Monstrous Dreams

On the late lamented TV series Arrested Development there was a character named Buster who had his hand bitten off by a seal.
Buster was, of course, quite distraught over this turn of events, and very sensitive to the way other people reacted to his deformity.
His family, in their dysfunctional way, did their best to be supportive, pretending that his prosthetic hook didn’t fill them with feelings of fear and revulsion, but invariably some comedic hook-related mishap would occur and the barely-restrained horror would burst forth from his family and Buster would run off wailing, “I’m a monster!”
When I get home from work, I generally take out my partial plates, lacking a better place to put them while they’re not in use, set them on the sink in the downstairs bathroom. Before I go to bed at night I pick them up and bring them upstairs to put them soaking.
One night when transporting them upstairs, in a moment of self-loathing and self-pity, I looked down at the frankly horrific tangle of metal plastic and said to myself, “I’m a monster!”
Then I thought about Buster, and I laughed, and the moment passed.
(This has essentially become a routine event for me at this point.)
Yesterday after lunch I had taken the out to rinse them off and had the “monster” thought, and so, inspired by the whole Buster connection, my subconscious served up a dream in which – under circumstances that escape my memory – my left hand got cut off.
Actually, an entire section of my forearm between my wrist and elbow was cut loose.
The people present for the accident managed to recover my hand and put it on ice, but neglected to recover the roughly two inches of my forearm, and so I ended up having my hand reattached to my arm, with a new wrist constructed two inches higher on my forearm. I had regained some functionality, but lost most sensation, and between the Frankensteinian stitching and the disparity in the lengths of my arms, I confessed my belief that “I’m a monster!” to someone (my brother-in-law Dean, I think).
Of course, the fact that I was sleeping on hand and it had gone numb probably also contributed to the dream.
There’s no point to any of this; I just thought I’d mention it because it was rather odd.
Sunday I had Easter dinner at Scott and Stacy’s. By the time Stacy had called to invite me on Saturday I must confess that I was dismayed – and actually a bit miffed – by the fact that I had as yet not been invited.
Still, I was glad when I did get the invite, and the food was, as always, very good.
I really need to start doing some cooking so that I have leftovers to bring in for lunch. Buying food from the little café in the other building is getting kind of expensive.
Another decent week for comics, but it does present me with a bit of a poser for the whole reading order process, as I’m torn between whether Jack of Fables or All Star Superman should get the coveted bottom spot.
Both titles are excellent and extremely entertaining, so it’s kind of a difficult decision based on that criteria.
Given its irregular publishing schedule, All Star Superman has the advantage of being something of a novelty. Officially, it’s on a bi-monthly publishing schedule, but it’s been at least four months since the last issue, and after nearly two years it’s only managed to get up to number 10 (and it’s worth noting that it was officially on a monthly schedule up until about issue 6 or so).
On the other hand, Jack always comes out in a timely fashion, and so it seems to me that it should be rewarded for its dependability.
Still, All Star Superman is always refreshing in that it’s an excellent example of how nostalgia should be handled, as opposed to the way it’s being handled in certain other titles (*Cough* Spider-Man! *Cough*).
Decisions, decisions…
While at the comic shop I overheard bits of a conversation about Iron Man, and, more specifically, the pleasure that the people talking take in seeing Iron Man – who could more properly be called Iron Douche these days – get his ass handed to him.
One of the people said, “I really liked the way he got his butt kicked in Thor,” at which point I chimed in with, “That was sweet.”
We all got a good nerdly chuckle out of that.
Work has pretty much been work. Nothing terribly new or exciting, which is pretty much a good thing, I think.
And that more or less brings us up to date.