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Young Zombies in Love, Part 1

Young Zombies in Love (part 1) by Kyle Garret from Best New Writing 2014

Karen has decided that her revenge will be cantaloupe. Greg is not a fan; he’s not a fan of anything in the melon family, so they rarely have it in the house. So she has bought not one, but two cantaloupes, which she will cut up and include in any fruit salad she makes, and he will have to eat around it.

She has decided that a silly fight deserves silly retaliation. She thinks Greg will see the humor in this. She hopes he will. She used to know.

When she gets to her car, Karen sets down her groceries to search her purse for her car keys. They regularly disappear into the void, hiding behind ridiculous amounts of change or tucked into a side pocket that’s supposed to be holding her cell phone. This is the kind of thing that used to annoy Karen, but at the moment she’s trying to be a better person.

When she can’t find them, she dumps her purse out in the Trader Joe’s parking lot, laying bare her life for any passers-by. There’s no sign of her keys.

She pushes her face up against the windows of her Acura and quickly scans the inside. There, on the passenger seat, are her keys.

“Yeah, that’s about right,” she says. She smiles a tiny smile because she should have known something like this would happen. She remembers one time in high school when she locked herself out of her car while it was still running. She takes comfort in the fact that at least the car is off, and that these days she has a cell phone.

She dials Greg, thinking that perhaps this is just as funny a way for them to make up as the cantaloupe.
She gets his voicemail.

She tries the landline and gets the voicemail.

Even if Greg didn’t hear his cell, he would have heard the home phone. Maybe he just couldn’t get to it in time. She tries the home number again. She gets voicemail again.

She tries Greg’s cell phone again. Voicemail. “Hi, you’ve got Greg, leave a message or risk never hearing from me again.”

“Hey, it’s me. Why aren’t you picking up? I tried the house line. I’m at Trader Joe’s and I locked my keys in the car. Call me.”

For a few minutes, Karen is angry. Why isn’t he answering? What else could he be doing? What could be more important? She is frustrated and angry and the annoyance she felt from the fight earlier, the annoyance she tried to bury and forget about, is bubbling to the surface. She thinks of the cantaloupes and even that doesn’t help.

She is always there for him, she thinks. She only saved his life and yet the one time that she needs him, he won’t answer the phone. He’s probably sulking after their fight, their pseudo-fight, more like. He’s using it as an excuse to sulk and to not answer the phone.

Or perhaps Greg has tried to kill himself again.

The contents of her every day life still lying in a pile in the parking lot, Karen begins to run. The grocery store is just under two miles away from their house.

“There are too many zombies,” said Greg as he knocked on Karen’s office door while simultaneously opening it, something she had repeatedly asked him not to do.

“I know,” she said, as he set the script down on her desk.

“It’s actually fairly decent, for an adaptation,” he said. “And I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that they added so many zombies.”

“I know,” she said again.

“I suppose their numbers aren’t even really the issue, so much that they show up right away, which is completely against everything the book is about.”

Karen looked up at him. He was sincere in his desire to help, something she hadn’t seen from him in some time.

“Well,” she said as she pushed herself back from her desk, “it would seem that someone at the studio has realized they aren’t going to make much money on a strict zombie movie.”

“I don’t know,” said Greg. He took Karen’s engagement as an opening and sat down in the chair on the other side of the desk, “Romero keeps making movies and I don’t think they’ve been particularly good for a while now.”

“I think they want more than just the horror crowd,” said Karen. “I think they’re looking for cross-demographic appeal.”

“Like the book.”

Karen flipped through the script. The notes she’d made in red pen had now been joined by notes in black pen. Greg’s were few and far between and generally consisted of “exactly” next to her notes.

“Which is why they gave it to me,” she said. “Because I do romance.”

Greg smiled. “You’ve been pigeon holed.”

Karen set the script back down, looked up at her husband, at his amused smile.

“Coo, coo.”

Whenever Karen had doubts about her marriage – which, if she were honest, was frequent even before Greg tried to kill himself – she thought about their third date.            

They had been driving to see some band, as that’s what they did back then.  Greg’s car had broken down, in and of itself a memorable experience since Greg was meticulous about keeping his car in working order.  He had no idea what was wrong, just that it had simply shut down, right there on the street.            
It was cold out, and Karen had curled up in the backseat to try to keep warm while Greg looked under the hood.  He kept looking at it, going over every inch of it, as if something would change if he just kept looking long enough.            

After a while, Greg crawled into the backseat and joined Karen, who was nearly asleep by this time.  He wrapped his arms around her, tried to keep her warm.            

“I called AAA,” he said.            

That was a big step for Greg.  He seldom admitted his own shortcomings and rarely acknowledged when he needed help.            

“I have no idea what’s wrong with it,” he said.  “They said it would be an hour.”            

In Karen’s mind, she snuggled in closer to Greg.  But the reality is that there was no room for her to move closer or even further away.  The reality is that she was half awake and just trying to stay warm.             But she holds on to the idea that the moment was about them and nothing else.              


“Three Roses” was panned by critics and barely broke even, but in Hollywood the former doesn’t matter and the latter is enough.  “A Winter Day” was a critical hit and actually turned a profit, and Karen’s stock began to rise.  She imagined that movie reviewers, if they ever considered screenwriters, would have declared that her second script was a natural progression from the first, and that only good things lay ahead.            

“Las Vegas Good-bye” opened in the top five.  The reviews were mostly positive but the gross, both domestic and foreign, far exceeded what the studio expected.  Entertainment Weekly went so far as to declare that “Romance Is Back!”            

It didn’t stay for long.            

Studios restructured and were bought up.  Movies were abundant and free online.  Movie theaters were expensive and everyone owned a plasma TV.  Tests were run, questionnaires filled out, and in the end it was decided that the movie going audience was shrinking, and that money could no longer be spent on “niche” genres.  Romance was out, unless it was able to bundle itself as a romantic comedy or, even better, an action movie with a romantic storyline.            

That’s how “9 Gun Salute” was born and how Karen became the most sought after script doctor in Los Angeles.            

It had been ten years since “Las Vegas Good-bye,” since someone bought one of Karen’s original scripts. 

It had been five years since she even wrote one.  Her time now is devoted to finding the love in action movies or the intimacy in war movies. 

And now she is looking for the romance in horror.

Karen turned off the desk light. Her monitor was still on, so the room was lit up by the eerie off-white screen. She pushed the power button as she stood, the light in the hallway guiding her way.

She walked down the stairs, looking down on the living room. Their 42” flat screen was still on, although the volume was low because Greg didn’t want to bother her when she was writing. She could make out his form on the couch and assumed he’d fallen asleep.

But he was awake, hunched low in the cushions, one hand behind his head, the other hand holding the remote aloft, ready to fire at any moment.

“Still up?” she said.

“So it seems,” he said, not looking away from the TV. “This insomnia bit is starting to get old.”

“I don’t think it’s actually insomnia,” she said as she sat down next to him. “You fall asleep eventually.”

“I know,” he said, sitting up. “Maybe insomnia would be better, as opposed to pseudo-insomnia.”

When Karen’s sister miscarried, her mother described her as being “broken.” Her mother said “she’s been broken by this.” It was a descriptive term Karen had heard hundreds of times before, but not one she particularly cared for. If the handle breaks off a coffee mug, you glue it back on. Karen’s sister was never going to be fixed.

But Karen couldn’t help but think of “broken” when she looked at Greg. Since his uncle died, he had very much been broken. And all she could do was try to think of ways to fix him.

Greg’s solution was sleeping pills.

Karen looked at the TV. It was the tail end of some late, late, late show.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It is what it is,” he said.

Karen leads a sedimentary life. On one hand, this means she is not in the ideal condition for running. On the other hand, it means that she seldom if ever wears uncomfortable shoes.

Her adrenaline wants her to sprint, but her body wants her to walk.

The most obvious change in zombie mythology over the years has been speed. While zombies were originally slow, lumbering corpses, the most recent zombie stories have changed this so that zombies are just as fast – if not faster – than the average living human being.

Perhaps it was the advent of the readily available automatic weapon or simply the expansion of the human race, but at some point slow monsters were no longer scary. Perhaps society just decided it was okay with the fact that death would eventually come for them. Maybe the only way to make death scary again was by making it fast and unexpected.

To avoid picturing Greg on the floor in the bathroom, Karen does math. She calculates the distance from the grocery store to their house. She tries to remember the last time she ran a timed mile and what the result might have been. High school, she’s sure. When would anyone recreationally time themselves?

Karen has determined that it will take her twenty minutes to get home, and that’s if she doesn’t collapse. But she has adrenaline on her side, adrenaline and the ability to disconnect her brain from her body.

She plays back the argument, the stupid argument that was about something stupid and was stupid for even happening. She thinks about how he overreacted, how he suddenly found fault in a stupid adaptation of a stupid book about stupid zombies. She wonders if she should have seen this coming. Her stupid self should have seen this coming.

Karen can’t help but remember. She remembers when she found him on the bedroom floor, dead to the world, but not dead to her. She remembers dragging him into the bathroom, lifting him into the bath tub, turning the shower on him while holding his head over the drain and sticking her fingers down his throat. She never hesitated, never stopped to question what had happened. It was as if she knew, as if she’d always known, that it would come down to that moment.

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Positive Parenting From Negative Parents

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine about our respective childhoods, comparing notes, in a way. While our upbringings were very different, they were thematically the same. Our motivation to do good — or to not do bad — was the same: fear.

Fear is fear is fear. Whether it stems from years being locked under a staircase or the sting of a belt or fabricated stories about people who will harm you, fear is fear is fear. There may be other problems that stem from the impetus for that fear, but that feeling itself is the same no matter where it comes from.

Entire generations of adults were raised through fear, through negativity.

My hometown has trick or treating on the Sunday closest to Halloween during the day. Everyone I have ever met from anywhere else in the country has been confused by this. But in 1981 a boy named Adam Walsh was kidnapped and murdered and kids going door to door at night was no longer considered safe, so my hometown decided to take precautions.

Part of it was the times; we were all prepared for nuclear war at any moment. Part of it was that the generations before us were raised with a very strict set of rules. But at some point the best way to get children to behave was through fear.

More often than not, it worked. I’ve led a pretty responsible life. I passed on a lot of chances because I was afraid of what could possibly happen, but I never got into much trouble.

There are, ultimately, two ways to motivate people: through negativity or through positivity. Negativity will get faster results and is much easier, but usually has unintended side effects. Positivity can take much, much longer, but the side effects are things like self-esteem and confidence. So it’s probably worth the extra time and effort.

And not to sound like a hippy, but positivity is always the best course of action. Positivity will ultimately get the best out of people.

I think my generation realized that at some point. I think we decided that we needed to raise our children in a different way. We decided to try positivity.

The problem is that none of us really speaks that language.

You then get a generation of parents who were raised on negativity trying to raise their children on positivity yet lacking the necessary skills to do so. More often than not, if we mess up it will be in overcompensating.

And this is how we get to endless internet articles on spoiled, entitled children and helicopter parents. This is how we get to mindless jokes about participation trophies (which have actually been around for 50 years, but we didn’t have the internet then).

We don’t want our children to live in fear so we do whatever we can to prevent that, even if we end up making mistakes in the other direction – as we should. Because you know what the world will take away from you? Self-esteem. Confidence. Naivete. You know it will give you? Fear. Humility.

Shrinking an ego is infinitely easier than growing one.

I understand that we run the risk of raising a generation of spoiled, entitled jerks, but I think that’s a chance we should take. Fear is the great enemy. Fear is the source of our misery. We have to do something.

For my part, I ask a lot of questions and read a lot of articles. I look for advice from people who know better. And perhaps that’s the lesson: we really can’t do this alone.

Each generation has the opportunity to do better for the next. That’s not a chance that any of us should waste.

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Ted Lasso was always a ticking time bomb

I really liked “Ted Lasso.”

The 1st two seasons were fantastic.

The third season was always going to be a problem not so much because it was the final season, but because there was a clock on “Ted Lasso” that had been ticking since the very first episode. It’s impressive that the show managed to delay it as long as it did.

The moment I knew that “Ted Lasso” had me was the end of the 1st episode when he moves into his new apartment. It’s an incredibly sad scene and it speaks to the fact that the show, while funny and optimistic, would also have real moments of poignancy.

That scene was sad because it was Ted starting his life over away from his loved ones. Coach Beard might have been there, but it still felt incredibly lonely. It would have been enough just with his marriage ending, particularly given the history the show would layer in for Ted and his wife.

For this dad of two, though, it was even more heartbreaking because Ted had left behind his son.

Perhaps if “Ted Lasso” hadn’t already been a season deep when I started watching it, I wouldn’t have been able to ignore that elephant in the room. Maybe being able to binge a full season was enough to distract me, whereas if I’d had a week in between it would have been harder to rationalize.

The bottom line is this: Ted left his son.

His wife wanted space and Ted, a successful college football coach, moved to another country, 4300 miles away from his only child.

Like a fucking asshole.

Ted and the Lassos

We never see the other side of it. Ted left because his wife wanted space, and while he was gone they got divorced and his wife started dating someone. At some point Henry would have blamed someone for what happened, and once Michelle started dating it was going to be her. There would have been regular calls about it.

But there weren’t, not on the show, because the best thing they could do was ignore it as much as possible. The times when they did incorporate Henry into the show only served to underscore that Ted was an asshole for what he’d done, yet no one was calling him out on it, not even the team psychiatrist.

Well, no one but Nate, who was vilified for it.

The final season was going to be a problem not because it had to wrap the story up, but because the show had gone two full seasons avoiding Ted’s horrible decision, and season three — regardless of whether it was the last season or not — had no choice but to deal with the beating heart under the floor boards.

And that was going to be tricky, because it’s hard to walk a tight rope of “Ted is a great guy” and “Ted abandoned his son.”

Believe…that people won’t think too much about Ted abandoning his kid.

Yes, they tried, and managed to distract us all with shiny things for the 1st two seasons, but Nate had brought it to the forefront at the end of season two: “go home to your son.”

In the penultimate episode of season three, Ted has it out with his mom, who finally gets around to telling him what everyone else should have been saying, go be with your son. Ted claims that he’s afraid to get close to Henry because Henry will eventually leave him, as children tend to do when they grow up. This is connected to the fact that Ted’s dad killed himself when Ted was 16, so he has abandonment issues.

As far as attempts to justify Ted’s choice, that was certainly an attempt to justify Ted’s choice.

Ted’s fear of connecting with Henry comes out of left field. It’s never hinted at on the show at any point. The fact that Henry is probably around 8 when his dad leaves makes it even harder to digest. Were there no problems for the first 8 years of Henry’s life?

Even if they’d had Ted say he was afraid to let Henry get close to him because he know that at some point he would die, it would have made more sense. It still wouldn’t have worked, but the connection would have been there.

It very much feels like the writers realized while the show was already on that they needed an explanation for Ted’s willingness to leave his kid, then struggled to fit a square peg into a round hole.

It becomes even more frustrating when you look at the show as a whole and realize that Ted didn’t need to be a father. Very little about the show would have changed had Ted just left behind his wife. In fact, it makes the show substantially better.

Yes, the show is heavy on fathers/sons, but it’s seldom applied to Ted and Henry, and Ted and Henry are never connected to the serious stories. Ted losing his father is pivotal to how he relates to the players on the team, but he doesn’t need to be a dad for that to work.

If anything, imagine if part of the reason his marriage fell apart is because he kept putting a wall up whenever Michelle talked about starting a family. Maybe that wall is what drove them apart. Being a surrogate father to his players was the safe way for Ted to be a dad.

They even tried to sell the importance of Ted and Henry thematically in the finale by showing us Jamie and his dad and Nate and his dad being all friendly with each other after Ted goes back to Henry. Ted’s relationship with Henry is nothing like those other two, but they’re all fathers and sons, right, so they must go to together?

“Ted Lasso” was always going to sputter out. The fact that it gave us two great seasons is a testament to everyone who worked on it. But this ending was inevitable and the signs were there from the start.

The Kids Will Not Be All Right

“I feel like I’ve changed.”

My life during the pandemic has been so packed to the gills that I do my best not to become enraged by the situation, in particular the fact that this situation could have been avoided, at least to this extent.

But that quote is from our 7 year old son and in that moment my heart broke. Immediately after that, I wanted to burn the world to the ground.

I shared both of those feelings with my son, albeit in muted tones.

It’s been over a year now since we were relegated to this house, a year since he was able to go to school, to see his friends, to be a normal kid.

He is a sensitive kid, more so than most, I know that. We’ve had enough conversations with his teacher to know that it’s not just something we see. He feels everything to the Nth degree, even more than the average little kid, and the last year has been a never ending stream of big emotions.

He and I talk every day about “the sickness” and about how he’s feeling. He talks about how small things can make him really upset and he can’t control himself. He talks about how Zoom classes are hard for him because he wants to be able to see his friends in person. He’s also an introvert and refuses to talk on his class calls because all of the focus fall on to him.

He told me that he used to be happy but that now he’s not. That’s how he thinks he’s changed.

We talked about how it’s not that he can’t be happy, but that when those moments when he is happy come to an end, that happiness just disappears; it doesn’t stay with him like it used to.

He’s in a special program. It’s once a week and it’s a call with just him and a teacher who’s instructed by a therapist. We just got him enrolled for counseling and that is only happening because the program just had a kid graduate and our son’s teacher jumped at the opportunity to get him in.

He was in a K/1 class last year, which means his class was half kindergartners and half first graders. It just so happened that his teacher from last year is now teaching just 1st graders, so she knows what he was like last year compared to this one.

I do the bulk of the parenting because my job allows for it and, as my wife has pointed out, I seem to have a capacity for it that she doesn’t. I don’t think that’s entirely true, but I appreciate the sentiment. I also know that I’ve been doing a really good job.

But after every call with our son’s teacher that involves getting him extra help (emotional, not academic) my wife gives me a look that is equal parts “you are doing a great job” and “this is beyond anything you could do for him.”

And that is, actually, fine with me. I put a lot of undeserved weight on my shoulders, but not being able to give my sweet, sensitive son the tools to deal with his emotions during a pandemic is not part of it.

No, the only undeserved weight I put on myself with regards to our oldest son is that so much of what he’s going through would, if this weren’t a pandemic, point to some of the mental health issues that I’ve dealt with all my life, issues that are genetic.

It’s one of those constant concerns I have, even though I know that having a parent who is actually aware of such things and who is open and honest about them is a vast improvement over what I had. But it’s hard to not feel responsible even though it’s something I have no control over.

I have framed all this talking about my son who, as I’ve mentioned, feels things very strongly.

But he’s not alone. He may be dealing with the situation differently, but he is not alone.

Our kids are going to be dealing with this trauma for years. The first full school year back in class (hopefully this fall) is going to be a disaster of epic proportions. For every kid who has fallen behind academically, there will be three more who have fallen behind socially, and another three that have fallen behind emotionally.

And this is without even touching on the kids who live poverty or are abused. Try to imagine what those kids have gone through for the last year.

That’s the hardest part, really. While the elderly might have made up the majority of the deaths as a result of COVID-19 (but most certainly not all — roughly 23K people under the age of 50 have died because of COVID — that’s nearly 2K A MONTH), our children are going to be the ones who are ultimately hit hardest because of this.

It didn’t have to be this way. There were contingencies. There was data. There was science. There were a litany of other countries that had to deal with it before us. The writing was on the wall.

And yet here we are.

My wife got her first vaccine shot yesterday. I get mine on Monday. We both get our second shots next month. Just being able to talk about a vaccinated world has started to lift my son’s spirits.

But it won’t be enough. Too much has happened.

It is going to take years for our children to recover from this and we need to start planning for it now.

Pandemic Parenting: The Daily Briefings

Given that we are always under the same roof, my wife and I don’t talk that often, not about things that aren’t directly in our path like what we’re having for dinner, how many conference calls we each have that day, or what time our youngest son woke up from his nap.

When we do have time to talk, much of it is about something we’ve generally taken for granted, at least on a day to day basis: the well being of our children, in particularly are older son, who is in the first grade.

Of course we’ve regularly talked about how are kids are doing in the past. But now that they are both stuck in the house with us all day for going on a year, the concerns are more pressing. It might need by every night, but most nights end up discussing the state of our children and what we can do to make their lives better.

It won’t end until the pandemic does, at which point these conversations will back to happening as needed, although I suppose that suggests that they’re not needed as frequently now, when the truth is they are.

I have tried my hardest to make each day as structured as possible because that is what works for our children and, honestly, it’s the only way to survive this. But there is a great deal of variation within that structure and every day is different. The mood of a shelter in place 7 year old is not consistent from hour to hour, let alone day to day.

There are times when I allow for the chaos purely out of convenience. Our older son has had way too much screen time the last few weeks, but that has made getting work done and taking care of our younger son (now 2) possible. It’s like napping though: you nap during the day and then you can’t fall asleep at night so you’re tired the next day and you need to take a nap. Letting the older one have too much screen time affects him, makes him more irritable and hard to communicate with.

My wife has a job that requires her to be a desk during specific hours of the day. I can do my job from a laptop and often just a smart phone, and my work is never so urgent that I can’t do it after hours and on the weekends. This means that I’m the one in the best position to take care of the boys during the week, which includes preventing our fearless two year old from hurting himself and helping our sensitive seven year old with Zoom classes and school work. Somewhere in there I have to do my won work, too.

My wife jokes that my ADHD, now controlled by medication, is part of what has made me successful in dealing with our current reality. She’s not wrong; being able to split my attention yet actually see things through to completion is the greatest gift anyone in this position could have. Well, I suppose that and a ton of patience, which I suppose the other medications I’m on are good for.

Most evenings, after the boys are asleep, my wife and I talk about our days. Mine is, obviously, more interesting. We talk about what steps we can take to help our kids make it through this pandemic with as little mental and emotional trauma as possible.

Because that’s the thing: they will ALL have mental and emotional trauma because of this. There are probably a fair number of adults who will, too. But our kids are going to be dealing with the impact of this pandemic for years. There’s no protecting them from it, there’s only helping them deal with it.

This has become the new routine. Here are the things that happened today, here are the moments that were concerning, here’s why I think they happened, here’s what I think we can do about it.

We talk about it. We make suggestions. We try to follow the line from point A to point B using empathy and wisdom. We try to figure out how we can change the daily routine, how to communicate any changes in a way that will help them sink in.

We go to bed. We try to sleep.

I wake up every few hours to either pee because I’m old or try to get the two year old back to sleep because he’s going through sleep regression or to check on the seven year old who moves around so much that he sometimes kicks the wall. And sometimes the cats wake me up and sometimes my wife, her head overloaded with too much information and too many feelings, talks in her sleep.

And then we get up and we do it all over again.

And we worry. We worry so much.

This is not what we wanted for them. This is not what they deserve.

But I know first hand that children do not always get what they deserve. I know that sometimes they have to live through things that they shouldn’t. But I also know that they can get to the other side and that the journey can be made much easier with people who love them.

Tomorrow is Sunday and we will spend a decent portion of the day preparing of the week ahead and at night, before we go to bed, we will talk about how we hope it will go.

And Monday night, as we talk before we go to bed, it will all have changed.

I don’t have strong enough words for this

Our friends’ 11 year old son passed away this morning. He had been fighting cancer for a long time. He and his family had been fighting so hard for so long that the fact that this is how that story ended fills me with unbearable rage.

We weren’t close to his family and most of our interactions happened via social media. They live in Los Angeles, which we left nine years ago.

But they are wonderful.

I know that people, conscious or not, put their best foot forward online, but they were genuine. They were one of the families that I looked to as inspiration. And the fight and resilience they have shown during this has only made me look up to them all the more.

I think I formed a connection with them because of how inspiring they are. And that got stronger after our children were born.

Their son had been moved to hospice a little while ago and after I read that I spent the night getting completely hammered and staying up too late. I laid in bed and all I could think about was him, an 11 year old kid that I have never met, whose parents I didn’t really know.

I think about what his moms are going through and it destroys me.

Then I think about his little sister and that’s it. There’s nothing left.

The idea that any adult would have the capacity to deal with something like this is absurd, but we put one foot in front of the other and we find reasons to keep going. But how does a child get through something like this?

I’m so angry and I’m so sad and I am, at best, tangentially connected.

My wife works at Pixar and we sent him a bunch of Pixar stuff. His mom sent us wrist bands they’d made and we all put them on and took a picture and sent it to her. Our older son asked me about it and I explained to him what it meant. He said he hoped that the other boy got better.

Today my wife and I tried to maintain some semblance of normalcy for our kids. The cracks showed a few times, though. And I know that our older son, at least, noticed. But I couldn’t explain it to him.

I don’t know.

Hug your children. Hug your partner. Think of this family in Southern California. Carry love and share it with everyone you can.

This world is wrong, but it’s the only one we have.

I miss the comfort in being sad.

Kurt Cobain wrote a lot of great lyrics. This is the one I come back to the most.

It’s clearly not his most metaphorical line or even one that evokes imagery of any kind, which is often where his strengths were in his writing. Really, it’s probably one of the simplest lines he ever wrote. But the simplicity is what makes it so wonderful.

I should mention that I take anti-depressants which, for the sake of full disclosure, is just one of a fair number of medications I take every day to help me enjoy life. I mention this because the idea of finding comfort in being sad can seem like glorifying sadness in some way. I think it’s fair to say that Cobain dealt with depression most of his life.

But that’s part of why the line is so perfect. He’s not saying that being sad feels really good, just that there’s comfort there, comfort because it’s familiar.

And he’s so right.

I have a great life. Objectively I have a great life. Subjectively I have a great life. I love my life. I can’t even believe I have it. It’s hectic and often difficult and wonderful.

There are times, though, when I can feel myself from years ago, living in a studio apartment in Los Angeles, drinking every night, writing every night, listening to depressing music all the time. And that feeling holds some fondness, even though I know that I was horribly depressed most of the time.

But that depression was the only thing in my life. I had a job and maybe some friends and barely a social life, so wallowing in my sadness was everything. It was my entire existence and it was easy.

Don’t get me wrong, it was still bad. It was brutal on my health and being unable to get out of bed because you can’t imagine a reason why you should is not a great feeling. But it was familiar and it was easy.

Being happy is hard.

Much of that is societal. Happiness, real happiness, isn’t about buying things and being famous, it’s about love, and love is, even now, a concept that many people can’t wrap their brains around. I know I couldn’t, not until the last ten years or so.

And some of that was my own mental health issues.

I had just been playing with our older son and we had a great time and there was lots of laughing. My wife watched the whole thing and afterwards asked me how my new medications had changed that experience. She asked if I had just never really been happy before and had been faking it.

I told her that happiness, to me, was like rain in a place where it seldom rains. The rain comes pouring down, but the ground doesn’t absorb it so it washes away. That was me. I could experience happiness in a moment, but when that moment was over it would leave nothing behind. I never absorbed joy.

Lord knows I absorbed sadness. I lived on it for so long. It was all I knew and I knew it really well.

There’s a strange freedom in sadness. It’s everything which means life becomes very simple. It makes everything harder, yes, but it also robs you of so many other feelings that are often complicated and confusing. Sadness is a security blanket that’s not actually secure.

And there’s clarity in sadness. It’s false, yes, particularly if you are dealing with depression, but you still feel like it’s true. Being positive that nothing matters is brutal. It’s also everything. It’s all encompassing.

But when that goes away, there’s a piece of you that misses it. It doesn’t make any sense and it’s probably not healthy, but it was a part of you for so long that you can’t just walk away completely. It was a huge part of your life.

Sometimes you miss the comfort of the familiar, even if the familiar wasn’t all that great.

Sometimes I wish I could go back there, but only if I could come back. If I could go there and come back whenever I wanted — god knows I’d get more writing done.

But the only options are going back there and staying there and not going back there at all and that’s not really a hard decision to make. I’ve worked so hard to get to where I am now that absolutely nothing could turn me away from this.

Still, Kurt was right: sometimes I do miss the comfort in being sad.

But I would miss being happy far, far more.

The pandemic icing on my 45th birthday cake

I’m already 45 in every other part of the country save those of us out here on the currently burning West Coast. The weather today was the same as it will be tomorrow, on my birthday: highs in the 90s, air quality unhealthy.

The rest of my family (my wife and our two sons) have birthdays in February, so this is our first pandemic birthday, nearly 7 months in. Honestly, though, at this age being stuck inside doesn’t have a huge impact on my birthday plans. My niece’s birthday is 3 days after mine, and if anything we’d be doing something for her, not me. And that is more than fine by me. Kids parties are always way more fun than anything adults come up with.

But this is a strange year for me even beyond the fact that 200K Americans have died from a virus that has run basically unchecked through our country. It’s strange even beyond the fact that the number 45 has forever been tainted in the eyes of anyone with an ounce of humanity. It’s strange even beyond another heat wave and so much smoke in the air that the world smells like the inside of a grill.

This is my first birthday since I cut my father out of my life.

I could go into great detail about why I did this, and maybe sometime I’ll get drunk enough to do just that, but the bottom line is that he is toxic, he’s always been toxic, and I can’t have him around my family.

As with most kids of abusive parents, it took protecting my own children for me to finally do something.

My mom and I still have a relationship, strained as it may be given the circumstances. I have no idea what she’s going to do tomorrow, since she has talked to me on every birthday I’ve ever had. She’ll have to find a way to sneak out of the house to call me.

That right there should tell you a lot.

My dad’s birthday was last week. I’m a reflective person on most days, but as I get closer to my birthday I start to think about every aspect of my life; I take stock of everything I’ve ever done that has led me to this point. And, honestly, the last few years have gotten pretty positive reviews.

I cut my dad out of my life via letter, a letter he responded to by placing all the blame on me and by playing the “woe is me” card. And he more or less said he’d never bother me again.

I gave him the most cut and dry moment to prove that he actually cared about me and he walked away.

So there was a period of time leading up to his birthday when I thought maybe I’d hear from him. Maybe he would do what I do on my birthday. Maybe he would look at his life and wonder what he had done wrong and what he could do better.

His birthday came and went.

There was no reason for me to think that he would have some kind of suddenly realization. I don’t even think a theoretical death bed would make that happen.

But, god, if one of my children said they didn’t want me in their life anymore I would do whatever I could to fix that. I would do ANYTHING. If you truly cared for someone, why would you just let them go?

Most of the time I don’t even think about my father. I had limited my interactions with him so much that cutting him out of my life almost felt like a formality. I feel bad for my mom, although I probably have more empathy for her than I should all things considered. My brother and I still talk here and there, but we never talked a lot to begin with.

So what happens tomorrow? What happens when I wake up and I’m 45?

I think I’ll probably get hugs and kisses from the 3 most amazing people on earth. I think I’ll spend the day with them, laughing, smiling, rolling around on the floor, jumping on the couch, snuggling in bed, loving each other like it’s all we know.

And I’ll got to bed happy. It won’t be because of the Scotch, which I will no doubt consume at some point. It will be because I have the most amazing life. It has taken me 45 years to get here, but, god, the destination has been worth it all.

Everything else is prologue.

I’m in the middle of the book, now, and it’s gotten really, really good.

The New Legion Isn’t Working

I love the Legion of Superheroes.

I could — and probably will — write endless posts about how much the Legion has meant to me over the years. I could write about how fascinated I was when I first read about them, how hunting down back issues was so much fun, how fan fic filled my head with the release of each new issue.

I can’t even begin to describe how much the Five Years Later era meant to me.

I read 5YL before I got around to The Dark Night Returns or Watchmen. The Legion was dense, mature storytelling to me. It was the standard.

I loved the years that led up to 5YL. I loved the Levitz era. For all his flaws, Levitz told complex. layered stories. Every issue featured an a, b, c, d, and e plot. He knew when to go big and he knew when to go small. He was able to write about the Legion in the scope that they deserved.

The Five Years Later team

Yes, like an episode of Pokemon, Levitz made sure every character in a scene said something, even if it wasn’t necessary. And yes, maybe of the characters remained rather two dimensional. But he fleshed out as many as he could, even if he had to use personality short hand for a few.

I was onboard for the first reboot, when the so-called Archie Legion was born. I loved it. I’ve never been the kind of fanboy  who holds on to his beloved characters so hard that he refuses to see them any other way.

Seriously, if you’re going to jump into the Legion, the reboot version is actually a great place to start. It’s like this amazing distillation of what made the Legion great. It was also planned out incredibly well, the kind of long term planning that you just don’t see in comics anymore.

The characters were fleshed out, although the creators used their previous incarnations as a kind of shortcut to make them fully formed characters in a hurry. And why not?

The Archie Legion

Look at it this way: any new iteration of the Legion is going to bring a fair amount of long time fans. One of the easiest ways to get them enthusiastic about a new version of a team they love is by at least keeping the broad strokes of the characters. The intricacies can change, but why completely bulldoze over something that was working?

Plus, given the Legion’s extensive history, it’s possible that new fans will go digging into the back issue bins and/or digital stores to learn more. Why would creators not take advantage of that if the characters weren’t horribly offensive?

I suppose if I were to make a checklist of what’s essential in a version of the Legion, it would look something like this:

3 dimensional charactersa lot of themmultiple story lines at one timecomplicated interpersonal relationshipshope

That’s not a lot, is it? I don’t think I’m too demanding.

The New Legion

So far this new Legion series has accomplished exactly one of those things: there are definitely a lot of characters.

And as of yet, those characters are ill defined. Not a single one has displayed enough personality to stand out. Hell, even the current version of Jon Kent has been something of a generic teen superhero.

What makes this all the more baffling to me is that a fair number of the characters come with personality short cuts. They were so clearly defined in the past that it would be easy, with just a sentence or two, to establish who they are. There’s no need for years of exploration, you can cut right to the chase.

And yet, for some reason, these personalities have been thrown out the window. I don’t need Ultra Boy to be exactly like he was, but he should be similar. The character running around the new Legion series is not him — he’s wholly brand new, or at least that’s how he’s behaving.

And I have no idea why. Jo Nah was a great character. You could claim that a number of Legion characters were two dimensional and lacked complexity, but Ultra Boy wasn’t one of them. He had a background that was unique to the team and a personality that had been fully developed.

Jo’s not the only one gets the short shrift, but he’s the worst case.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk about the diversity issue with the Legion. They’ve never been the most diverse team, although there have been very minor in roads made over the year.

In particular, Fabian Nicieza and Pete Woods put together a great team for the New 52 Legion Lost series, which was sadly undone the way that most New 52 books were undone (if they were even good to begin with): editorial interference. Still, the line-up was probably the first great example we’ve seen of a Legion team that’s connected to original yet pointed at the future.

It wasn’t surprising when Bendis and Sook revealed their version of the Legion and some familiar characters had been changed to diversify the team.

It was hard, however, to not immediately think about this column on the trope of black superheroes and electric powers.

It’s also hard not to notice that the effort to diversify the Legion for some reason involved getting rid of all the (albeit few) diverse characters that had been Legionnaires in their history.

Why keep say, Matter Eater Lad but not include XS? Or Kid Quantum II, who was a stand out character from the Archie Legion. What about one of my favorite Legionnaires, Invisible Kid II?  Hell, Nicieza and Woods had already made Tyroc cool.

I am all for diversifying the Legion, but doing so at the the expensive of the actual non-white characters is a really weird choice. And it’s not an either or. Give me black Lightning Lad, yes, but give me XS, too.

The XS thing is particularly egregious given that, like every other writer, Bendis appears determined to connect the Legion to the 21st century DCU. XS is the perfect connection.

It’s also strange to me that this new iteration of the Legion doesn’t have any non-humanoid members. You would think, since this is no longer the 50’s, we’d see some creativity what a Legionnaire looks like.

Again, that’s not something the previous versions of the Legion were particularly good at, but there were a few strides. Gates, in particular, has a fair number of fans. I’ve always loved Quislet. And who didn’t love Tellus?

Who Are the Legion?

The concept of the Legion doesn’t fare particularly well in this reboot.

The beauty of the Legion’s origin is that three teenagers who have never met before suddenly step up and save someone from being assassinated. They weren’t called to service. They acted out of selflessness and responsibility. They acted as a team right from the start — three kids from very different planets acting as one to save someone they’d never met.

It’s simple and wonderful and where you go from there doesn’t really matter. How the team is officially formed and grows doesn’t need to be set in stone. But that initial origin story matters. It sets the tone for the entire idea of the Legion.

And for some reason that’s been discarded.

The other 2 reboot Legions

I guess you could make the argument that it’s to tie the team to the United Planets more closely than they were before, as the UP seem to be just as important to this series as the Legion. But that feels wrong, too.

Consider this: the last Legion reboot (the threeboot) was build on the premise that the Legion existed at odds with the UP. This new version was build on the premise that the Legion exists because of the UP. Neither interpretation is great. At least the Archie Legion, drafted and expanded by the UP, ultimately threw off those shackles. The original Legion didn’t really work for anyone but themselves.

Making the UP so important also takes some of the focus away from the Legion itself, as does including Rose, a character from the 21st century. We’re seven issues in and I couldn’t tell you how any member feels about any other member, but that makes sense given that I couldn’t tell you anything about any of them.

And everything so far seems to be funneled through the lens of the UP. Each story so far has been connected to the UP. I could say that it’s all one big story, but it’s not really that big. There are bad guys with Aquaman’s trident and the Legion are fighting them. Ultra Boy’s dad is mad.

There’s your 140 pages of story so far.

The Legion CAN’T Be Decompressed

To a certain extent, none of this should be surprising. Multiple stories and large casts aren’t really in Bendis’ wheelhouse. Perhaps interpersonal relationships are, but the cast is so large that I don’t know when he’s going to find the time to actually develop any of that. The fact that Bendis writes every character the same exact way is going to make it that much harder to make a number of different relationships seem unique.

I suppose the idea was that Bendis loves Superman and Superman conveys hope and Bendis wrote Ultimate Spider-man who was a teenager, so you combine those two and presto! You have the Legion of Super-heroes.

The problem is that there’s more to the Legion than that.

The problem is that DC has spent a long time now trying to figure out what the essence of the Legion is and it just isn’t what it was to begin with.

That’s not to say that the Legion no longer represents hope, because they do, at their core that is what they were and what they ever will be.

But hope doesn’t mean simple, and this Legion series so far has been as simple as they come. It’s not even shallow popcorn movie simple. There’s just nothing there. There’s no meat on that bone.

And it’s not even doing a good job of making the team and the book about hope, which is theoretically what it’s supposed to be doing. Nothing about the book so far would indicate that hope is in short supply somehow.

Is There Hope?

I’m honestly at a loss for how to turn this book around. The obvious answer would be to have a story that requires them to break into smaller teams and give each team its own dynamics and its own mission. Give us the Espionage Squad. Give us five pages an issue on two or three teams for an arc.

Have them struggle against something big with real stakes. Give us time to see how each of them reacts — how any of them reacts.

Stop using Superboy as the way into the Legion because this particularly Superboy has been around for like 10 minutes and no one is any more invested in him than any of the other characters.

Give us some idea of how the Legion is organized. Show us what they do every day. Show us the cliques in the team, the grudges. A throwaway line every now and again isn’t that.

Just do some of the things.

Because I love the Legion.

But what we’ve gotten so far is not living up to the name.

Aging Jon Kent Was a Mistake

Let me start with three opinions:

1. Super Sons (Jon Kent and Damian Wayne) was fantastic and I miss both the series and the relationship that those two characters had. I loved that imaginary stories from decades earlier suddenly became real in the DCU.

2. The actual story that aged Jon was bad. It made no sense that Clark and Lois would let him go off with Jor-El even if Lois was going with him (which made no sense, either) and Lois certainly wouldn’t have left Jon with Jor-El by himself. The whole thing made no sense, but that’s often how Bendis writers: he has a point A and a point B and he forces a line in from one to the other, even if it doesn’t work.

3. I love the Legion of Superheroes, so if points 1 and 2 were necessary for 3, I figured I could get over it.

The problem is that it’s become clear that 1 and 2 weren’t remotely necessary for 3. And, honestly, 1 and 2 have made 3 worse.

Who Is Jon Kent?

Part of the problem is that teenage Jon Kent hasn’t been developed at all. The extent of his development has been that he’s less childish than he was before, I guess?

The idea that Jon is responsible for the United Planets is a bit of a stretch and completely unearned. Superman doing it? Yes, totally makes sense. It makes so much sense, in fact, that the story of the UP forming had to eventually focus on Superman. Scores of other alien races would ultimately ignore Jon’s involvement when they tell the story, because who the hell is Jon? But everyone knows Superman.

But somehow the story of Jon inspiring the UP lasts until the far future, so the Legion comes to get him. Jon goes to the future and…does nothing. So far in the Legion series he has done nothing at all, other than break a rule by going to get Damian and bringing him to the future.

Jon is there for exposition, for backstory. But even that has taken forever. And, again, it’s unnecessary. He’s not acting as a POV character because he’s freaking Superboy. And hundreds if not thousands of comics have managed to give the backstory of superhero teams without a supposed POV character.

Honestly, the series would probably be covering more ground if it weren’t for Jon’s involvement.

Superboy and the Legion of Super-heroes

When Geoff Johns brought the “original” Legion back in 2008, he made a few changes to limit some of the elements of the team that required fixing every few years.  The biggest and best change he made was how Superboy was a member.

When the Legion first appeared, Superboy was, well, Superboy. Clark Kent flew around Smallville having adventures as the Boy of Steel. When he grew up, he’d be Superman and fly around Metropolis as the Man of Steel and somehow no one put the two together and figured out who he was.

That’s not really the kind of thing that would have worked in modern comics, so post-Crisis Superboy went away and Superman never put the tights on until he was in Metropolis.

This was a problem for the Legion, given that their history was so intertwined with Superboy, their inspiration. The Superboy they knew wasn’t the real Superboy, or at least not the Clark Kent who would grow up to the Superman in the main DCU reality. It’s a story that the Legion would revisit multiple times in order to provide more clarity and make it more urgent.

Reboots would point to the adult Superman as inspiration for the team, but it didn’t have the same feeling. Whether it made sense or not, Legion is and will always be connected to Superboy.

So when Johns brought back the “original” team, he made some changes (thus putting “original” in quotes). One of those changes was to address the Superboy issue. He did so in a surprisingly simply and poignant way.

Clark Kent had met them when he was a teenager, just as the original story went. But he wasn’t Superboy at the time. He went with them into the future and had adventures, but did none of that in our time. This allowed him to maintain his secret identity.

Honestly, you could make the case that he used the Superboy costume in the future and just kept it hidden in the present until he was an adult. It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch.

The idea of lonely teenage Clark Kent finally finding some friends who all had superpowers is fantastic. Emo Superman is a characterization that writers go back to again and again and it always feels at odds with who Clark Kent is. So why not explain why the lone survivor of another planet who could barely touch people without hurting them didn’t become an anti-social outcast?

What About the Story?

What does a teenage Jon Kent do for the comics? What doors does he open up, what stories does he introduce that could not have existed before?

As noted above, he wasn’t necessary for the Legion and he shouldn’t have been necessary for the formation of the United Planets.

What about all those stories about Lois and Clark dealing with a teenage son? That’s easy: what stories? Not long after aging Jon up, he was sent to the future and for some reason hasn’t returned, even though it’s time travel and he could literally return the moment after he left.

I suppose we needed a POV character to meet the Legion of Superheroes, but has that even mattered so far? Did we need Jon Kent for exposition? Origin stories are revealed all the time over the course of a story without the need for a single character to be taught everything.

But the Super Sons? The Super Sons are unique. The concept itself was formerly set in the “imaginary story” reality of the DCU. But it was suddenly real! Or, as real as they can be in a fictional universe.

Robin was Batman’s actual son! Superboy was Superman’s actual son! And they were both crazy dangerous kids and even more extreme opposites than their dads! It’s such an awesome concept and it actually happened.

I would say that Lois and Clark would never let their pre-teen son run off to the future alone, but the awful story which sent Jon off with Jor-El proved that wrong. I mean, logically they would never let that happen, but what do I know? I actually think everyone should have different speech patterns, too.

So what, exactly, did we get out of aging Jon Kent up? A teenage Superboy? Here’s the funny thing: Kon-El is back. So there are now two teenaged Superboys, so aging Jon makes even less sense.

Legacy?

Apparently, Jon is supposed to be the next Superman at some point and will surpass his father as the Superman. There is nothing about any of that that I like.

But it’s not really a big deal since it will never happen. This is comics we’re talking about. More specifically, this is corporately owned superhero comics we’re talking about.

This couldn’t have been done for Jon to take over his father’s role, then, even if that was some kind of a vague plan before Dan Didio left DC. I don’t care how much upheaval there is at Warner Brothers these days, no way they start their own streaming service and ax their most popular IPs at the same time.

The Super Sons are a great IP themselves, although Warner Brothers still owns that, of course. There are so many things they could do with that comic and those characters.

Even better, Superman and Batman being fathers created one of the best dynamics DC Comics has seen in years. There was so much potential there and we got to see so little of it.

Aging Jon Kent up on its own has meant very little, but when you add in the fact that it ended the Super Sons it makes the decision all the more unfortunate.