Pilots are Sexy

Today I met a pilot at the Santa Monica Airport.

He's a nice guy, about my age, likes to hang out at the airport and watch the planes land. Santa Monica hosts both small general-aviation aircraft and the bigger corporate jets that fly regular interstate routes, and it's got only one runway, so it's interesting to watch how the controllers weave all the traffic together.

This guy I met has been taking flying lessons for a month or so, flying on average five days a week, an hour at a time. He's been a quick study, I guess, according to his instructor, who said that he'd qualified to solo more quickly than any student he's ever had.

Private pilot training is divided into two phases: basic flight training; that is, learning to take off, fly around, not crash, talk to controllers, land. This phase culminates in the solo flight, when the student flies the plane alone for the first time.

Then, once one knows how to fly, one learns navigation: reading maps, using navigation instruments, flying long trips from one airport to another to another.

Today was my friend's first solo flight. He flew with a different instructor, first, to get a second opinion: yes, his skills are such that we trust him in the plane alone. The different instructor taught much differently than his main instructor, having him do unfamiliar maneuvers and fly under different conditions, in a plane he was unfamiliar with. My friend was a little nervous.

But then he got back with his normal instructor, in the plane he'd learned in, and managed to pull himself together. They did touch-and-goes: circling the field, landing, taking off, circling again. Then he pulled the plane off the taxiway and let the instructor out.

It was sort of gusty, and there was a lot of air traffic in the area, and it was getting late in the day, but he pressed on; he took off, circled, got diverted on approach by the tower, and finally eased the plane down to kiss the pavement. "Nice job on final approach," the tower said, uncharacteristically conversational.

He gunned the engine, took off, and went around again. A perfect landing. And a third time: a little overeager; a little harder touching down. But nothing broken.

He taxied back to pick up his instructor, who shook his hand. "Congratulations!" The instructor wrote in my friend's logbook: "1st solo!!" Two exclamation points. One more than usual.

My new friend is a better driver than I am. He's more aware of his environment. He's working harder than I normally work, studying charts and regulations and procedures. He gets up a lot earlier than I do, and he is well on his way to a significant accomplishment: his Private Pilot certificate. Already, soloed, he has successfully performed an exceedingly difficult task that has a very narrow margin for error.

His plan, he told me, as we sat outside watching the air traffic come and go, is to fly to the airport where his father still visits. His father, once a pilot, now watches from the ground as his past climbs into the clouds. His father's health, he refuses to admit, is deteriorating.

His father knows nothing of his flying lessons, yet.

His plan is to fly to where his father sits watching, open the cabin door, wave his hand and say "Here I am, Dad. Hop in and I'll take you for a ride."

His name, as you may have guessed, is Me.

Xanga Sucks

So I started clicking on random people's Xanga sites, just to see what's out there.

"it's march 1st! yayyy" reads one post, followed by about 16 comments all reading, approximately, "hi lol!!!1!!1!"

Another poster tells the world, "wow, it's been a month and a day since my last post. weird." He/she (the picture is of a llama) previously wrote about how "im such a slacker with this, sorry it's been forever since i've posted."

One girl describes how "I've been watching Full House a lot lately, it's sucha good show!! It's so sad sometimes, k this is boring". Her boyfriend responds to every post. "love you baby! And I miss having 249 with you a lot."

In pale pink type on a white background, one young man writes "wow it's so nice outside". Twelve people comment on this, saying, for instance, "haha" or "ITS A BEUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEGHBORHODD". This is Featured Content.

More Featured Content, from a different site: "im devil and im here to say im best damn rapper in the USA heayyaa". Six comments, including one prolonged transcript of a chat session, in which sWeEtKiSsEz describes how:

"now greg is calling me a prep cuz i like justin i guess
and i am no way in hell a prep
im a punk/athelete
did u see my outfit today?
total punkish"

Some blogs are meticulous accounts of the writer's daily life. Some seem to be comprised mainly of transcriptions of songs, set against a huge background photograph that makes the text hard to read. Other sites are artful, insightful and/or entertaining. But a lot seem to be just words arranged haphazardly, with a careful precise imperfection. As if you threw a bowl of alphabet soup against the wall, and then went through and misspelled all the words that were accidentally formed.

Then I found a site featuring multi-page essays written by a seventeen-year-old guy:

"After I met the man I sat on a bench in the park and I saw a woman get taken up to heaven and squirrels talk to each other in an unknown language and lives change and exsistences become different. I saw a man who glowed and a man who faded into the background like a chameleon and I only saw him because he was standing by a brick wall and looked like brick and a truck drove past and he could not change quickly enough. So I counted myself lucky."

Every day or two this guy writes these long essays, with fifty or a hundred comments from readers, with raw, adolescent boredom and sadness wrapped up together. There's such a volume of it, imaginative and rough, and edged, as if it's written with charcoal.

I clicked on a link, and was taken to his livejournal page, where he's written even more ... poems, here, and stories, and more traditional blogging in a conversational tone, and it quickly becomes apparent that his xanga page is a certain type of creative outlet for him, and his livejournal is another.

To have an outlet wherein you write the same way every time, where that screen eventually conditions you to adapt a certain mindset, the same way that your e-mail login page conditions you to type your password ... to adopt that sort of discipline as a young writer is very important, I imagine, since I never had it. Here on this page I'll vary wildly in tone and subject matter, as do most of us, and as a result it always takes time to settle into a style for the day, and it's never long until I'm done and the next post will be different, and the style flounders, infant.

Ray Bradbury's an example of someone who's nurtured and developed a style. His words crackle like ball lightning, never settling, dancing alight each concept, daring you to comprehend before they press on into the night. I'm listening to this book on CD, in my car, and when I concentrate and listen it's like standing in a waterfall, weight pouring on me, trying to drink, feeling heavy and elated together.

Oddly, it's very easy to get distracted from this book, sitting in traffic, realizing suddenly that I've been thinking about the chemical composition of jet contrails and a paragraph's gone by and I've missed it. The words are oil-slick, loose and wriggling, and they have to be clutched and examined and tasted, or they slide off and flip away.

When I listen, they crush me, steamrolling with imagery. When I glance away, they pass by; but I glance quickly after and think back and still see the faint afterimage behind my lids. I hear the ringing echo and feel the warmth left in the air from their presence, like Montag in 'Fahrenheit 451'. Even when I don't hear them, they pass through me, speaking directly to my dreams. I drive, late on an empty freeway:

"Three in the morning," thought Charles Halloway, seated on the edge of his bed, "why did the train come at that hour?"

For, he thought, it's a special hour; women never awake, then, do they? They sleep the sleep of babes and children. But men, in middle age: they know that hour well. Oh, God!

Midnight's not bad; you wake, and go back to sleep. One or two's not bad; you toss, but sleep again. Five or six in the morning; there's hope, for dawn's just under the horizon.

But three, now, Christ. Three A.M.

Doctors say the body's at low tide then. The soul is out, the blood moves slow; you're the closest to dead you'll ever be, save dying. Sleep is a patch of death. But three in the morn, full, wide-eyed staring, is living death. You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rise up, you'd slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot; but no, you lie, pinned to a deep well-bottom that's bone dry.

Regarding the AIM/FAR 2004

Got a few hours to kill? Need a nap? Try this book. Put me out like a light, sitting in the Burbank Public Library parking lot at three in the afternoon. I half-awoke a few times, sure that the kids were laughing at me. Maybe they were. I couldn't tell.

I did learn this, however: Shuffling about the library with swollen cheeks, a week's scruffy beard, unkempt hair and a general malaise gets me the exact same looks from cute high school chicks as does my everyday dashing self.

The only possible explanation, of course, is that I'm just that magnetic.

And it's nice of them to glance quickly away and not look back. Polite. It's a bit awkward to have everyone constantly undressing me with their eyes.

I Coulda Used the Wisdom in Those Teeth

I don't know what's worse, being chained to the couch taking Vicodin and Extra Strength Tylenol and eating applesauce, or being well enough to go back to work.

On Friday, the dentist lay me down and peered into my mouth. He had a bad comb-over and, Nikki told me later but I didn't notice at the time, what apparently appeared to be half his jaw missing. "What do you do for a living?" he said,

"I'm an editor," I said.

"Really, okay. What newspaper, what magazine?"

"Film," I said, his flashlight in my mouth.

He blinked twice. "The talkies, I guess, huh?"

"Um," I said. "Yeah."

Later they lay me on a slab, strapped me down and knocked me out. Next thing I knew I was waking up. I was still drugged out of my mind, but I was determined to remain lucid. I ran facts through my head as quickly as I could. I stumbled and was guided into a wheelchair, into which I slumped heavily. I could think, but couldn't speak.

They gave me pills. Wheeled me out to the car. I remembered what they'd told me before the surgery.

The receptionist/assistant rattled off her list from rote memory. "No typing with the right hand, use a pen to tap the keys," she said.

I cocked my head. "Because of the IV?"

She nodded. "No heavy lifting, no milk on the first day, no mouthwash for a few weeks, no brushing today, when you do brush, it's down on the top, up on the bottom, no up and down motion for a while."

Who thinks of this stuff?

"You might not go back to work until Wednesday," the dentist told me.

So on the long ride home I called my boss. The same boss that had regaled me with tales of his own wisdom teeth extraction, when they didn't use the IV sedation, when he heard every snapping tendon and tearing ligament.

"Stu," I said, my mouth stuffed with bloody gauze.

"How are you feeling?"

"Just wanted to give you a head's-up," I said. "Dentist said I might be out 'til Wednesday."

"Your dentist is on crack," he said. "I've had that done. You rest up, and call me Monday morning."

The weekend was spent lying on the couch, icing my face, timing the pills so I took enough to dull the pain but not enough to give me liver damage. Gargle with warm salt water every two hours. Ice fifteen minutes on, fifteen minutes off. The sheet they sent with me said "Spaghettios [sic] are tasty and nourishing." Who thinks of this stuff?

For the past three nights, my mouth has waked me at four AM to take more Vicodin. I really don't want to be on these drugs. I've been taking Tylenol as much as possible to avoid the Vicodin. Last night I tried to go to sleep without taking anything. That was a mistake.

When the drugs are active, I feel fine. A little sore, maybe. The Vicodin doesn't make me spacey. A little run down, of course. But I'm functional. Lethargic yet lucid.

But I called my boss this morning. "Stu," I said.

"How's it going?"

"I don't think I'm going to make it in tonight."

He called me a pussy. I fumbled for an explanation. "I don't think I should be driving on this Vicodin, anyway."

"You're still on Vicodin? After three days?"

"I've been trying to take Tylenol, but it's only so strong."

He sighed. "Fine. But if you have to stay out after tomorrow, I need a doctor's note."

"Sure," I said as he hung up.

Now, if ever I had a valid excuse to stay home from work, I think this is it. But I know we're a little short-handed at the moment. My two night shift co-workers are a new guy still learning the ropes and a guy who's totally burned out, who's staggered in like a zombie for the last two weeks. So I know why they want me back, and I feel a little guilty about staying home.

But dammit, I don't feel good. My own personal health is more important than whether it means the day shift has to stay a few hours overtime tonight. And although I physically could sit in traffic for an hour and fumble through the night, I don't want to.

And I shouldn't want to. I'm in the right here. Then why do I feel like I'm just rationalizing? Why do I have to sit here and convince myself?

Les Printemps

How do I know it's Spring?

When I step out of my car at 4:00 am, in the tender hours before the dawn, and I can smell the blooming flowers before the dew dries. The fragrance escorts me through the night.

That, and it was ninety degrees today...

Obligatory Comic-Book Post

So, let's see what's in the news:

"Its market share slipping, Image Comics has made a change at the top, replacing Jim Valentino, who resigned this week as Publisher, with Erik Larsen."

Hmm. Well, as the one Image founder that's actually consistently put out a book in the decade-plus since Image has been founded, I guess that's good.

"Larsen promised changes under his leadership, including a shift to more superhero books from Valentino's emphasis on "cutting edge, alternative comics. '....[M]y roots are in the more mainstream camp,' Larsen said."

Ah. I see. Because Image's market share is slipping.

"Industry sources have told Internal Correspondence the other Image partners thought that Valentino was taking Image in too much of an 'alternative' comics direction and that they feel that Larsen will be able to nudge the company more toward the mainstream and provide more support for Image's top-selling comic book titles."

Sounds like Miramax. Indie-turns-mainstream. Indie cred lost as market share rises. Erik Larsen the new Harvey Weinstein? Too early to tell.

Image Comics started out as a rebuttal to market-leader Marvel's tradition of corporate ownership of intellectual property. Image's comics are all creator-owned, not publisher-owned. Thus, the theory goes, the risk is off of the publisher and onto the creator. So there's little to be lost in publishing all kinds of stuff, and the market will determine what it wants.

Initially the Image books -- things like Spawn, Youngblood, Savage Dragon, WildC.A.T.S., StormWatch -- in other words, things you may have heard of ten years ago if at all -- were as revolutionary in the arena of mainstream comics as the intellectual property argument was in the arena of comic book copyrights.

After the initial boom, the '90s begat a bubble of Internet proportions around self-indulgent, often-late, often-mediocre comic books. Image's improvements in physical production led to industry-wide upgrades in paper quality and color. Cover prices rose.

Image began to splinter almost immediately. Many of the seven founders -- defectors from Marvel, all -- founded their own "imprints" from which to publish the kinds of books they liked. Jim Lee's WildStorm was eventually bought by Marvel's rival DC. Rob Liefeld's Extreme changed names and publishers a couple times in a slow process of implosion.

Jim Valentino's Top Cow has had arguably the most success long-term, not discounting the meteoric rise and slow fade of Todd McFarlane's Spawn title (McFarlane has now parlayed his comic book success into action figure sales, and singlehandedly introduced a revolution in quality in the world of action figures. He has all but left Image Comics behind). And so Jim Valentino has been Publisher at Image, in that office park on Batavia just south of Katella.

Other ground-level publishers have risen to fill the void the Image initially carved out of Marvel, and Marvel itself under indie-makes-good chief editor Joe Quesada has reinvented itself and rescued itself from a late 1998 bankruptcy. Image's 15-20% market share in the mid-nineties, thanks largely to a sheer volume of mediocre titles plus a few megahits like Spawn, has been gobbled up by all the other indies that Image paved the way for. It's as if Ralph Nader became Secretary of State or something, and it opened the floodgates for third-party candidates.

Meanwhile, in the office park on Batavia, Jim Valentino quietly left the door open behind him. A haven for comic creators with no fear of a corporate machine chewing up and destroying their characters, Jim Valentino's Image has offered to accept submissions and help independent comic creators publish and distribute their work, supplying high-end services like computer color, printing, and distribution. It's as if Disney was looking for home-grown Pixars.

And while all this has been happening, in the background Erik Larsen, an Image co-founder, has been writing and drawing his book Savage Dragon, now improbably at issue #113. The most no-nonsense Image founder, Larsen has proven himself to be a sensible businessman. I have no doubt that Image's new superhero attitude, meant to distance itself from the clamoring hordes of low-run indie comics and reestablish itself as a powerhouse in the marketplace, will be profitable.

The question, though, is whether it will be any good. Image's first popular titles, like Spawn and Youngblood, were a reaction against traditional superhero fare and helped to change a genre's dynamic across the entire industry. The natural progression, as that succeeded, was toward less and less traditionally mainstream content, helping to bring new ideas to the marketplace. Broadly-drawn superhero books like Supreme fizzled out in favor of darker, more genre-ambiguous titles like Witchblade, The Darkness, and Fathom; and fantasy flourished with titles like Battle Chasers.

Marvel, meanwhile, has reinvented its superhero shelves with its Ultimate editions of Spider-Man, X-Men and other popular titles; also, it caters to less clean-cut tastes with its Marvel Knights line. Perhaps the time is here for Image to gently curve back towards the largest market in the industry, but if so, the void that Image once occupied with left-of-mainstream superhero books isn't there waiting for Image to return, and the indie fare that it helped nurture now clutters the shelves.

And the door that Jim Valentino left open to aspiring creators? Only time will tell if Erik Larsen will prop it open with a cardboard cutout of Superman, or perhaps close it altogether. Superheroes and comic books were born together, so it's no stretch to assume that superhero fare will bring buyers back to Image. Whether it be a regression or a renaissance, only time will tell what the future holds for aspiring creators like Stephen and, yes, myself -- creators writing the types of books that Image used to publish.

See Ya

I gave back our apartment keys today. This is the first time I've moved for no reason.

I mean, I moved to go to college, and then again when they were gonna tear down Cheverton, and then to L.A. to make my place in the world. And sure, it's not a bad thing; the new place is bigger, and nicer, and has more fun places for the cats to explore.

But it's weird, you know, to suddenly pull up roots and change addresses and enlist people with pickups and sign leases and paint the walls and everything. To go to all this effort, just out of the blue. If I was moving cross-country I'm sure I'd have pared down my possessions. But across town? Hell, just throw everything in the trunk!

TCF tells the story of moving across campus at college -- he'd just throw stuff in his car, thinking "it's not even a block away, I'll just make as many trips as I need." He didn't bother to Tetris all his stuff together efficiently. So then he's trying to unpack, running up and down stairs like a sucker, you know, with handfuls of pens or whatever, and it still took forever.

But I digress.

There's something about spackling. About covering up all the holes I've made in the walls over the last couple of years. About purposefully trying to erase any evidence of my having been there. About rendering the last few years moot. About covering my tracks. About erasing my history. About starting fresh.

But not quite, because when I pull the screws from the wall, a little plaster buckles outwards ... and even when I sand down the spackle, a little mosquito bite bump remains in the wall.

If I scratch it, my fingers are dusted with plaster. Dust flies as I sand down the wall. Unconsciously, I scratch my nose. Had I been pulled over, I'd look like a cokehead. A cokehead with a trunk full of guns, no less.

That little mosquito bite, or that stain that barely still shows through a new layer of paint, that will last a day and then vanish when they repaint again -- that's my legacy there. The fuzzy corners I put into the cabinets so the doors don't slam. The screws I put into the refrigerator shelf. The wire I used to fix the chain in the toilet tank. I was here. And damn it, I made this place better.

There's something about leaving a place changed.

About looking at the impressions in the carpet where the couch was, or the table, or the bookshelf, and knowing that the impressions won't come out.

About knowing that if I come back next week, the walls will be repainted, the carpet replaced, but maybe, someone soon will check their mail and find something addressed to me ... and briefly, perhaps, they'll wonder:

Who lived here?