GalacticMu

I live in a working-class black neighborhood that is bordered on one side by a affluent white neighborhood and on the other side by a very poor, very dangerous predominately black neighborhood (also, living here has gotten me out of the habit of saying African American, because the blacks look at you like you’re retarded when you say it).

The poor neighborhood has a gun violence problem. Right before we moved here a young anti-gun activist living about seven blocks over was shot and killed; on nice days, like today, when I am out walking I see at least one young black man in a wheelchair, and usually at least one limping one. Because I’m a dumb white lady it took me a while to realize they were shooting victims.

Today on my walk I passed three young men who had trouble walking, and when I passed one of them he said to me, “Lookit’ you, lady! Unh-huh!”

“Hi,” I said as I approached him. Men are very flirtatious around here. I often get a lascivious “Salam, sister.”

“Day-yum. In your nice comfortable gym shoes out walking left-right-left-right.”

“Uh?” I said.

“Don’t be angry at me, sistah.”

“I’m not? What?”

“You don’t gotta walk so fast, we ain’t gonna catchu.”

It is common for me to find myself in this communication purgatory. I assume he is just being cheeky, but a few blocks later I wonder if my fast walk has appeared to him as white fear or something (or would that be black fear?). BattleGate is almost certainly laughing at this right now, because I have a conspicuously rapid walking pace that she dubbed the “City Walk” – it’s an unconscious effort on my part. Later yet I wonder if it was some kind of good-natured ambulatory bitterness.

When I was in New Orleans eating a muffaletta sitting on a park bench away from the crowds, a large black man approached me and asked, “You be honest with me if I ask you somethin’?”

“Yes?”

“You be honest?”

… “Yes?”

“You be honest if I can tell you exactly where you bought them shoes from?”

“Why would you want to do that?”

He stared at me. I stared back. I felt like I was in another country.

“You said you’d be honest.”

I figure he’s crazy and deploy a mild Look-At-The-Elephant*. “I’m gonna eat this sandwich now, before I have to get back to work. Take it easy.”

He walked away. Later in my hotel room as I was reading over a press packet for the city, I came across a safety pamphlet. Among other things, it advised that there was a scam locals ran where they’d tell you where you got your shoes from and then ask for money, and how you are to firmly repeat “NO THANK YOU” and not engage them in conversation. I flipped the paper over, expecting there to be something on the back side. What part was the scam? Could they hypnotize you? I was intrigued, but there was no further explanation. If Jonno or Richard are reading this, maybe you have some explanation for me: there’s no actual scam, right? They are just advising tourists (or press, in my case) to be frightened of beggars?

Anyway, I’ve only been frightened twice since living here: one was a wiry, enraged crazy woman who thought I’d laughed at her (I ran, ‘cuz bitch was gonna fuck me up) and the other was a huge truck full of football fans on the night of a big Bengals game, who pulled over to where I was walking our dog so a woman could open the door and call, “Come over here, baby!” in a weirdly friendly tone while I overheard someone else say in the cab “Just go over there, quick!” (again, running). The last one was by far the scariest, and nary a black dude in sight.

*My dad worked as a caretaker for developmentally disabled sex-offenders and told me that he’d defused several dangerous situations by actually pointing outside and going “What the-“. This was fondly referred to as Look-At-The-Elephant.

It all started with something called Space Buddies 2000.

The year was 2001.   It was early spring.  In Washington State early spring is not unlike winter, or late fall, or late spring, or parts of summer: rain.  Pervasive, monochrome, characterless rain.  Living in that kind of environment requires at least two bars per city block, and the equivalent number of coffee shops.  It’s the environment that spawned Starbucks, Kurt Cobain and Bacon Salt.  And me.

The way I remember it is as follows: a group of kids were sitting around in one of the divier local dives when we drunkenly agreed to start a science fiction gang.  We’d been haphazardly meeting for sci-fi TV and movies, booze and dinner for a short time already, and it seemed harmless to make it official.  We made a toast and each gave ourselves new names.  “Subspace Eddy” had already been a joke name of mine since I’d made the inebriated comment to a Star Trek episode, “Why are they always on about that Subspace Eddie guy?”  BattleGate will have to tell you her own story, because I have no memory of how it came about, other than that she, like I, already had her name.

Years passed.  Members came and went.  Other member’s loony-tunes girlfriends accused BattleGate and I of trying to steal their boyfriends away* because they were third-wave feminists who didn’t believe that any women could actually be that into watching the 1979 Black Hole unless they had a nefarious motivation.  Space Buddies 2000, over the years, dwindled down to four: thee who nowst form GalacticMu.  Something had to be done.

But, since I don’t believe in linear timelines, we are going back again.  Back to 2004.  Enter: Dungeon Majesty.

A cult public-access TV show of moderate renown, Dungeon Majesty was the epitome of nerd-girl-dom: four D&D players and a Dungeon Master in a live-action, poorly greenscreened serial.  Holy shit!  Homemade live-action D&D!  BattleGate and I swooned.  If only we were skinnier and lived in LA and had though of it sooner.  Years passed, but the inspiration didn’t.

Continued in PART 2. 

Link to Dungeon Majesty.

Link to Dungeon Majesty Wikipedia deletion discussion, a prime example of why I don’t participate in Wikipedia  (short version: DM drew attention from multiple geek sources – both online and off – was publicly embraced by Wizards of the Coast and Dungeons & Dragons, was picked up for over a dozen MTV2 microspots to air between videos, and most recently joined forces with famous web artist Leslie Hall – and was deleted by the Wiki-ghouls for a lack of notability).

*As a side note to the ladies: yes, if you want to get pollinated,  being able to have an informed opinion about the efficacy of space elevators while also dressing up like Kaylee from Firefly is a stone-solid way of guaranteeing your choices amongst a wide selection of attentive, eager nerd-boys.

Subspace:  I’m kind of excited about the G.I. Joe movie they’re making.

Hal:  What, a cartoon?

Subspace:  No, it’s real.

Hal:  But… who is going to be the Cobra Commander?

Subspace:  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the guy from Brick.

Hal:   He’s twelve years old!

Subspace:  He’s a man now.   Anyway, they released photos of what the good ninja, Snake Eyes looks like.

Hal:  Oh yeah?

Subspace:  Yeah, he looks cool.  But they didn’t show the bad ninja.  I can’t remember what he’s called.

Hal:   Snake Butt.

Subspace:  Yes, right, Snake Butt: where is he?  You can’t find him.  He’s like a snake’s butt.

Hal:  Are you even sure you’ve found him when you do?

Apologies for a lack of content, dear readers, but I grudgingly had to write something “for real,” as the punk shits say. Somebody’s got to pay for the dilithium crystals to run this thing (which based on my pay, will not be me).

I’ve also struggled to compose something regarding the death of Arthur C. Clarke, but I got nothin’. Sorry. I just wasn’t a dedicated fan of his, and I have a certain amount of shame over my impassioned mockery of his TV show, Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. GalacticMu commenter and old friend of mine, Shane (he’s getting really old, like with kids and everything), reminded me that as a teenager I called it Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Crazy Shit in lieu of being able to recall the real name. The program infuriated me: the somewhat smug old Clarke sitting there, introducing himself erroneously as the “inventor” of the communications satellite, after which he’d give compelling evidence for something mysterious – only to end each episode with haughty denial that any such mysterious thing could exist. Believers of strange events/phenomenon were often chided in his lulling, mealy British accent, often prompting me to shout at the TV “SHOULDN’T THIS SHOW BE CALLED ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S WORLD UTTERLY WITHOUT MYSTERY?”

It wasn’t until I was older that I appreciated him for the person he was. I appreciated that he fled to Buddhist paradise Sri Lanka (I can attest as an atheist forcibly surrounded by religion at all times: Buddhism is not a bad choice) and intently lived out the rest of his science-fiction loving years running a diving school and living with friends (which I always misread as “driving school,” a visual that makes me laugh and laugh. “Merge left here – I said merge left! There is perfectly reasonable scientific explanation for merging left!”). I appreciated that his wit never left, and that he honored and loved space travel until his last days. And I especially appreciated that he famously predicted the use of House Chimps by the year 1960. He’d apparently never actually met a monkey and did not know that you’d be far better off paying a hobo to come due chores for you.

This one’s for you, Arthur.

More on this when I find out more.

THIS JUST IN: I cannot spell “satellite”.

I have this mental thing, see. No, not the one where I fear we are secretly being controlled by a race of brain-washing skull-like aliens. The one where I feel like certain events are Real Fairy Tales.

“Fairy tales” might not be the right words, but it’s the one I’ve been working with for about a decade now. The first time I had the Real Fairy Tale realization was when golf pro Payne Stewart (who, according to The New York Times, was “known (…) for his traditional knickers and tam-o’-shanter,” a sentence that made me snort with Bender-like derision) and five people of lesser importance died in a bizarre plane crash.

The story was weird, and upon hearing it I was overcome with a sensation similar to déjà vu – except, instead of having a feeling that it had happened before, I had a feeling that it was important. The feeling scared me: this is how people go crazy, I thought. This is what happens to the nut jobs that they find in apartments full of garbage, rocking and muttering to themselves about Crystal Pepsi. Wait no, that’s programmers. ANYWAY. Despite my nagging fears of impending insanity, I explored the feeling, and to my sort of comfort, it stayed. I suppose I rationalized that if insanity was truly at my doorstep, it might behave like schizophrenia and come on in little fits and hiccups before unleashing its full fury. I clearly don’t know what I am talking about.

Instead, what I came up with was this: there are consistent themes to parables and myths, and these usually involve characters of high stature or unbeatable skill who then learn something. I mean, thematically, a parable is supposed to involve humans (unlike a fable, which involves animals or inanimate objects) who make a decision of some kind (usually a complicated moral one cloaked as a simple, day-to-day decision) and then suffer consequences.

Now: fairy tales. Fairy tales are parables + magic (and often substitute moral lessons with chaos). And this is where my brain slots the event like the Payne Stewart crash. This is where the crazy feelings come in: it is bizarre – almost too bizarre. Bizarre in a way where I feel some kind of cypher hanging over the whole event, like a pattern. And I fear when I use the words “fairy tale,” you think I mean those cute pink dragonfly-winged little people. I don’t. I mean the things that steal your babies in the night and replace them with hateful homunculi.

Here are just a few of the events that I feel have been a part of the Real Fairy Tales so far:

When I am at my most pessimistic and feel that even the grocery checkers dead faux-smile might send me into rampage over the mockery that is “hopefulness,” I find the best thing to do is indulge the feelings*. The primary way of doing this – like the primary way of waking up consists of coffee and Sudafed shooters – is to visit Peter Watt’s blog, No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons.

Peter Watts is the author of some of the best science fiction writing of the last decade, namely the Rifters Trilogy (just to be confusing, against Watts’ wishes the publisher split the last book in the trilogy, Behemoth, into two separate books, bringing the “trilogy” count to four) and the Hugo-nominated Blindsight.

Watts is lumped together in my mind with people like Anthony Bourdain: crusty, self-damagingly intelligent, pessimistic and the exact sort of person you want at the bar with you. I can identify with Anthony Bourdain not because I appreciate his chain-smoking while eating blood sausage, but because he recognizes his own Schadenfreude. Watts is very much the same way; to not be drawn into his visceral delight of the broken, the flawed and the messy is to not be a thoughtful human.

Much is explained by Watts’ training as a marine biologist. It also helps me to think of him at home, in some kind of tatty, aged robe, ignoring the fetid litterbox of his deranged and hostile cats by writing an exegesis on the neurological functionality of zombies. I find it a much more sane than thinking of Stephen King, each morning mechanically propped up at his immense oak desk overlooking all of Maine, drinking Diet Pepsi and smashing out an entire novel before noon. A biologist, I can imagine, is doing the same kind of things I am: burning one’s self of hot frying pans in the kitchen and then going into stuporous reveries about the biological nature of pain (and then disregarding them in favor of eating something comprised largely of whipped cream for breakfast). Not that I am in the same intellectual ballpark as Watts, but I imagine that I would be allowed to… uh… wax his balls? Grease his bats? I don’t know anything about baseball but I know a fair amount about double entendres, and I fear I’ve ventured into the wrong territory.

ANYWAY.

Halcyon and I were just the other evening discussing the possibility that Asperger Syndrome is an evolutionary specialism designed to combat the uncategorizable mass input of modern human existence. Why? Peter Watts is to blame.

* While in this state I am still capable of recognizing beauty (generally in the form of cake) I just don’t believe it to be the transcendent, hand-that-beats-all that the luckier among us do. The existence of cake in the universe does not make me believe that cake is the prevailing force. Entropy and chaos are still the prevailing forces. I’ve dealt with chaos cake before, and it is not pleasurable.

The Hollywood brain trust is planning to release another Incredible Hulk Movie.

There is only one rational response to this: why, for the love of all that is green, go there?

Maybe because the previous incarnation, directed by Ang Lee, was roundly despised. Much of the criticism centered around the cartoonish CGI. I asked my good friend Captain Obvious of the good ship O’rlly what he thought.

H: Do you think the hulk was too cartoonish?
CO: The hulk was a cartoon.

The hulk originally appeared in Marvel Comics (1962), in a story penned by Stan Lee and drawn/plotted by Jack Kirby. Here’s the gist of the plot, for you Rigelians and trans-dimensional entities with your soundlessly gibbering mouths: a meek and mild-mannered scientist is exposed to deadly gamma radiation, barely survives, and thereafter is prone to fits of “hulking out”: turning gray, getting big and muscle-y, gaining an unquenchable desire to smash things, and losing any interest in sustained silent reading.

It’s a modern retelling of Dr Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde. A scientist made to suffer for the excess of science. Id vs. Super-ego, made visible. The essential conflict is man vs. self.

Ang Lee’s hulk (2003) strayed from the essential conflict by introducing a “bad-guy” secondary character (played well by Nick Nolte). However! The theme (the price of scientific excess) remained, since Nolte’s character was the epitome of a morally bankrupt scientist.

Nolte rounded out a stellar ensemble cast (notably featuring Sam Elliot and Jennifer Connelly) and a remarkably nuanced performance from a mis-cast Eric Bana as the hulk. Character motivations are believable and subtly played. The military man (Elliot) rightly recognizes the Hulk as a threat and moves to subdue and destroy it. Bana enjoys and fears the Hulk persona. Connelly is caught between. The movie is well-edited and uses some split-screen cuts to enjoyable campy effect.

Not this time! The new Hulk will stow that thinky crap by introducing a troglodytic arch-nemesis (Abomination), made using the Hulk’s blood. No complex moral quandaries will vex this Dr. Banner (Edward Norton): he wants to destroy the Hulk, but is bound by a sense of duty to kick the bad guy’s assssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

He wishes it didn’t have to be this way, but hey, Support our Hulk.

The new movie will not admit to being campy. It is grim as death. So it trades cartoonish CGI for ghoulishly overdrawn bodybuilder CGI (all the better for the extended musclebound-monsters-punching-on-each-other sequences). Because this is serious business, people. The fate of the world hangs in the balance or something.

That level of seriousness, about a movie, about a giant green monster-man movie, reveals a dangerous pathology on the part of the film-makers.

Listen up, filmy people: the Hulk isn’t a monster, out there, in the world. It’s a monster inside you. You need to learn to laugh at the Hulk. You need to hug the Hulk and teach the Hulk to love itself. Only when the smashing stops can the healing begin.

Always here to help,
Halcyon
Psych Officer
GalacticMu

(HALCYON enters kitchen)

What’re you doing?  Oh, you look like you’re on some kind of tidying streak.  I’ll get out of your way.

(HALCYON quickly exits kitchen)

If the fresh “Roasted Salsa” from The Fresh Market tastes strangely rich and meaty… it is because it contains beef stock, tallow, and chicken fat.