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I had to see for myself, and it’s not as bad as the “haters” made it out, but fuck it’s disappointing there weren’t better ideas to develop. Like the Scooby gang all grown up and working in the same boring office. Or fighting off a zombie apocalypse (which I think has been done in comics). Certainly a next generation of them, so the diversity wouldn’t seem so forced again. The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse had “ethnically-mixed friends” 35 years ago!
Holy coincidences, Bat-Bat, lucky as I was with a seed because I of course forgot about my DVD, only to be floored by the reunion episode with the Mighty Heroes!

I’m sometimes glad to be proven wrong—what am I saying, as a pessimist, I count on it—the mulefa and war with the angels weren’t unfilmable; I was only unable to predict that budgets for such spectacle would eventually be approved for the small screen. Not like me, too, to quote the books (“There’s plenty of folk as’d like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle”) and fail to make the connection to “Seen and Not Seen” from Remain in Light.

I’m also reminded how I found the series in the first place, from a co-worker whose church-arranged husband strung her along for just long enough to finance his business and obtain a green card. The spinster’s faith is surely unshaken: “L’absurde naît de cette confrontation entre l’appel humain et le silence déraisonnable du monde.” Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe

I woke up the other night and decided to read up on the Pussycats, having largely parted ways with them after disappointing revival attempts at the turn of the century. Their Wiki mentions a compilation from Rhino in 2001, but the one I got was issued a few years before, and neither had “Clock on the Wall”, anyway, which may have turned me off most of all.The 2020 Blu-Ray remaster looks crisp like my OTA VHS recordings aren’t (despite using SP mode!), and even while I was making them I knew it was too late for that idyllic spirit of adventure they depicted, it could still await my next of kin.

There was a suspicious car traveling up the street, I think maybe because the driver wasn’t immediately visible, so somehow I was able to hop in the back and confront the occupants. “This isn’t possible,” I accused, “You must be from the future!” The two or three men admitted as much, as our vehicle converted to a boat and took off on the open seas. (I was reminded of The Last Starfighter, which we watched the other night. It wasn’t really that good, was it, apart from the premise, which I’d rather have seen again on a 12-minute episode of Regular Show.) We entered a purple gash in the air, and the sky went from sunny to dark as we docked. They warned me that in their time, non-Whites were gone, purged, didn’t press for an explanation, and that I’d stick out. The city was a bland shade of brown and eerily empty of inhabitants, like an early videogame. The boy, still a four-footer, tried befriending one of the local Village of the Damned children but heeding our host’s advice, I told him to let go of her hand.

Thought-provoking foray into race relations aside, another of my familiar themes in dreams is the long journey on foot alone, often across unimaginable distances and non-navigable terrain, which may or may not be a corollary of transportation woes, though fortunately I spare myself the actual experience and only reflect upon it before or afterward. This morning I traced my trip from somewhere in northern New England to upstate New York by way of Canada and the “Madison” River, probably mistaken for the Hudson. Is there some challenge I’m bracing for, and am I burdening myself unnecessarily by taking the more difficult approach, like how I prefer to use a manual screwdriver instead of the cordless drill?

A single-lane road went around the back of the parking lot, but when I approached it to exit, two sedans were oncoming. The asphalt ahead of them was broken, though, resulting in an abrupt four-foot drop, which neither must’ve seen because the first fell head-long onto the lower ground then the one behind landed on top. It seemed like I stepped out to investigate. The driver of the buried car appeared: he (?) was a hunched humanoid, but his body was covered in a large drum-like steel shell and his head comprised of goggles for eyes and a screaming mouth. Another of its kind emerged from the wreckage and was just as angry. I left the monsters to themselves by promptly departing to their left in the original way out, glad that the dashcam had caught everything.

Has this already been done? A man’s life is linked inextricably to an ancient samurai sword somehow and becomes virtually immortal unless the weapon is broken. Well, that was the premise of the caper I took part in before waking up for good today (then again, it is Sunday), where a female Japanese detective and I uncovered the mystery, then rewound to catch a re-enactment of the origin of the bond between the two, which, to our disappointment, was lacking in special effects: he was a nobody who happened to be around when its crate was broken.

In retrospect it may not amount to much, but there was at least some progress from the Killing Eve remake where the queers were relegated to supporting characters then letting them be the leads, if only “coded” as such and surrounded by the most extreme examples of the opposite sex.

The chair, a simple four-legged wooden one the kind I sat on for most of my youth, dragged me all the way over the thick carpet in the office to Rosario Dawson’s cluttered cubicle. I hadn’t brushed my teeth yet so I felt a bit embarrassed about just having woke up while she had already been on the job.

The heat and humidity had been suppressing just about any initiative to make good on all the ideas I had been accumulating, and even with my subconscious prodding me to complete the one about the chair we saw while walking to the store, it took the return of a few cooler nights before I finished the page in his journal—not that he’d notice; my hope was that it’d inspire him to make the time in his busier schedule to commemorate moments like these, however regular.

Son and I began a rewatch of the series, now that he’s more familiar with the retro music cues, maybe to combat Teen Titans Go! fatigue, and I can’t help but notice the similar theme of outrageous escalation, further heightened because of its comparatively “regular” origins. In fact, I’m reminded of my own forays into fantasizing about escaping from uneventful times, my only scans of which I’ve collected here (and implore owners of any existing hard copies to contribute):

• “The Amazing Zit”
• “Morning Run”
• “The Videogame Conspiracy” Part II

First, some domestic scene-setting: Tony had plastic surgery to resemble キムタク and I was serving oranges that grew increasingly unlike ones I’d pick at the grocer, the last so much larger and hideous it had to be a saggy grapefruit. A cabbage in the fridge had a purple streak in the center that also indicated its past-best state. Then I was part of an outdoor procession returning home from a protest gathering and a young woman walking beside me looked dejected, so I took hold of her hand, which seemed to pick up her spirits. This platonic gesture caught the eye of my boyfriend, former co-worker Fred (to whom I apologize, my field isn’t what it used to be), whom I pointed out and neither of them was pleased. When we reached the tall carved double doors of the place I shared with him, I bid farewell to her and she turned my way with a Ruth Wilson smile under her hood, which all but sealed my fate with my current relationship. We retreated to our indoor pool with a third man, who joined us in a game where I threw a football at a target at the other end, but my partner remained distant. The living room hid the water under a retracting floor like the one at the host’s in The Party, and as well as we were doing, I knew it was time to divvy it all up.

Cursory keyword search tells me I may not have mentioned it yet, though dreams like this happen often enough that my recollections of them ought to convey the real emotional or intellectual impact from such self-inflicted scenarios. (I shall never forget one where I met 할머니 years after her passing and was overcome with sorrow that we didn’t have more time together, feeling it even after I woke.) But jealousy is for more passionate, primitive minds—I recall a recent opportunity to experience it when the wife took a younger lover, which left me nonplussed—and my simulation only produced resentment, a reminder of immature wardens.

I looked through the doorway and saw a young person’s bare arm suspended unnaturally high above the room, undulating slightly and the fingers wiggling to show that someone unseen was behind it. Suddenly I was attacked by a dozen gray fists, but I fought them back, defiant and insistent that they weren’t getting to me, even as the image of my aggressor in the back changed shape and color.

In quite the change of setting to an anime convention, my friend and I (I think it was Frank Hsu, because he was tall, thin and decked out in motorcycling leathers) were admiring the life-sized mechs on display, and when we learned we could actually climb inside one for photos, queued up thinking that we were first in line. Turned out it already stretched around the display and the others were full-on cosplaying as sentai pilots, so the Shoei or Arai helmet and riding gear looked philistine in comparison. Nearing the end of our wait, a woman with a baby approached and we let her cut ahead of us, but she then tried chaining in a fat relative who waddled up and we objected vehemently. I don’t remember taking any pictures because the very next thing, my buddy looked more like that fucker Steve Bannon and was thanking me; such an abrupt edit in my timeline frightened me that Alzheimer’s had struck and this was how my perception would continue, jumping from one moment to another, unaware of what happened between them.

It’s how I reconcile Severance and Navillera. (Although the former will probably be revealed to be mad science like Dr. Brain, the Trojan Horse implant that has to be “macrodata’d” to override memory or willpower conflicts.) Bread-winning aside, what good are we to our loved ones if we don’t know who they are anymore? What good are we to ourselves?