These two very true stories are to dispel any myths about my intelligence.

Story One: The Toothpaste Incident

Brushing my teeth is something I do on occasion, and this was one of those occasions. While applying the toothpaste to the bristles of the brush, I was inadvertently pressing down a group of bristles with the tube. Moving the tube of toothpaste off of the bristles created a slingshot out of the toothbrush bristles, launching a small glob of toothpaste right in my eye.

Toothpaste in the eye is a painful experience.

Story Two: The Mouthwash Incident

Often after brushing my teeth, I’ll use mouthwash to really rinse the gunk out of my mouth. Since no one else shares my bottle of off-brand mouthwash I decided what the hell, I’ll go ahead and take a glug straight from the bottle. I sealed my lips over the opening, tipped my head back and took a mouthful. Well, my lip seal was too tight, creating a pressurized bottle of mouthwash. Removing my lips released the pressure, and with it a healthy splash mouthwash was projectiled straight up my nostrils. For a second I was worried. This is going to burn, I thought. After waiting a second, green teeth cleaning liquid dripping off my face, I breathed a sigh of relief for the lack of pain I was feeling.

I use a washcloth to clean off my face, when out of nowhere the stinging starts. My nostrils are on fire. At this point I consider suicide, but decide against it because I feel hunger coming on and killing myself on an empty stomach is an unattractive proposition.

***

In other news, two new articles I’ve written are up. My PS3 review for Fairytale Fights and a new edition of Comics That Don’t Suck. If you love me, you’ll read them!

We’ve moved into our nicer, larger apartment, which has been great so far. I’m still amassing furniture (I don’t have a mattress yet, although I do have a frame for some reason), but it’s coming along. We got some fish, thanks to the internet having places to get random stuff for free.

Nathan paid us a visit these last few days, so we made a trip over to the coast. Checked out the Heceta Head Lighthouse, a trip I can highly recommend thanks to the awesome tour guides. We saw some sea lions chilling out and a whale in the distance blowin’ water all over the place. The high/low point of the trip with the salt water taffy – high point because it was good and low point because I kept eating it. Finally we made our way over to the beach. Climbing to the top of the sand dunes, especially after that salt water taffy, was enough to make me consider suicide. But it was pretty, so I decided against it. As for the water? Balls cold.

I also wrote a new feature for N-Philes about Comics That Don’t Suck, you should read it because you love me.

Is it pretentious to quote myself?

Let’s be honest: most comics suck. But so do most movies, games, TV shows, and so does most music. But with these mediums most people seem to think themselves pretty good at weeding through the trash to find the morsels of goodness. Why is it, then, that more people don’t sort through the horrible comics and find the good ones? Sure, every once in a while the mainstream will notice something likeWatchmen or Maus, but many great comics fly well under the radar. With Comics That Don’t Suck, which will be an ongoing feature here at N-philes, I hope to bring some attention to comics that you probably wouldn’t have known about otherwise. If you never read comics maybe something will catch your eye and you’ll pick one up. If you already love comics, hopefully I’ll show you something new. For the very first CTDS I’m talking about Tim Sievert’s first published comic: That Salty Air. I also had the chance to talk with Sievert about his book (among other things).

the rest…

 “I think he didn’t want to do the old tricks people expected of him,” Karen Green, his wife, says. “But he had no idea what the new tricks would be.” The problem went beyond technique. The central issue for Wallace remained, as he told McCaffery, how to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” He added, “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”

From the New Yorker. The whole thing is worth a read.

I found this over at the Wall Street Journal. It’s adapted from a commencement speech he gave about three years ago, and I liked it enough to think it deserved a repost over here. It’s a tad lengthy, but worth your time.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

If at this moment, you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude — but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real – you get the idea. But please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called “virtues.” This is not a matter of virtue — it’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often described as being “well adjusted,” which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphal academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default-setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what’s going on inside me. As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in, day out” really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired, and you’re stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home — you haven’t had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job — and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the workday, and the traffic’s very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store’s hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can’t just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough checkout lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can’t take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn’t fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I’ve worked really hard all day and I’m starved and tired and I can’t even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid g-d- people.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth…

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do — except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn’t have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It’s the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to rush to the hospital, and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am — it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you’re “supposed to” think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it’s hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you’re like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat-out won’t want to. But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line — maybe she’s not usually like this; maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who’s dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible — it just depends on what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important — if you want to operate on your default-setting — then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship…

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

If you’ve been reading my this page for any amount of time you’ve probably noticed that I pretty much like everything I talk about on here. I’m always recommending something,  talking about how much I enjoyed something, or demanding you read something, or whatever. This might make it seem like I like just about everything and that you should ignore any suggestions I make because hey what’s the point if I like everything, right? Well, that’s not really true. The fact of the matter is I’m kind of an asshole about the things I like. I’m legendarily picky and kind of a snob when it comes to things like books and movies and music. The reason why I’m so generally positive on this site is because, well, I pretty much only write about the things I like. It would be really easy for me to primarily write about all stuff I hate, but someone else I know is already doing that and doing a better job than I could anyways. So while I’m sure to bitch about things from time to time usually when I’m going to talk about entertainment in one way or the other, it’s going to be positive. Anyways.

Happy Times by Yimou Zhang. Zhang is a pretty well known director nowadays for movies like House of Flying Daggers, Hero, and Curse of the Golden Flower. While I’m a pretty big fan of these, his best movie (that I’ve seen) is Raise the Red Lantern - a film so far away from kung-fuing and swording and daggering and flipping that the only way you could even start to guess that it’s the same director is the incredible (albeit much more subtle than his more recent stuff) cinematography. When I heard he made a comedy movie about eight years ago I knew it had to be the next on my list for me to see. The story starts out being pretty funny, but by the time it ends it’s much closer to sad than amusing. Describing it as bittersweet is probably overstating its sweetness, but it is there. It’s a good little movie and I’m glad I watched it.

Lake of Fire is a documentary about abortion by Tony Kaye (American History X). The movie is long – about two and a half hours – and NOT for the squeamish. Both sides of the issue are covered with a few mediating voices in between. It’s fair, disturbing, enlightening, and not easy to forget. If you’re undecided on the issue I recommend it. If you’re already solid on one side or the other I highly recommend it. It didn’t change where I stand on the issue, but it made me think a lot about it.

I read Good-Bye, Chunky Rice by Craig Thompson. It’s a sad comic about moving on in your life even when you’re not sure where you’re moving on to or exactly why you’re doing it. It’s about friends and the impact people have on each other before and after they’re out of each other’s lives and how there really is no such thing as “out of each other’s lives.” To make this a short review, the book is striking and brilliant and haunting, but in a non creepy way.

At the end of the weekend I realized that pretty much everything I read and watched was, at least to an extent, fairly depressing. If you decide to go after any of this stuff, I suggest spreading it out a bit.

Also of interest, Derrick pointed out to me that Google just announced a new web browser called Google Chrome. It sounds pretty promising, as outlined in this comic by Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics fame. Who knows if the final product is going to be any good, but I’ll be right there to mess around with it as soon as the beta comes out.

UPDATE: The beta for Google Chrome was just released and I’ve got to say… it’s pretty sweet. It’s faster, the interface is nice and logical and everything feels really open. There are some weird things about it and I do miss a few of my Firefox plug-ins, but hopefully with time people will make versions of those for Chrome. Check it out. I’ll have to play with it more before I decide if I’m switching permanitely, but so far it’s looking good. If you try it out let me know what you think.

Also not of interest, for some reason every time I write “each other” I want to write “eachother” like it’s one long word. It’s annoying and if you search the archives I’d be shocked if you didn’t find more than a few examples of this misspelling. Maybe someday the powers that be will decide that English should evolve (laterally in this case) and “eachother” is how the word(s) is/are to be written, but not now. Not today.

Some of you may remember back in 2000 John McCain was making a run at the White House. David Foster Wallace, one of my favorite writers (and certainly the one I envy the most for the pure amount of skill he has oozing out of every orifice of his person), was commissioned by Rolling Stone to write a piece on the man during the primary campaigning. Wallace turned in a massive document (massive, at least, in comparison to most magazine articles) which was butchered down and a small piece published in said magazine. Later on the full essay was released in Consider the Lobster going by the name Up, Simba. Now a few of you diligent readers may remember me mentioning way back how much I enjoyed the abridged audiobook version of Lobster, although that version did not contain Up, Simba.

Anyway, this essay is beyond good and should be read by anyone with even a passive interest in American politics, and especially by anyone without even a passive interest in American politics. Not only is it bruisingly clever and funny (like everything Wallace writes), and not only does it give you a great behind-the-scenes look at the way a campaign is run, it also paints a brilliant picture of the pitfalls of American politics and the current generation in general. The essay doesn’t have any answers, but it asks some fascinating questions.

In a whirlwind of marketing sleaziness the essay has been republished in its own volume called McCain’s Promise, an obvious ploy to profit from the current election. I don’t understand why you would buy that, though, when Consider the Lobster is like a dollar more and has oodles of great, additional, content. There is money to be made off the ignorant, I ’spose.

I’m not suggesting you read this essay. I’m not saying you might like it or that if you get the chance you should check it out. It’s more than an urge, even. I’m practically demanding that you read this essay. If you know me personally I’ll let you borrow the book. If I don’t know you or live near you, quit being a cheap bastard and buy a used copy of Consider the Lobster for a measly five bucks already.

Afterthought: In case you’re worried about the essay being too pro or too anti McCain, don’t. It’s written neutrally. Some of it seems pro, some of it seems anti, but it’s all honest. And like I said, it’s about a lot more than McCain.

The last day of the con. I made the last of my purchases today (rest assured the amount of comics bought over the weekend was far more than excessive), then headed to the world premiere of Sockbaby 4 with Doug TenNapel, Jon and Dan Heder, and Doug Jones (Pan’s Labyrinth). It was goofy and silly – certainly the best of the Sockbabies so far. After that the convention was basically over, so we took the bus to the beach. It was too chilly to swim, but we figured we should at least go to the beach, since we’re in California and all. From that experience my feelings of how crappy the Houston area beaches are were reaffirmed. Tomorrow we head back home, it was a fun trip while it lasted. Keep your eye out for my “Who I Met” post, along with a photo post and follow ups about if the comics I bought were any good or not. Sound exciting? No? Yeah, I understand.

MONDAY

I’m sitting in the airport terminal waiting for my flight. Good trip, all things considered. The fun stuff will be posted later.