Sometime around 2:30 in the morning someone slammed a car door then hit the “lock” button, resulting in a honking horn (it couldn’t have been the young couple, as there was only one honk), which prompted the dog upstairs to start baking in one of those unusual moments in which he was actually barking at something.
After considerable effort I managed to get back to sleep, woken again at 4:10 by my alarm going off with the strains of a guitar and the sound of Type O Negative’s Peter Steele singing “I don’t wanna be. I don’t wanna be me. I don’t wanna be me anymore.”
In response I said, “I don’t wanna be me, either…or at least, I don’t wanna be me awake at 4:10 in the fucking morning,” and so, saying to hell with the idea of working out before work, I reset the alarm for 5:00 and rolled back over, only to be instantly confronted with more guitar and more of Peter Steele singing.
“Whu…?” I said, annoyed that my resetting of the alarm obviously hadn’t worked.
It was with even greater annoyance that I looked at the clock and saw that it said 5:00.
Shortest damn 50 minutes of my life.
So now here I am at work for my last Sunday. Soon Sunday will be the new Monday, and Thursday will be the new Friday, although technically for me Friday is Monday, and Monday has pretty much been Saturday, which means that Thursday will now be Monday and Sunday will be…Tuesday? Something like that.
I stopped reading comic books on a regular basis sometime around 11 years ago, for a variety of reasons, most notable of which (or a the very least, easiest to explain) was the fact that at the time the nearest comic book store was 100 miles away.
Sure, I’d occasionally pick up the odd graphic novel or trade paperback collection here and there, but I wasn’t reading any monthly titles.
So, given that I was no longer really a member of fandom, I took little or no notice of manner in which fandom had made the move to the Internet.
It was only very recently, through the discovery of the OYATM posts on Usenet, that I got back into the world of comics (even if it’s the world of comic as it was 12 to 15 months ago), and became aware of some of the new talent that had come along during my absence, or even the familiar names that were popping up in unexpected places (Grant Morrison writing JLA and X-Men? Was this a parallel universe? Bizarro World? That Judd guy from one of the seaons of MTV’s The Real World was writing Green Arrow? WTF?).
The names that soon came to stand out for me were Ed Brubaker, Devin Grayson, Greg Rucka, Geoff Johns, and, last, but certainly not least (especially considering that she’s the whole point of this too-long set up), Gail Simone.
I’ve enjoyed Gail’s work on Birds of Prey a great deal, and look forward to the point in OYATM in which we finally get to her work on Action and Villains United.
(For the record, she wrote a great episode of Justice League Unlimited featuring two of the Birds of Prey characters.)
However, before she started writing well-crafted stories with smart, snappy dialogue and fully-realized characterization, she wrote an online humor column called You’ll All Be Sorry.
It was actually YABS that helped her move from hairdressing comics fan writing funny articles in her spare time to best-selling comic book writer.
(Ironically enough, Birds of Prey, the book she would eventually take over, was a frequent target for her wit)
If I’d been paying attention to what was going on in the world of fandom on the Internet, I might have discovered this column – which frequently came close to making trail mix, or whatever else happened to be in my mouth at the time, come shooting out through my nose – 7 years ago rather than last week.
If that had been the case, I would have had something to eagerly look forward to every week from 1999 to 2001.
Of course, given that for a good portion of that time I was lost in a drunken ISP-less haze I wouldn’t have been likely to be able to read it anyway.
And of course, I wouldn’t have had the collected archives to read throughout this long, slow weekend, providing my only salvation from the eyelid-drooping tedium.
I can’t honestly recommend that any of you go over and read the YABS archives because, even though they contain some of the funniest material I’ve encountered this side of Michelle Collins, I know that most of you are not comic book fans, and as such won’t get most of it.
Which is a shame, I think, but oh well.
(Of my regular readership, Scott is the only one whom I know is a comic book fan, and, like me, he spent most of the weekend devouring the YABS archives, so there’s no point in telling him about it now.)
The point of this all, though, is that Gail Simone = my latest crush (despite minor obstacles such as a husband, a son [possibly more kids; I only know for sure about the son], and two dogs).
Her blog is also entertaining, though a little light on content, and most of the content there is about, not surprisingly, comics and the comics industry, but it’s still worth checking out.
Anyway, a big thanks to Gail for helping to make my weekend a lot less boring.
And if you ever decide to lose the husband and the dogs, look me up. We’ll figure out something to do with the kid(s).
Where The Hell Did That Come From Department:
Speaking of dogs (if only parenthetically), the other day I was sitting around listening to the dog upstairs bark. It had been about an hour since its owner had left and it’d first started barking.
I was sitting there fantasizing about killing the dog (anyone who’s read Watchmen can probably imagine exactly what I was thinking about doing to it), when, as usual, I reminded myself that I would feel incredibly guilty afterwards if I were to kill the dog, and that, in fact, I was beginning to feel guilty for even thinking about it, despite how much I wish the thing would just shut the hell up and accept the fact that the bitch (I felt guilty for thinking of her as a bitch, too) is just going to keep on abandoning it every day like she does every goddamn day of its miserable goddamn life the way she has no doubt been doing since long before I moved in.
At that point I began thinking, as I often do in my more charitable moments, about just how miserable the dog’s life really is. I mean, it sits there alone all day railing against its loneliness, howling its misery to an uncaring world.
Are he and I really all that different?
I’m not so sure.
Wait, yes I am; we’re totally different. For one thing, eventually she comes back to him every night and takes away his loneliness, whereas I never have a reason to run around and piss myself from excitement (which isn’t to say that I don’t do that).
For another, he’s a fucking dog.
Anyway, while caught in the throes of this moment of empathy, I hit upon a mucually beneficial solution to my problem, a mutually beneficial dirty hippie solution.
I could offer my services as a free dog-sitter.
After all, I’m home all day most days, and I could provide him with the reassuring companionship he so desperately needs, which would stop all the barking, howling, and whining, and maybe, just maybe, looking into those sad, knowing canine eyes might melt my cold, cold heart and help heal my wounded inner child.
It would be the perfect solution…if it weren’t for the fact that I hate that fucking dog, I’m allergic to pet dander, and my wounded inner child can sit his ass in the corner and bleed quietly, suck it up, and leave me the hell alone.
Nothing is melting my cold, cold heart, dammit!
Besides, as soon as I considered the notion of dog-sitting, the idea of taking him for a walk and letting go of his leash and throwing a ball onto the bypass popped into my head, and I was back to where I’d started.
Writing this is taking much longer than it should have, and I have fewer than two hours to go on my last Sunday, so I suppose I should pretend to do something work-like.
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