In which the Audience is treated to a bit of an origin story.

I attended Catholic school as a child at what I can only assume was at the insistence of my father's mother who was a needlessly surly individual with a love of tacky horse statues, the bible, and poorly applied lipstick, in that order. The school was a large and unwelcoming brick building with an attached church and a playground made of concrete and donated railroad ties. The classrooms were equally unwelcoming and some equally concrete. Being in those classrooms felt like being in a box, and despite the love that I have for giant empty boxes that can easily be made into rocketships and caverns to explore, I hated being in school. My teachers never opened the windows which made the rooms stuffy and overly warm. Lessons were constantly peppered with thinly veiled scripture delivered in a way that wasn't fooling anyone and only succeeded in reminding me that before I could eat lunch I had to go to Mass, which was the most horrible thing I had experienced so far In Life. Being a standardly produced seven year old, it was hard for me to sit still and be quiet while a man in a dress swung a foul smelling ball around his head and spoke about things I didn't quite comprehend in a voice that sounded like nothing I'd heard on TV, and so was not worthy of my attention. As a result I was constantly talking and fidgeting and getting in trouble.

Standard Catholic school punishment for one of my age was Beating The Erasers. I'm not sure if you've done this before, but its wonderful. I couldn't fathom how people of apparent authority and education could view this as something to avoid. For those unfamiliar, Beating The Erasers would happen directly after lunch, when freedom and playtime were still fresh in my mind, and entailed taking a wicker basket full of chalk-dust covered board erasers that had been used all morning outside, which is exactly where I wanted to be. I was then required by biblical law to clean these erasers. To do this, one would hold an eraser firmly in each hand and smash them together with all the delight that a child who is knowingly about to be covered in dirt can muster. Each time I would bang the black rectangles together a plume of white dust would shoot out the sides inevitably clinging to my Jesus endorsed wool uniform. After several solid whacks the dust cloud would settle leaving me pale and ghostly with a white haze in my hair and on my face. The second stage of the sacred process would be to hit the erasers on the brick wall of the school, which would leave behind a white eraser shaped print that, thanks to my natural talent for Legos, had its potential realized and the side of the school quickly became the canvass for cityscapes, letters, and oddly boxy animals. The final phase would involve me wandering around the pavement kicking rocks and using my Giant Ghost Monster Talent to smash the newly discovered White Rectangle City until someone would realize I was missing and come to collect me. I was always careful to keep one dirty eraser in reserve so I could claim the job was not yet done. After all, Jesus doesn't like liars.

Perhaps a more appropriate punishment would have been to send me to the playground, which killed no fewer than two dozen children a year. The playground's outer perimeter was a chain link fence in a state of magnificent disrepair. Bits of sharpened metal jutted out at odd angles ready to skewer the next inattentive recess goer. Rather than tend to the inevitable bald spot that would occur in a playground lawn the school opted to bury the whole thing in loose gravel several meters deep. Walking from one place to another was like walking across the surface of a too soft mattress. Children were constantly falling in an effort to move from one death trap to the next. The only thing that made moving easier and contained the mountains worth of loose gravel were the railroad ties which were rivaled in pokiness only by the fence. Splinters were commonplace and removed with grim determination. The stabbing got in the way of a good slide after all. The only thing not always sucked into the mass of gravel were the posts of the swing set, which as far as I remember remained delicately balanced on the brink of toppling over with the slightest amount of movement. While I don't recall them ever actually falling, I do remember the terror I would feel when I would be on the swings and look down to see the post lift itself from The Gravel. The one upside to The Gravel was that, when compared to the surrounding cement and large chunks of wood, it presented a relatively soft place to land when, at the apex of your swing and terror, you would hurl yourself into the sky and hope for the best. While this plan never failed me, one of my schoolmates was less than fortunate and in a swing jump that would be spoken of for hours to come, failed to clear the last giant splinter and fractured his skull on a railroad tie. That was the third time I saw an ambulance in person, and it was still much larger than the toy version I had at home, which made me rather disappointed in my trinket. My schoolmate returned to school some days later with a shaved part on his head and several thousand stitches. I like to think he was never the same afterwards, or could suddenly play the piano, but I don't actually remember either way. No one bother to replace the blood soaked railroad tie.

The only pleasant memory I have of that school (aside from Amy, which is another story) was the Halloween Festival. It took place in a large empty building, perhaps the gym, but to be honest I don't remember my school even having a gym. Supervised Calisthenics apparently would have gotten in the way of Supervised Prayer. Regardless of where it took place, the Halloween Festival allowed me two opportunities: The chance to not wear my uniform, and the chance to win cake.

If you wore a costume you were allowed to participate in the Cake Walk, which involved a series of numbered sheets of paper taped to the floor in a vaguely circular pattern and worked much like musical chairs, with the participants walking around the circle listening to Monster Mash. The music would stop and with all the enthusiasm of a nursing home cribbage game Someone In Charge would call out a number. If you were standing on that number, you won a cake. An entire cake. All to yourself. When you won a cake you left the circle of paper and went over to the cake table where all the poorly made cakes were arrayed. My mother made the same cake every year. It was a bundt cake, chocolate with chocolate frosting, with candy corn arranged in some design on top. It was lopsided despite the use of a cake pan and perhaps eighty percent frosting, which made it the most popular cake on the table. It was a brown donut shaped pile of diabetes and I was always crushed when I couldn't win back the cake I had brought. As for not wearing my uniform, the Festival allowed me to essentially dress myself in any kind of ridiculous pile of stuff I could scrounge from my house. I would often wear pants as sleeves, backwards shirts, too large hats, and the occasional garbage bag. This of course caused my mother to not let me leave the house for fear the neighbors would think I was retarded. Each year I would come down the stairs with my newest "costume" and she would stand up, shake her head and point back upstairs. In the time it took me to return to my room and take off my Mattress Strapped To My Back outfit my mother would have created a masterpiece in seasonal horror using common household goods. My favorite was the mummy, which was made from our only white set of bedsheets and all the toilet paper in the house. She also managed to produce a small pile of makeup to color my face and hands with. It had extra Stringy Bits that dragged out behind me and tripped up my fellow Cake Walkers, which pleased me greatly. Her most awkward, yet in retrospect her most creative, costume was the Mexican Jumping Bean. I had been in my room de-costuming for no more than a few minutes when she produced a large frame made of sticks and circles of styrofoam. When I asked what it was she told me to be quiet and do what she said, which is how a good amount of her parenting went. It was strict, but remarkably effective. She had me climb into the oddly shaped monstrosity and promptly wrapped me in her favorite costume crafting tool, the bed sheet. This one was brown, and fitted, and was just big enough to cover the whole frame, leaving my head and hands free. I looked like Violet Beauregarde from Willy Wonka, but was an unsettling shade of brown. I couldn't move my feet very well and had to shuffle everywhere, which was fine, because I was supposed to be jumping anyways. The also gave me the chance to trod on Cake Walkers toes in an effort to cripple them, thus ensuring I got my own cake back.

I only attended that particular school until the third grade, but it was enough time that, without even realizing it, I learned the artistic value of not being worried about being dirty, became fascinated by my first Massive Head Trauma and was surprised that my mother was good at something outside the field of momhood. But even more importantly, it was plenty of time for me to figure out that conforming to what others wanted of me wasn't something I enjoyed and the further I was from what they wanted, the more cake I got. Which I still think is a good bit of Science.

In which The Narrator is informed that people still want to read this, and, in realizing he has nothing to say, instead recounts a tale from childhood.

When I was growing up I lived above a woman named Jan who was very fat and played the bagpipes. My family lived on the top two floors of the house, and she occupied the basement. I used to play in her yard all the time, because, due to my kindergarden idea of wealth and possession, since we lived in most of the house, all the yard should be mine. I was kind enough to allot her the small strip of weeds that ran down the east side of the house, which I also played in, but I never left my toys there, because that was her yard. I even let her keep some of her things in My Backyard. After all, even though I was six, I was still civil, and it helped that her doghouse made a wonderful ladder for me to get into my tree. Of course, every time I would climb into my tree she would release her dogs which were of a breed that I have never seen since and each were the size of tigers and had a taste for little boys. I would stay in that tree while she laughed, rolls jiggling, until she called off her hell hounds and returned to her bagpipes and I was able to run back to the front of the house to safety. I didn't like Jan. Once she let me try to play the bagpipes, but to prepubescent lungs this proves impossible. A fact which once again set her shaking like the green jello and marshmallow dish that my mother was convinced I loved. I didn't.  

When Jan moved out I declared a national holiday and promptly built a treehouse in My Backyard of staggering proportions using all the wood I could break off of our fence. I also moved into her apartment.

Upstairs, in my kitchen, was a terrifying door that had been painted over so many times you couldn't see the crack in the frame in some areas. It was also blocked by a table and several boxes and I was convinced that through that door came All Things Scary. As a child I was not often scared, except of course by the movie Pet Cemetery, and who wouldn't, and so it was no real challenge for me to move the boxes and the table, chisel away some paint and open the door. Once my mother found me in my newly claimed staircase she informed me that it led to Jan's apartment, which of course meant an Expedition was needed. The door at the bottom of the stairs was unlocked, but was slightly blocked by something on the other side. Being a small and spry Adventurer I squeezed myself through the small gap and found myself in Jan's vacated apartment. I also found myself mostly stuck behind an abandoned bookshelf. After being there for what I'm sure was months I was able to slowly squeeze into My New Apartment to find it was furnished with a slightly broken bookcase, two boxes containing things I no longer remember, a book of carpet samples, and several spoons. Over the next few days I moved out of my parents house and began moving things into My New Apartment. I took action figures, my pillow, and enough soda, crackers and candy to feed me until college. 

The next logical step was of course my housewarming party. This was carried out wonderfully thanks to Jimmy and Gabe, two brothers who looked nothing alike and lived around the corner from me. They were also the only two kids on the block who had their own television set. Once I told them about My New Apartment it was only a small matter of tricking their mother into leaving the house so we could go out the door with their tv. We planned for days and eventually decided that it was best to just wait for her to go to work and then hide the tv outside. Once darkness fell we would smuggle the tv around the corner and down the street to my house. The following night we did just that. The walk back to my house must have taken several hours and crossed many miles and the entire time I was convinced we would be jumped by any number of roving gangs with clever names, butterfly knives, and matching hats. Having executed our master plan to steal a television and eluding any potential turf war we returned to My New Apartment with the tv, which was joined shortly by my nintendo. We stayed up all night playing Galaga. 

As I sat there on my couch that looked suspiciously like a book of carpet samples eating candy from the bag with a spoon I felt sophisticated and adult. And I knew that I would never have a better apartment, regardless of how much fence wood I could steal. 

In which The Narrator is strapped to a table, and a Death Ray moves ponderously towards his delicates.

Some of the best memories (and some of the only good memories) I have of my father are laying on the floor of this office with him listening to old radio serials of The Shadow and The Green Hornet. They were amazing. I'm six years old, maybe, somewhere in there. The room we were in was always dim because my dad would never change the overhead lightbulb, if it even had one, but would instead use a single desk lamp with a green shade for light. The radio was always slightly off tune, which made the shows sound scratchy and distant, which is how I pictured The Past to be when I was a kid. I laid on the floor night after night with my head inches from the radio as jewels were stolen and banks were robbed. There were goons and getaways and excitement and each night I would think, just for a second, that this would be the night that Evil emerged victorious. But every night a Hero would step from the shadows in the nick of time and save the day. It never failed. They never failed. I was in awe over that fact that these people would right wrongs and dispense justice not because it was their job, but because it was Right. It didn't quite matter to me that they did it by throwing bad guys off rooftops.

By night it was the radio, where I used my imagination to form the pictures of masks, trench coats and fists, and by day it was cartoons and reruns of the 1960s Batman TV show, which told my impressionable imagination that fighting crime was brightly colored and had no consequences for the good guys. It was around this same time that I found comic books. The first ones I remember reading were Elfquest comics, which, while I don't actually know where they came from, I'm sure I have my brothers to thank for them. For me, comics were perfect. They were bright and fast paced, with a harshly defined sense of right and wrong. Their morality was easy to spot and understand; monsters are evil, masks are good. Once the comic book flood gates were open it took moving to Yakima to close them. And they didn't close because I wanted them to, they closed by Yakima does not lend itself well to imagination.

I continued to have television and movies to solidify my world view, but I couldn't find comics in Yakima. It was like the town hadn't heard of them. I killed time and continued my personal Nerd Parade by learning to play chess and backgammon and marbles (which, I might add, I was uncannily good at) until I found Ron's Coin and Book. Ron's was the only place in the city that sold comic books. It was run by a cranky and terrifying man with an uneven mustache and an obvious hatred of children. The shop's main function was buying and trading rare coins and baseball cards. Comics were an afterthought to the man, who I always assumed was Ron himself, but never bothered to find out for sure. Comics where the only reason I went there though, and when I went, I wanted all of them. But I didn't know enough about them to know what I was looking for. Ron was no help... any comic book questions directed towards him were met with sharp glares and a suggestion that "the real money is in Fleer!" which wasn't actually a sentence that I understood, but I knew the packs of cards had bubble gum, so that was something at least. (Ironic Interlude: shortly after that statement was said to me Fleer was bought out by Marvel Comics. In your face, Ron.) I would walk past the boxes of comics and eventually just reach in and grab one at random, lay my change on the counter and leave the store with a sense of accomplishment. The shop was scary, and leaving there alive was a feat, and comic books were the spoils. I collected for a time, but accessibility and terror limited my options and it would be nearly ten years before I would start Collecting.

I spent today with my comic books. There was some reorganizing, some were put into bags, some were read, and, as always, I shook my head when looking at some of them, wondering why I ever bought that particular issue. Thats the biggest problem I have with comic books. Most of them are crap. Its not that a particular issue is bad, its just that all the story lines have been done. Its rare that I read something that hasn't be done time and again by various authors under various publishers. Don't get me wrong, they are usually pretty well written, its just that after eighty years its probably hard to come up with something new. Characters are duplicated, sometimes blatantly so, made worse by the fact that writers often move back and forth between publishing companies, muddying the creative waters with each pay raise. Whenever a particular problem arises in any given comic Something Man or Captain Whatever will show up and punch it/go into space/mind control something/time travel their way to victory in a convenient 32 page bundle. This will then happen in every single comic that comes out every single wednesday.  All of these things pile up into an entertainment medium that is stunningly average. Sure, there is the occasional gem that makes me want to clap my hands and the occasional pile of garbage that makes we want to slap a stranger, but all in all most comics are the same.

But I keep buying them. And I'll always buy them. I'll buy them because they connect me to my childhood and to the kid inside that I try so very hard to make sure is fed and encouraged. They are entertaining and, as cliched as it sounds, I've learned a great deal from them. I know that I wouldn't be who I am without them. Comic books have shaped my perceptions and my moral code. There often isn't much gray area when it comes to my thinking... things are either right or wrong, and since I'm the Hero in my own head I should know the difference. If something isn't working out just right launch it into space. Problem solved. Crisis averted. At least for the next 32 pages.

In which The Narrator pays tribute to a creature that, thankfully for the world, has no thumbs.

When I first met Mac he tried to escape. He was very tiny. We opened the door to the room filled with kittens and he ran out. He was headed straight for the door to the main room when Heather grabbed him and picked him up, leaving his little legs swinging. You could tell that if he could get out that main door, he would blow that pop stand and never be seen again. We brought him back to the room at Cat City where the new kittens all hang out and be adorable all day where he promptly perched himself on my shoulder, and eventually on my head. Mac had a way of sitting on a person and radiating an arrogance that was both infuriating and endearing. You could tell that Mac thought he was better than anyone in the room, and yet you wanted to pet him for it in hopes that he would give you a little more attention than anyone else.

Mac (who, I would like to point out, was named "licorice" at the shelter... worst name ever) was my first real pet. I grew up with animals... plenty of dogs and cats and the occasional chicken or horse, but they were all outdoor pets. They were Family Pets. They weren't mine. I didn't really care about them to be honest. I enjoyed that they were around, sure, but I hated taking care of them. Resented them for giving me more chores. Even the guinea pigs that I had for a short time. They lived in my room but I never considered them my pets. They were just these furry things that lived in my house and made it smell bad. Mac was different. He instantly fit it in in our home. We brought him home with the advice from the specialists in the back of our heads... give him time to adjust... he'll get used to things... he might be scared at first. The first thing Mac did when we brought him home was leave his cardboard crate, race around the house, and jump from the back of the couch to the bookshelf. He loved being up high, and would do everything he could to get there, including running up the back of my pants, up my shirt (or sometimes bare back) to my shoulder, where he would leap to the tallest shelf/cupboard he could find. It was amazing. It defied all I knew about cats. It was Parkour. It should have been our first sign that we were in over our heads. We brought him over to my sister's house for a bit of a cat play date. We let met out of the box and he did four things... all in a row. He ate my sister's cat's food. Scratched on their post. Used their litter box, and, when the resident cats came to investigate, Mac punched them in the face and took a nap. He was quick to prove himself to any other animal.

Mac was smart. Freakishly so. He only needed to see something once to know everything about it. Like that one time... He was sitting on the counter next to the lightswitch. I turned the lights on. Mac looked to me, looked back to the switch, and then reached head over and flipped the lights off with his mouth. Heather and I looked at each other a bit stunned, then laughed, and I turned the lights back on. Mac however, wasn't having it, and turned the lights off again. Rather than incur his wrath, we wisely decided to leave the lights off and go about our business in the dark. Mac quickly took over the house. We did what we could to hold him at bay, but there was no stopping him. We tried compressed air to dole out punishment. Didn't work. We tried a spray bottle of water. Didn't work either. We added lemon juice to the spray bottle. It only made him stronger. Then we tried vinegar water. First time I pulled the trigger with that in the spray bottle I accidently got him in the eye. He started to run away, but stopped, turned back around, and just stared me down with his one red rimmed and irritated eye. From then on the spray bottle would just have no effect. I was spray him and spray him and spray him and he was so incredibly stubborn that he would sit there and become soaked rather than do what I wanted him too.

He would also scratch on the only things we didn't want him too. It started with the bed, so we got that anti-cat-super-mattress-covering-tape when he promptly peeled off the bed and scratched behind it. Then he moved onto the bedroom door. He would scratch at it all night long. So we decided that the best thing to do would be to get one of those over the door knob scratching posts, foolishly thinking that if he had that, he wouldn't scratch the door.... All that scratching post did was give him a ladder so he could reach the door handle and open the bedroom door and again peel off the damn tape and scratch the bed. Like I said, unstoppable. In a desperate and hair brained attempt to stop the door scratching and thus bestow upon us a night of uninterrupted sleep we actually padded the door handle with duct tape and plastic bags, and wrapped the entire bedroom door in a blanket, sealing all edges with more duct tape. The only thing this achieved was to give Mac a chance to terrify us and break our spirits. Rather than do a Normal Cat thing Mac climbed to the top of the door, removed the duct tape from the top, climbed between the blanket and door and back to the floor... where he scratched on the door anyway.

He opened closets to get to his treats. He pulled those same treats out of their new hiding spots once we took them out of the closet. He would steal meat from your sandwich. He played fetch. He loved to sit in the fridge. Occasionally, he tried to kill us. I came out of the shower one day and Mac was sitting on the stove. He had turned the oven on, and was making it hotter and hotter, five degrees at a time, by hitting the buttons with his paw while he stared at me.

Despite the reign of terror Mac quickly worked his way into our family and our hearts. I've never really wanted a cat. I hate the cat hair. Almost as much as I hate glitter. Yet as time went on I cared less and less about the constant blanket of hair, and more about the thing that supplied it. I didn't want this to happen, and I didn't think it would. We got Mac for Heather. He was her birthday present, but every day I found myself loving him more and more. He joined me when I was happy and he was there for me when I was upset. I have never known a cat to have so much force of personality and life.

Mac is now eighteen months old and dying of cancer. His coat, which was always softer than I thought possible, is raggedy and coarse, it sticks out in all directions and he's stopped grooming himself. He doesn't eat anymore. Not even kibble, which was always his favorite food. He no longer drinks any water, regardless of how close to it we put him. He body is skinny and you can see the tumors on his sides. A few days ago his right eye became completely dilated and won't go back to normal, and he rubs that side of his face on the walls that he walks past. He moves slowly, and has an unsteady gait. His breathing is rough and his purr is broken and choppy. But he still purrs. He still cuddles with us and he still rubs his face on ours. But he is dying. Tomorrow we take him to our vet to have him put to sleep. I love him, and I will miss him.

And right now I would give anything to have just one more night with him scratching at the bedroom door.

In which a silver lining is found and we learn that real cops don't have dinosaurs.

As a good number of things in my life spiral towards their most assuredly grim and emotional ending, I've been trying what I can to keep up my spirits. I've always had a bit of a cheery disposition, and generally speaking I'm rather worry free. This has not been the case of late. But rather than dwell on that, I'm going to dwell on some things that have recently happened that I use to remind myself that all is not crap, and there are still piles of greatness laying around for whenever someone decides to pick them up.

My job at the bookstore is a wonderful one. For one, its a job, which I am forever grateful that I have, when so many people sadly do not. The bookstore is full of amazing people and good memories. And children. So many children. They mostly blend into the sea of people that its my job to watch, but recently there has been a trend happening that makes me happy. More and more children are dressing themselves. This means that the bookstore is filling up with toddlers in various states of chaotic dress and they are still too young and hopeful to worry about being judged by others. Like the little boy wearing elf ears who spent his time looking at barbie coloring books. Then the little girl who was in the store with her father, she was dressed as a knight and spent her time chasing other customers trying to slay them. And my personal favorite, Little Batman. I see this boy in the store all the time. He comes in with his mother and goes about normal shopping business with her, he just happens to be wearing a homemade Batman costume. The cowl is too big for him and constantly falls over his eyes, which usually means he runs into a table, or trips and falls. But, like any good superhero, I've never seen him without his mask. No matter how many times the cloth blinds him or he steps on his cape he doesn't take it off, and I like to think he leaves it on at home also. The image of a toddler in a Batman costume sitting at home eating cereal or coloring, without any concern for anything other than playtime always makes me smile.

And speaking of carefree children and playtime you should all go buy a copy of the comic book Axe Cop: Bad Guy Earth. Axe Cop is perhaps the second best thing on the planet right now. It is illustrated by Ethan Nicholle, who knows what he's doing well enough to get paid for it, and written by his six year old brother, Malachai. The comic is about Axe Cop, who is a cop with an axe. He is, of course, different from Normal Cops, who don't have axes. Normal Cops also don't have dinosaurs. Axe Cop's dinosaur is named Wexler, in case you were wondering. And with other characters like Uni-Avocado Soldier (which is an avocado. Thats also a soldier. With a unicorn horn... Obviously.) and Leafman, and The Best Fairy Ever, reading the comic is just like being six again, surrounded with action figures, with cartoons on the TV and no concerns other than who is going to have Their Head Chopped Off in the next fight. Which is how the comic is written. The two brothers sit around the house with their plastic axes and sunglasses (because all Good Guys wear sunglasses) and they play with toys while Ethan asks questions and takes notes as Malachai narrates what's happening. The end result is one of the best comics I've read in a very long time, full of wisdom like "nighttime is the best time to kill Bad Guys because they are asleep."

And speaking of reading and the second best thing on the planet, lets move onto the best thing on the planet. My brother is Talented. He's also just published his first book for kindle and various other e-reader things that involve technology that I am unfamiliar with because I find it to be scary. The book is called Engines of the Broken World and it is what I like to call A Really Good Book. To quote from the Amazon listing...

 "When Merciful's mother dies during a brutal, early snowstorm, she and her older brother Gospel are left almost alone in a dying hamlet. With only the questionable aid of a strange, shapeshifting Minister, they will discover that death is not neccessarily final any longer. As the blizzard worsens and horrible secrets become clear to them, Merciful will be forced to make decisions that will either save or doom her world." 


Sounds good, huh? Well, what that little snippet doesn't tell you about is the Horrible And Dangerous Fog Of Doom...  Occasionally I will read something that makes me terrified of something that I shouldn't be. The HADFOD in this book does that to me for fog. I used to think that fog was kinda neat. I liked the muffling effect it seemed to have on life, and the fact that I never really feel cold in fog. A bit chilled perhaps, but never cold. Now fog scares me. The other day I woke up and it was foggy outside and I was convinced that that was The End. Thankfully, not everything in books is real and the world wasn't devoured by HADFOD and we can all continue to read others books by Jason Vanhee, some of which I've read already, and all of which fill me with more pride that should be allowed. The book is incredibly well written, with characters who are memorable and unique. This endorsement doesn't come from a sense of familial duty... anyone who knows me knows that I'll be honest to your face, feelings be damned. This endorsement is because I truly mean that it is A Really Good Book. Which you should go buy right now. Or I'll chop your head off. 

In which Technobabble and Time Travel finally earn their keep, though earned too little too late.

Two of the things that I love in life are comic books and bad television, which is why I'm still watching Smallville. I don't much care for Superman (too much of a boy scout), but the show is terrible (which means its essentially made for me). The show is full of things thats I hate (like bad writing), but its got things that make comic book shows perfect (like bad writing). I started watching it when I was in film school because I just so happened to live in Metropolis. I was always seeing and walking through the film sets... The library in Vancouver was used as the courthouse, the alley by my school was used for various illicit dealings, and my street was turned into Smallville's farmers market. I know extras on the show, could see where Lex Luthor lived in real life, and walked by where Green Arrow lived in less than real life.

The problem with Smallville is that it just wasn't good. I hate the Villain-Of-The-Week pattern of writing that seems to plague most sci-fi shows... It implies that the writers think their viewers are incapable keeping any story straight that isn't shown in a musical montage in the opening credits. I hate that sci-fi shows feel compelled to justify the strangeness by using Science. Don't get me wrong... I don't know the first thing about Science really, but I can tell a made-up word when I hear one. I don't care how many times you reverse the polarity of your flux capacitor using an ion grid, your differential magnometer is never going to get you enough oscillating overthrust. It just isn't!! The "science" is even worse on Smallville because of the added Alien Factor. The Alien Factor, when used correctly, can just smooth over any wacky pseudo-science problems a show might have. No one told Smallville this. Every time Krypton comes up any sort of plausibility (you'll notice I'm not even trying for believability) goes right out the window.

But despite the show being filled with so many things that I hate I continued to watch it. I kept struggling through season after season hoping it would get better. And it actually did. I know. I'm surprised too. The writing got better, the cast was shrunk (which was needed) and they show stopped trying to force the comic book physics and just did what they wanted to without explanation. And in the current season, they actually managed to pull off a time traveling episode that didn't make me want to punch someone in the neck. Its now a show that I am happy to watch as well as one that I wish would have more seasons to it... I just wish it didn't take ten years to get this way. TV is not a fine wine. It needs to be developed, but it shouldn't have to age to be good.

In which our Audience is introduced to The Narrator, and promises are made that probably won't be kept.

I have done this before. My last blog covered my time at film school in Canada through most of my time in New Zealand. After a bit the weather and wine caused me to become sluggish, and so I stopped writing. That blog was the apparent delight of at least several people, one of which introduced herself to me at the IMATS in Vancouver, and told me that my blog was the deciding factor in her choice of makeup schools. I found this rather surreal, and was left with the urge to sign an autograph.  Despite the facts that I love to hear myself talk, enjoy repeating myself, and the cell phone rates for international calling in New Zealand are the best I've ever seen, I used my old blog as a way to keep people informed while maintaining a remarkably lazy lifestyle; the same lifestyle that led to the demise of said blog. The theory behind The Shiny And New Blog is that I will be able to keep the lazy at bay, and thus keep people informed of the things I have probably spent all day telling them already. However, I am rather lazy, and typing is hard work, so the best I can offer is that I'll try, kinda. And, if in that trying, something makes me want to sign autographs again, then this blog will be worth it.