The great thing about porch furniture is that you can sit on your porch. I know that seems obvious but I kind of forgot about it when we didn’t have it. Paliki is still getting more use out it than we are. There have been nights when I open the door to let her in before I head to bed and she ignores me. She’s got a nice comfy chair. She’s got fresh air. Why should she come inside?

I’d still prefer a couch out there. Except for work I prefer sitting on couches than in chairs. Couches are for lounging. They are for stretching out and kicking back. They are for cramming bunches of people together in big monkey piles. Jaydogg nixed the idea of keeping a couch on the porch though. I believe he thought it was tacky.

I sat on the porch this morning drinking coffee. Cold leftover coffee. Skook joined me (he just sit on the porch itself, his butt is too wide for the furniture) and we sat watching the dogwalkers going by. I’m always amazed by the number of dogs in the neighborhood. It’s rare to walk anywhere without running into someone and their dog.

More evidence that I’m not a dog person – I don’t feel a need to say hello to every dog I pass. I find a lot of them amusing and smile at their human companions but that’s about the extent of the greeting. I don’t pass a cat without requesting an interaction.

Skook and I made a game out of guessing when the dogs would increase their pace. They know Skook is on the porch and want to get by as quickly as possible. Most of them start really pulling their leash when they hit Dick’s property. Dick’s place is two houses to the south. I can’t tell when relax again because our view to north is obscured by foliage. Can’t tell when the ones coming from the north start hurrying either. Those heading south do seem to mellow out once they’ve hit The Bearded Guy’s place just past Dick’s.

We watched 7 human/canine combinations go past before I ran out of coffee. Skook’s downstairs now and I’m trying to figure out what to have for breakfast.

I ran across an article this morning that says that our national debt is currently 6.46 trillion dollars. That’s $6,460,000,000,000.00. This is $60,000,000,000.00 over the debt ceiling agreed to during the Clinton administration.

At first I thought this was an overwhelming amount. So I divided the debt by the current estimated population of the United States (290,686,706) and discovered that the national debt could be paid off today for only $22,223.24 per person.

Send in your money today!

On my walk to work this morning I saw a woodpecker sitting on a streetlight. He was hunkered down on the outlying metal extention that houses the lightbulb. Every so often he’d hammer away at the metal beneath his feet. Not the brightest bird apparently.

Marvel Comics is reviving their Epic line. More specifically they are reviving the Epic name. From what I’ve read so far the emphasis of the line will be much different from in Archie Goodwin’s day. What interests me is that they are actively seeking scripts from new writers. Or rather, they will be. They’re not ready for scripts yet. It’s work-for-hire stuff and they seem to be encouraging people to come up with stories set in the “Marvel Universe” and the details aren’t all in yet as to what the exact deals will be.

I mostly lost interest in working in “mainstream” comics a long time ago. It’s not as if I tried really hard to get the work. When I first started out I didn’t think my art would go over well with the superhero publishers. It was crude and unpolished and not at all slick. As I got more skilled I became better able to draw action hero types but I had less interest in doing work-for-hire stuff. Eventually I put doing comics (and drawing much at all) on hold to deal with more tedious life stuff.

In the last year, since the guys at the Black Seal invited me to contribute illustrations to the first issue, I’ve been working a lot of creative projects. Much of that is writing as well as drawing. I’ve always written. I used to write short stories for extra credit in 5th grade. I started a novel back in 7th grade that sits, unfinished, somewhere in a box in my mother’s basement. The novel’s protagonist still shows up in my sketchbooks now and then. I’ve been working with Nizzibet on screenplay and comic script ideas since we got together back in the Nineties.

When my Life Plan was to be a Comic Artist, being a Comic Writer was always part of the plan. I never imagined one job being separate from the other. So when I heard about the Epic opportunity the writer part of my brain automatically kicked into gear. It’s never been dormant for more than a few days. It only took a little bit of digging through my biological memory banks to start thinking of different Marvel Comics characters I’d enjoy writing. It did take some digging. I haven’t read any Marvel Comics in the last few years. I’ve kept vaguely current with Marvel Universe continuity through comics reviews on the internet and by flipping through new comics when I’ve been in a comic store.

Once, I could have told you how many times Spider-man had fought Doctor Octopus, how many times the Kingpin had escaped death, who the Puppet Master’s relatives were – important stuff like that. But it’s been many, many years since Spider-Man #103, the first comic I ever bought and read. I don’t know what issue Spider-Man is currently on. Rough calculations tell me that the series should be nearing its five hundredth issue sometime soon. I don’t know if Doctor Octopus is supposed to be alive or dead. I think Norman Osborn, the original Green Goblin is back (and he died back in Spider-Man #122).

To part of the Marvel comics fan base continuity detail is important. I do understand that. It used to be vitally important to me as well. It’s still important to me but in a more limited way. When a series – of novels, television programs, films or comics, is easily accessible I like it to be internally consistent. If a character gets his right hand chopped off in episode nine I don’t like it when he shows up missing a left hand in episode nineteen. I remember being annoyed by the inconsistency of history in L. Frank Baum’s original fourteen Oz books. I couldn’t understand how Baum kept getting details wrong. Didn’t he reread his own stories? As a Spider-Man fan I loved knowing the history of all the characters and loved watching the soap opera of Peter Parker’s life unfold.

I don’t see any point in trying to catch up on all that history now. There are somewhere near two thousand Spider-Man episodes out there in form of multiple series, mini-series, specials and guest appearance in other characters’ series. Much of that material is out of print, available only as back issues to be purchased at higher than cover price. And that’s just Spider-Man history. There are thousands more episodes of Marvel Universe history published in dozens of other titles and most of it is out of print. Over the last few days I’ve tried researching the history of just a few characters on the internet. What a headache.

The comic book fan in me would still like to play in the Marvel Universe, especially if he could get a paying gig, so I have been playing with ideas for one shots and mini-series. Fortunately, when it comes to wanting to write MU stories, the characters that most interest me are usually villains or oddball heroes that never managed to sustain their own series. The villains can be especially attractive. It’s been said that part of Spider-Man’s appeal was that he lost as much as he won. Maybe. Things certainly went poorly for Mr. Parker much of the time. But compared to any of his rogue’s gallery Spidey was an all-star. The Lizard, for instance, has made seventy-five appearances in various comics. If those were issues of a series that would total more issues than the average comic has before cancellation. And, because he’s a villain, he always loses. But he keeps getting back up to try and conquer the world again. There’s a certain appeal to characters who just refuse to give up.

I don’t know if any of my ideas will make it into script form. If they do I’ll need to know more about what Marvel is offering before I submit. And if I submit it’s a longshot that my story would be accepted. I’m having fun thinking about it. That’s the main thing for now.

Wouldn’t you know it, it’s time for me to head home and the rain comes down. Hopefully it will vent itself before Nizz has to catch her buses. I kind of like the dreary trudge through the wet but I prefer my sweetie to stay warm and dry.

It’s going to rain on me as I walk home. I will be laden with groceries and my shoes will squish as I walk.

So many things I “should” be doing this morning. So many things I’ll have to do before I can head off to work. I’ve got lunches to make (cucumber and celery and leftovers for Nizzibet, pasta and sauce for me – sauce is done, pasta needs to be cooked) and home accounting to enter, not to mention 3 different art projects I could work on and there’s that shirt that needs buttons reattached to it. And I just want to bundle up on the porch and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. Maybe put some tequila in that coffee.

All of which would probably just make me dizzy, if not down right ill. And I don’t have either the cigarettes or the tequila in the house.

Just that kind of morning I guess.

Started reading The Stand yesterday. I read the first version back when 1985 was still The Future. This version, the expanded, mostly-what-Stephen-King-would-have-had-published-in-the-first-place, had the dates updated to 1990 plus. (This second version was published in 1990.) It’s a nice little time capsule reading it now in 2003.The world he wrote of had no internet, no cell phones and no cable. Certainly there were cell phones and cable TV but their impact on society was so slim that they aren’t mentioned in the book. There are three television networks, easily co-opted by the powers that be.

I read Year Zero by Jeff Long a few months ago. Published in 2002, that was another doomsday plague novel and it shows the difference between the world of the eighties and the world of today. In Year Zero the survivors watch the world fall apart on cable and the internet. Those involved in trying to find a cure watch the heat signatures of human civilization fade out by hooking into the satellite networks. They know where on earth there are survivors by finding their campfires at night from orbit.

I call Mom in a few minutes. I’ll get some laundry started before then. Have some breakfast after. Finish up a few more panels of Wild Nights in Oz. (The way I’m doing has turned each page into memory hogs on the computer so I’ve broken each page into sections. I’ll reassemble it all at the end.) Then do some illustrations for the Kung Fu Dictionary for Mandate of Heaven. Guardians of Order approved the proposal on Thursday so we’ve got until the end of May to get the thing finished. It’s our deadline not theirs but we’d rather get it together sooner than later.

End of Means

The foolishness of it is – the ends cannot justify the means because there are no ends. There are only means. There is only the journey. Perhaps death counts as an end but if we accept the religious view (any religious view) that there is an afterlife then death is simply the means by which we transfer there. If there is an armageddon that’s only the means to establish eternal paradise.

When I was an atheist I decided that the only way to behave was to be good to people. To watch out for them and take care of them (and the rest of the world) as if each moment was the only chance I’d ever have. Certainly that was my faith at the time. I’ll make no claim that I succeeded in behaving that way. Day to day existence trumps ideals 99 times out of 100.

And today, though I’m not certain of any spiritual concepts (though I have faith in a few), I keep that ideal in front of me.

If planet Earth’s life cycle is as scientific theory indicates, then, way down the line, the sun will expand and take this world into itself. Whatever evidence that humanity leaves of its existence a few billion years from now will be wiped clean.

All empires fall. The continents move. Does what we do matter? Does how we do it matter? We decide that, minute to minute, day to day. We will fail to live up to our ideals because ideals don’t have dishes to do and cats to feed and children who insist on using white walls as Sharpie sketchpads.

This little rant only seems to end with the edit after this paragraph. It continues in my mind every day.

I’m up early for a Saturday. Saturday is Sleep In Day.

I start the day with coffee. Check the TV guide. There’s the new Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles on Fox so I turn on the TV. As often seems to be the case with the TV guide listings for children’s shows the TV guide was wrong. I don’t know what I’m looking at but the character design is unattractive so I change to A&E and watch the last few minutes of a David Bowie biography. He’s put out 35 albums? I don’t think I own one at the moment.

That’s done so I get online. No one has posted at with my Lifeforms Unlimited chatgroup. I check friend’s blogs. Long-S-S-Pier has some eloquent to say as usual and FSCKD is short and pithy. I read Lovesettlement’s thoughts soon after he posted them originally and he’s not added to them. Sarah Byam has a new essay up at Tuppenceworth. Read that yesterday. I check briefly with Salon. Yup, the ghostmaking continues.

Soon I’ll wake Nizzibet and we’ll work on writing. The story is set in the 1870s somewhere on the Kansas prairie. Bad things happen. Heroes fight monsters.