all this heavy grown up drama that’s keeping us apart. And, you know, as I say, I can understand him being honked off at me, but grown ups deal with this nonsense and move on.

Still, he did apologize to S-G, and he’s mentioned to her that he’s getting to a point where he thinks he’ll be willing to meet with me, too. I have no problem expressing my very genuine regrets for all the trouble I’ve caused to him, S-G, and the kids, if that’s what he needs to hear from me. So, I guess we’ll see.

Oh, I should mention right now that the entry I posted a few pages back regarding his delusional belief that squirrels were putting porn on his hard drive? I made it up. SuperGirlfriend and I had our suspicions that he’d found my latest blog, and I figured if I wrote something like that here, he’d have to blow up and mention it to her, and we’d know for sure. However, while we still suspect he’s lurking on the blog, he has apparently gained an admirable measure of self control over the past few months…so, who knows? Maybe we can all be adults.

But, anyway... I totally made up the thing about squirrels. Mike, if you're reading this... I sincerely apologize.

I also don’t want to make it seem like I don’t have some sympathy for the guy. First, he’s the SuperKids’ dad, and as with the President, I’ll always respect that position, if not the person in the actual job. (Okay, I'm lying about always respecting the President. In fact, I honestly can't see much about the position of President that is, inherently, in and of itself, commanding of respect. Even assuming a President actually legitimately wins an election, so what? In the case of a lousy President, it just means a lot of morons voted for you.) And I can certainly understand that he feels like his entire life has gone through a tornado of shit, and I can even empathize with his apparent need to find someone else to blame it all on… and here I am, dating his ex wife and living with his kids half the time, and, worse (in his eyes) making them happy (for the most part; there’s times I piss everyone off too, I’m sure).

So I can understand to an extent what he's dealing with. What I don’t like is that he’s always been completely unwilling to take any responsibility whatsoever for his current life circumstances, and he’s been just as eager to pile every bit of blame he can on me and/or his ex wife… and because S-G is a very loving person, he still has the ability to hurt her badly, and he does so more often than not. I’ll admit, he mostly seems to do it out of thoughtlessness and a nearly vegetative lack of consideration for her feelings than any actual malice… but the end result is the same; one of the kindest, gentlest women in the world (and the mother of his children) sobbing to herself in a supermarket parking lot.

I’ve always been willing to assume responsibility for the things I’ve done that have created problems for him. Unfortunately for the way he’d like to view reality, I did not break up his marriage. In fact, I urged SuperGirlfriend to keep going back and giving him a chance after she’d left him the first time, because I do not like to see kids having to live without both parents in the house with them. However, he continued to make S-G miserable no matter how many opportunities she gave him to stop doing it, and eventually, she had to end the marriage. It was only after they were living apart and the divorce was inevitable that S-G and I became involved as anything other than friends.

Now, I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life before, and it’s all because of SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids, and I try to show my appreciation to them every day, every chance I get. So it may sound hypocritical of me to claim that I regret the negative consequences of my new happiness to the ex who got left behind… but I do. I would prefer not to purchase my happiness at the cost of someone else’s misery. So I do feel for the guy… it’s just that sometimes, when he’s cluelessly blundering around in the heartstrings of the people I love most, and bellowing belligerently to anyone who will listen that the failure of his marriage is everyone’s fault but his own, well, my sympathies get a little strained.

Still, maybe things are looking up. I live in hope.

PRESS YOUR LIPS AGAINST SOMEONE ELSE’S BUTTOCKS AND SMOOCH, BABY

There’s someone named Captain Kal who is no slouch at asskissking. I mean, when it comes to sycophancy, there are no flies on this guy. Take a look, for example, at this comment thread exchange I found today over on a Smallville board between him and my old buddy Slappy:

If one wants proof that Captain Kal has shot and scored with his blatant slobbering textual rimjob, one need only look at Slappy’s cheerful response, in which he smugly opines:

Heh. You gotta love it, or, at least, I do, when perfect strangers are utilizing my one time collegiate bonds to so flagrantly advance their own agendas with pusillanimous pudwalloping ex-buddies. And yet, while I nearly always enjoy other people talking about me, there are a few corrections to the above I feel obligated by my fidelity to Truth Above All to notate here, if only for you, the esteemed elite who actually read this nonsense:

First, if I have ‘verbal diarrhea’, Captain Kal lives every minute of every day in a ghastly thousand gallon vat slopping over with his own reeking bodily wastes. Not only is he smeared like athlete’s foot all over this particular board, but I can’t find a spot on it where he’s ever posted less than 500 words at a shot. And he takes a lot of shots. If he’s the kettle and I’m the pot, then he’s so black that he not only doesn’t reflect light, but even gravity gets trapped below his local event horizon.

Given that, it seems to me that when Captain Kal speaks of jealousy, he uses the easy and assured vocabulary of the expert, and his comprehensive command of the subject matter comes from his long and intimate experience with it... and not, if I might essay a very small pun, as the jealous-ee. Further, given that he’s at least as verbose as I am (not an easy feat to accomplish, and one I sincerely feel he deserves a rousing Hee Haw salute for, at the very least), I would assume that what he’s jealous of is (a) I once actually spent some time with the object of his awestruck and worshipful affection, and/or (b) I actually have an entertaining writing style, while his prose has the mellifluous elegance of an anvil chained behind a slow moving brougham.

Second, when Captain Kal refers to me as a ‘wannabe’, I hope he is saying that I wannabe a professional comics author. If so, I canna deny it; I am, in fact, loathsomely guilty of wannabeing the same thing that many thousands of comics fans (including the Much Admired Slappy Himself) have wannabe’ed over the decades that comics have been in existence, and by God, all right thinking Americans agree that I should be pilloried and shunned for it, too. There’s no point in evasions or circumlocutions, I confess my crime frankly -- I certainly do wannabe a professional comics writer, and I kinda suspect Captain Kal wannabe’es one, too. (I also suspect he wannabe’es enjoined carnally with my old buddy Slappy, but, well, I can’t help him with that.)

However, it is possible that Captain Kal is implying that I wannabe Slappy Himself, and I can understand why he’d think that, because sure as shit Captain Kal can relate to that desire. I, however, have no desire to be my old buddy Slappy, because for one thing, my old buddy Slappy looks like he got into a pie eating contest with Jabba the Hutt and not only did he eat every pie in the entire galaxy, he also devoured Jabba in the process. And while I’m a fat guy, I don’ wanna look like dat, nossir. Beyond that, while I get tired of doing call center work from time to time, if the price of being a professional comics author is to be a loathsome puffed up smirking toad who craps all over his former friends for no particularly good reason, then I’ll stick with answering phones for a living, and smile while I do it, too.

Moving on to what Slappy himself has to say about me, well, I don't know. Maybe at some point in his voluminous prior asskissing that I haven't read, Captain Kal raised the subject of Mrs. Slappy and therefore my old buddy was simply responding to a point already brought up elsewhere. However, it strikes me as unlikely to the point of ludicrousness that anyone as obsequious as Captain Kal would initiate a conversation with his personal deity figure on such a deeply private matter, so I'm going to assume that in point of fact, the first mention of Slappy's better half in this conversation came from Slappy himself. Going forward with that assumption, I can only sigh in exasperation at what seems to me to be a pointless invocation of said spouse in Slappy's whimpering, mealy mouthed and cowardly back hand at me, and in my humble opinion, his obvious need to work our one time mutual friend into every conversation regarding me amply reinforces what I have always believed but never understood about the true source of friction between us, at least, in his addled mind: he is, apparently, on some fundamental level, deeply insecure about my one time relationship with his beloved.

This is, it should go without saying (not that that will stop me) madness; whatever happened ‘twixt dear sweet Ann and I (and it wasn’t all that much, honest to God) happened twenty plus frickin’ years ago, and for most of that twenty plus years she’s been living with Slappy, and, presumably, at least occasionally she's been allowing him considerably more carnal congress with her various orifi than she ever allowed me since she’s had his kid, for chrissake.

I don’t know how to break this to my old friend gently, but if winning the lady fair was so damn important to him that he's still bringing it up a millenium later, well, ten out of ten dentists interviewed agree, he done did it. Let's move on to something new.

As to me being unwilling to take direction from him or others in regard to my over-verbosity, well, I dunno. Slappy taught me an enormous amount about writing in general and writing comics in specific. I may not have agreed with every last little pearl of wisdom he attempted to impart to me, and perhaps somewhere in there he did indeed try to tell me that less was more, but Slappy himself ain’t exactly the tersest Modern Age comics writer on the planet, and the Silver Age comics writer he and I both idolize above all others, Steve Englehart, was, at the height of his powers, pretty frickin’ liberal with his word count. And, as with Captain Kal, if I have 'verbal diarrhea', then my old buddy Slappy at the very least has the occasional case of the textual squitters and trots, as he's been known to cover up quite a significant percentage of beautiful artwork by Alex Ross and/or George Perez with captions and word balloons in his day, too.

And, last but not least, writing straight prose essays is an entirely different discipline than writing for comics. My articles aren’t illustrated and my words aren’t meant to be put into little boxes that will, necessarily, cover up some of someone else’s brilliant art work. If I’m going to paint a picture, I have to do it with actual black and white letters on the page; I can’t rely on a hotshot with a pencil and/or a brush to do it for me. Which is to say, Captain Kal has never seen me write a comic book, so he has no idea what kind of comics writer I would be. Slappy, on the other hand, has never seen me write a comic book that was actually finished (in terms of being drawn, inked, colored, lettered, and printed), so he really has no idea how effective a comics writer I might be given the opportunity, either.(On some level, though, I suspect he feels... and fears... I might be awfully good at it; he's certainly put a lot of effort into making sure I never get a chance to show anyone.)

None of it really matters, o’course; Captain Kal is, as noted at the top, pretty obviously just looking for the best way to slip his tongue into my old housemate’s nether aperture, and Slappy is simply taking the opportunity to once more underscore that I’m a worthless human being and his wife never really liked me one little bit, no matter what she may have written on various Christmas cards once upon a time. It’s sad, I guess, that Slappy is still living so deeply in my shadow, and sadder that spineless simpering slugs like Captain Kal actually take up space and protein in our world, but I can't be blamed for either, although I have little doubt both of them would be happy to try given the opportunity.

I would also like to take this opportunity to note that one of the profoundest differences between Slappy and myself is our relative comfort level with this kind of absolutely shameless sycophancy. ("Oh, and not to digress too much", he snivels, "but could I just plant my lips all over your gigantic fat ass a few dozen times by insulting someone I've never met that I know you don't like? Thanks so much.") This kind of major sucking up is the primary reason I eventually kicked Julian Perez (another major contributor to this particular Smallville posting board) to the curb. I simply don’t trust a toadie, and more than that, I don’t find them even remotely entertaining or likeable. I have little doubt that Slappy can always find room for one more fawning lickspittle at his emotional trough, but I can't abide the whiney little fuckers. If that makes me a bad human being, well, so be it. At least I'm not out on the Internet writing unprovoked bile about my old friends for no reason but sheer childish spitefulness. I'll just have to comfort myself with that.