Monthly Archive for June, 2008

    You heard me, reader. It was a terrible mistake to go down this road. Would that I could take it back, but I’m afraid the web address of this site is just a little too…awesome. No, it is simply out of my hands, the blog must remain. 

     The reason, I think, that this blog was an unwise move on the part of yours truly is God. He’s up there, He’s got some spare time (apparently), and He’s decided in that infinite wisdom of His to spice things up a little on this blog. He knew I had elaborate Bat-theses planned for this blog (The Pros and Cons of Harvey Dent, Why the Joker is Funny…and yes I have written them), so He just keeps making insane crap happen to me so I’ll have to write about that instead. My life has never been this interesting to read about before, and I’m afraid it will only get worse. He’s a tricky, tricky God.

       Case in point: yesterday I fender-bendered a VW bug on Jefferson Park Avenue, my first anything-close-to-an-accident in my driving career. In my defense, we were at a yield sign, and the girl was fully stopped when it would have been wiser to take some initiative and enter the flow of traffic. Also, again in self-preservation, I bumped into her because I let off the brake just a little too much (we were on a downhill slope). At first, we were going to handle things privately, but when she called me today to inform me that the repair would be $500, I raced into the warm bosom of Geico. 

      By the way, the damage is not that bad. There’s a barely visible mark on her back bumper which would cost maybe $100 to paint over, but of course that’s not what they’re telling her. Car mechanics are really quite a phenomenon in the modern world. They join an elite group comprised of dentists, oil companies and people who buy books back from college students, who are simply permitted to rip us all off. This is the true Axis of Evil. We all know it, we all let them do it. They prey upon us, not every once in awhile, but every single time. Corrupt cops may take some “cream” (if you will) off the top every now and again; these people furnish their pads with our ignorance and vanity. Car mechanics are the worst, however; dentists, after all, would cost you nothing if you eased off the soda, and oil companies probably deserve something for having to extricate their product from the most war-torn parts of the world. But car mechanics operate on a simple business plan: we will rob them all, because they’re idiots. 

       And of course, because they have fully embraced how evil they are, they always manage to produce a full dissertation on why that fly on your windshield will cost $200 to get off. These speeches must be wonderfully exciting to deliver when you, the car mechanic, know how ridiculous they are. It’s like a cop pulling a woman over for speeding, and then sentencing her to two nights in jail for “Being smoking hot but a total ice queen about it.” Law degree or not, we have a sense that one cannot get away with that. We know something is amiss. But if we were as ignorant of the law as we are of the mechanical horses we ride around on all day, that woman would find herself doing community service and attending “Being a Better Total Babe” seminars (which I’m sure the cop in question probably operates himself).

      The situation is very similar, dear reader. When the young lady I bumped into the other day (who really is quite friendly) shows an auto shop the minor scuff on her bumper, and the pitchfork-carrying demons employed there inform her that they will need to remove the entire bumper to complete this job (I’m not making this up), one cannot help but marvel. This mark could probably be removed with a fingernail, and yet they spin fantastic tales of bumper removal. It’s just stunning.

         The Wii is an amazing game system, and for those of you who can, I overwhelmingly recommend you pick one up. I’ve been playing an excessive amount of “Wii Tennis,” against an increasingly adept computer opponent whose tenacity is incrementally renegotiated as my perceived talent rises. The motion control apparatus is so precise that I find I have distinctive moves, such as a 360 degree counter-clockwise assault which is so ruthless that my opponent can only dive fruitlessly at it. The Wii can definitely tell the difference between a back-hand and a forward swing, even at high speeds, and it gauges my timing and applies it to the ball with a precision I find breathtaking. It’s enough to make me want to take up tennis for real…except this is way more fun.

         I’ve been reading Jeph Loeb and Time Sale’s “Batman: Dark Victory” over again, and I’m stunned by how much better it is than I remembered. For the unwashed masses, “Dark Victory” is the sequel to the graphic novel (longer, fancier comic book) “Batman: The Long Halloween,” which is the story of how Batman, Police Commissioner James Gordon, and DA Harvey Dent team up to bring down organized crime in their city, and how the war on crime costs them more than they could have ever imagined. Their long-suffering families are pushed away, their personal limits are tested, and even their personal safety is surrendered in a war against evil. The story ends in a tragic twist when Harvey Dent has acid thrown in his face during a trial, and morphs into the murderous vigilante Two-Face, who is bent on using more…efficient methods to bring crime down. The character of Two-Face, of course, mirrors Batman in a frightening way. Harvey steps outside the law, and so does Batman, so what really separates them? Could the Dark Knight ever be nudged into being like him? 

      ”Dark Victory” picks up after Harvey Two-Face has unlawfully executed the head of the Gotham mob, putting the last nail in the coffin of organized crime. Harvey then turns himself in and is committed to Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Unfortunately, with the mafia out of the way, a new breed of criminals (dubbed “the freaks”) is ushered in. These include The Joker, Poison Ivy, Catwoman, The Riddler, etc. And even though Two Face is incarcerated, it appears he is uniting this new breed of criminals to continue his war on the last remaining remnants of organized crime. I just read a stunning scene last night that I thought I’d recount to you: 

        Harvey’s trial for the murder of Carmine Falcone has just begun. He is standing in the witness box, being cross-examined by the new District Attorney. Batman is in disguise as a security guard, waiting in the wings for anything to go wrong. Suddenly, in the middle of questioning, Two Face asks what time it is. Batman immediately senses something’s wrong, because Harvey is wearing a watch. The DA answers “Uh…2 o’clock.” Two o’clock. Two Face. Oh no. Suddenly, the entire rogue’s gallery of Batman’s adversaries explode out of the floor and attack the courtroom, as Harveny politely raises a finger and says: “I move for a recess.” Before the smoke can clear, he’s gone.

Amazing.

     If you enjoyed that, rest assured: the fall of Harvey Dent will be the backbone of the upcoming “The Dark Knight.” Don’t fear spoilers, however, since their particular take on it will be very unique.

Hello there, my favorite readers in the whole world. FYI, if any of you are emailing Cor and I and wondering what the hold-up is, you must remember that we have no internet in our residence yet. Please be patient with us and just use the telephone if it’s a serious emergency.

So! Last week was terrible. I lost my temp assignment, Corelyn got dreadfully sick (she is actually still recovering), I had to plant a tree in bad soil, and we discovered a lot more credit card debt from the wedding than we thought we had. For me, it’s just one more load upon the ol’ shoulders.

It’s weird how absolutely nothing can prepare you for the lifestyle change that marriage and adulthood brings. I think it’s even more pronounced for me, because I hit both at the same time, right out of college. I get the impression a lot of other people ease into it. Suddenly, we kind of have…nothing. It’s like living an entirely different new life where you must begin from scratch, even though you’re still accustomed to the old one you had. I’m used to being able to keep up on TV shows, and new releases from my favorite artists, but I can afford neither audio discs nor cable at my home. I’m used to, you know, eating things, but it’s tricky affording that too. And, of course, I already owe a credit card company a lot of money, and I don’t even own a credit card (don’t blame Cor for that, every inch of that debt comes from our wedding).

I’m a person who thrives on having a comfort zone, but I really feel like I have almost none now, and of course it’s only going to get more pronounced when we’re on the other side of the country. I talked to Corelyn about this, but she admitted that she has not noticed this feeling even close to as much, since she’s living down the street from where she used to, and is still working at the same exact job. Anyway, it’s a new experience, but I’m happy to be striking out into the frighteningly new, rather than languishing in comforting familiarity. As Corelyn put it when we discussed this on our honeymoon, “That’s the Allen in you.”

We had a lovely visit from Cor’s father this past weekend, as my wife came out of the tailspin of symptoms that had been attacking her for days on end. He’s in Alexandria on business, and was kind enough to road trip over to C’ville to have dinner with us, watch us play Wii, and discuss “The Dark Knight” with me. We headed to a South-African-styled restaurant called “Shebeen” (not sure about that spelling) on his insistence that he needed a good hamburger/steak, and indeed we discovered just that.

So the tree! I’m sure you’re wondering what happened with the tree. Well, it was quite an ordeal. I drove over to Carlos’ (the landscaper friend of Cor’s mom who got us this thing) the other day and led him to Ms. Lake’s residence. Upon arriving, Carlos deduced two things very quickly: 1) That the chosen spot was no good, 2) The soil in Cor’s mom’s backyard wouldn’t play nice with the tree. Oh joy. Carlos laughed at me, “This is more than you bargained for, isn’t it?” Yes, Carlos. Yes it was. Still, with a little sweat and work ethic, we got the thing in the ground, and I paid the man for his time. I’m not getting into details, but I must admit I couldn’t help but laugh at myself as I exhausted an already pitiful bank account in order to acquire…a tree.

Nonetheless, dear reader, I learned a few fascinating tree tips you may want to take home: 1) Don’t mulch a tree. It’s a waste of time and can choke the tree, 2) If you put compost or such things around a tree, never let it touch the actual tree trunk, as disease can get in that way. Neat stuff. Take that home with you and never say I didn’t do anything nice for you.

“The Dark Knight” is a mere four weeks away, people! Can you FEEL it? I can feel it. We’re getting so close I can hardly sit straight anymore. Corelyn has been dutifully plowing through even more relevant Bat-canon in order to prepare for the big day; last weekend she obliterated Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee’s “Batman: Hush,” and now she’s working through Frank Miller’s “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.” I must have the coolest wife ever. Weep with envy, other Bat-fans.

Also on the “get excited” list, “Wanted” comes out this weekend. It’s a straight-up actioner starring Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman and James McAvoy (who my wife would likely run away with if the opportunity presented itself), and directed by a Russian fellow whose name I cannot recall. The reviews so far are stunningly positive, and it looks to be the first really great shoot-em-up action movie in a long time. I recommend it for anyone in the mood for a few thrills this weekend.

    Side note: Penny Arcade is also the creator of a charity called “Child’s Play” that donates a TON of money to kids in need every year. The amounts, I believe, are in the hundreds of thousands.

They did a comic about it when it was founded.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/12/3/  

This one is great, too. Ignore the industry talk if you don’t understand it.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/3/29/

      There is truly no more awful moment in the experience of a man than awakening to a lack of pants. You wake up, bathe yourself in soap and hot water, fix your hair, shave, brush your teeth, arrange your thoughts, plan out your day, and then one failed trip to the closet scuttles the entire voyage. Answer me this, dear reader, what amount of stunning physical beauty, world-wise confidence, or encyclopedic knowledge of anything will allow the civilized world to forgive you for having no pants?

       The answer, of course, is that the sin of no pants is unforgivable. We simply do not get past it. You can cure cancer, but they’ll still arrest you for it in public or fire you for it in the workplace. And there is no forgiveness, either; no one is going to laugh it off and say “everyone forgets to put on pants sometimes.” Walk into the office without the expected cloth coverings hanging from your waist , you’ll be lucky if anyone looks you in the eyes ever again. It is simply not acceptable.

       Why do I go on about this? Because this morning, as I sleepily stumbled my way about the apartment, readying myself for work, it became clear to me that I had entered into this Twilight Zone of horrors. My pants were gone. To say that they were, and still are, “lost” is not fully accurate, because in a living space so small this phenomenon just can’t happen. Things are normally “lost” when there’s too many places they could be, but in a living space as small as ours, tearing the entire place apart (which I did) is not only possible, it’s a reasonably quick activity. My pants are not lost, they are…truly disappeared (not a typo, I like the sound of it). The extent of my frantic search for them this morning, and its failure to yield fruit, means that the only places left for them to be would require some kind of horseshoe-esque “throw the pants” game, and that game would have had to take place outdoors. I don’t have the best memory in the world, but no such game rings a bell. Maybe Cor has hobbies I don’t know about.

      Of course, this pants catastrophe was not orchestrated by the night-time escape of one pair, but the perfect aligning of stars so that every pair of work-aproppriate pants I own was either gone or not wearable. What does a man do in this situation, with t-minus five minutes to leave before being late to work? Even if there was a clothing store open at that time other than Wal-Mart, a lack of pants begets an inability to venture into the world to acquire more. My eventual solution was a pair of grey slacks which did not fit when I acquired them, and do not fit now, but they are on me, and society would appear to be appeased. How exactly their cruel, unfeeling dimensions are in some kind of aesthetic harmony with my body is one of those mysteries one doesn’t ponder in much the same way that Wile E. Coyote does not look down once he has run off a cliff.

     Right. So enough about pants.

      One of the things that most people who have held temp jobs can probably tell you, and something I can now endorse as relentlessly true, is that it’s not to your advantage to get jobs done too quickly. There are a myriad of reasons for this, which I will now detail: 1) Your employer will begin to feel like they don’t know what to do with you, 2) It starts to sound like complaining when you’re always asking if anyone “needs anything at all,” 3) Your co-workers and superiors sometimes get kind of threatened if you’re too good at what you’re doing, 4) Ask for too many jobs, eventually they start “finding” things for you, and this means that they are digging down into the reserves of duties that everyone has been putting off. In other words, every time you ask for work, your tasks become that much more awful. I’ve already finished the filing I had to accomplish this morning before lunch, but I’m not saying a word, because the only place we can go from here is feeding an angry grizzly bear, or something equally horrific.

       Yesterday was a fun day, despite Cor’s efforts to the contrary (kidding). My wife and I have the same argument many times over, and it begins when she suggests (read: demands) that we produce a magical list of things “to get done today.” My reply is normally that I just got home from work, that we’ve been slaving like druids for the past week/month, and that we should do something fun. Cor’s reply is that we’ll do that once we’re done with the list, and it’ll be better anyway, because then she’ll be able to relax and focus on enjoying herself. For the first two years of our relationship I fell for this, but time, the wisest of teachers, has instructed me that “done” is a fool’s paradise; a mythical land that Corelyn prophesies about often, but will never actually be reached. She’s not *lying* to me, I think part of her clings to the idea that her incredible work ethic (it really is amazing) will ever be sated by the burnt offerings she sends to it, but the older we get the more she and I are realizing that this is a mirage. The reality of adult life seems to be that there is no “done.” There is a never-ending stream of things to do, all of them crucially important, and if you want to keep sane you just have to relax sometimes anyway.

       So, conceding to her a certain amount of rudimentary productivity (such as grocery shopping, check-depositing, etc), I then mandated a solid hour of “Mario Kart” on our Wii, followed by several episodes of “Scrubs,” one of our favorite TV shows. It did the trick, we both relaxed and found ourselves in a serious discussion of how the character of Catwoman has been handled through Batman’s comic book history.

Corelyn’s embrace of Batman, the Joker, and the universe they live in has been among the more magical events of my life. She has read and watched more Batman material, and fathoms it with greater focus and clarity, than any guy I know. The now-famous example of this occurred when Billy, Corelyn and I were watching an animated Bat-movie together, and the Joker winkingly intoned “pappa spank!” at Batman. This is an awkward and hilarious expression, and all three of us laughed, but as we did Cor glanced at me with a look of recognition. At first I didn’t understand why, and then I remembered: Batman had said “pappa spank” to the Joker in a comic book…from 1940. I dare any of my fellow Bat-fans to claim they would have caught that reference.

It occurs to me that I have not transcribed the events of our honeymoon cruise here, but you will have to wait awhile for that, dear reader, because…well I don’t feel like it right now. However, it bears mentioning that I acquired a terrible illness during that cruise, which has plagued me ever since. Food poisoning, you ask? Nope. Malaria? No. I have, instead, contracted “Enjoyement of Resident Evil Moviesitis.” I don’t know how it happened. I have publicly condemned them many times, having seen the first and written it off with great satisfaction. Fate, however, had diabolical plans for me. I was sitting in our luxurious room late one night near the end of our cruise, contently flipping channels and nursing a small sunburn, when I arrived on a “Resident Evil” marathon provided by TNT. I have long hated the writer/director of these endeavors, Paul W.S. Anderson, as he can be relied upon to produce garbage like “Alien Versus Predator” and “Mortal Kombat: The Movie,” but “Resident Evil” and its equally hilarious sequel “Resident Evil: Apocalypse” entertained me so thoroughly that I was embarassed by it. I have now rented “Resident Evil: Extinction” and, though I’m only half way through it, I can report with great shame that I’m absolutely loving it. It’s better than the second and at least as good as the first, all of which I’m constantly in the mood to watch. God help me. If that can be called a “recommendation,” then it’s my recommendation for today. It’s probably closer to an attempt to spread my contagion.

After work today, Cor and I are heading up to Alexandria to spend some time with the good folks there. We never get enough. I called Billy to let him know we were coming, and he replied that married life must be amazing. “Why’s that?” I replied, although I already agreed with him. “Well,” he continued, “When I told mom that you and Corelyn were coming to town, she thought for a second and then said, ‘Clean your room, you’re sleeping on the couch.’” I think I see his point.