All posts by Splotchy

a.i.

Bruised Ego

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Last night, I had a dream that I wrote a comic book with another person. They had done most of the writing. I don’t remember who did the artwork. I couldn’t really take much credit for it, given my minimal participation. I think it was a non-superhero comic.

This rhymes with an elementary school memory of mine. I think it was 4th grade. We had to write a book, which actually included a bound cover. I don’t remember how we did that, but that was part of the project.

I procrastinated for every major assignment in school and this was no different. As the deadline approached, I begged two guys in class, Gary and Dave, if I could join them on their project, which was close to being complete and was a bunch of puzzles, word finds, etc. They reluctantly let me. I did a lot of the lettering in the final book, but I never felt I was really part of it, and it wasn’t my book in any meaningful sense. I think this somehow caught in my subconscious and replayed a variation of that in my dream.

Dave ended up going to a different middle and high school from me. His family seemed kind of snobbish, and he seemed like he turned into a snob to me as well, in what little interactions I had with him. Who knows, maybe I was wrong. I can be an atrocious judge of character.

I went to school with Gary up through high school. He was the first person in my high school class to die. He got into a motorcycle (or was it a motorbike?) accident shortly after graduation. He’s been dead for decades now. I don’t know how someone who I knew as a kid could be dead for so long. It doesn’t feel real.

Back to the dream. After the dreamtime comic came out, I was dream talking to this other person who was a successful comics artist and he was enthusiastic about working with me, but in a superhero milieu. I had to look up how to spell milieu. Looking up milieu wasn’t part of the dream, I just did that now while writing this post.

Back to the dream again. I said I didn’t have the full concept and I didn’t want the guy to get ahead of me, but I did have an idea for the name of the superhero — Bruised Ego.

Since I’m not too tight with any comic book artists, here’s a rendering made by a rather questionable and unsavory acquaintance of mine, Art Interior. Spelling is also not his strong suit.

Enjoy! (or don’t!)

teevee

Television

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I live in a western suburb of a major city. I’m not sure what the economic makeup is — it used to be working class, now it’s probably closer to middle class. I think it used to be more conservative, but as younger families move in, might be a little more liberal.

The houses are pretty close together. At night you can walk down the street and see the glow of a television from a fair number of houses. We have a television but it’s down in our basement, which is not really warm and inviting. This is mostly because we don’t have lot of room in our house, and we have some big things taking up what would be our TV room.

I never watch the television. We canceled our cable a couple years ago. We had this span of time (probably years) where we paid for cable but didn’t watch it. We did a similar thing for our telephone landline. After a couple years of receiving only calls from telemarketers, we finally canceled it. My wife would have canceled it sooner, but for some reason I hesitated.

There’s wiring that every house in our town has to allow for a telephone line. It seemed like a big deal to turn that off. Disconnecting cable didn’t seem to have that kind of weight. I don’t know why — maybe because telephones go outbound and inbound and television is only inbound? One thing connects to other people, and one thing doesn’t really do anything meaningfully social.

I do still watch some television shows. I watched The Bear on my computer, also have been watching Venture Brothers with my son, also on my computer.

I imagine what it will be like to walk my block in 10, 20, 30 years. Is the glow going to be gone from all these windows? I’m honestly surprised there are still so many televisions glowing at night. That’s possibly a sign of the state of my suburb — old customs still being followed, but gradually fading as the old people leave/die, and the new people arrive.