Saving the World?

Good Times
It wasn’t saving the world...or was it?
A little treat lay in store for us in the back yard: the hot tub’s still hooked up, if not especially hot. We take a detour to the Dollar General, where I find two awesome little Marvel comics shirts with art from back in the old school days, and they turn out to be 1.50 each! I know the one with the six heroes is probably the one he’d like, and I don’t mind the Iron Man; heck, I felt a little like I bought it for the kid I was who learned to come shopping and ask for nothing so well.
Two cool-ass shirts, on the way to coming up with a swim suit for Angela. She hopes at this point we’ll be swimming with Sabrina at her mom’s pool. Man, eight days based out of the Cave alone, with all the books and props and ideas and energy and viewpoints overlooking the valley and a pool down the street? Are you KIDDING me? You could not set up a better place to set me loose that Gypsy Cave. All it needs is a box of comic books, and heck, after Angela gets out of the hot tub, I break out one to read there.




It just happens to be the very first issue of ROM, which has never been reprinted. It’s kinda how many people imagine we Americans live every day, but for me, this is my improvised everywhere vacation, the first we’ve had of any kind in many years. This is a set of elements so perfect it could only come together just this way this time. I don’t wonder much how things would be if I were there to enjoy it every day. I can’t imagine living there and not being compelled to be here in California. That’s just the way it became, before I even got here, and weather and will permitting, I’m brushing against a lot of my dreams. Alone, this was a moment so quiet, I could be nowhere else. We’d had a nice, quick walk, too, before coming in to change, so it’s the type of moment I should go back and live as an antidote to worrying about things truly beyond my power.






You’re imagining this misunderstood, mind blowing space knight standing in a real countryside, while disguised alien enemies try to prod us to destroy our self-deputized savior. You’re there with the young woman in the middle of it, as the fusilage flies and she uncovers evidence that this strange being has spoken a story true. Though she is now in his confidence, without a word he flies away, and Brandy Clark is filled with adrenaline and doubt. There are satellites flying out of sight overhead, and TV antennae on the rooftops spread down the country roads, just beyond the sounds of the battle. It is an age with far less media. It is a time then more ripe to be taken over by carefully placed enemies of humankind. It’s 1979 and summer’s ended and as the days pass into their cooler counterparts, life goes on without knowledge of the secret war in its midst.



Without much steam, I could enjoy being outdoors while reading about Brandy Clark and ROM’s encounter with the National Guard, with dry fingers and a cool drink nearby.
Speaking of National Guard, a fine reason to get out and spend 5 o’clock getting dry is my old friend David is on his way straight over from work. He’s already texted you needn’t bring a thing but yourself, but we’ve got him covered where it counts. We’ll soon all be going for a walk, and with me comes a flood of memories and the spirit of who we were in gettin here, two poking bellies filled with laughter and memories of what we called friendships and adventures. Oh! He did that gig several years out of high school, along with attaining a degree in physical therapy---National Guard. My friend drove a fucking tank. (Just like Rom throws.)


We met girls and rocked out, harbored ideals and a drifting gravitation towards self-awareness, my friend the biggest cynic I trusted who had such an unerring sense of right and wrong and buried so many hatchets with loved ones, driving us sans air conditioning to the house, windows down, laughs, an echo of time killed too deeply to need burying.





I can not express to you how much we laughed. How much fun they find in their sons, even if they are tempted to the shit-bird side of choice now and then. Man, they care so much about how those boys come out, and their attention’s given so freely day to day that I’m sure it’s rather exceptional that someone’s showed up to be the temporary center. I’m holding together friends, generations, little kids that remember me for my voice from our one real time in each other’s company. I’d just buried my Dad, and that night it was so cool to feel full of love and friendship and kindness and wisdom and see so clearly that, given a chance, it was good to pass that to another Dad, another Mom, who might could do with a friend on this road on which we all kill time.



How much more fun was it then this time, to be over before sunset, having a beer then going for a bounce on the trampoline, thoughtfully cleared for weight purposes by the boys, while David said, “go hop on and relive a little bit of your childhood.” You see, for a regular guy, he is like a god in his gift for giving childhood to people. Don’t remember your own? Talk to Dave. He still remembers how to have a good time. If all we can do with the time is kill it, if the best we can do is save our responsibilities with love, if we’re all just passing this way---why don’t we make it fun? All I mean is, from the moment Amy wrote to say let us know when you’re coming to town to this one where I remember the day we had in the middle, it’s one expression of a never-ending supply that will replenish you with hope, the energy for a little fine tuning.



It’s nearly Halloween, now, a favorite time around that house, where the kids (who love playing with Zombies) make a killing in goodies and costumes and play take highest priority (well, along with safety, of course!). It’s so cool to have a household where the family thing’s happening in a style reminiscent of the people with whom we spent so much time with on the rest of the way up here to adulthood. Being an adult also means we share Amy’s bean casserole and sit up extra late, which becomes a little walk which comes back to the big living room for a viewing of Woodstock: the Movie, a treat I’d never seen, complete with Dave-O dancing and singing along and my head tingling all the way through the chanted “Hear Me, See Mee, Feel Me.” There weren’t nearly as many goofy photos as there would’ve been if we’d been tying one on weekend style, but every beer I did have on the way to midnight was tasty.




Man, they did not plan to sit up that late, but there we were awake, there we were as just a one-night only engagement, and man is it a good thing Dave-o doesn’t go to bed at 4:40 am before workdays on a regular basis, but that’s what it took for him to complete burning me about 50 albums of my choice to go with a disc loaded with great comics. About two weeks from now, I am going to back primarily at the drawing board and it will be good to have all that music. But the funny thing is, I am addicted to cheap copies of old comic “floppies” and it will be a change reading them the way most people do these days! I just feel so obliged to type or be drawing from a photograph or screwing around reading and sending messages, when I use this laptop. It can do this, another amazing thing I’ll enjoy. You look at it from the point of view of, let’s say, 1979, and you have such an amazing array of media at your fingertips, just for FREE.

But one thing I don’t try to do is read too much at a time on a screen. I’ve saved all the world for you I can. I saved part I care about.
This is just getting verbose.












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This is just getting verbose.

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Something good will last

So:


Day Four


I’m thinking back to the middle of our vacation on a day where I truly feel reconnected with my surroundings again here in San Diego. The people shouting hello and waving from the balcony of the Embassy Suites are worth a snap, a picture to remind me of them waving to the street, and us waving back.


Waves, back and forth. Without any forethought, our walk took us to the water, where the bay has receded. The massive battleship passes us in the sun. The purple ray heals; its purpleness shines up and down the frame of the video I take, which passes over the ship bearing waters, over the distant kite in South Marina Park, and then back again over the Embarcadero, where I find Angela with me on our last---most recent---walk.

Our first walk together ever was the subject that dominated me on day four of vacation: there seemed no better time to snap pictures of what’s left, anyway, of the place where she and I first went for a walk. We’ve wanted to remember it for so many reasons, as it was the first private instance of our friendship, which is what all the walks worth taking are really about: friends with yourself, friends with others, miles you walk for yourself and others. We discussed so many things: on the walk today, we talked about how one cannot judge oneself in a way, for the totality of all the elements of the positive and negative repercussions of our lives is not usually visible. The facts are not all on hand. The complete trial can never render a verdict! Soon, the subject becomes where to shoot the first picture outside of Angela’s new boots, and the lack of beauty before one crosses from the intersection of Harbor Dr. and Pacific Hwy., and then we are walking into a quieter, off-season Seaport Village.


I’d started the day reading a book, swapped for a note left in the dining room, which Angela is looking right now, as I have yet to enlist her actively in this writing.

It’s called Little Essays Toward Truth. I enjoyed the discussion of topics such as Man, Memory, Sorrow and Wonder, with the vigorous voice of Aleister Crowley. The poetry in some specific terms reconciles with specific conditions, ceremonies and offices, and the writing in between is in a tone that is unapologetically intellectual. AT first I find the fluid construction of high vocabulary a bit comical, but I understand as she reads it that Crowley intends to take us out of the ordinary frame of thinking, and so, presents a stratus that hovers observantly above the ordinary life it suggests be lived in a non-ordinary way.


Make no mistake, a deep scholarship of Kabbalah is implicit in these observations, coming from one who has intuited a few experiences very deep to me. If Crowley himself, who had many people who cared about him and may have feared for him in some of his mysterious research and exploration, was occasionally reckless or reflective still of some chauvinism born of his admiration for his father and defensive recoil from his difficult mother, he was not without worthwhile opinions.


My own mother is very glad to have us down; she doesn’t smother me, but she appreciates my contact and opinions and time and, in some form, my goals. So it was that we squeezed together a photoshoot, tracking Angela and I from the place I had my first silly mistake in front of her to the nearby alleyway, Opera Alley, where we shared our first kiss. Many drawings will be born of this effort; I see particular pages, and they are moving from dream to reality ---as reality of drawings, of fictional people, who have something to learn from what I was taught by experience.


So we go: from Broad Street, we walked over to the restaurant parking lot where I drove Debra’s borrowed---but that’s another story. Mom, having a bit of trouble walking still, decides to take a rest on this hot day on a bench near the corner of 2nd Ave. and Broad St. Meanwhile, we take pictures to help us envision a background that, frankly, is no longer in the same form---but at least we can get perspective, distances, spaces in which to look for inspiration for our drawings. Next we go around the restaurant, now abandoned, after so very many identities. It’s hard to shoot much with which to recreate the place, but it was useful to the memories. We find a walkway we would’ve loved to have during that time, now running beneath the bridge beside the restaurant.

So we go: across the bridge, lined with many lights, passing over the Oostanaula River, recalling the piggy-back ride I gave her on the way down the same bank, which now has steps. Hmm! Someone’s commemorated our walk, our retreat, our...hmm, our private space; it’s now a decent place to take a date even when the sun’s out! But the sun was NOT out the night we crossed that bridge. I just wanted to cheer her up, and I was full of confidence and at least enough love for myself to grant myself an adventure, which was all but kicked off, and what I was waiting for at the time, I don’t know, because I could’ve bought my bus ticket to Colorado anytime, with my bills turned over to my future bro-in-law and sis, in our old apartment, and my two weeks’ notice at Red Lobster complete.

Now I was 21, and while I didn’t think too much of what I’d accomplished in my life just yet, I was less interested in judging and more interested in living a certain way, where I heard music along the paths, where I could be alone and not lonely, and see the things and hear the things and treasure the things that would become my art, my songs. I didn’t believe I could draw at the time, and now more years than I care to tell later, I’m drawing this walk, this one act of kindness, which got the better of me, in some ways, seeing as how that walk continues to this day.


So we go: to the gazebo where we met the man with one eye, relaxing on its seat and enjoying a drink, for which I contributed a dollar for the next round after hearing his story and his question: “so are you two married?”

“Not yet!” we both said. Hahahahahah!!!!

So we go: wait, there’s a woman there reading this time, and she found out what we are out there doing, and enjoyed the thought very much! It’s nice to spread a bit of romance. It can happen to you!


So we go: Mom’s only going to stay cozy on that bench but so long, and I call her quickly to let her know we’re on the bridge back. We figure the bridge the first time had to be Fifth Avenue, so we’d come positioned to take Opera Alley back over to her workplace, where sister Dixie closes the kitchen, and if it takes forever, it’s either because they’re having a drink and having a good time, or there is indeed something about that night that will last forever.

Looking up, I wonder if there’s some sign some way to tell me should I kiss this girl.


Soon I have her looking up, too, for a literal sign. I will never forget our first kiss.


India ink at Michael’s, groceries and commentary on the local looks at Kroger’s, “and don’t forget the sweet drink at Starbuck’s in ...whatever...” Yes, Barnes & Noble, where we agreed outside with some fellow, it’s plenty hot enough. All nice---all filled with talk of our friends and family and really, it’s pretty good to be with Mom while she buys a bit of salad and some carrots to help tide us over while we’re at her house, not to mention the haircut she got me, which I went to while the ladies took the groceries on, where I got a chance to relate to Mom’s hairdresser friend my story above, and of my comic, and a bit about herself came with the clip, too. Just what I needed for fresh, clean growth.

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King Me too

Once we’d settled on a place to meet my Mom, Sabrina changed from Captain D’s attire to Chili’s pretty quickly; photographed the Cave. Went to special place after stopping to pose with Mocha. Took me back to play pretend places set up, temporary homes away from home. “Finn loved helping me clear this, he’s a hard worker!”
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King me.

Coronation road by the lock and dam, smoking a rare treat, a clove from Sabrina as the sun beat down on a moderate lunchtime country road that sped by with bits of the past and friends and thoughts in life remembered.

Found crown, toy yellow plastic thing; was encouraged to wear it in to Chili’s and say it’s my birthday. The four of us go inside in the best of spirits, maybe a little something they didn’t recognize...or maybe, pay attention.

So proud to have my beautiful friend with us, to have my chosen family seated together, the woman who bore me, the woman who married me, and the confidante to both of us who had been with us more hours by influence than any other single person this year. She’d volunteered a healthy portion of photos to consider for our expressive D’n’A art.


I was thrilled to have their company, to be here for this first meeting, my friend of whom I’d been so proud and my mother.

I cut off salmon and steak both for Eric in Sabrina’s to-go box. Our time there evoked memories of Brenda’s Place, our restaurant, where I worked with Mom. The wooden checker table and pieces broke boredom on occasion, especially when this one old gentleman would come by to play me. He helped me master the game. It was the place I read that old People magazine that changed my life (the 1960? Wow!) and where I drew and wrote, for fun, my last comic book before adult hood, the Uglies #1.
Got to rush to the old comic book shop, nearly too distracted by nervously talking about my new fortunes opening our own comics and printing imprint and praising San Diego.


Found our way home beneath threat of rain; every inch of road had some memory, as well as the moment at hand. Still much like driving to the past to go home with Mom, even though it’d never been my home in particular. I could see how life in Rome would be flashing me my past every day. I remember feeling much more nostalgic for it, around 19 or 20, than I did today.


All in the Family, Andy Griffith, and Sanford and Son. It was like Dad could come home from work any minute. I also enjoyed Eternals 4 from my friend Steve Peters, who’s worked with Dave Sim and creates the quirkiest alternative comics full of philosophy and surrealism. I also sampled 40 pages of Al Crow goodness in Little Essays Towards the Truth, a comic book or two (a Giant-Sized Defenders #3, written with great aplomb by my man Gerber), then Sorry!
You know this game? You not only capture and send other players back to start, but you even have the Sorry! Card that lets you swap from Start to wherever your opponent was! Obviously, some trash talking and teasing fills out the four color experience.


4 rounds we played, while a 60’s hits compilation I found spun nearby. Four, so they could both have a win a piece with my two. It is nice to be the “villain” sometimes, when you bring together loved ones. This entire trip through my kingdom had been about the loved ones brought together by my life, had reconnected the little network with love and support and fun.


Four parts together all day: it was thematic.
Angela and I walked in the midnight cool through the neighborhood. Two houses a day---at least here, where she could stake out with her computer games for a few hours and play with the dogs, things were quiet, as sometimes, that is the point of a vacation.

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