I need to take a nap.
‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”
The problem isn’t writing new things, it is amassing the courage to deal with what I’ve already written. Sometimes I wish I wrote less new things, quite honestly.
‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”
You have nothing to blame but your own incompetence! You should not have tried to do that! Stop faulting society for your own failures! Do not pout at people more capable than you! They can not help your inadequacy! That one has its own problems anyhow. Observe:
This is quite stupid. But we knew that. Yet it helps to reaffirm our knowledge sometimes. Why can’t any of these characters be smart? Why do they all have to be stupid?
Negative! You are not what I wanted! You get less respect than beans. You get less respect than green apples in cartoons. You get less respect than the Anthony Michael Hall season of Saturday Night Live. You get less respect than Disney’s The Black Cauldron. You get less respect than video games without army guys or zombies in them. You get less respect than chickens. You get less respect than Awesome Possum and Socket combined, assuming that low levels of respect are recorded as negative values, thus meaning that to add them together results in a lesser total figure. You get less respect than a Personal WBS Home Page. Posing with a bow tie animal does not at all improve your chances.
NO! YOU DON’T GET TO DO THAT! There’s already a picture of you here! You are not making a shocking entrance! Ha, ha! Vindictive typed laughter! I have beaten you this time! Unless… no! That can’t be right. Something is wrong. You’re trying to distract me from…
I seem to have erred.
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Somehow, saying “thank you” actually thanks a person. That has long mystified me. If you are as confused as I am by this and want to deprive the expression of any grattitude a thankee might potentially receive from it, you should consider, as I have done lately, prefixing “thank you” with “I.” So easily transformed is “I do so appreciate you enriching my life with your deeds!” into “our committee has decreed your action adequate to merit this brief personal notice” that it scarcely seems such a transformation is possible. And even though I included the word “appreciate” in the more effective hypothetical thank, I have discovered that actually saying “I appreciate” something is worse and less human than either thank form. “I appreciate it” always seems like it will be or should be followed with “but…” and a positivity negating agent. It is like hearing of a humorous situation and remarking “that’s funny.” You might as well not acknowledge it at all!
On a related note, when I hear of a humourous situation I generally do not acknowledge it at all. Even when I consider them to be that. I would feel incredibly foolish to suddenly resort to the petty vice of “lol” after eleven years of avoiding it, but I also can’t ever bring myself to type “ha ha ha ha” in anything but an ironic or vindictive sense. The same sense one speaks “ha ha ha ha” in.
Such as:
It just seems weird to represent actual laughter with. And the popular alternative “I had to laugh at this” comes through as insincere and excessively formal. I already laughed, if indeed I did. I probably stopped before I began wondering what to say. Even in actual mouth conversation I tend to suppress mirthful outbursts. How can I tell people I don’t hate them? People are less likely to notice you aren’t laughing if you follow up someone else’s funny thing with your own funny thing. And so my only available path of action is to attempt to top everyone else’s jokes, always, forever, which is a thing that is not actually possible. And if it was people would resent it. Fortunately, it is plenty resentable anyway. I ought to know: I have sent it many times.
I link to my old pages too much.
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I remember, a year and pieces ago, I was trapped in a car for several hours going toward a sinister destination and the radio operator gave me a break from the same dumb cds I’d heard countless times recently and instead brought up a station comprised of songs I had heard countless times not recently. Or recently, but in the context of a “retro” or “throwback” media item not indicative of society’s tastes in general for anything other than retro throwbacks.
So, almost every 1980s song I heard in that car started with the exact same DIP DAH DIP DAH DIPN DOT drum introbe. There were a good (well, adequate) few years when I was convinced the 1980s music I used to like was of a nearly consistent higher quality than the modern rubbish constantly flinging itself at me. This was maybe 1998 – 2001ish. Now I realize it’s pretty much all simplistic repetive formulaic nonsense. Thank you, culture of regurgitation, for not permitting me to not be reminded always! And yet still I identified “Electric Avenue” in under two seconds, even though it’s doubtful I’d heard it more than three times prior to then. But then, most of these are the sort where when you’ve heard them once you’ve pretty much heard everything it can throw at you three times. They have minutes to fill. OUT! IN THE STREET! Also, Private Idaho, which only has two past exposures. While preferable to moment without an end!, some trashy ska song I heard one time –under unusual circumstance not involving a radio station or the particular set of tiresome CDs I’m used to being tired of– and probably never will again, whose obscurity likely means you will not hear it ever, and there’s no sense in complaining about it, or letting my complaints about detract from the more prevalent threat, I forgot how this sentence started.
[x4]! That’s not even a song, it’s an arena chant. What a bad bad band. DEET DEET DEET DEET DEET DEET great beat, guys. I hope you don’t get sued by birds. I’d love to hear it for five minutes and then another five minutes when the next track starts. Over that I’d like to hear a basic note sequence three times followed by a fourth that’s slightly different.
This is not good. I’m forming this sort of opinion on all possible things. My tastes are impossible to satisfy. It may be unreasonable of me to expect to be satisfied. Why, were I in the business of employing double-negatives for my business I might go so far as to suggest that I cain’t get no- ARRRRRRRGH I HATE THAT SONG TOO!
Somebody who I was aware of once linked those who were aware of him to an abysmal Naruto-branded vague contextless clipfest and I couldn’t concentrate on how abysmal it was because the music bothered me so much. It was a garbage techno remix of the first half of everyone’s favorite “scary” disgraced public domain orchestra piece that isn’t Ride of the Valkyries, In the Hall of the Mountain King, but artificially elongated by using extra repetitions which made it totally intolerable. People can’t comprehend music with more than a bit of variation in too short a period, and they’re too weak to write new music, so they dumb up old stuff to suit their needs. Yes, I know that. Overclocked Remix is almost ten years old, isn’t it? But this one baffled me… It’s not as if that particular Peer Gynty excerpt is an article of music that’s hard to make disgusting by pairing with unimaginative drivel.
A theatrick trailer for the 2009 feature film Bride Wars,
Somebody should have told the director that.
I wish I could show you that this was also the talk show clip, but just that one scene, in its entirety, with that music, and then with the audience having to applaud afterward. The pinnacle of the film, that which the whole thing should be building up to, and it was still awful, and the publicity campaign (henceforth referred to as “you”) showed it for free, with the expectation that this would encourage me to run out drop dollars to see that movie whose lame apex you just showed lamely (“you” now reverts to its previous owner). It was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen. It was even sadder than going quite out of one’s way to create and arrange a comic strip to fit in a specific published book format and then putting it on a free, formless web page because it ended up only being kind of good. It was yet more sad than spending many hours of many days writing the sort of pointless thing whose climax might be a description of the climax of Bride Wars. I would avoid anybody who did both those things, though.
And now I am quite sad. I am sad that this sequence of thoughts is only about one third over. I was unprepared for realizing that I dislike the music I grew up with every bit as much as the music kids “today” are growing up with and that kids before me grew up with to bring so many of my other resentments together.
JUST ONE A THOSE DAYS!
I EAT BEETS
(disclaimer: I do not eat beets)
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I thought it would be funny if I acted crazy and posted a psychotic rambling thing of obsessive details. I forget that this often comes across as legitimate crazy.
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Latest development: automated birth-day greetings from message forums I haven’t used in months that I’m not particularly active with when I do use them still aren’t cutting it. Robots, alas, still haven’t learned to love. Do they think I don’t know what they say about me when I’m not around? Do they think I don’t know who’s always trying to undermine my sanity by filling up my error box with broken links I fixed years ago?
If I said such a thing I’d only appear in silhouette, too. Years ago I wrote something to the effect that I did not understand why people abbreviated “Patrick” regarding this particular occasion. The full truth of the matter is that I hate it a lot. I hate the sound, I hate the look, I hate the needless informality that serves no purpose other than to be more hatable. I additionally hate all beef patties, I hate rice paddies, I hate Patti Mayonnaise, I hate pat-a-cake, I hate patios, and I only just kind of like Pad Thai. Patamon gets a special pass because it claims to be a “mokvwap,” which apparently I discovered (or at least invented the word for) without realizing.
Although This one is pushing my limit. And now that I think of it, I discovered dopes, too, and things only got worse after that.
That one at the top– who put it there? It clearly did not climb up there because it seems unaware that it is there. It also seems unaware that it is wearing a scarf. Why would it wear that? If it was capable of sensing cold there are other things it could wear before a ridiculous scarf became necessary. And the one in the middle — it thinks it’s so introspective, with its fingers all clasped up. It thinks it is smarter than other dopes! Guess what, dope: you’re still a dope! You’re just as dumb! You actually seem dumber because of your shallow attempt to appear smart. Who put a cape on it? Who created a dope-sized cape?! And why? Is this a means to distinguish it from the scarf dope? What would be the point? They’re both dopes. And the third one, it can’t read! Obviously! There is an arrow pointing this out, and were the dope not oblivious to all and also was able to read, it would know this. It has no comprehension of anything it sees. Yet it smiles. Why does it try to fool us? If you took the book from it, the thing would continue smiling. Who gave it the book? Was this just a bad book, or is there a person who truly has so little appreciation for literature as to render a work unfit for further distribution by letting a dope near it? Why have these specific, unusual fashion accessories also been targeted? What sinister, conniving, cowardly, unscrupulous fascist could possibly
Please don’t come over here.
On a final note, I have just the strength remaining before passing out from side effects of my Futile Rage Syndrome medication to observe that the bow tie creature’s once small and unintimidating ears have somehow expanded (though it still has no nose) to become the size dopes’ ears used to be , that position vacated as said dopes’ ears themselves inexplicably grew in size. I suppose it’s not worth asking whose fault that is. Not without arranging to have myself temporarily locked in a room lacking sharp edges first.
Revenge.
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Beets.
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Why is it such a big deal that Jay Leno is talking/has talked with The President this evening? Can’t Mr. Obama come on television anytime he wants and say anything he wants anyway he wants? It’s not Deal or no Deal, after all. That is both a unique privilege and responsibility.
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The first four pages (akadaka: the first “six” pages’ frames arranged into the actual number of pieces of paper they would fill in the unlikely as ever event I printed them out) of Aw Beans presents Energy Zone starring Nemitz who has Not Yet Appeared and Doesn’t do Much When it Shows Up reconfigured to be, it was my initial intention, less unsightly.
The writing isn’t any better, and it’s possibly worse in a couple places. Otherwise it just seems worse because it’s easier to accept that sort of thing when the pictures match. Also, as might be expected, I spent a month doing what a normal person would get done in a week, so I think I should do another page of the “real” story before returning to this.
Excuses below, comprised of the raving psychotic nuttiness I wish I was capable of actually working into a story. Aw naw!
Progress was fast enough at first that I thought it prudent to post a notice of my intent, on the side of the page there, a thing I would not normally do. I hate when people hype junk in advance. I, however, wasn’t hyping so much as trying to buy myself imaginary time from my imaginary need to provide regular page updates, and merely stating a willingness to do something does not, for me, constitute an “update,” even though by dictionary definition it does. And now, the boring part.
However, very soon afterward I ran into difficulties, one of which being my inability to stop myself from exerting effort for very long, and the other being a baffling momentary rise in demand for dopey pictures made by me unrelated to this. So much of what I do exists for no reason that when somebody specifically requests something, especially with dollars, any amount, I cannot ignore it.
Unfortunately, as a result of some pseudo-artistic “phase” (evidently I’m so cynical I can’t even use my own language without irony) I am going through, many of the images resemble opening cutscenes from gameboy advance games.
I have no idea what’s going on in the “are you keilphix kumquat?” frame. I wanted it to be interesting or odd but then realized the first interior picture should not be too odd, and everything is a mess. All I was sure of was that I did not want chess pieces in it. I meant to just make some quick temporary solution that i wouldn’t be annoyed to have wasted time on once I thought of something better.
One of the shamefully major obstacles, the reason i put the project out of my mind for two years was that the very first page included a chess board, with tiny little pieces drawn on it, in half the frames. So then I needed to trace that board, trace all the little pieces, figure out which pieces they are, and think of what they should be changed to since… even if this was about normal dopey american earth people I wouldn’t want them to be playing chess because I think chess is boring, but certainly it’s hard to have even the minimal “otherworldlyness” I am capable of if the fools play chess and on the very first page. alas. Adding a new first page before it only slightly reduces the trouble total.
And then on the third or fourth page, with the exchange between pog and the dopey lizard, I didn’t like that all. Both characters exhibited attitudes entirely inconsistent with what I have them doing later. My effort to soften that only further convoluted things.
The comedy central channel keeps running promopes for its ROAFT of Lawrence Cable Gentleman. I thought I had a slanderous thing written about him that would be important to get in before a heavily advertised insult show, regardless of whether I intend to watch it (I don’t!), but it’s evidently pretty basic. If it was complete and had a point I suppose I would have put it here already.
People think Dan Whitney is insincere and phony not because he appears in movies, bad movies, as Larry The Cable Guy, but because he’s Larry The Cable Guy as whatever the character in the movie is. They just don’t realize it. It’s like when you have the cast of Tiny Toon Adventures AS the cast of Star Wars, or the cast of Muppet Babies AS the cast of Star Wars, or the unendurably enduring cast of The Simpson AS the cast of Star Wars AS the cast of Monopoly*. It just seems less than valid. The flanlike Family Guyites actually had a full length “movie” that was somehow for sale where they were the cast of Star Wars. And Larry’s not making fun of bad movies, either. He’s just making bad movies. I have to think this may lead to serious psychological problems, for him, if it hasn’t already. He must know the movies are bad, and maybe he thinks
*the unsettling corporate synergy of the Robot Chicken Star Wars Episode Part 2 eludes inclusion in this sentence due to not making use of a specific nonexistent “cast.”
And if he did drop all the fat points, these non-typical results legally required to be presented as non-typical results were supported by an additional incentive of getting paid heaps of dollars to appear in the ad for the product. Us proles without personal trainers to keep us on the program and make sure we also eat
Oh, I see. I forgot that Chowder Pot III, my favorite least favorite local restaurant, now offers call ahead seating. I just hope a pot will be enough. You may want the Chowder Cauldron, Mr. Guy.
I already eat my own food! I’m not going to pay you dollars to let me continue doing that! My own food. Yes, I imagine obesity is rarely a concern among the section of the populace that sustains itself by stealing pies off of window sills. Haaa ehhh. I think these things only ever required people to buy special food so that at some point the requirement could be dropped and made to seem like a special privilege.
I try not to insult overweight people as a group (really!). Fats are one of the precious remaining groups about whom cruel jokes are socially acceptable forms of discrimination, along with nerds, gays and hill folk. Which possibly explains how they’re so easy to get laughs with. However, it is my personal goal to make every task as difficult as possible for myself. I only hope this is as hard for you to read.
But! I eat many horrible things and owe my scale stability mainly to an overactive metabolic processing system. I expect one day soon it is just going to stop and i’ll look like a mancubus within a month.
And it only gets worse from there. You may be surprised to learn that there are worse things than living in hell and being regularly gunned down by little men in green suits and your co-residents. You could be so out of shape that you can’t lift your otherwise incredibly useful metal, handless arms to swat a dope off your head.
Do you get the impression I didn’t draw that with the expectation that I would be showing it to anyone? Or does the rest of this entry rule that out?
If you have a ridiculous neck that makes you look dumb, there’s nothing smart about a big collar that’s just as ridiculous. If anything, you look twice as dumb. The best thing about this creature is that two people can strangle it at once.
Look at that idiot! It’s almost smiling even though I have challenged it with threats and insults.
G’dahh! I’ll punch it off the screen. Hold on to your paper, for bandage purposes. You’ll look like a mummy when I’m finished. Since mummies are also not allowed, you will be ordered off the premises. I think it is actually rather benevolent of me to use that on you right off the roll.
Don’t you point that at me! What is that thing FOR? I’ll yank it off! You don’t deserve it! I will strangle you again with it, fool. I will cut it off and put it in a box and you can come get it when I’ve forgiven you. You have FAILED as a monster. You aren’t scary and you can’t win fights. Punishment. Those brown pointy things are probably pieces of plastic you stuck to your head because you’re conceited and pathetic. And yet I suffer to think of how stupid you’d look without them.
Oh? OH? You’re fortunate I choose to address you at all! Beast. You should know that you have no right to stand up for your rights. Oh, and by the way that green frame doesn’t match this background at all. I don’t think it would match any background. It’s far too bright. That was your worst idea. Why do you even think you deserve a frame? You’re not special! Nobody would hang you on their wall in anything but the most literal medieval sense!
Is there a frame there? No frame! And you have no proof that is my wall. I may be borrowing it.
Thur
Is that what it has gotten to? Meat loaf dreams? Meat loaf dreams that transition into Wolfenstein dreams? How dull have I become?
Wednes
Argued with the cat. Was disgusted by its attitude.
Tuesday
I spent some time in an abandoned garage. I found the darkness welcoming, as well as the absence of Gameshow Network/Stupid Model Show Channel voices murmuring incoherently from below. I would have stayed longer but I had neglected to bring an object to assist in disposing of my nasal fluid residue, and was not yet open to the idea of using my clothing for wetness absorption. That I would have to be coerced into minutes later.
I tried lying down in the grass. I had already slipped and fallen while trying to throw a brick at a vacant resident’s pretentious yard pine tree and decided I should at least take advantage of my new position. It was not good. The grass is sharp because people cut it all the time with [inexcusably loud] machines. They only stop and leave when the grass gives up and stops growing in late November. So demoralized is the grass that it does not regain the confidence to grow again until Spring, but by then property owners have returned to cut it some more. I don’t like dirt anyway. Still, the experience was bearable enough that it may be worth trying near a place more visible to non-“association” citizens. Most people will ignore or not even see a body, but eventually someone will investigate and discover it is not dead. I will be interested to see how somebody reacts to this sort of thing. I’m guessing it will be with disappointment, both at the lameness of the prank and the lack of revelation of hidden tv cameras. No no, I just did it because my life is otherwise meaningless, yet I remain too sensible to expose my immediate acquaintances to the repercussions of violent crimes. My fear will be the last thing to go. Try again next week.
Monday, the nine:
I was outside my home, in the rain, trying to burn off some of my shame. I must have been particularly invested in the idea because as I reached the end of the road (it is a long road) I had to stop and lean against a sign and wait for my respiratory guild to reach an interim agreement. Usually I can merely slow down or stop. Unfortunately, this was not a stop sign, so I looked out of place. A car which had recently passed me stopped in the near distance and eventually hooked around and came toward me again. The driver asked if I was all right. I responded that I was a bit depressed, but this was only audible as an indistinct mumbling. I don’t think I’ve been all right in my entire life. Has anyone? A better query would have been if I was right enough for the immediate situation and I was. The violent coughing up of phlegm is actually a standard part of this routine. The next question, “do you want me to call somebody?” I responded to more voluminously, saying not to do so. Was I sure? I was. If there was anyone nearby worth talking to I would have stayed inside and done that. We parted with “you look like you’re going to pass out” and “it would be for the best,” once again not terribly audibly. It was the closest I had come to having a conversation in days. I wish I was capable of doing something so hard that I lost consciousness. It’s much better for getting attention and closer to some sort of productivity than a grief nap. I would just lie down in the road but that would be dishonest, and uncomfortable, besides.
Still, all in all the experience was a magnificent improvement over the last time I travelled in day-light and was seen, when I spoke instead to a duo of police officers who had been called forth with reports of “someone walking around in a daze.” I was not aware prior to then that it was a crime to find the clouds and scraggly tree branches more interesting than asphalt. Ehhh, I can not fault the mystery coward(s) for not recognizing me; they only live here for four months of the year.
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Cliff edges continue to be sources of great danger.
Oh schnozzle, is this another entry about that Fallon bloke? Hooray for us!
Do feel free to just look at the pictures and imagine what the tiny little letters are going on about.
Yeeah, I saw’d Jimmy Fallon, doing his things on the television show. Some stuff worked, some didn’t. Some stuff seemed to work that I hated a lot. And verily there were curtains and bands and suits and desks and clips. But one thing stood out to me as particularly indicative of why I should not continue watching the program, and it surprisingly had nothing to do with the frequent bits of product placement. I could give a bushel of Del Monte brand canned beets that the three items Mr. Fallon invited three audience members to lick in exchange for ten dollars across fifteen minutes in a showbituary with no other aspect called “Lick it for Ten” were properly identified by the gorky announcer. Really, it’s no worse than the Price is Right, which I also could never watch on a normal basis for reasons completely unrelated to its commercial cooperation (for example, were you aware that it is a game show about guessing how much stuff costs?). That junk’s only going to get more prevalent if we don’t want commercial breaks to get even longer. Somehow. I don’t know what is keeping television from going back to being entirely written by the sponsors. Not “integrity,” certainly. Anyway, that was the first show. The second was better. Still not great, but I don’t want it to be great because I don’t want to want to watch this. I just want it to be so unremarkable that I won’t remark upon it again.
But! My justification for bringing up this topic. On the Friday show there was a food preparation segment and it ended with Mr. Fallon having constructed an edible object. It has been my understanding that the whole point of cooking bits on these shows was that everything went wrong and that it was fun to see how they could go wrong, in contrast to the typical outcome of the chef guest’s own television programs (naturally, there’s no reason to speak on tv to a chef who has no tv show). More basely, it is fun to play around with food. I don’t like seeing edible items get wasted, but realistically one must assume that regardless of outcome most of that stuff is getting thrown away as garbage whatever happens.
But that’s the best kind!
Curiously, one of the promotional ads that appeared prior to the show’s daybew depicted just such a mistakeful occasion. The woman on the left, who the nbc.com file name informs me is the domestic cyborg 215_RACHAELRAY_001, has a run-in with a wizard who magically transforms her into a flaming stunt-person who is too embarrassed to face the camera. No such sorcerial chicanery took place on the actual broadcast, alast. And despite the goggles not even a simple Family Double Dare physical challenge dared break out. Just a couple affluent goofs clinging classes together while watched by millions of pitiful proles.
Although I mentioned not being bothered [more than I usually am] by the sponsors, I couldn’t help but notice that when I looked up the internet version to get the illegal pictures that it was accompanied by full-screen Subway Restaurants ads with a banner aftertaste and Jimmy actually spoke “subway eat fresh” before he bit into the thing he was biting into (and then he pimped his own website). A joke, perhaps, but the best joke for a situation is never a current marketing slogan for a product roughly equivalent to the object you see before you. Earlier in the week Craig Ferguson, who I have been watching again because I felt about about the way I dismissed him two weeks ago even though there is no logical reason that I should since it’s just a dumb tv show that has no feelings, had his own needless chef guest who prepared little hamburgers and I am certain that at no point did it as much as occur to Mr. Ferguson to state “I’m lovin’ it!” or some other related meat-mash market mumbling.
Everyone knows the Scottish hate the British. Truly tragic, because, as a helpful person reminded me, Scotland is part of Great Britain.
I have no problem with the idea of cooperation, and if put into such a position I would also likely attempt to follow the foodmaster’s instructions, just because I do so hate trouble (Not even complimentary popomatic bubbles can change that). But I would never be given a show like this! But if the world broke and I was, and I still wasn’t willing to mess stuff up just to amuse people, I would at least look over the items on the table during the preceding commercial “break” and try to think of some stuff to say about it, secure in my knowledge that watching people make food is kind of boring, and upsetting in additional ways for people who will not have any part in consuming it. I suppose I really do owe it to them to sabotage the situation, even at the risk of having a man dressed like a buccaneer yell at me. And beside all that I have to imagine that not quite having his expectations met by a culinary amateur is less of an insult to a legitimate chef de cuisine (I’m assuming) like Mario Batali than is comparing his work to a Subway product.
Wow, it seems like every three days I realize I haven’t updated this thing in three days these days.
I don’t remember why I wrote this.
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Watchmen are OVER!
It is necessary for this line to be in the preview [of the film known as Watchmen], not because it’s just plain great writing, but any film which includes a breakup or disassociation of any sort must denote this in the preview. Who can forget “I’m Spiderman no longer!“? Not I! And I really thought he was done being Spiderman, too, just as certain as I always am that America’s most ubiquitous magazine adorners really won’t find comedic romance by the end after the tragic events of one-minute-thirty-seconds. Hang up those phones! Cry on those benches! Drive your car at night! Yell “wait!” at a person who will not wait! You’ve had it this time!
As with any preview, the faults of Watchmen’s rest largely with whoever made the preview, and it was not my intention to take in any of it. But as it is necessary for me to procure the interest of another person when I wish to see a film, I had to be aware enough to say “there! That’s what it is!”
It does, though, bring to attention that the characters depicted in the film are The Watchmen. When I went through the comicoid a year or so ago1, it became apparent that all the characters were intentionally avoiding referring to the gang as “the watchmen.” Like that wasn’t their name at all, and the story was only called “Watchmen,” not even with a “the,” because comics always sell better if they have “man” or “men” in their titles. Perhaps it was believed that this one was well done enough that when people realized it wasn’t a proper -Man story they wouldn’t mind. And maybe “Watchmen” was their name, but the writer was trying to make a point by not saying it, possibly with the intention of distancing his story from any further Man-related misconceptions. He’s kind of a weirdo. “Who watches the watchmen” appears in the backgrounds a lot, but it is never pointed out who, if anyone, that specifically refers to. Of course one assumes it refers to the heroes, but it could just as easily be crazy person graffiti that means nothing. I don’t have the right sort of intelligence to be offended over such a subtle change, but yes, verily, it was odd hearing the people be called “the watchmen.” This entry should be over but it isn’t.
1 Thankfully prior to my knowing a film was being made, but it is not integral to my story that you believe this
I do think a great opportunity was missed to have Late Show announcer Alan Kalter portray Walter the hobo,
Look! Another one!
but in the end that will not be what makes me come away from the film disappointed. A lot of these things I like or sort of like up until the end and then I get bothered because nothing ever happened to make me truly enjoy them. If something had, and just as likely if it hadn’t, an abrupt, vague, pessimistic, miserable ending made sure I left upset. There Will be Blood, Capote, Pan’s Labyrinth, Waking Life, The Wrestler, The Wrestler, The Wrestler, I don’t ever want to see any of them again. I’m sick of smart people recommending this joy poison to the world. I don’t have a lot left. Is there really no middle ground between cringely sappiness and losing faith in humanity? I found out after seeing the sickening “7 pounds” that it supposedly was “bad” but it didn’t seem to me all that much worse from some of the “good” movies getting every star from the same people. Evidently the misery factor transcends quality.
Soooo… at least Watchmen has some neat visual effects. Even if its flashback plot progression and character motives are as underexplained as Slumdog Millionaire’s, and I expect they are, I will already understand what’s supposed to be happening because books let you stay on a page until it makes sense. Therefore I will not be eternally backlogged mentally, trying to figure out what I missed while I was trying to figure out what just happened. What are those kids selling? Did they steal that stuff? How long is that train ride? Why is Salim so angry when he gets to be 1980s Michael Jackson?
Yes, Slumnaire Milliondog is also based on a book, but that wasn’t a comic book. I like me some pictures. To recap: I didn’t want you to get the impression that my ability to appreciate intellectually complicated works was under-developed so I told you I get held up by cartoons in little boxes.
I mentioned, on a previewous occasion, seeing a different watchmen preview. but that was back in July or thereabouts. At that point I was just mesmerized to see stuff, and figured that I knew the story anyhow so there wasn’t an issue of anything being “spoiled,” and I would still have half a year to forget anything important. At this, the week of its release, however, with televisual advertisements and actors floating about talking over the things (“my character is a member of the watchmen!”), I understand that the trouble is as great as ever, even if it’s not the story that gets spoiled. There are many things which can be spoiled. Like eggs. I realize the irony of talking about spoiling and then linking to a page from the thing that’s mostly words. Sure do.
Here is my ironic let-down ending.