I feel sort of like I shouldn't say anything because it would be kind of a blasphemy to so implicitly ask for attention in the face of what feels like a big strange shadow. But then again, it's things I've read that have communicated to me this impression of wide disaster.

Once again, I'm thinking on how frail and naive the human posture is. I mean, you can't go around assuming disaster will happen to-morrow. But it does seem our intricate infrastructure of operating systems is based on dreams that are old and invisible until they're knocked out from under us.

Natural disasters like the recent tsunami and Katrina, juxtaposed in our media with disasters wrought by human action, emphasise to me how much these things all end up being about tending to the injured and rescuing survivors. It seems we're being reminded again and again that we are mere sacks of flesh and bone.

I seriously hope that changes one day. Until then, from sunny and discordantly calm San Diego, I'm going to be making some decidedly useless, non-corporeal things . . .

As news from New Orleans continues to be bleak, it feels strange to be here in a city that's cloudless and still. It's eerie not knowing what sort of condition a prominent portion of the country shall be in next week at this time.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush continues to infamously demonstrate his inability to grasp a serious situation at any level. Amidst even some normally conservative pundits' criticisms, I was sort of amused by this little MSN headline meekly attempting to gloss the President's conduct;

"President vows aid to storm-hit area."

Oh yeah? Gee, I was expecting the government to shrug its shoulders and try not looking in direction for a few years you damned putz.

Caitlin keeps linking to the Red Cross to encourage people to donate. It's a good idea, if you can.

I hope New Orleans comes out of this one.

Katrina has me worried about several friends and acquaintances. But fortunately, they all seem capable of getting out of harm's way.

However, articles like this suddenly make me feel I may never be able to visit New Orleans, or what is recognised as New Orleans, in my lifetime. I'm getting foolish, queasily sentimental feelings about Poppy Z. Brite's Liquor and various movies depicting the city.

Anyway, I hope things turn out better than expected.

The new Boschen and Nesuko is up. All kinds of things happen.

I feel like maybe I forgot to include someone though . . . hmm . . . I'm sure it'll come to me . . .

I've been watching all these Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movies lately, and then I see this on Dark Horizons--a little story about Hugh Jackman wanting to employ an Australian dance competition winner, Tom Williams, in his new Wolverine movie. The article provides a link to footage of the winning dance and, boy, do I ever miss the days of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.

Am I crazy or can this guy barely dance at all? He's hardly keeping time with the awful music, forgoing any steps in favour of rickety poses that aren't even particularly attractive or interesting. And the gracelessness of the dancers' movements is mirrored by their pathetic clothes. The girl's only sexy because she's almost naked. Which is nice, but actual nudity is too readily available in this world for it to mean anything.

One of the cool things about these Astaire/Rogers disks is that they all come with vintage shorts and cartoons, so you can somewhat simulate the 1930s moviegoing experience. Swing Time has a short called Hotel a la Swing that features a segment with a hell-themed floor show. They were studio dancers--no big names. But with only four cuts (each shot longer than Tom Williams' whole routine), they managed with dance and costumes to not only out-dance this Williams mug, but also to be sexier.

We are living in the Hanna Barbara era of sexiness. Mass-produced images of scantily clad crashing bores bully their way into the limelight, while only the lucky find out about quality art and porn.

All hail the lazy, horny prude.

There's an interesting article on Roger Ebert's web site right now. It's Ebert's response to the makers of Chaos, who wrote Ebert a letter in reply to his review.

Reading over this discourse, I was reminded of, "it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." If the number of reviews of Chaos I've read are at all accurate, the famous quote might well be applied to the film. But Macbeth was talking about life and, so, his sentiment is not dissimilar from that of Chaos' makers.

I've not seen Chaos, and I probably never will, because it sounds like it's probably not very good. So I won't say I have anything against the movie as, not having seen it, I don't feel qualified to form an opinion. But what does irritate me is the apparent attitude of its makers as expressed in their letter to Ebert.

That Bernheim and Defalco's stance echoes that expressed by Macbeth is hardly an endorsement of their views, when considering an argument Ebert made, "As the Greeks understood tragedy, it exists not to bury us in death and dismay, but to help us to deal with it, to accept it as a part of life, to learn about our own humanity from it. That is why the Greek tragedies were poems: The language ennobled the material."

The position that life has an underlying meaninglessness is a valid one. But you need more than a position to make good art. And saying that you have a position doesn't invalidate someone finding your movie to be an unpleasant experience.

I don't think a movie with all sorts of bad shit going down needs to have a contrast impression of hope. But I do feel art needs to be entertaining or beautiful, otherwise it's a waste of time. A piece devoted to discussing a new thought or set of thoughts regarding life is a philosophy text. Bernheim and Defalco couldn't have put their thought into that format because it would be achingly obvious that it is unoriginal, which is probably something they don't wish to admit to themselves.

As a number of excellent writers have said, there aren't really any new stories. Chaos is, itself, as several people have pointed out, a retread of Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left, which was itself a remake of an Ingmar Bergman film. What an artist brings to the idea and the story is their style, their craft, and themselves.

Ebert observes, "I prefer that the artist express an attitude toward that evil. It is not enough to record it; what do you think and feel about it?" This in response to Bernheim and Defalco's assertion; "Natalie Holloway. Kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq shown on the internet. Wives blasting jail guards with shotguns to free their husbands. The confessions of the BTK killer, These are events of the last few months. How else should filmmakers address this 'ugly, nihilistic and cruel' reality -- other than with scenes that are 'ugly, nihilistic and cruel,' to use the words you used to describe 'Chaos.'"

There's an implied arrogance in that attitude that really annoys me. It's as if they've seen powerfully disturbing images and wish to somehow elevate themselves by making themselves the generators of similar disgust. Like a monkey trying to force respect by throwing crap at you.

Bernheim and Defalco sort of remind me of Joel McCrea's character in Sullivan's Travels. Sullivan being a Hollywood director who, tired of making screwball comedies, wants to make a truly dismal picture about the ravages of the Depression. Only, in his quest to live as a "common man" he discovers what the people really want from him is more of his screwball comedies--to laugh, to enjoy themselves.

I suggest the next time Bernheim and Defalco want to disembowel us with one their movies, maybe they ought to spend some quality time in Iraq.

There're children around here to-day. They're annoying. As children are.

I bought the new Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers box set yesterday, and I'm fiercely pleased about it. I watched Follow the Fleet last night, which was almost completely good, except for the "Face the Music and Dance" number, which was brilliant.

I'm starting to hate the automobile again. A little while ago, I received a notice from my insurance company that they were going to cancel my insurance because I'd failed to mail in a set of papers saying I acknowledged my family weren't covered drivers in my insurance. So I called and asked if I could still mail the thing in and, yes, they said I could. I guess it'd slipped my mind, perhaps because when I was getting insurance for myself, I didn't feel like I was getting insurance for my family somehow on the sly.

On Monday, as I spent an increasingly irritating amount of time searching for these papers, I came across my actual insurance policy thing, which clearly stated that I had already clearly agreed that my family wasn't on the policy. So basically Mr. Insurance Company was impatiently tapping its foot at my tardiness in fixing its fuck up.

Well. I suppose it's time I got to writing to-day . . .

A couple weeks ago, we were sent notice that at 10pm on the night of Friday, August 12th, electricity would be out for the entire neighbourhood for up to ten hours. It was in anticipation of this that I finished the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter on Thursday night--or, Friday morning at around 5am or so, to be precise-ish (this detail shall be important later in the story, friends).

I honestly didn't think I was gonna make it. Thursday was, after all, Thursday, meaning for most of the day I had to be out of the house and therefore couldn't use said daylight hours to get going on the final two pages of twenty-six. It also meant that I got only three and a half hours of sleep for Wednesday night.

I tried to sleep a couple hours after returning here in the afternoon, but, despite two cats hanging about, demonstrating how it's done, I couldn't pull the sleep trick. The invested sum of fatigue therefore transferred itself into the Headache Deposit, which became active at around midnight Thursday, with sluggish interest. I was ready to give up and somehow cram it all into the few electricitied hours of Friday, but . . . somehow . . . slowly . . . putting one line . . . at a time . . . the gradual process seemed to continue itself without my bidding. And a cup of tea helped me along--the first time I'd ever put milk in tea, and it was pretty good.

So I woke at 5pm on Friday, feeling outrageously groggy. I replied to some e-mails and a post on Caitlin's LJ before heading off to the mall for coffee, to try to start feeling like I didn't need to do anything in particular. I knew I was going to need to be in a serious time-killing mindset.

My plan was this--Do what I'd normally do, on days where I'm not working on Boschen and Nesuko or something else; go to Tim's and hang out until 1am or so. After that, if the power wasn't back on, I vaguely planned on reading at Denny's or going on one of my unwisely long night walks. Trouble is, I only do the latter when I have a lot of hard thinking to do and my life seems generally bleak. But I've been feeling pretty good for a long time, now, so I was likely just to be bored by such a venture.

Anyway, I called Tim from the mall parking garage . . . to discover this one night, of all nights, he couldn't have me over.

So what the fuck was I supposed to do from 10pm to 8am on a Friday night? And if you are, as you probably are, more of a people-person than me, you're probably not qualified to give me a valid answer.

Well, first I thought I'd see a movie. On Thursday, when I was forced out and about, I went to see Jim Jarmusch's new movie, Broken Flowers. And it is, by the way, the best movie I've seen so far this year. There's deserved praise for Bill Murray's ability to convey impressive volumes of emotion with little facial twitches. The story of a man searching for a son he may or may not have sounds mundane enough, but what made me absolutely in love with this movie was just the absolute brilliant pacing--which, well, wasn't necessarily brilliant, except it made me think of how I've been inundated with typical-movie, dumbed down narrative. It was nice to see a movie that didn't feel like it needed to hit obligatory plot points, didn't need to tell me something once, then yell it through a bullhorn. There's a quality about this movie where you feel information is being got as naturally as you get it interacting with the waking world, and yet, you know these are all elements of a story the filmmakers are deliberately threading together.

So the story ends up being a man whose life of pleasure and romance has come to a sort of grinding halt as he has a sort of epiphany of knowledge-absence. The film is a sort of rumination on the absence of easy-plot points, actually. It's funny and sweet and sad, but always canny, always fluffless, if you will.

Anyway. So on Friday, I felt I was in a good movie-place, and thought I could pick another as satisfying . . . turned out nothing sounded particularly interesting. There were movies, like The Great Raid which sounded like they might be decent, but I just wasn't in the mood for. Finally, I noticed that Revenge of the Sith was still playing at Horton Plaza, and having been meaning to see it at least once more before it left theatres, I went to the 10:10pm showing.

Horton Plaza is something like in the dead centre of downtown and I drove all the way up to the top of the parking structure. I went up a little ramp that terminated in a short wall, and there was no ceiling. So when I got out of the car, I felt sort of like Batman, surrounded by night amongst the twinkling upper portions of skyscrapers.

The cinema is at the top level, and the theatre Star Wars was playing in was on the second floor of the cinema. Which was huge--an enormous stairway, as tall as this two story house I'm sitting in now, and almost as wide, lit by purple neon, flanked by escalators. At the top, a little plaza of closed concession stands with park benches and potted trees. I was a half hour early for the movie so I sat there reading Gulliver's Travels.

I purchased, in the downstairs concession area, for four dollars, the most obnoxious small Coke I'd ever had in my life. I guess, sensitive to criticism of overpriced food, the cinema had decided to make the "small" so only in height, but its width now need rival that height. It was like drinking from a baseball mitt.

The Soda Jerk (is he yet so named?) tried to mumble out a commercial whilst filling the beverage, but I abruptly interrupted to request that my Coke have no ice. He numbly dumped it out to refill it again.

It was not that I felt I could actually drink so much Coke as I find lately I'm driven murderously mad by the sound of ice clinkling around in a paper cup.

Revenge of the Sith was still a wonderful movie, and nice for the almost empty theatre which meant people couldn't make impatient sounds during the film's lesser moments. And so I discovered I actually don't mind those lesser moments as much now. I even sort of like them.

After the movie, I decided to go to a Denny's I'd never been to before, and so went to Point Loma, an area I often found myself in late at night when I lived in Ocean Beach. But I'd never been inside the Denny's.

The people there were strangely nice to me and even asked if I wanted my own seat, away from the other customers. Sometimes I wonder if my black fedora makes me seem like I might be one of those anonymous restaurant critics.

By the time I got out of the Denny's, it was around 2am, and I decided to see if the power had come back in my neighbourhood. I drove back to Santee, and drove around . . . And the power wasn't back. Everything was eerily pitch dark, and there was a crane in one intersection lit by blinding floodlights.

So I drove to a Longs Drugs I knew was open 24 hours. I wandered about there until the noise of the floor cleaner started to annoy me. I then went to Save-On and found they had a DVD section--all DVDs for 1.99. Most of them were crap you'd expect, but I carefully perused them, trying to take as much time as possible, and found Buster Keaton's College, and a collection of old Superman cartoons. When I left, it was around 3:30am. So I decided to simply drive awhile.

I drove north on the 15, then took 78 west, and came back down 5 south. It took about two hours. I listened to Tom Waits' Real Gone and Ani DiFranco's Little Plastic Castle.

It seemed it took forever for 5am to finally happen, but when it did, I was immediately in a Starbucks, and I stayed reading Gulliver's Travels until sunrise.

When I returned home, the power was still out.

I went to sleep, and awoke at around 9am to discover it was rather hot and the strange silence in the air was making the littlest noises like the vicious stabs of toy soldier bayonets at my temple.

The power came back on briefly at 10am, but in about an hour, there was, as I discovered later, a fire somewhere and power went out again. I didn't get any proper sleep until it finally came on for good at around 1pm.

I feel like having fun to-night.

The new Boschen and Nesuko is up early. I spent all night working on it because the power here is scheduled to go out to-night. At least we were warned. I'd have been pretty annoyed if it were sprung on me.

So now I need to sleep. Any references in this chapter, you ask? Er, yes, but I bet you can't spot any of them. I'll say only this; Bette Davis.

Crack your melon on that one.

Well, happy fucking Wednesday to you, and you, and most especially to you, meaning me, I think, who made it all possible.

For various reasons, one of which may have been laziness, I didn't work on Boschen and Nesuko very much over the weekend. Reasons as various as; I kept re-writing it, it dealt with subject matter that I was having a hard time making myself get enveloped in--see, although it probably won't be when you read it, it was sort of hard for me to dwell on, particularly when I could have been at Tim's playing bright, happy, innocent Jedi Academy or Final Fantasy X-2, Which I've been playing lately 'cause Caitlin's been gabbing about it.

Is there anything more sterile and safe than to-day's video games? Ultra-violence--with almost no blood, hardly any bruising, certainly no nudity, sex, and let's avoid cussing . . . Even as I'm having a good time, I constantly have this spectre of an Emerald City around me where heavily makeuped, phoney folks in gaudy fake material costumes are scrub-scrubbing here, scrub-scrubbing there, la la la . . . Or if there is sex and violence, it's practically the name of the game, and even then it's restrained.

Anyway. Finding myself hugely behind yesterday, I determined to work on Boschen and Nesuko with absolutely no distractions, until I'd gotten three pages done.

That would be pages 202, 203, and 204. I did manage to do page 201 over the weekend.

I woke at 1pm and let myself read some blog posts while drinking my coffee--I find it's better to have had coffee before getting to it than to be having coffee while getting to it. But after that, I didn't look at the internet at all. From 2pm Tuesday until 5:30am Wednesday, the only distractions I allowed myself were to stop and eat twice, use the bathroom four or five times, feed the cats and change their litter box, and from 11pm to 11:30pm I watched The Daily Show. And that was it.

Now, it wouldn't have taken me as long if this had been an average chapter. But this one has all kinds of itty bitty details that I absolutely had to have, even if people won't notice them and they won't show up on some monitors (I was dismayed to find that the tears and redness I'd carefully placed around Nesuko's eyes in previous chapters are all but invisible on Tim's fancy flat monitor).

But, hurrah, I did it, and now half the chapter's done, and now I've got three days to do four pages. It should seem like pie after last night. I suppose I oughta get to it . . .

It's funny how a night like last night can make the following day feel like the beginning of some kind of new era.

A new Terry Gilliam movie! I'm suddenly very excited.

And Marilyn Monroe had sex with Joan Crawford!

I bought Suspicion the other day because it was on sale at Borders and I rather like the movie. It really is a shame the studio insisted the ending be changed but, as Hitchcock pointed out, the whole of the movie beforehand is still very important. And very wonderful.

Let's see if I can think of anything to say about other movies I've seen recently . . .

Ah. Miraculously, Tim was able to get hold of Urusei Yatsura movies five and six. Urusei Yatsura movies can be very difficult to acquire in the U.S, with the exception, for some reason, of the second movie, Beautiful Dreamer. Some say Urusei Yatsura's humour is lost on American audiences due to the fact that a lot of it is obtuse references to Japanese culture and folktale. Personally, I rather like the gleeful strangeness of it at times.

The comic on which it is based was by Rumiko Takahashi, creator of Inu-Yasha, Ranma 1/2, and Maison Ikkoku. Urusei Yatsura preceded all of those titles, and set up many of the themes common to each of them--bizarre, violent, immature characters in bizarre situations, with a love story in the middle.

Urusei Yatsura was made into a television series in the early 1980s. The first episodes set up the premise--Ataru (whose name can mean "struck by a fallen star" or "very unlucky") is a student at Tomobiki high school and quite lecherous. When one day earth is besieged by aliens, it is Ataru who is randomly chosen to play tag with the beautiful alien Lum in order to decide the fate of the planet.

Lum's species bears a peculiar resemblance to the Japanese mythological creature "oni," often referred to as a Japanese ogre. Ataru must grab Lum by the horns to win, but unfortunately, Lum can fly. Eventually, Ataru takes Lum's bikini and, while she's chasing it, topless ("Give me back my only outfit!"), Ataru grabs the horns, forgetting Japanese mythology, and rashly exclaiming that now he can get married--his girlfriend had promised to marry him if he saved Earth. However, when one grabs an oni by the horns, one is granted a wish by that oni, and Lum interprets Ataru's exclamation as a marriage proposal. Soon, she's moved in with him, and his home begins to attract all manner of alien and mythological chaos.

Urusei Yatsura can mean "Those Obnoxious Aliens," but "Urusei" is also a crude spelling (pronunciation) of "Urusai," which means, sort of, "You're being too noisy!"

So, I've now watched the fifth movie and I don't think I enjoyed it as much as I would have a decade ago. Years of inundating myself with a broad variety of movies has altered my taste a little, so I become a little uninterested, at times, with the film's unrelenting twists of strangeness, which sort of have a greying effect. Perhaps this is why I've so enjoyed Maison Ikkoku recently, as it's Takahashi's most subdued series.

But, in the end, how could I not love Urusei Yatsura 5?

Trouble begins when Lum's senile grandfather half remembers trading her hand in marriage for an antidote to a poisoned fish he'd eaten as a young man. So Lum's betrothed comes to Earth on a flying chariot drawn by eight black pigs. Soon, Ataru leads a group of monks and mythological Japanese characters in an intergalactic chase to a dark planet, all the while refusing to admit it's because he loves Lum. But there's a collision in hyperspace, and Ataru's ship and another crash-land on the dark planet. The other ship belongs to a girl in love with Lum's betrothed (of course).

The girl packs a rocket launcher, threatens the groom, and Lum is cloned. It looks like everyone's gonna die, but then Lum and Ataru get in an argument and Lum decides to stay on the planet. The movie continues with a plot about Earth being overrun by giant mushrooms, and a looming, grinning, memory erasing device that can only be deactivated with tennis balls.

Ataru's wealthy friend, Mendou, assembles tanks to fire tennis balls from their cannons . . .

And so on.

Some of it is cheap, romantic comedy shenanigans, but there's something sweet about the credulously strange, treacherous, and vicious characters.

About a half an hour ago, I leant close to the cat Lucky's ear and whispered, "Tell me about the future."

Far from uttering a word, Lucky merely looked at me, wide-eyed, in something like terror and walked quickly away. If nothing else, this proves that cats do have the gift of foreknowledge.

I went to the horse track on Monday for my mother's birthday. It was dull. The prodigious spaces of time between races were filled with only fine cheese for diversion--the menu featured little for the vegetarian. The best was a plate of cheeses and fruits, intended to accompany wine.

I've taken a book with me to all family functions of the past couple months--my cousin's wedding, a party for (I think) another cousin--but my mother gave me to understand that I was not to bring a book to the track. This, so that I might at least credibly feign enthusiasm.

The second brick on my chest was that I was to feign so after only four hours of sleep--I'd had to drive my aunt to the airport at 5am.

At one point, my sister asked if I was feeling all right. I felt slightly irritated at her asking me that question in front of my mother, as I was sure she knew there was only one possible answer I could give; if I was fine, I'd say "fine." If I wasn't, I was still going to have to lie and say, "fine." I explained this to her when we were alone and she said she hadn't known. Maybe it hadn't occurred to her, but I wasn't seeing straight. Anyway, she had her revenge when, later, my mother was saying we'd stay only until the sixth race and my sister begged to stay for all eight. And so I spent five hours sitting, intermittently giving in to the temptation to rest my eyes.

There were, however, a couple of very nice looking female horse-riders (not jockeys, I don't think, as they didn't race and only road alongside the race horses when they were being presented), and that is sort of a fine thing for a pervert like me to see.

I was wearing my usual black felt fedora and it seemed to capture a special notice among the employees, who perhaps associated it with the classic image of the track. At one point, an old security guard came to our table. He abruptly started to chat casually with us and explained, seemingly by way of idle conversation, that he was seventy four years old and a professional bounty. He mentioned that Mafioso, sent from the east to hide out, often wore hats like mine. He asked me if I was Mafioso.

He asked like someone who seriously wanted to know but wanted it to come off like a jocular thing. But I'd also just watched the 1932 version of Scarface the night before, so maybe it was only my sleep-deprived fancy. Though, you know, it's probably hard being a bounty hunter at seventy-four, especially if he also needs to work as a security guard.

And, wouldn't you know, it's time for me to sleep again. I'm tired of my body requiring food and sleep.

A new Boschen and Nesuko is up. References to Bugs Bunny and Hamlet.

The thing's at two hundred pages now. That sure seemed to happen fast.

So, yes, hot, cloudless days. And then, last night, a thunderstorm. Why not?

It sounded really close, too. I was sitting near the television watching The Strawberry Blonde, when it suddenly seemed massive flash bulbs were going off outside the annoying "wall of windows" this house has. At times, the thunder was loud enough that I wasn't able to hear the movie.

Then the power went out for about a second. No big deal, until I found later that the computer had developed some kind of problem where it acted like it was constantly loading something while never actually being able to load anything. It didn't recognise the page of Boschen and Nesuko I'd finished last night as existing, any more than it recognised anything else on the hard drive. Fortunately, after I restarted the computer a couple of times, it went back to normal. I really don't know what I would have done if it hadn't, as it suddenly was made plain to me all the different ways in which I'd be inconvenienced if I lost this computer.

I suppose I oughtn't say that, for all the enemies I have reading this. Well, I still have Justice and Lady Liberty on my side, and that's a great three-way, let me tell ya.

As for the movie last night, it was decent. I used to have kind of a crush on Rita Hayworth, but this movie made it very clear that Olivia de Havilland was prettier and a better actress. Her scenes with James Cagney were the best parts of the movie, by far. Suddenly I wanna watch The Heiress again.

It is hot around here. It's been hot for weeks. On Wednesday, it rained. I was driving at the time and when it was slow, infrequent drops, I avoided switching on the wipers, knowing it would make things worse. When I finally did switch them on, they indeed left thick arcs of smears. It's like it was raining grease. Which would match somehow with gunky-feeling heat that persisted.

Yesterday and to-day were the usual cloudless bowls of yellow-blue hot. My plan this morning was to read at Starbucks while completing the requisite first, strong black coffee, and then maybe going to Jamba juice to add some haphazard fruit to my diet before getting to Boschen and Nesuko. That first sip of coffee in the morning usually takes everything out of my mind--it's a beautiful moment of bonding with the great coffee spirit. But the Starbucks I went to only had Mild, and it took a little while before I could concentrate on Gulliver's visit to Luggnagg.

But, having finished that, I find myself now in the middle of a Passion-Mango Matcha with Green Tea and I think it might do. I want to rewrite the end of the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter before I start on storyboards, which I ought to've done yesterday, except yesterday I was rewriting bits of the chapter and was too damn tired from it being Thursday to do much else.

When I finished the script of the previous chapter, I had a very definite idea of what was going to happen next, but I compulsively re-wrote it in my head for weeks before I actually sat down to the first draft on Wednesday. I'd been re-deciding points, working out certain logistics, and then, having it on paper, found a whole new set of things to puzzle through. I wrote six pages on paper, and then changed them drastically while typing them up, and now I want a different ending.

You know--and this doesn't really relate, but for some reason, it got me thinking about it--one of my biggest complaints about the Peter Jackson film version of The Return of the King is Sam and Frodo splitting up due to Gollum's machinations just before they reached Shelob's cave. The director and writers, in the commentary, explained they felt they needed to do this because they didn't consider the trio's difficulty with Mordor's terrain to be dramatic enough. They needed character conflict and they needed Gollum to succeed once in his goal of driving a rift between Frodo and Sam.

And that pisses me off. I don't like those motives, as they seem to cynically place a desire for teh drama over sensitive character portrayal and the simple logistics of the situation. Man, it eats me. I don't think Gollum really could have driven them apart. I don't think Sam would really have abandoned Frodo just because Frodo told him to. Not merely because of loyalty and a awareness of what the ring was doing to Frodo, but also because Sam must know in his heart that he probably doesn't have the means to return home. I don't believe the little personal drama would divert their attentions from very big and sinister Cirith Ungol and the other perils of the environment. And I don't feel two friends barely getting along in a hellish land is boring, or less interesting than a pointless squabble.

And I didn't need to feel like Gollum had psychological power over them. That's not what's interesting about Gollum and it's not relevant.

Well, I still basically love the movie, but I have more complaints about it than any of the others. I also don't like that Gollum didn't die with the ring in the same, accidental way he did in the book, and Sean Astin seemed way too American Gung-ho in the last film. But I still love everything about Minas Tirith, Shelob, Gandalf, and all kinds of other things . . .

I finally found a comic book shop yesterday, and a really nice one, too.

On our way to the Comic-Con on Friday morning, Tim, looking out the window, had spotted a Comics N Stuff. I couldn't see where he was pointing, but I knew the general area, so decided yesterday to explore it.

I scoured the shoddy clumps of storefronts in El Cajon as carefully as I could while driving, but I was ready to give up after about ten minutes or so. Then I saw it, wedged against a skinny, busy street by the freeway onramp; a small, white brick building with an impressive mural painted on featuring an enormous Batman, Hellboy, Jack Skellington, Roman Durge Lenore, and Yoda. Inside was like the intestines of a giant coated with comics and action figures. Labyrinthine, and the biggest comic book shop I'd seen in San Diego County.

I looked up and down the walls, though, without seeing the Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder comic I was looking for. I didn't want to leave empty handed, so I looked closely at everything, to see if there was something else that was cheap and interesting. I saw Mike Mignola's and Troy Nixey's Jenny Finn, the first two issues in a single trade paperback, for seven dollars. Caitlin had mentioned it on her forum yesterday, so I grabbed it. It turned out to be a really good exploration of British sailors in the late nineteenth century being corrupted by a strange fish disease.

As I was paying for this, I noticed, lying on the counter, without a plastic sheath, the very Frank Miller/Jim lee Batman I'd come in for. So I bought it too. Miller's writing was decent, and Jim Lee's art reminded me of how much I suck.

I was strangely restless for a few hours after that, wanting something, but not sure what. Finally, I pulled into a grocery store parking lot, bought a couple apples, and sat in my car eating. It ended up being precisely what I wanted.

I used to really hate apples--they'd always give me a stomach ache. But lately I've been struck by random, odd cravings for them.

I really like Jedi Academy and some of the mods I've been downloading lately. This is all at Tim's house, where he's set up two computers. So while he's lost in Guild Wars, I'm busy perfecting my lightsabre technique. And one cool thing about Academy is that there is a technique--you can slash horizontally, hack vertically, diagonally, behind you, in an arch or short chops. And when your blade hits your opponent's, it reacts dynamically--if they're swinging and you're sitting still, your blade is knocked aside, sometimes out of your hand. And the bounding boxes are nice and tight--if one blade misses another by a couple inches, they don't touch, and someone gets cut in half.

Well, you need the dismemberment code for that last part. But that's also dynamic--if your blade goes through a wrist, a hand gets cut off. The first time I was trying out Academy's dismemberment, I cut Darth Maul in half which, I know, was a funny coincidence.

So it's really hard to learn how to use a lightsabre properly. And those with sabre-staves or two sabres seem to have a definite advantage. I learned this while going one on one with Darth Maul in a perfect user made Free For All map of the Naboo hanger bay and power generation-something-or-other-with-pits area from Episode 1. I was using Gunner Yuna from Final Fantasy X2 (a much better environment for her than actual Final Fantasy X2). It was almost impossible to defeat him with a standard sabre, and most of my wins were due to me using Force Choke or pushing him into one of the pits.

Lots of good player models for the game are downloadable. Last night I added the Predator, and most of the cast of Inu-Yasha. In case you were wondering, if Kikyo were to fight Indiana Jones in the Death Star hanger from Return of the Jedi, Indiana Jones would win.

Damnit, the Comic-Con's over. If that thing went 365 days a year, I'd be a completely different person with a different routine, social skills, and store of knowledge.

Details of Setsuled's Expedition now follow;

I went early on Thursday, the first day. I woke up at 7am. I'd planned to get ahead on Boschen and Nesuko earlier in the week but never managed it. But I was still up appreciably late on Wednesday to make Thursday morning a drag.

I went early because I wanted to attend DC's talent search at 10:30am. But, to spare you the suspense that fragmented my attention for days, I'll tell you now nothing came of it. Apparently I'm not what DC, Vertigo, or Wildstorm are looking for in an artist, which isn't terribly surprising to me. But my hopes were raised somewhat by some of the really crappy comic book art I'd seen recently, especially in some Star Wars comics I'd been reading (which, I know, isn't DC, but, you know, industry standards, I figured). I remembered snickering and pointing with Tim at a particular drawing of Aayla Secura where her arm seemed to be coming out of her head.

But the talent search thing did mean I had to get up early for the next couple days. The worst was Saturday, because by Friday night, not only was I not ahead with Boschen and Nesuko, I was a little behind. I had to ink the last half of the second to last page, pencil and ink the last page, and colour the last four. By the time Friday night was dead and Saturday morning was climbing from the birthing pit, my styrofoam brain was no longer able to comprehend the meaning of my actions and black lines and colour were sort of oozing their ways into existence on the computer screen. But, by the gods, it got done and I got two hours of sleep, to boot.

When I found, Saturday morning, that I wasn't chosen to be interviewed, I didn't really feel bad. I'd started thinking about how I'm not really much of a good soldier. How I'm better off trying to get my own stuff out there.

I wandered the floor, turned a corner, and saw that a young woman had chosen to walk around topless. She had nice, large-ish breasts, a leather cap, and a long black skirt. She walked like she wanted people to think she was perfectly comfortable and courageous, but something about the way she gripped her boyfriend's hand told me she wasn't at all comfortable.

I was trying to get to hall H to see, I think, Kevin Smith and Richard Kelly or something (I forget). When I saw that there was a queue, I decided not to bother, turned around, and saw that security had already spirited away the topless girl. It's a lucky thing, too; who knows how many boys had already been ruined for honourable marriage by the sight?

I saw the Samurai Stormtrooper on an escalator, but I didn't know what it was until Chris Walsh told me about it. And there were many good garden variety Stormtroopers, a good Darth Maul, and lots and lots of people wearing very comfortable looking Anakin Skywalker costumes. I was also privileged to see a pretty young woman in a Leia Slave costume. But oh, the experience is simply too fleeting.

As for actual celebrities, high profile artists, or writers in attendance, I saw far fewer this year than usual, and those I did see I didn't look for very hard. I'm kind of disappointed I missed David Cronenberg on Thursday, and Bruce Campbell for three days, but I simply didn't feel very excited by the idea of sitting around listening to talented people having nothing much to say, especially when I was operating on so little sleep.

I was hanging around one corridor on Friday, wondering where Tim and his friend Amber had gotten to, when I realised that Jhonen Vasquez was speaking in the room next to me, so I went inside and took a seat.

Vasquez was saying how people normally asked really dumb questions at these things, which is true, and I hoped his speaking out against it would discourage all but the truly interesting questions. But Vasquez himself, aside from coming off as being a neat, intelligent fellow, didn't have a great deal of interest to say. Yes, he was happy to've worked on Invader Zim but, yes, it was a pain in the ass dealing with money-conscious collaborators. And yes, he has ideas for other works involving Johnny and Squee.

I was sort of bemused by how he seemed mildly unhappy that many people admired Johnny (the character), whom he'd meant to be somewhat pathetic.

Later that day, I saw Jill Thompson in a corridor talking to some people, but I didn't stop to listen. But, hey, all ya'll, I was close enough to tackle Jill Thompson. Envy me, yo.

I had a good time attending panels on web comics on Saturday and Sunday. I'd never heard of any of the panellists, which was sort of funny as I've been looking at all sorts of web comics over the past couple of years looking for the rare decent one among millions. The panels were on promoting web comics and earning a living off of them. I didn't really learn much I didn't know, but was reminded of some things I've been too distracted to do.

But it was nice just seeing what a bunch of web comic makers were like. Not only the panellists, but most of the people in the room had web comics. It was sort of nice suddenly feeling like I was part of a society.

Anyway, in case you'd like to know, panellists I saw on Saturday were Bill Barnes, Scott Kurtz, James Kochalka, R Stevens, Dave Kellett, and Kristofer Straub. Sunday, in addition to Bill Barnes and Scott Kurtz, there was Steve Troop, David Willis, Raina Talgemeier, and Andy Bell.

They all seemed like reasonably charming people. Talgemeier, the only girl, was very quiet on the How to Make Money with Web Comics panel because, apparently, the poor young lady doesn't make any money with her web comic. It seems her comic requires a subscription to read, which has driven humanity away. A good thing to remember, I guess. I approached her afterwards and offered my condolences, and snagged the only free comic I'd managed to get at the con, a little promotional copy of her Smile. It was cute, and interesting as apparently it was about her getting her front teeth knocked out when she was younger. I could identify as I wear a false tooth to-day for one I lost playing little league baseball as a kid.

I read her comic while waiting for the trolley to take me back to East County. I'd never seen the trolley station so crowded and the blue and orange lines were all fucked to hell because it seems a Padres game was happening the same day as the last day as the Comic-Con--and the stadium is across the street from the convention centre.

So we had a huge mass of baseball fans packed to bursting in the little red trolley cars along with huge masses of costumed comic fans. A hot, sweaty, uneasy atmosphere it was as two social groups were blended as they were never, ever meant to be.

Reading an entry in Franklin's blog, I decided to go out to-day looking for this new Batman comic. And beheld, I did, the comic book store apocalypse.

I knew my previous regular shop at Parkway Plaza had been gone for weeks. So I went to North County Fair and saw theirs had closed as well.

About two weeks ago, I'd been to Mission Valley Centre and had discovered that a cool anime/manga shop, that'd been there for many years, had been driven out by a comics shop. So I went there as, since the store was new, it was bound to still be in existence. I coyly thought to myself, as I ascended the ramp from the parking garage into the mall, that I oughtn't count on this store still being around, the way things were going. But I was still dumbfounded to discover that the shop was indeed closed.

I remembered a little shop near a hospital where Trisa used to work, so I headed there. Yes, the shop still existed, but as I approached, I was stopped by a sign proclaiming that the store's new hours meant it was now closed on Mondays.

So there will be no comics to-day.

Only yesterday I was surrounded by an unimaginably vast universe of comics, and now I can't find one damned shop. So suddenly and violently have I been expelled from heaven. Is it 2006 yet?