Nine years ago, a good friend of mine died in a senseless car wreck on the road to Valdez.

He was eighteen.... just like the rest of us from the class of 2000.

He was the only guy I knew who had no enemies. He was also possessed of an unshakable self-confidence and a generous spirit.

And the fact that he, of all people, died the summer we graduated is so goddamned tragic it's almost funny.

Almost.

Happy trails, man.

We still miss ya.

Seriously.

Fuck all of you.

The comic has been around since 1985, and yet now, ONLY NOW, do I see any of you fucking toads even PRETENDING you've read it.


And most of the pricks I've seen blathering about it clearly are only pretending.

The movie only exists because the X-Men films (shit) and Batman Begins (keen) convinced the spineless cocks who run Hollywood that this property was worth a go.

So they went in and butchered it (the way they do) and now, all of a sudden, everyone and their fucking brother is Rohrschach fanboy.

"But ____," you say, "surely if the movie generates interest in the comic, it can;t be all bad!"

To which I reply, "Screw you, anybody who takes the superheroic sub-genre of comic books seriously at all has already read it, or would have anyway."

And the hell of it is, Watchmen isn't even "groundbreaking" anymore.

It's one of the goddamn classics.

But do I see any of you drooling maggots giving, say, Astro City a whirl?

Of course not.

There isn't an Astro City movie to make you feel like you know what you're talking about.

And thank God for that.

So, I've reached that point, that dreadful, awful point...

I need to find a job.

But more than that, I need to figure out what to do with myself.

Because I honestly have no idea at this point.

People ask me, "what do you like to do?"

And I have no idea.


My life has all of the direction of a damn leaf on the wind, with none of the fun poetic connotations thereof, and all of the bad stuff.

"You're young, you can do anything, anything at all!"


Yeah.

Right.

I'm so free I'm paralyzed.

When I filed for unemployment, as part of the schtick, they ask what my "career" is.

"I haven't got one."

I don't think it's really sunk in for them yet.

Hell, it's just STARTED sinking in for me.

I take pride in nothing I do. I take joy in very little I do. Mostly, I lurch through the motions to keep food in my stomach and roof over my head.

And it's all so damned POINTLESS beyond that.

My great-uncle Sam died last night. It was a stroke, and if there's any mercy to the whole mess, it's that it was probably quick.


I loved my great uncle.

We went fishing in Lake Huron when I was little, and he remained my "fishing" buddy for the rest of his life.

And now he's gone.

Just like both of my paternal grandparents.

My grandmother, who made applesauce for me, where one of my earliest memories was of sitting in her kitchen, smelling the apples cooking down.

Or my Grandfather, who went hiking with me in the Sierra Nevada when he was 83.

Like my uncle Tim (Sam's nephew), who I barely got to know, but who had also read Fritz Leiber and had been places and seen things that left me awestruck- and who I have missed every day since.

Like my friend Cole Goodhand, who was one of the best people it has ever been my pleasure to know, who died in a senseless car wreck the summer we graduated high school.

Like my friend Brian Henry, who died of Leukemia when he wasn't even 21.

Like my neighbor Doug Schamel, the father of one of my best friends growing up, who died in his sleep without warning.

I am so tired of all of it.
I'm simply too burned out to do much more than sit here, numb and ranting, and wishing things were different.

All of this, all of it, has happened over the span of roughly eight years.

And I'm tired of all the grief.

For some reason, I feel like I missed the bus the rest of the human race caught... case in point, Election Night.


Obama's victory in no way made my UNhappy.... but I just couldn't really tap into all the whooping and hollering that went down. Nor could I wallow in gloom and doom like the OTHER half of the population.

I just didn't see how it mattered to ME, personally.

Because, for all of its historic import, it was, in the final analysis, just another Presidential election.

And I've lived through seven of them, and have voted in three.

And as far as I can tell, I'm still here.