Well, Darling Ones,

I’m displeased to report that the infinite sadness has yet to abate. I did a lot of the same sadness-fighting steps as yesterday: slept 12 hours, ate eggs & hashbrowns, continued reading The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and instead of watching Ferris I thought I’d lean into the sad and so spent most of the day listening to Frightened Rabbit’s discography on shuffle. I’ve since moved on to my UGH 2020 End Already playlist.*

Yesterday on the phone I told EM about the infinite sadness and she said, “Maybe it’s okay to just be sad for awhile.” I scoffed because I cannot afford to be sad AND lonely AND a giant bummer. Nobody wants to listen to a giant bummer whine on and on about being sad for no discernible reason. Sometimes she forgets the only real value I provide is in being entertaining and making people feel good about themselves and loved.

The other thing she forgot? I have a Superman tattoo right in the middle of my chest. This shocked the hell of out me. Also, it’s the second time in two months that a long-time friend has forgotten about my S. It’s weird because I think of that tattoo specifically as like a defining personal trait. Tall. Fat. Superman tattoo. Everything else comes after those three.

“Why do you have a Superman tattoo?” she asked.
“Because I wanted to make sure that every man I ever met for my entire life will tell me all his opinions about Batman and comic books in general.”
“No, really, why?”
“It was the summer of 1994 or 1995 and ‘Pocket Full of Kryptonite’ was really popular.”
“. . . ”
“Come on!” I shouted. “That was a joke. It was funny!”
“The Spin Doctors are never funny. So why Superman?”

I love and hate that we’ve become such good friends that she will wade through my distracting hilarity and wait until I’m ready to tell the truth.

“Well. . . Clark Kent was a journalist and I was a journalist. Superman was the only one of his kind, and so am I. He doesn’t really fit in on Earth and has to hide so much of who he is in an attempt to be accepted.”
“I can see that,” she said.
“But it was mostly so I could hear about how great Batman is my entire life.”

I’ve been told more times than I can count this tattoo makes me even more intimidating, which is my number one problem when it comes to getting men to fall in love with me.

Recently I was bellyaching to a different friend on the phone about my loneliness and what felt like a constant stream of rejection from men.

“You don’t need a man,” he said.
“I KNOW!” I shouted with 77 inches of belligerence. “But I want one.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s gonna be tough because you’re dude kryptonite.”

He went on to tell me men are most insecure about their height and their intelligence, and I got those things in spades. “You’re always going to be taller and smarter,” he said. “Most men can’t handle that.” The whole conversation reminded me of that time P.Holt told me about connoisseurs. And just like that other conversation it made me a little happy to be seen and a little sad that men are fucking idiots.

Kryptonically yours,
Jodi
 
* This is my UGH 2020 End Already playlist. It is all dudes. The addition of Jeff Tweedy was because Wolfdogg suggested it and he’s my musical soulmate. I frequently ignore his suggestions because I’m kind of a dick and he has a penchant for liking guitar wankery bullshit. But when he’s right, he’s right.

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Last night, or rather at 12:45 this morning as Paco began to caterwaul and bat at the downstairs window, and as Walter, who is spending the week at Supergenius HQ while Sisters #2 & #3 and everyone else vacations in Florida, began to bark, I thought about going downstairs and wringing the neck of the calico cat bastard.

However, since I was naked in bed and had wimped out by turning on the AC to combat the armpitty MN weather, I decided to stay where I was and just think bad thoughts about the cat. Long about 2 a.m. before the adrenaline completely wore off I decided that since it also visited on 4th last month that it’s clearly a cat in heat, and who am I to judge harshly a creature looking for some loving? Then I remembered the derelict screens and I judged that stupid cat bastard for trying to seek out loving from my cat who has no testicles.

Lucky for the calico the damage to the screen was minor. I’m hoping she doesn’t come back tonight. I could use a full night of sleep.

Not that it matters, really, because I am on vacation from my summer job.

In other news, I met my cousin’s new girlfriend on Saturday and it was weird. We’d all gathered at his McMansion in the swankier part of Prior Lake for my Uncle Wayne’s 60th birthday party. Before I get to that, I have to tell you that Sisters #2, 3, and I decided to make Uncle Wayne an honorary member of the Sister Club for his birthday because he’s so snarky. Last night at family dinner Sister #2 said, “We get our snarkiness from Wayne.”

Anyway, so I met the girlfriend for the very first time in my entire life and as I shake her hand and say, “Nice to meet you” she says, “Let me see your Superman tattoo.”

Uh. . .

Can we all agree that that’s really fucking weird? Like, who asks such a question? And she knew that the Superman tattoo is located in my cleavage, because she made a sort of “show me your tits gesture.”

And how did this woman I’ve never met before, whose been dating my cousin for like six months know about the tattoo? Like does he say, “oh yeah and I have this cousin with a Superman tattoo on her chest”? Because I cannot remember the last time I’ve mentioned one of my cousins with someone I was romantically involved with.

It was so awkward and so weird that I’m not even sure how to process it yet.

The post The Return of the Cat Bastard & Other Tales from Monday appeared first on I Will Dare.

Holy Shit, Batman! This is one incomprehensible, incredibly confusing, and ultimately boring comic book. After much heated debate (Kingdom Come vs. American Born Chinese), this craptastic superhero graphic novel became Rock & Roll Bookclub’s July pick (it won in a random drawing).

It’s been about two years since R&RBC picked a book so shitty I couldn’t finish it (the unreadable The Boy Who Cried Freebird), and now comes Kingdom Come.

Graphic Novels are usually quick reads filled with lots of pretty pictures to get you through the rough spots. Generally, you’re nearly finished with the book before you start to smell shit. So really it takes a special brand of shittiness to make you quit half-way through. Kingdom Come has that extra special brand of shittiness. It’s like super, new-improved awfulness, because this is a Superman book that I couldn’t finish. Me. Superman.

It kind of breaks my heart.

I’m not exactly sure what the fuck is going on in Kingdom Come even though I read the first chapter twice in an attempt to try to better anchor myself in whatever wacky DC Universe this book takes place in. From what I can tell the Justice League retired after Superman quit because The Joker killed Lois Lane and some sort of metahumans came and started bossing everyone around. And there’s an old guy traveling through the time-space continuum with a sort of angel. The old guy has visions that involve Armageddon and he spends a lot of time quoting bible verse.

Something happens and Magog (I think) splits The Atom (or Particle Man or whoever it is) and turns the Midwest into a nuclear wasteland. This brings Supes and his pals out of retirement, only they’re all old and saggy now. And Batman is evil. Or at least he teams up with Lex Luthor, so I think Batman is evil.

I’m not even entirely sure, because I have no idea what the fuck is going on. I quit on page 140 of 210 or so.

Because I’m not an avid follower of superhero comics and I don’t always know the history, I’m willing to spend a little time in each book being confused and waiting to get my footing in the story. It’s the danger of superhero comics and genre fiction, they rely a lot on the conventions of their genre and make the assumption that a reader is familiar with those conventions.

But 140 pages should be more than enough time to figure things out. When I realized I still had no idea what the hell was going on and that I didn’t care what was going on, I quit. Sorry Supes, this book is the suck.

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Also, I accepted an offer from the Dream Job.

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