When Ever I Wake Up

The cupboards were bleeding again. Looking up from the steam of my Randall's Cup-a-Soup, I could see the red drips seeping through the closed cabinet drawer and pooling on the counter top. My heart pounding, I pushed my chair back from the kitchen table and made my way to the cabinet.

Flinging the cabinet open, I saw on top of the white plastic dishes a severed forearm, still bleeding at the elbow. From just outside I heard the shuffling steps and quiet moan. I knew I would soon have a visitor.

The room temperature dropped twenty degrees, and I felt a presence, one that brought tears to my eyes and bile to my throat. And then I saw him, only inches from me, reaching towards me, the ghostly pale figure, the stench of rot almost making me faint.

He reached past me, and grabbed the arm. "Oh," he said, through a loosely hung, only partly flesh clad jaw. "I wondered where I had left that!"

It was then that recognition began to penetrate my hardened soul. It was my brother Andrew. He had died when I was only twelve and he was ten. A failed attempt to cross a bridge with a train behind us. I made it. He didn't. And here he was. But not as a child, but as a fully grown adult. Well, at least the parts that had not rotted off.

"Is that Randall's Cup-A-Soup?," he asked, as he tried to re-attach his arm, using a nearby stapler. "Damn! I even miss that! That's pathetic, ain't that the truth?"

The truth was, this was not the first time I had seen Andrew. Sometimes I was in places where the wall between the real world and the spirit world was considerably weaker than other places. One thing did seem to be almost universally true. Almost everywhere I went, Andrew was dead.

I sat back down, weary, but no longer frightened. "How's it hanging, big bro? You look like crap, half worn out."

"Speak for yourself," I replied, staring at the vacant hole where Andrew's right eye should be. "Yes, after all this time, I still fight going to sleep. But eventually I have to surrender, don't I?"

"Crap. I wish I could sleep. Roaming the earth in a quasi-zombie state ain't all that it's cracked up to be, believe you me."

I sighed. Might as well get to the heart of it. "Well, you see, it's a little different for me. Every time I wake up, everything changes."

"Change?", Andrew asked, as he tried to stuff an intestine back in place. "What do you mean, change?"

"Whenever I wake up, everything is different. One time I have a family and I'm living in Seattle. The nest day that I wake up, I'm a single guy who's a clown in a rodeo. The next day I'm something deadly dull like an accountant."

"Please!," shuddered Andrew, part of an ear falling off. "You're giving me nightmares! So you wake up somebody different each day? Wow! Say, do you ever have a nice set of knockers?"

"No, I'm always me. It's like me, but in an alternate reality. One where choices made by me or others have led to different outcomes. Like you. You died in my original reality when you were ten. If that's true, how are you an adult here? Do ghosts age here?"

"Oh, H to the no! Last year I fell into the path of a commuter train at a subway station."

"Hmmm. You and trains...not a good match!"

"So how long has this been going on?"

"I don't know. Several years, I guess. I lost count at four hundred and ninety eight. It started at my fortieth birthday. I think someone might have put something in my drink."

"Geez, worst Mickey of all time! Well, I guess that's why you were a little surprised at seeing me. You really didn't know this version of me. And if this is your first night here, you may not have anticipated how things work here." Andrew turned and looked out the window almost wistfully. "You haven't seen Sarah yet, have you?"

"Sarah?" She was my wife, the love of my life before the great unmooring took place. I only rarely have seen her since. Often when I do see her, we hadn't married and she doesn't even know me. Sometimes, the heartbreak is more than I can stand. "Sarah's here? And she's connected to me?" Hope filled my spirit.

"Yeah, ya dope. You two were married for twenty years!"

"Were?"

"Oh, cripes! That's right, you don't know. She's...she's like me."

I couldn't take it anymore. I might soon see my dead wife, a rotting corpse. "Andrew, I..I...don't know if I could handle that."

"You might want to start wrapping your brain around it. Because..." And then I heard the steps and moans from outside, creeping closer, ever closer.




Someone was shaking me awake, violently. "Sir! Sir! Wake up! We're at Defcon Four and you're the only one who may be able to talk her out of it!" I rose from the couch I had been apparently sleeping on, blearily confused, looking at the woman standing above me. Where was I this time? Defcon Four? Somebody playing War Games?

She hustled me down the hallway. Historical paintings lined the hall, men wearing suits with firearms in their hands stood in front of a door I was being led to. A person emerged from the door and anxiously came over to me. "Mr. Secretary, please! She already has launched the codes! You only have five minutes to talk her down!"

Oh my God! Have I mentioned that I don't inherit the abilities of whatever alternative me has? There was one time I woke up as pilot and almost crashed a Jumbo Jet! And this was serious, more serious than not knowing how to a do a damn Balance Sheet. "You..you have get to someone else to do this! I...I don't feel like I can do this!"

You have to, Mr. Secretary! You're the only one who can save the world!"

He opened the doors, and there I saw the most frightening thing I have ever seen.




President Palin.


God help us all.

Witchy Woman!

Christine O'Donnell: I'm not a witch....I'm you!

T. M. Strait: Huh? You're me? How did that happen? When did you possess my soul? And if you can do that, doesn't that make you a witch? Ahhhhhhh.....!

Christine O'Donnell: I'm nothing like they say I am...

T.M. Strait: Well, of course not. Not if you're me now. And if you're me, than who am I? Doses this me I'm you? Ahhhhhhhhhhh......!

Christine: And when I get into the Senate, I'll do what you would do!

T.M.: What I would do? You're serious! Single payer health care, here we come! Greening the economy...infrastructure improvements....education investment...woohooo!

Alison: Hey, hubby! Watchu doing?

T.M.: Can't you see? I'm Christine O'Donnell.

Alison: That's a shame. You're gonna get your ass kicked by Chris Coons.

T.M: Wait a minute. The commercial's over. What happened to my boobs? I'm me again.

Alison: The spell only lasts while the commercial's on. You're you again.

T.M.: She really is a witch!

Alison: No s---, Sherlock!

All In A Color for $1.49

I found this neat device online called The Inflation Adjuster. Put in a monetary value, select a year, and it will tell you what that would be in 2009 dollars. So I thought I would try the price of a comic book in 1960. One dime. The answer that came back in 2009 dollars stunned me. Seventy Two big ones! Pennies, that is.

That's right. Comics adjusted for inflation should be about 72 cents. Obviously, they're more than that. About five and a half times more than that (given the $3.99 price the industry has been pushing us towards). Are there reasons for comics to have increased so dramatically above inflation? I'm sure there are, some of them good, some of them not so good. I don't want to get into an argument over that. What's indisputable is the fact that it takes a larger ratio of disposable income to keep up the habit than it did a generation or two ago.

There are many suggestions to assist the long time survival of the comic book industry. Graphic novels and compilations have been fairly successful. They have helped penetrate the bookstore market. Magazine level items like Spider-Man Magazine or Shonen Jump can be found in Wal-Mart and some grocery stores. The Internet is awash with experimentation, some promising, some pretty gruesome.

But, like the melting glaciers are being dwindled by global warming, the mother source is starting to dry up. The comic shop and the weekly/monthly habit is dying. The connection to younger readers is almost non-existent. The last list of sales I saw  had zero comics with sales over 100,000.

Maybe there is no hope. Maybe we just let the mothersource die, and pray that what's left is sufficient. Before we all pack it in and consign weekly comic buying to the scrapheap with radio dramas and pulp magazines, I have one last suggestion.

They key is in the habit and the stack. For me, there was nothing like going to a comic store and coming home with a great big stack. In the 70s, ten bucks would buy me as many as twenty new books. Now, ten bucks would get me two, maybe three max. People want to be social, they want to share. all our technology has not eliminated shopping and personal contact. We need them to want to come to the store weekly. We want them to buy a satisfying stack!

So here's my suggestion. One or both of the big two need to start a line of weekly comics, priced no more than $1.99 and maybe even $1.49. They can be smaller than the standard book, 24 pages or even 16. They can contain 10 to 16 pages of story, depending on the cost analysis of the publishers. They should have four to eight weekly titles, with stories that make you want to get the next issue. If they could publish three full-size issues of The Amazing spider-Man every month, I don't see why they couldn't do this in these smaller sizes every week.

DC could have titles that focus on their cities, such as Metropolis starring Superman, or Gotham starring Batman. Marvel's could be organized around teams such as The Avengers and X-Men, or those great titles that they used to have, such as Strange Tales and Tales to Astonish. Some or all should be all ages to help attract younger readers.

On a periodic basis, be it monthly, bi-monthly or even quarterly, these titles could be sold in a magazine or graphic novel as collections. Some readers will want to follow weekly. Other may prefer the periodic collections.

Yes, I know this idea may be met by resistance from those in the know. There may be myriad production problems. I don't know. I'm just a reader who's been in love with comics for a half a century. And I thought I would give my suggestion one shot. Maybe, just maybe, I won't have to take out my comics to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren and say, "Do you see? Do you see what we used to have?"

Political Prediction Update and Reflections

No, I am not going back on my predictions of a month ago. I am generally satisfied with my overall conclusions, which are as follows: 18 to 23 seat Republican gain in the House, 2 to 5 seat Republican gain in the Senate, the reactionary elements of the Tea Party becoming more bitter and desperate. I did want to briefly consider some of the major trends in the last month.

I am very worried about the large amounts of corporate, foreign and wealthy individual dollars that are being dropped into our election process. This may influence some races that could have fallen to the Democratic candidate. On the other hand, the blatancy of this money has become so apparent that it may have a backlash effect, especially if Democratic politicians are strong enough to keep pointing it out. Citizens Untied has proven to be the most destructive Supreme Court ruling since Bush v. Gore, and definitely in the top five worst rulings of all time. If not changed very quickly, this will be the last shovel full of dirt burying the corpse of democracy.

I have recently heard that there are 70 Tea Party candidates for the House, of which roughly half are leading or contending. Of course what the MSM is not saying is at least half are NOT contending. So let's say 20 to 25 win. What does that mean? I think they will try to steer the Republican house in a more reactionary direction, if that's even possible. It will make compromise with the Democrats even more difficult. They will be a frustrating nuisance, and only have the power that they can gender through fear and intimidation. Tragically, that may be more power than their numbers warrant.

The false equivalency that CNN keeps trying to bring to the table drives me crazy. I don't mind them trying to be the "more journalistic" network in the middle. But journalism means calling it like it is. If all the crazy candidates are one side, it's best just to call it that than to try to gin up something on the other side. The Democratic equivalent of Newt Gingrich is not Lanny Davis.

The house being allowed to burn in Tennessee is a terrifying glimpse into a Tea Party future. If I were a Democratic candidate, I would play this up, over and over. The rescue in Chile is an example of what government can do IF we let it. They took over from day one, they did it methodical and careful, they brought the best resources from around the world, and we all cried for joy. Contrast that with the Gulf Oil disaster. The media, the government. BP - all sniping at each other. Meanwhile, don't kid yourself. just because our A.D.D. press is not covering it, doesn't mean you won't be seeing negative effects in the gulf for generations to come. And guess what? We're back to drill, baby, drill again!

Sorry for the somewhat random nature, but these are my thoughts with the election less than three weeks way. Please feel free to share your thoughts. I welcome the dialogue!

Old Pat T and the Great Bathroom War

They had to take her away. The ambulance came and took her away, and we never saw her again. Old Pat T had taught her last class.
We moved from small agricultural Charlotte, Michigan to the blue collar suburb of Bridgeport, Michigan during the summer before I started First grade. If we had stayed in Charlotte, I would have had to repeat Kindergarten. I was a rebellious little kid who didn’t feel like it was important to share with the teacher what you were learning. I defied rules at all turns, was obnoxious, and missed most of the last weeks of school, lying at home, almost dying with severe hard measles.
First grade changed all that. Set in an old school building that only had the first grade in it, there were four classrooms on the main floor and one, one solitary classroom that was set below. Below in the basement. And that was where I was, not alone, but with twenty some other terrified kids. Alone in the basement. Alone in the basement with…Old Pat T.
Old Pat T, whose real name is completely lost to me, was our teacher. She was a Bridgeport institution, having taught First grade for decades – for all we knew, centuries. We were alone down there with her. There were no aides or assistants in those days. Any stuff or nonsense any of us had hanging over from Kindergarten was knocked right out of us.
We had a big walk-in closet down there, where we hung our coats and mittens and all those things you needed to survive in chilly Michigan. And it was used for one other thing. Time out. Oh, not the cute little sit in the corner time out used today. No, this was something else. If you were bad, she would put you in there. With the door shut. And the lights off. I must not have always been good. Because I remember that closet. I remember it all too well.
I remember poor Jimmy Schauman coming in with his pants wet, and Old Pat T humiliating him in front of the whole class for having wet his pants. He tried to tearfully deny it, and wound up in the closet for his troubles.
It was a troubling time for all of us. Our only relief was when we got into the light of day at recess. The only other time out of our dungeon is when we went as a group to the bathrooms upstairs. A fairly routine task. That is, until the Great Bathroom War.
There were only one set of bathrooms in the building. These were on the main floor with the other four classrooms. Every classroom was supposed to have a set time to go, as not to overwhelm the facilities. This was particularly true for us in the basement, and this strict schedule may have helped explain why we boys with wild, untamed bladders might occasionally have accidents. Old Pat T was not going to vary her schedule for anybody.
One fine school day, Old Pat T organized us for our trek upstairs to the bathrooms. But when we got up there, one of the other teachers was starting to line up her kids ahead of us. Well, Old Pat T was livid. This was not right. This was her classroom’s time, not this young upstart’s.
They engaged in verbal battle. We watched, our mouths dropping in amazement. We had never seen two adult teachers going at it like that, saying words to each other that many of us didn’t recognize. The confrontation became physical! Old Pat T slapped the upstart, and the upstart punched Old Pat T in the gut!
Meanwhile, as the fight was going on, we students from both classrooms, we of the full bladder club, came in and used the bathrooms together, operating in unison, without conflict or strife. When we came out, the ambulance was there and Old Pat T was being taken away.
I don’t remember what happened to old Pat T, other than that she never came back. I don’t know what happened to the young upstart who slugged her. I did learn that sometimes, if we don’t let ourselves get confined by authority and fear, we can all just go to the bathroom together.
The remainder of our year was more peaceful, even if we were in the basement. Yes, it helped straighten out a bit of my wildness. But it also left me a little bit terrified of authority figures, an attitude that has continued to this day. It has also left me with the need, wherever I’m working, whatever I’m doing, to make sure that I have quick, easy, and unfettered access to a bathroom.