Holy somnambulism, Batman

Sunday.

Laundry.

Cleaned out my closet. One white plastic trash bag stuffed with clothes. Destination unknown. Spared some old, nostalgia-filled t-shirts after wifey said she could make a quilt with them. Really, I asked. I stood there stunned, as if she just told me the cats have built a functional rocket to Mars. I didn’t know you could do such things with t-shirts. For me, until today, t-shirts had two life stages. First, you wear it. Second, you part with it by throwing it out, washing the car with it or losing it when you gave it to a girlfriend because you thought she looked hot when she slept in it (or when she stole it from you outright).

Yoga.

Wrote a hell of a lot in my journal, mostly around the superhero project I'm working on. Did some thinking about the societal differences between Spiderman and the X-Men. Re-read "Dark Knight Returns" by Frank Miller. Personally, Miller jumped the shark after his masterful reinterpretation of Batman. Everything else he's done has been...well, not sub-par, but not as interesting. Or he's just surfing the same themes. Hyper-Republican government. City and world on brink of destruction. Slums as far as the eye can see. Outcasts, probably mutants.

Then again, I'm probably jealous. I'm surfing those same themes in my novel, too. At least I'm abandoning them when I work on my second novel. I wonder if Miller is channeling Dickens, too.

Worked a bit mentally drafting two blog entries. One on Michael Jackson, the other on "the Future."

Returned a couple emails, which reminds me: Go to ye local music shoppe and pick up Roger Waters' "Amused to Death." It's about a numb culture that is in love with media coverage of war and how men go into war way too easily these days. Written in the wake of the first Gulf War and pre-reality show TV, it's eerily reminiscent of our world now, and a sad commentary about how the Clinton era was a refreshing break between oil wars and flashy, sanitized explosions on CNN.

And if anyone knows how I can get my hands on satellite photos of the Feb. 15 marches, please get in touch with me. I know someone besides the CIA has to have them.

Also, I'm thinking about getting up very terribly early to work on my novel. I can't work that much in the evening; want to spend time with wife and cats. I leave my wife alone way too much anyway, sacrificing her for this keyboard. When I say "a few more minutes," she knows it's shorthand for an hour. It's not fair, so I think struggling out of bed, where at least one cat can keep her company, is a more fair abandonment. Let her enjoy the sleep of the dead. Let's have our evenings together.

Writers, from what I have gathered, like to work in the still-dark morning. Supposedly, the juices are flowing better when the fingers of dawn are creeping into the night air. Personal experience tells me the night gives something potent to the writing hands, or anyone in the artistic frame of mind. Maybe your body is overtired and the brain juices up, firing off different pistons to keep awake. Maybe it doesn't care anymore and bursts out with raw sentences, honest prose. No one is looking. The city is comatose, and in this silence your words are kings.

The drawback is, I'd be getting up at 5 a.m. Maybe 4:30.

The pain.

Today's Word...

Hasn't been updated yet...or at least by Sunday 9:30 p.m. Seattle time. The prisoner breathes a sigh of relief as the gallows fail to operate. A sign from above that mercy is to be on his head tonight, and not the hangman's noose.