All-New X-Men (Vol. 1), Issue #5

All New X-Men (Vol. 1), Issue #5

* Part 5 of 5 of the Yesterday’s X-Men storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: All-New X-Men (Vol. 1) Issue #5! In the previous installment, Old Cyclops is a big whiny crybaby and Young Hank is going to perform his Doogie Howser doctor magic on his aged, mutated, heart-murmuring self.

Magneto and Frost are mad at Cyclops, the good guys back at the school are mad at Cyclops, and he sits there with his malfunctioning visor grinding his teeth and sobbing and moaning. Dude needs some Klonopin.

This issue wraps up the first story. Every single one of these mutants is broken and beaten. Without exception. It’s a wonder no one killed themselves yet! Ha ha. Suicide is serious, please call 1-800-273-8255 if you or someone you know is considering suiciding and you can talk to a representative who might make you feel worse by accident. Sorry.

All New X-Men (Vol. 1), Issue #5 [March, 2013]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis

All-New X-Men (Vol. 1), Issue #5

Old Beast is having a flashback where he and the young X-Men are back in school and Young Hank has already mutated into Young Beast. He prowls around the halls all excited like a kid in a candy store, or Donald Trump Jr. in a cocaine store. As it turns out, Jean Grey has done some magic psychic voodoo and transported both of them into Old Beast’s brain. Maybe! Jeannie has never done this before. I hope they’re not stuck forever!

Well, Young Beast (who is actually Old Beast) tells Jeannie that she’s not supposed to become telepathic for at least another year. Perhaps all this jumping around time and being traumatized into fucking oblivion has jump-started Jean’s telepathic battery. Cool, huh? You can thank him later for showing up in the past and rearranging all of the metaphorical furniture.

“I can’t get over how good it is to see you,” Beast tells the very-much alive Jean Grey, “I’m sorry about all of this.”
“No you’re not, you did this on purpose,” she snaps back, a little salty that Beast had to go and mess with time and space. You don’t DO that, man!
“I’m sorry you have to grow up faster than you were planning. But you’ll go back and Xavier will put it all right.”

Another version of Young Beast shows up to the party. He’s not blue yet, but he’s beefy! Super beefy. A beastly slab of beef, this one. The two Beasts talk to each other and finish each other’s sentences, and it’s darling as heck, and Jeannie is amused by their encounter. The two Young Beasts want to bounce ideas off of each other in order to determine what’s going on with their old, stinky, senile, fetid, useless older self.

All-New X-Men (Vol. 1), Issue #5

Well, for starters, I don’t think manhandling Blue Beast’s titties is going to help all that much.

Non-Blue Beast knows what the problem is! Eventually, their older self is going to fuck around with their mutation and, years down the line, it’s going to cause a whole slew of issues! Such as, and get this, having weird heart attacks and panting and heaving in this ugly hospital room.

Don’t blame Blue Beast! He’s the same person as you are, Non-Blue Beast, you janky little whelp! Second of all, how was he supposed to know what would happen? They were fine for years! Decades, even! So take a chill pill, Jill, before he gets shrill and he’ll kill you with a quill. It will be a thrill. You swill.

Back in the actual real world non-psychic head invasion, the rest of the X-Men are cautiously worried about Young Hank screaming nonsense into the face of his older, comatose self. All like “THE HELL YOU WILL!”, and Wolverine confirms that he’s a twelve-year-old. No hair on dem balls yet.

Meanwhile, back in Head Land, the two Beasts pore over a wall full of fake-ass equations. They each keep repeating “oh my stars and garters”, which is the worst catchphrase since “Jiminy Jillickers!”

In the real world, Young Hank wants everyone out of the room except Jean. Kitty Pryde wants to stay, but he tells her to go fuck herself!

All-New X-Men (Vol. 1), Issue #5

If it makes you feel any better, Benjamin, it’s less because you’re a mutant and more because you look just like every mass shooter in the last twelve years.

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS! Benjamin, Mr. FaceApp, got kicked out of school and he’s going to sue the pants out of all of them. Not only that, but he thought all of you were his friends! Oh, sure, you’re gonna protest mutant rights until you get gunned down by police Kent State-style, but when a real actual mutant, with a big ol’ dick by the way shows up in the flesh, you all are like “HUB BUB BUBLBUBULB”! Well, screw you guys, I’m going home.

Benjamin storms out of there with his purple skateboard and an ugly scowl on his face. Like a sexual predator, Scott Summers is hiding behind a tree with a sexual predator jacket and a sexual predator hat. And large, red, sexual predator sunglasses. “Sorry you’re having a bad day,” he says, moving in for the kill. Benjamin recognizes this asshole right away.

“Can’t help but feel partly responsible,” Cyclops says, hands in his pockets like he’s going to sell this kid drugs any minute now.
“Partly responsible?!” Benjamin scowls incredulously, “I give you full permission to allow yourself to feel fully responsible. You show up– you bring– what was that? Your whole mutant superhero roadshow with you.”

Kid’s got a point. Cyclops has no way to react other than sheepishly. Trying to be the bigger man and all that happy horseshit. He tries to explain that he has no idea what that was all about and he doesn’t know what to say and he doesn’t know what to do to make it better. This, preposterously, if you can fucking believe it, doesn’t sit well with Benjamin. He asks to be left alone.

Benjamin walks about six steps before curiosity gets the better of him and he about-faces back over to sheepish Cyclops. “Why me?” he asks him, getting up in his face. Pfft, don’t flatter yourself kid. It’s not about you. People like you are popping up all over the world right now. A real PANDEMIC, you might say! Get yourself a mask, kiddo.

All-New X-Men (Vol. 1), Issue #5

I’m still not convinced that Cyclops isn’t trying to worm his way into some quality cuddling time with this flirty display.

Cyclops admits that he doesn’t know what the hell Benjamin’s deal is. He knows shapeshifters, oh God does he know shapeshifters! But this isn’t really shapeshifting. And it’s not totally becoming another person entirely either. Odd stuff. Unprecedented, you might say. It’s very sexy.

Benjamin lets his guard down and allows Cyclops to start playing the sympathy card. All that cult stuff that one needs to watch out for. Kindness, understanding, making the target feel like he’s not alone, that’s he’s cared about, all before he gets a nice cup of Flavor Aid in Guyana.

“You need guidance and training. I’m offering it to you,” Cyclops tells him.
“I have the internet. I know who you are, Scott Summers. I know what you’ve done,” Benjamin counters, pointing his bony, accusing finger at the handsome perpetrator!

Cyclops tells him he can just walk away from all this if he doesn’t like it or him. Trust him. And his target is snared! They’re immediately transported to the New School of Creepy Weapon X Holocaust Experiments! Welcome home, son!

Meanwhile, back at the Jean Grey School of Hard Knocks, Young Hank is gettin’ touchy!

All-New X-Men (Vol. 1), Issue #5

Look lady, you’re distracting me from my very important giant lightbulb starin’.

Young Hank shows off his moves by flipping up to some ceiling pipes and twisting around like a six-year-old on a jungle gym. “Don’t do anything crazy,” Pryde warns from the floor, “you tend to, sometimes, do crazy things.”

Crazy? Moi? Hey now, Young Hank has more of a vested interest in keeping himself alive than you or anyone else, Kitty Cat, so if Young Hank wants to do CRAZY SHIT then WABWHA HABWHWBWBW AHWBWHWBA PPFFFFTTTTTHWBAB!!

Pryde looks hurt by this. Oh well!

Back in Hank’s Head, a young blue Beast chit-chats some more with Jean Grey. He doesn’t want to give her a big I-told-you-so, but she got in Cyclops’ head and now she knows that Beast was telling the truth all along! ♫♪ told you sooooo ♪♪♫♪

Jean bites her lower lip like someone who doesn’t like the idea of knowing she’s going to die some day for reals. “How did I die?” she asks Beast. “Which time?” he replies. She doesn’t like that at all! Nevertheless, she wants him to show her. Show her how she dies? Like, as in, get a front row seat on the action? That sounds grim. Let’s do it!

OK, honey, get your telepath probe and root around in there for a bit. Just get deep in Beast’s brain. Look at the big brain on Beast! It won’t hurt, he might even like it a little too much. She looks. Her eyes pop open like “BRRRZRRTT!!” and she sees a swirling vortex of past scenes that look like cutouts from other X-Men issues! Stuff like her emerging out of water covered in flames. Her stare upon her own dead body. Her kissing Wolverine. Her with hair like Margaret Thatcher. Her her her. These glimpses mean nothing to me, but I’m sure they mean something to somebody!

All-New X-Men (Vol. 1), Issue #5

…It was so tiny and BLUE and it was shaped like bent mushroom that had withered in the sun over the last twenty years!

Jean yells “NO!” really loud, emits some violet light, and knocks over a table full of Young Hank’s equipment. She flails among the scalpels and beakers while Pryde runs to her assistance. She saw everything! And it wasn’t pretty!

The women walk out of the room. Young Hank gives his comatose older self the side-eye. “What are you up to?” he asks out loud while filling a ten-gallon syringe with red liquid. “Let’s hope one of us is as smart as the other one thinks he is,” he says, injecting ten gallons of Kool-Aid through Old Beast’s hospital-room chest plate thingy.

What’s happening outside the front of the school again? Why, Wolverine and Storm confront Young Cyclops and his ragtag team of precocious chumps while a slew of lookie-loos gawk at them brainlessly. Young Cyclops is all like “SORRY, I’M SORRY, WAAAHH, PLEASE FORGIVE EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW PLEASE I’M BUT A CHILD” and Wolverine is like “pfft”. They’ve got Wolverine talking like a Goodfellas. They’ve got Wolverine speaking like fuckin’ 4’ 7” Joe Pesci.

“Every time I could’a just popped a claw in the back of your scrawny neck and stopped you cold,” Wolverine muses, savoring the thought and popping a stiffy instead of a claw. Storm tells him to cut it out and stop being mean to the genocidal dipshit.

For reasons I don’t understand, Wolverine declares that killing Young Cyclops will make Professor Xavier magically appear. Probably not, though, because the Professor would’ve probably fallen head first into the toilet by now. Wolverine wants to get democratic with it and put the notion of killing the kid up to a vote. Cyclops tells him to knock it off. They look like they’re either about to kill each other OR hug and kiss. Perhaps both!

“That’s quite enough, all of you…” chirps a mysterious blue beastly voice. Young Hank and Old, Revitalized Beast show up! Beast has ten gallons of Kool-Aid sloshing around and he feels fit as a fiddle! “Logan, I didn’t bring them here so you can work out your issues.”

Huzzah! Hurray! Excelsior! Hooah!

All-New X-Men (Vol. 1), Issue #5

Bad example. Ebenezer Scrooge didn’t learn a damn thing.

Someone objects to this sentiment. Jeannie Grey doesn’t want to go back. First of all, living her life on the original track means she dies and that doesn’t sound fun whatsoever. Second of all, she’s seen everything, and I do mean everything, for the next ten or fifteen or eighty years. She saw it all in the blink of an eye! And it sucks. So no. Third of all, Professor Wheelchair is going to know what happened and he’ll flash the Men in Black mind-wipey thing on all of them. Fourth of all: no.

Jean keeps talking and talking and talking and talking and talking and talking and talking and talking. Being an X-Man means a lifetime of torture, disaster, whining, and bitching. Nothing matters anyway, it’s all going to lead to this exact same point. So fuck it.

So here’s the deal: they stay, right the wrongs, THEN they can go back and get tortured and experience disaster and whine like bitches. But not a second earlier than they’re supposed to! Got it? Good.

Wolverine doesn’t like that. Get your ass back to the past.

No.

Now Jean wants to get democratic with it. Voting time! Show of hands please.

All-New X-Men (Vol. 1), Issue #5

Everyone’s a comedian…

Only the youngins are to vote. Everyone says yay except for Angel, but who cares about him? I don’t. I don’t know that guy. He can get thrown into the dump for all I care. Right into a landfill full of hypodermic needles and baby feces.

“Then it’s settled,” announced Jean.
“It’s not settled,” argues Beast, who brought these kids here in the first place, “you’re just kids. You can’t just go bobbing around in the future doing whatever you want.”

Kitty Pryde puffs out her chest and uses her most authoritative squeak she can muster. “I’ll keep an eye on them!”

Cool stuff. That won’t be a torturous bitchy moany disaster.

Angel still isn’t pleased. He wants to know where the hell he is in this horrible future. He hasn’t seen his older self loafing around anywhere. What gives?

He probably farts himself to death.

ANYWAY, Young Cyclops wants to talk to Jean for a quick second. Jean walks away and tells him to leave her alone.

Final Thoughts

DRAMA! It reminds me of high school, except here two airplanes didn’t fly into the Twin Towers during my 9th grade French class.

HOW ARE THEY GOING TO RIGHT THE WRONGS! Tune in next time when I tackle the next All-New X-Men storyline! In, like, seven months.


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The Social Network (2010)

Tagline:
You don’t get to 500 millions friends without making a few enemies

Wide Release Date:
October 1, 2010

Directed by:
David Fincher
Written by:
Aaron Sorkin
Produced by:
Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca, Ceán Chaffin

Starring:
Jesse Eisenberg
Andrew Garfield
Justin Timberlake
Armie Hammer
Max Minghella

The Social Network

PREGAME THOUGHTS

I was in college when The Social Network was in theaters. Its release date was on my birthday, in fact, and I can’t think of a better birthday present in 2010 than not watching this movie!

After an additional decade of Mark Zuckerberg still being “influential”, supposedly, to whom I have no fucking idea (plus a sufficiently long enough stretch of time since I’ve watched anything written by Aaron Sorkin), I had decided that I can be motivated to tolerate another two hours of Sorkin’s style while viewing a movie that depicts Zuckerberg in a timeless negative light! The window for this motivation wouldn’t have stayed open much longer. And here we are.

THE 350(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS

The year is 2003. Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is on a date with his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara), and she’s super tired of his awkward, robotic, sperglord bullshit. She understandably breaks up with him, possibly months later than she really should have! Mark gets mad and throws a lot of shade about her in his LiveJournal that evening. Still riding the high of his misogyny-fueled ambitions, Mark hacks into the college database and creates a HotOrNot ripoff website using photos of all the female Harvard students. It blows up overnight, crashing the servers.

The Social Network

Cool website you got there, fucking incels.

Rich, arrogant, WASP-y, rowing team twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) each channel their inner entitled pretty-boy James Spader and try to recruit Zuckerberg for work on the social network they’re developing with their friend Divya (Max Minghella): Harvard Connection. Zuckerberg accepts and immediately steals the idea, rounds up his rich friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) to help fund the development of Facebook. Divya and the Winklevosses spend months under the impression that Zuckerberg is working on Harvard Connection. We all know what happens next!

I assumed the whole premise of Zuckerberg and Saverin meeting up and getting involved with Napster co-founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) was complete Hollywood sensationalism, but it turns out that this had also really happened. And indeed, they meet up with Parker, who is portrayed as a hyperactive cool guy visionary instead of, more likely, the complete nerd he actually is. Parker envisions Facebook to be a billion-dollar business. Zuckerberg is on-board. Saverin is skeptical. Saverin becomes gradually pushed farther and farther out of the partnership.

So that just leaves all the impending lawsuits! The Winklevoss twins, along with Divya, finally come to an agreement on suing Facebook over intellectual property infringement once they learn that its dominating presence had reached Europe.

Saverin, meanwhile, feeling salty about his lack of influence over the project, freezes the bank account in a petty move to get Zuckerberg’s attention. Zuckerberg secures an investment deal that cuts Saverin’s share of the company to .03%, so he’s mad about this and decides to sue Facebook as well.

Many of the interstitials of the story revolves around these two lawsuits. In both cases, Zuckerberg settled because he was advised he wouldn’t win on account of him being an unsympathetic, smelly robot that the juries would detest! And then the movie ends with Zuckerberg stalking his ex-girlfriend, the only person throughout this whole movie who didn’t kiss his ass.

The Social Network

Justin Timberlake is in this movie for some reason.

TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER

TOPIC 1 — Aaron Fucking Sorkin

I have a lot to say about this smug, crack-smoking Ivy League wannabe. I’ll probably write the exact same stuff whenever I decide to watch A Few Good Men. Or Moneyball. Or Molly’s Game. Or if I feel like writing about any season of The West Wing or Sports Night or The Newsroom. Or anything else he wrote ever.

I believe that there’s a half-life of enjoyment for anyone who takes to Sorkin’s writing style. When I first watched Sports Night in, like, 2008, I found his writing style fresh and engaging. Certainly, it was my first Sorkin experience ever. I was in college and I lapped that shit up like a dog. Then The West Wing was even better. Presidential advisors helping to run an entire country? It was the perfect context for that fast-paced, ultra-important, high-stakes banter! Studio 60 in the Sunset Strip was the start my cynicism with the style, but I stuck with that one. The Newsroom annoyed me and I didn’t finish the first episode.

Watch enough Sorkin and you’ll be able to recognize his trademark recyclable garbage from a TV three rooms away. You just need to hear two characters exchange two sentences in the middle of any random scene from ANYTHING he has ever written. He’s very good at writing characterizations for self-righteous narcissists who believe they can, and demonstrably succeed to, THROUGHLY OWN A PERSON during an argument with a very scripted, very overwrought monologue. He’s good at this because he is a self-righteous narcissist. And he himself is the embodiment of a scripted, overwrought windbag. It’s the easiest project in the world for Sorkin to develop a character who is a horrible, arrogant, friendless asshole.

And that’s why Aaron Sorkin jumped at the opportunity to write about Mark Zuckerberg.

The Social Network

Now son, I’m the law man here. I’m the law man and you’re the layman. *smirk* *smirk* *SMIRK*

TOPIC 2 — Mark Fucking Zuckerberg

This guy sucks balls and I’m pretty glad this movie didn’t aim to paint him too positively. Reportedly, the script leaked over a year before the movie was released to theaters, and that gave the twerp a brutal amount of time to squirm and stew about the fact that a movie was being made about him. That’s fantastic. It’s pretty telling that he obviously knew what to expect.

The funny thing is, knowing how the movie would portray his backstabbing idea-stealing real life self, Zuckerberg attempted to pre-emptively do a charitable thing one week before the movie’s release. Even funnier, this money was completely wasted! And he was criticized heavily for the poor timing of the action. It’s as if he has no self-awareness!

Sorkin is pretty fucking good at writing smarmy, confident characters. Jesse Eisenberg plays one of the most unlikeable protagonists you’ll find in cinema, and this is a compliment. His acting is phenomenal, portraying Zuckerberg exactly as the average person might picture him (exactly as the average person should picture him).

“I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive,” Zuckerberg said during an interview. Well, lol to that, sir, because not only did you get a movie made about you while you were still alive, but also while you were still in your twenties. You deserved it. I’m glad it made you uncomfortable.

The Social Network

Go back and cook your meth, Pinkman.

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

Natalie Portman revealed during “Newsweek’s 2011 Oscar Roundtable” that she gave a dinner party for writer Aaron Sorkin, while he was writing the script for this movie, to which she invited a bunch of her friends from Harvard. She wanted to give him the chance to listen to first-hand stories about the social life at Harvard University.
Yeah, and I bet Sorkin thought that this dinner party was actually going to be an orgy and he showed up to Portman’s house wearing a toga and smelling like horse pheromones. He had a flask full of mouthwash.

Mark Zuckerberg originally planned never to see this movie. He ended up taking several of his employees to see it. He later remarked that, despite some of the film’s inaccuracies, they got his clothing right.
I don’t know what’s better: the fact that Zuckerberg “planned never to see it” and then took people to see it, implying that he changed his mind completely while it was still in theaters, OR that he didn’t even have friends to go with. He took employees, who I imagine wouldn’t have bothered whatsoever if Zuckerberg didn’t pay them overtime for it.

Andrew Garfield came into rehearsal with a copy of Economics for Dummies. Inspired by that move, Jesse Eisenberg bought C++ for Dummies. According to Eisenberg, both he and Garfield read the introductions of their books and then put them down.
Method Acting for Dummies also remained unread, it seems.

The Social Network

We’re just a couple of fun dudes with a 40″ height difference hangin’ out at a party!

Jesse Eisenberg, who is diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), said in an interview that one of the hardest things about the role was having to deliberately speak and behave in a manner he had struggled against in his own personality his entire life.
Haha, oh my god, no kidding? So Jesse Eisenberg had to channel Jesse Eisenberg in order to accurately portray Mark Zuckerberg? That’s the saddest thing I’ve read in a long time.

After casting, David Fincher forbade principal actors from meeting their real-life counterparts until filming was completed.
“Do not meet Mark Zuckerberg! I demand that you stay away from Mark Zuckerberg! Don’t even think about it! Jesse, what did I JUST say! Stop it, Jesse! Stay away from him, Jesse! NOOOOOO!”

Aaron Sorkin directed the last shot of the film’s shoot. David Fincher announced he was leaving- Sorkin thought it was a joke until the production crew came up to him asking how to film it. It only amounted to a second’s worth of footage anyway, but Sorkin got to announce the final wrap at the end.
Immensely funny to imagine David Fincher going “fuck THIS shit” and storming out when there was exactly one second of shooting left for the film.

Armie Hammer was forced to eat a lot of junk food to keep his weight up. All of the rowing he had to do for the film would have made him lose too much weight otherwise.
This sounds like abuse to me, considering there was, at most, 40 seconds of footage of Armie Hammer rowing in the entirety of The Social Network.

The real Mark Zuckerberg had never heard of an Appletini before he had seen the film. After he tried one, he liked it so much he made the Appletini Facebook’s official drink.
Jesus Christ, dude.

The Social Network

Reminder that a bunch of women corroborated Armie Hammer’s cannibalism fetish. And now we have TWO of him??!

IS IT WORTH A WATCH?

It depends completely on your ability to withstand Aaron Sorkin. Everyone gives decent performances, but they are VERY Sorkin-directed performances. And sometimes that makes me want to puke up all my vital organs. Other times it’s tolerable enough. I think being based on a true story helps here, so Sorkin didn’t have much wiggle room to cook anything up from his own cocaine-pickled brain.

If you’ve already gotten enough Sorkin saturation to last a life time, you can skip this movie. Just read about it on Wikipedia.


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Superman (Vol. 2), Issue #151 – “We’re Back!”

* Part 1 of 9 of the Superman: No Limits collection *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Superman (Vol. 2), Issue #151 – “We’re Back!”

I’m going to do something a little different here. Not all comic book storylines are nice and linear. Sometimes, there aren’t even really continuous stories! Often, a bunch of issues of different ongoing series are packaged together in a collection merely because the stories are very loosely connected, or, perhaps they were all released at around the same time. This seems to be common with comic books up until the 2010s, from my meager experience.

Superman: No Limits is my first of many, many, many, many, many future forays into the world of loosely-bound trade paperback collections. I expect nine issues of individual Superman stories with different writers, cartoonists, plots, and even characterizations of Superman himself! And if it’s an overall good experience, I’ll try to knock out a few more collections from this era in the near future.

Superman (Vol. 2), Issue #151 [December, 1999]
Written by: Jeph Loeb
“We’re Back!”

Superman (Vol. 2), Issue #151

FASTER. THAN. A. SPEEDING. BULLET. I don’t know, man, it looks like those bullets are whizzing past him to me.

“Perry told me once, it’s not over until ‘The Bulldog’ is put to bed.” This is the very first sentence of a Lois Lane soliloquy. I’m bored already!

“The Bulldog” is the newspaper’s last edition for the day. “Putting to bed” means sending it to the printer. Of course, that’s just that day. There’s always going to be tomorrow. And there’s always going to be future days for a long time. That is, until the sun becomes a red giant, envelops the Earth, and puts everyone out of their misery! That’ll be in *checks watch* about five billion years from now.

I can’t tell for sure at the moment, but it appears that Superman is sifting through Daily Planet building wreckage. We see him hoist the giant globe that crowns the top of the building (or used to) and fly off into the Metropolis downtown area with it. Like Atlas bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders! Or something equally, or infinitely more, profound.

“The Daily Planet has gone through some tough times lately,” narrates Lois, catching us all up, especially me, “Lex Luthor bought it for the sole purpose of shutting it down. He almost put everybody out of work.”

That’s in the past already, though. I can assume that this was all covered extensively in Superman Vol. 2, Issue #1 through Issue #150! I don’t have to read all that right now until I get fired and divorced and have infinite time on my hands! Ha!

But, Perry White had good news for everyone. He just needed some “heavy lifting” and, suspiciously, Clark Kent slipped out of the office. Lois doesn’t know why. Maybe he was getting too horny and had to go jerk off in the men’s bathroom. Again.

Superman places the globe atop the not-destroyed Daily Planet building, from whence it came. Perry is on the roof already, and he gives Superman a hearty “Thanks.”

Superman (Vol. 2), Issue #151

Gee whiz, Archie Andrews doesn’t want to make his boss all cross!

The next morning, Lois strides down the street toward the newly-reopened Daily Planet office building. “Feels like the first day of school,” she says with nervous energy. I don’t know how long the newspaper building has been closed, but my best estimate is seventeen decades.

Poopypants Jimmy Olsen races up and gets in the elevator before it closes on his freckled, pimply face. “So, why do you think Luthor sold the Planet back?” Jimmy asks Lois with his best crooked Joe Biden smile.

Lois doesn’t answer. She must’ve slept with him.

The elevator doors open and the hallways are filled with giant, framed print-outs of front pages with headlines like “METROPOLIS ON FIRE” and “DOUBLE TROUBLE” and “WHICH ONE?”. I wonder if something big happened recently!

Lois stares at one that reads “IT FLIES”, one of her own legendary front pages exclusives, and starts reminiscing about that day when Superman hoisted a rocket ship. Must’ve tilted on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral and made a trajectory straight for the heart of Metropolis! That’s unlucky.

“What was it Clark said when he first got hired…? ‘Guess I’m not in Kansas anymore.’ I thought he was talking about Dorothy, but he wasn’t kidding.”

Hey Lois, where are you going with all this, huh? Are you dying of cancer? Are you quitting your dead-end job to become a hot dog saleswoman? Maybe a little bit of both?

The office is full of people NOT working, but rather gossiping about the recent events and making hypotheses of their own as to why Lex Luthor sold back the Daily Planet. Maybe he missed the Sunday funnies BADLY?

Clark the Nerd is already typing away at his Window 98 with the Pentium II processor and the 14 GB hard drive. “When did you get in?” Lois asks him while making a total Hilary Swank face. Why, only SECONDS before you did, my good chum. He came in through the window in the custodian closet, which Lois doesn’t find suspicious whatsoever. I mean, everyone in the whole building has entered through the janitor closet window on the 70th floor at one point or another! Certainly!

Clark is working on yet another Superman story. Lois is about to berate him for having a big boner for Superman when Perry White interrupts both these hatefuck birds and yells for them to come into his office for some boot-in-ass treatment! And he’s wearing his favorite cowboy boots today, the ones with the specially-fitted toe spurs! Jimmy has to go too for some reason.

Superman (Vol. 2), Issue #151

Clark Kent’s been hitting the Taco Bell XXL Grilled Stuft Burritos a little too hard during the furlough.

“I called you all in here so I could talk and you could shut up,” Perry White growls. Ahh, how he missed this. He’ll tell the rest of the staff soon enough, but White considers these his closest allies who have stuck with him through thick and thin. Jimmy too for some reason.

Perry’s looking to quash any rumors about him running the place. Not gonna happen! He’s had seven heart attacks in the last three years and he doesn’t want another one tomorrow, got that?! So let’s all welcome the actual new publisher: Ben Shapiro!

Ew, no! That’s a discussion for another time. Jimmy gets offered his old job back as a photographer if he wants it. It makes me wonder what else he was considered for. Janitor closet window sealer?

Lois is distracted by another framed front page hanging in Perry’s own office. THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN. Hey, that’s a pretty iconic story, ain’t it? I’ll have to hit it one of these days. In 2035. “Of course, Perry would want this one in his office. The hardest story we ever worked on.”

Clark gets offered a position as a foreign correspondent. You know, because he’s always ducking out of the office anyway. Might as well leave the fucking country and get decapitated by the Taliban. “It’s a whale of an opportunity, but it could be hell on a marriage,” says a concerned Perry, but Clark says that he and Lois can handle it.

So Lois and Clark are married? Am I supposed to know that? Is that what the TV show Lois & Clark was all about? That explains why entering the building through the janitor closet didn’t seem so weird to her, right? Well, that’s no fucking fun!

Superman (Vol. 2), Issue #151

The one-man Trenchcoat Mafia has arrived!

Anyway, Lois is all like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What about ME? But she doesn’t get to know yet, because Lex Luthor pops into the office like he owns the place! Which he doesn’t! Not anymore! So he’s trespassing and should be thrown in an abandoned jail.

Jimmy asks Luthor straight up why he sold the newspaper. “Ah yes, tongues are wagging, aren’t they? I could hear them all the way over at Lexcorp.” Lex pivots to Perry. “You know why, don’t you, White?”

Perry wants Luthor to say it. All kinds of “YEAH I know, but, uhhhh, I want you to say it first. So, I can, like, confirm it, heh heh.”

Lex stares Perry down for a panel. “Simple economics. Sometimes unloading a bad investment is the smart thing to do,” he responds smugly. Perry doesn’t buy that. Obviously not. Because Perry knows why, right??

“I run Metropolis,” Luthor says coldly, getting right up to Perry White’s face close enough to smell his mouthwash and Vicodin breath, “I think it’s good to have a voice out there that opposes me. It makes it look more like a fair fight…even if it’s with a mouse.”

Tee hee. Luthor laughs at Perry White’s pathetic insistence to stand up for the Daily Planet. “You’re as much of this newspaper as the ink on the page. You’ll do anything to keep it running…” then Lex Luthor grins rather fatly in an evil red glow, “…even if it kills you.”

Superman (Vol. 2), Issue #151

Evil fat Lex Luthor thinking about pie right now.

Time for Lex to go. Good seeing you guys! He’s gonna go wax his head or something. Bye!

“He never answered the question, did he?” says Clark, brow furrowed in consternation.

“There are times I wonder if Clark’s disdain for Luthor – and he’s got plenty of reason for it – doesn’t have a little something to do with my past with him…” Lois thinks.

Let me get this straight. I just got through all of Superman: Birthright where Clark has a boner for Lois, and Lois has a boner for Superman, and Lois doesn’t have a boner for Clark, and Clark is sad that Lex Luthor is mean and not friends with him anymore, and Lois hates Lex Luthor… and now Lois has a boner for Clark, and she knows he’s Superman, and also they’re married, AND she had a sordid, lusty past with Lex Luthor? What the fuck and why?

Perry White’s as impatient as I am with all this. He tells these three cretins, his best friends in the whole wide world, to get out of his dang office. They’ve got a paper to write! It’s not gonna write itself! All the news that’s fit to print and all that jazz. Move it!

Superman (Vol. 2), Issue #151

I’m not entirely convinced that these two don’t have a sordid, lusty past as well.

And move it they do. Lois returns to her desk. Everything’s back to normal, huh? So why does it feel new and weird? Like some shoes you gotta break in for a while? Or, like, I dunno. A marriage with some guy you work with?

Speaking of which, thicc-ass Clark Kent needs to duck out to go visit his mommy in Kansas. He’ll be back in an hour. Don’t wait up! *smooch*

Lois muses on the biggest story of her career. One that no one can know about. She pores over a tiny little newspaper clipping with the headline “LOIS LANE MARRIES CLARK KENT”. It’s the day she married Superman himself. We get a full-page spread of their tongue-rasslin’ in a church. Looks like a sham marriage to me. There’s no way they consummated that. Kryptonians produce spores, right?

Superman is already back on his farm. Lois is kind of jealous of Clark’s closeness with his parents, mostly because Lois’ parents are dead or estranged or QAnon or a combination of all three or maybe just really, really stoned these days?

Old Jon and Martha Kent are hanging out on their large swinging porch chair when Superman fucking crashes into their house like a heat-seeking missile. “Thought I heard you, son,” Jon says passively. Clark’s parents look rather cornfed. They look like they write in to the Pluggers newspaper strip on a weekly basis. “Is everything all right, Clark?” Martha asks all motherly. Motherly love is just the thing for you, you know your mother’s gonna love ya till you don’t know what to do.

Superman (Vol. 2), Issue #151

“Martha, dear, I think our hapless, dimwit son may have been body-snatched. Get the hose.”

“Whatever makes you happy, Clark,” his mom says, hugging him, the universal phrase from others that means “that sounds like garbage to me, but hey it’s your life”.

“Sometimes you’ve got to plant the same field a dozen times before you find out what you had there in the first place was just right,” wheezes old-man Jon Kent, dishing out some of that sheep-fuckin’ rural wisom.

Wow, wasn’t that nice? *fart* So, in no time at all, Clark is back at the Daily Planet. He probably came in through the laundry chute this time. Lois wastes no time making fun his mama’s boy bullshit, but Clark is distracted by a streaking fireball making a beeline right for the building. The sound of the streaking fireball hitting the street in front of the building sounds like this: “WHAROOM”. Again, I must state that I wish I could make a living making up comic book onomatopoeia. I’d be all like “BIZZZORT” and “CRUUKAAA-MCBOOOOOOOMSPLUT”.

“GREAT CAESAR’S GHOST!” yells Perry, who is drawn with his eyeballs a millimeter apart from one another, “Don’t just stand there, Lois, find out what in heaven’s name just hit us!”

That would be funny if it caused the Daily Planet to shut down again on the very same day it reopened. lmao

Lois takes this as the approval for her old job position. She tells Jimmy to grab a fucking camera and start hoofing it. Glasses already off, Clark is full speed ahead. Well, not full speed, I guess. That guy is faster than guns, if I’m not mistaken!

Superman (Vol. 2), Issue #151

Use your eyes, dummy! No wonder I’m always looking for your keys.

Superman is Superman before Lois and Jimmy even make it to the ground. Superman’s all “what seems to be the problem, officer?” while a giant crater smolders in the middle of the street, disrupting traffic.

It’s not a thing that hit the ground, though. It’s a…uh, guy.

“MONGUL!” Superman cries in big red block letters. Mongul is a large, purple, Frankenstein of a meaty man. “I…hear the disgust in your voice, Superman. And while I bear my dead father’s name, you are speaking to his son.”

YAWN! I don’t care about this! Where’s Lex Luthor and his leather jacket? I don’t want to see the follies of MONGUL’S LARGE ADULT SON.

Well, things aren’t going well for Mongul The Son. He crash-landed on Earth face first because he’s desperate for Superman’s help. “You are the last, best hope for us all…”

I will remind the reading audience that this all has happened in about eight panels. Things move fast in Metropolis. Not like Smallville, where things…move…slowly…

We end with a flashback. Lois is in Lex Luthor’s ugly, furniture-free office working out a deal. Lex Luthor will sell the Daily Planet back in exchange for Lois Lane killing one story of his choosing in the future. It doesn’t matter what it is or when it happens. If Lex says don’t write about it, then don’t fucking write about it. She is not to quit, retire, or get fired before this happens. If you so much as make a sneery face at Perry White, so help him Lex Luthor will make you eat so much feces for breakfast you won’t even know where you asshole actually is anymore! Everyone she cares about will eat shit. The Daily Planet will eat shit.

“Despite whatever feelings I may have once had for you,” he concludes.
“Yes. We have a deal…” Lois responds with forlorn puss.

Final Thoughts

Saucy! Spicy! Whoa mama! This ain’t your dad’s Superman! Meow!

This Son-of-Mongul guys seems uninteresting. I hope I’m proven wrong.


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East of West, Issue #20 – “The Nation Rises”

* Part 5 of 14 of the The Apocalypse: Year Two storyline *

Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: East of West, Issue #20 – “The Nation Rises”! Maybe this one is actually the Viagra commercial issue. Oh me oh my. In the previous installment, Babylon spends quite a bit of time murdering warthogs and pigs in the woods under Balloon Orb’s direction.

He is being told now to murder his enemies before he even knows that they’re enemies! Sounds like it’s really going to be Balloon’s enemies. I wonder if he has a list like Richard Nixon.

East of West, Issue #20 [August, 2015]
Written by: Jonathan Hickman
“The Nation Rises”

East of West, Issue #20

Hey, we haven’t seen many of the goings-on at the White Tower lately. Madame LeVay and her trusty BDSM lackey Doma Lux are discussing their frustrating misfortunes with respect to sending their diplomatic messengers to the Endless Nation. Three envoys sent, three heads in boxes sent back.

Actually, Lux tells LeVay that it’s not all heads. One of them might contain a torso and/or a butt! It’s so mutilated it’s hard to tell for sure. At any rate, one of these days the Endless Nation is going to have to talk to the Union. Keep sending the lambs to the slaughter, Lux. Keep going down the list! Maybe the 865th time will be the charm, but we’ll never know unless we keep pushing it! Chop chop, now.

Nah, they’ve already sent a slew of people already. They’re running out of the peskier individuals: political enemies, minor donors, and Donald Trump Jr. Jr. Jr.

“I need to think outside the box,” LeVay says. Lux agrees.
“What I need is someone I can trust,” LeVay says. Lux agrees.
“It would also have to be someone higher up,” LeVay says. Lux agrees.
“Someone whose very presence brings a certain amount of gravity,” LeVay says. Lux agrees.
“Someone extremely close to me,” LeVay says. Lux agrees.

East of West, Issue #20

WHOOPS! You just over-agreed yourself into a suicide mission. Next time try slinking away quietly.

Hey, Lux! Look what an endless cycle of yes-manning and lickspittling has gone for you! Get your jacket, it’s time to visit the Endless Nation!

“Pay close attention. Your enemies are everywhere.”

“What are you really, Child?”

House of Mao flashback. I know this because Daddy Mao has not yet been decapitated. Not that I can see. I can’t tell. He is walking and talking.

“If I told you that your were nothing, some of you – most of you, perhaps – would believe me… As to be something, one must have value.”

Mao is addressing his army, except they’re sitting in rows cross-legged and wearing Dalai Lama robes. He chides them all, calling them useless and wasteful and broken and weak. It’s for no other reason but they have failed to lift themselves up. By their bootstraps! Let’s git ‘er done!

Perhaps they’re all failures because their homelands are failures. They’re just no good. Does Mao’s army comprise recruits from other areas of the Divided States of America? Are these people that defected, or are refugees, or are defected refugees??

Mao is looking to right the wrongs. He’s their savior! “Among you, the observant will have noticed that all of you are a certain age. This is intentional, as with the passing of time the lies you have lived become unwavering truths. The cornerstones of a personal religion based on doubt, fear and defeat. But you, you can still be SAVED.”

Yap yap yap yap yap. Yada yada, from this day forward they are all Widowmakers. While Mao flaps his gums, we see a large jet barrelling its way through the sky. Over the desert lands, into Endless Nation territory. Between two guards standing on top of pedestals. Weaving around the sparsely distributed, creepy futuristic high-rises. Heading toward a terrifying urban landscape at the bottom of the canyon, complete with this awful head in the middle of it all.

East of West, Issue #20

Hey, I wanted to visit Toronto. But NOOOOOOOO…

It’s the Machine City, and the large jet contains the diplomatic representatives of the Endless Nation who tried to strike up an alliance deal with Xiaolian. “It’s done. The PRA has agreed to support us.”

However, Chief, there are terms. Certainly there are terms. Xiaolian demands all the Lucky Charms that we have in our reserves, AND a couple of tickets to see “Donald Trump Jr. Jr. on Ice” live in November. He’s going on the “my son was murdered by the Endless Nation” tour.

Chief is neutral about the news and suspects that arrangements were made beyond his instructions. It ends up being true. Shaman backpedals. I mean, things were tough. Xiaolian drove a hard bargain! Lots of tense deliberation and nineteen-dimensional chess here. And she really wanted those tickets and–

The Chief grips his head in exasperation, but he takes his Chief helmet off. Shaman has with him a couple of PRA mofos with the hand tattoos on their faces. “I’m sure the sanctity of our city is something our guests naturally recognize, Shaman,” Chief withholds any wrist-slappings (this time), “As the PRA are… relocated people just as we are. They do not need the importance of borders explained to them,” he says as the two PRA mofos make themselves at home.

East of West, Issue #20

We have so much in common! We even finish each other’s sandwiches.

“Welcome friends,” Chief says, welcoming the friends, “I suppose you have a message for me.”

Yes, they certainly do have a message. Ahem! Ahem hem hem! Cough! Basically it’s this: you should consider yourselves lucky that Xiaolian’s “sphere” of goals and expectations align nicely with the Endless Nation’s “sphere” at the moment. This alignment won’t last forever, be warned. BUT, it might, with some… er… uh… cooperation. Yes, yes. Until the end of time, please.

Aha, well, that’s bold of you. But he respects that! Too many leaders of this splintered Former United States just beat around the bush and lie and cheat and steal and commit blatant murders right in front of everyone’s eyes.

“It’s good to know where one stands, isn’t it Shaman?” Chief puffs his cigarette.
“It is a gift… The knowledge of who is on your side…” Shaman agrees blankly, “And who is your enemy.”
“Yes it is. And we should celebrate that contrast. Come with me… and I’ll show you the difference.”

This is the part where Doma Lux’s ugly ship lands in the Endless Nation’s Machine City. She is flanked by two of her armed guards while she holds a box, hunched over like Quasimodo.

Two alarming Endless Nation spheres appear in front of them. “Okay. Easy boys…” Lux hazards a few phrases of timid reassurance, “We’re going to get through this just fine.”

Or not.

East of West, Issue #20

Come on, men. This is not the time to lose your heads here!

Freshly decapitated armed guards notwithstanding, Lux continues forward. Terrified. For the first time in 20 issues, she legitimately looks in over her head.

“Ah. Such generosity… The Great Union offers of yet another ambassador,” Chief comments wryly from his Chief Throne, surrounded by his people, “We keep sending them back… but the message implied seems to get muddled on the journey home.”

I speak quite freely and often about comic book characters pooping their pants, but no one has pooped their pants in any instance quite like Lux has right now. She starts gibbering, frightened as all get-out. “Seriously? President LeVay believes that if she keeps sending envoys, eventually you’ll open a dialogue.”

“And there are gifts,” she adds meekly.

Pffft, go to hell with your gifts! Go to hell and say hi to the devil and stay there.

Please, sir. LeVay comes in peace! No foolin’! She doesn’t want war! Only peace! And she wants you there, Chief! She has other pressing matters, not bombs and tanks and warships and DEFCON 1s!

East of West, Issue #20

Bombs and tanks and warships and DEFCON 1s… I like the sound of that. Give me one of each with extra mayo.

Listen, lady. Your president may not want war, but the Endless Nation wants war. They’re savoring this. They have no interest in cooperating with the stinky Union. Off with you! You get to live today, Lux, because you’ll continue to be a necessary plot vehicle. BUT, relay this message to your president: go to hell and say hi to the devil and etc.

Lux drops the box. It contains blood and guts? That’s not a cool gift. Chief is going to be an Indian giver! Yuck, I’m really sorry about that one. Anyway, she won’t get off that easily. Quadraplegic time! Lux owes the Endless Nation her arms and legs. It’s only fair. “Do you require an anesthetic?” one of the giant, android-esque guards asks the quivering woman politely.

“Go to hell,” she says, beefing up her gumption once again. The throws a punch at the android. It goes “DONK”. She hurts her hand something terrible!

Android returns the favor with an unrelenting punch right in the kisser.

She coughs and falls to the floor and she’s bleeding everywhere and her face is all banged up and she smiles and grunts out a “that’s all you got?”

“My father hit harder than that,” Lux tells the robot boldly.

Another punch to the face causes a PRA guy to demand a halt to this brutality. He unsheaths and unfolds his cute compact sword.

“Look at me, girl. You know who I am, don’t you?”
“Yuh-yes… you are a Maoist… from the House of Mao.”
“Yes, and you have been disposed of, abandoned here to your fate. But I look at you and wonder… do you still have value?”

East of West, Issue #20

Yeah, she sure looks useful. She looks like a million bucks.

“What is the meaning of this?” growls Sir-Chiefs-a-Lot. Why, it’s simple. The meaning of this is that Lux, too, has been relocated. Just like the Maoists. Just like the Endless nation. Diaspora and all that jazz.

Welcome, Widowmaker! You will make widows now. Flashback to Mr. Mao teaching his people what it actually means to be a Widowmaker. “Some of you – the very best – will stay here with me as my personal guard. An illusion that this is all that your are, but the rest…”

“…I send you back out into the world. I send you back from where you came.”

“You will return to the ones who abandoned you, and to the nations who cast you out.”

“And there you will work in secret for our great state.”

We see this particular Maoist, sitting among the several thousand other Maoists, grasp the pale hand of the short-haired, dark-haired, dark-eyed person behind him.

“My Widowmaker… lying in wait.”

Final Thoughts

What the FUCK is going on? Are they implying that Lux is a Maoist who has been maintaining the illusion of loyalty and spying on the Union? To what end? The Union is barely even a key player in all this business! The Union is barely even a state! The Union looks worse than Detroit! Well, almost worse.


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Make Your Existential Crisis Work for You!

I don’t believe in God. It would be nice if I did, but I don’t. It’s just not in my blood, yo. It’s just not my style, Jack. I don’t rule out the idea altogether, though! If I had clear evidence of a God or an afterlife, I would consider it. As it stands now, if push came to shove and I needed to stop straddling the agnosticism fence because Mike Pence has a gun to my head and needs to me to choose a second before he kills me righteously, then I would stand by my gut conviction that, no, God doesn’t exist. However, it’s more complicated than that. Here’s what I’ve settled on and accepted for myself with respect to this philosophy:

1) God may or may not exist and we’ll never know, even after we die.
2) The existence of God is inconsequential.

THEREFORE, I firmly believe that if God does exist (and it may be in some way or form that has nothing to do with the manner in which every religion in the universe has decided), then worshipping such a God is a waste of time anyway! Like, what are you doing? If you had an ant farm in your bedroom, and the ants all collectively, as a little ant society, decided to worship your ugly, pimply face as their God, what the fuck are you going to do to ensure their eternal afterlife accommodations? How could you possibly be in charge of that? The most you can do is smite them if they piss you off. Like, if they barely make a dent in your ant farm dirt and all their tunnels are lackluster, then you can settle their earthly fates with a toilet or a magnifying glass. It’s not like you have any control over them afterward, though. Then it begs the question as to why some petty, immature adult child should be worshipped at all in the first place. Right? Yes. Thank you.

You’re not fooling anyone, lady. Those wings are fake. You’ll be dead and extinguished from the universe with the rest of us.

Where does that leave me? For starters, the petrifying concept of eternal oblivion! Exciting!

Let’s flesh that one out, shall we?

– Hey, Tom! Forget about oblivion for a moment! Let’s say an afterlife does exist! Heaven or Hell! Wouldn’t it be better to just assume that Heaven and Hell are real and definite? Then you can live your life with the knowledge that either reward or torture awaits based on the decisions you make during life!

Yes, ok, that’s not a very good point at all, but I’ll indulge. The ideas of “reward” and “punishment” mean nothing to an unconscious brain. If you believe in a soul, then you also believe in some sort of consciousness associated with that soul. As in, your “self” as a dead person, whatever that might be, would be able to actually experience this reward or this punishment. That doesn’t fly with me.

Then, there’s the very human concept of justice. Do good stuff and you deserve good things. Do bad stuff and you deserve bad things. Every religion has its own distribution of morals and ethics into respective “right” and “wrong” categories. Murder? Bad! Helping? Good! Abortion? Bad! Sustaining damage to parts of your brain that control emotion, cognition, empathy, and social behavior, resulting in shooting up a Dairy Queen? Gray area! Dying before baptism? Bad! Performing a reprehensible action with complete ignorance? Maybe ok! Maybe bad! There’s too much ambiguity to almost all human actions, thoughts, and behaviors! If I tell God to go fuck himself at age 14, is that it? No going back? Harumph!

In short, no, I don’t think it’s healthy to base all your morals and ethics upon the possibility of getting a reward at the end of the day. Then, arguably, you’re not really doing it because you want to. You’re doing it out of fear of the punishment.

♪♫ If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawn mower! ♫♪♫♫

– Hey, Tom! All that sounds kind of rude and callous, but to each his own! Let’s go back to oblivion now! Is the thought of eternal bliss way more appealing than eternal oblivion? Even if you don’t believe in God nor an afterlife, isn’t the idea of happiness that lasts forever appealing?

No. Here’s the most haunting quote I’ve ever read about this subject. It’s from Hendrik Willem van Loon’s book The Story of Mankind, a fucking book for children, from 1921.

“High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is one hundred miles long and one hundred miles high, and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed.”

Chilling. If one believes, in some way, that consciousness persists past death, then I believe that the very notion of anything lasting forever is panic-inducing. It sounds unfathomably torturous. I’d want to kill myself! And I wouldn’t be able to! I’d need a goddamn out, man. Even if I was completely chickenshit about afterlife suicide for seventeen quadrillion years, I’d still be more comfortable knowing that I could end it completely once and for all at some point.

Therefore, eternal nothingness sounds way more appealing once you realize that you wouldn’t be conscious. It sounds awful now because I certainly AM conscious at this point in time, and even the knowledge that I was unconscious for 1010,000,00010,000,000 years prior to being alive doesn’t really make me feel any better about what comes after. Psychologically, an eternity in the direction of the past is less terrifying than an eternity in the direction of the future. It’s not like I minded then. Why would I mind later? Because I think I would! For some reason.

Ohhhh shit. I needed to stop for gas but no fucking way, man.

– Hey, Tom! You sure are writing a lot of boring words that I’m barely paying attention to! I have one final question, though! HOW, exactly, are you making this existential crisis work for you? Huh? You see that post title up there? Try that one on for size, hotshot!

OK, you called my bluff! Nothing works for me. I’ve read dozens of articles and ideas and analogies and theories and philosophical musings in order to find something I find even somewhat agreeable. Every time I find an opinion about the aftermath of death that was slightly reassuring (you don’t care now about the eternity before you were born, and you won’t care about the eternity after you die), I’d find something else that was unspeakably horrifying (at the time of death, what’s left of your dwindling consciousness will initiate a near-infinite time dilation slowdown of your perception, causing a true eternity of conscious absolute nothingness).

So here’s the closest I’ve come to accepting theories that seems simultaneously plausible and comforting:

1)  The concept of “existing” is a construct that our brains invented to maintain our arrogant idea of self-importance. Not “existing” anymore is just the way things eventually have to be for anything, including the universe, and I’m not going to be around to give a shit when any of that happens.
Here’s some corny stuff coming up, but I have decided to fully agree with it: There’s an infinitesimal chance of you existing at this point in time in this part of the universe. But it happened. And if you’re reading this right now, chances are very good that you ended up in one of those prosperous first-world English-speaking countries. It’s a gift. So make the most of it.

Oh, that’s not that comforting? How about this: If you think about it, you become unconscious every night when you sleep. Not fully, but you know what I mean. And you don’t give a damn. You go to bed at 5am and you spend 14 hours not knowing 14 hours passed and then you wake up at 7pm. That’s everyone’s experience, right? Maybe you’re normal and sleep 18 hours a day! In either case, now imagine going to sleep and, instead of 18 hours passing by, you never wake up again! Not so bad, is it? Ha!

Oh hey there, sailor. You come around here often?…

2) Never, ever waking up again isn’t as scary as I initially had multiple lung-destroying panic attacks about.
I spent a lot of time rationalizing my way through this one and I don’t think I’ve fully wrapped my head around this idea, but endless oblivion can be tackled with this thought exercise:

Let’s say you get hit in the head by a flying Christmas fruitcake and you’re knocked into a coma. You have no absolutely no idea. You’re blissfully unaware that you’re only alive because of a fucking tube, and you’re getting hellishly nasty bedsores that you can’t even feel anyway. We’re going to completely take out the emotional factor with respect to losing loved ones, feeling like your life was wasted, everything in society being completely different, global warming, etc. etc. This is purely “I’m alive” stuff.

OK, nix that. Pretend you were cryogenically frozen and preserved! That way you won’t make decomposing flesh arguments!

-Let’s say you wake up unfrozen in 60 days. Two months. Not so bad, right? You suddenly jumped ahead two months, and you’re none the wiser. You might feel disoriented that you missed out on time, but you didn’t even know that this missing out was even happening.

-Let’s say, instead, you wake up unfrozen after 60 months. That’s five years. Very disorienting, but it was a blink of an eye. You’re alive, and that’s what matters now.

-Let’s say, instead, you wake up in 60 years. A blink of an eye from your perspective, right? We’re still ok.

-6,000 years! 1.5x the age of Earth! In the blink of an eye! For all intents and purposes, you did not exist that entire time, but here you are, fresh out of your stinky cryogenic state, completely unaffected mentally by this lapse of time. Still doesn’t seem that daunting, right?

-6,000,000,000,000,000,000 years! That’s 18 zeroes! Six quintillion years have gone by! You didn’t even notice. It almost feels refreshing. The universe is only 13.7 billion years old, and this is literally 437,956,204 times longer! 438 MILLION TIMES LONGER! All that time did not matter one fucking bit. You could go another six quintillion!

– Are you headed for a point here anytime soon?

Yes! No more finite numbers. Here we go…

-Infinity? Holy shit, dude. No. No thanks. That’s absolutely terrifying.

But why? Why is that scary when a 1 with nine million zeroes on the end isn’t? It’s because the mere thought of waking up again makes the impossible-to-fathom stretch of time bearable. No matter how long it is, it’s fine. No matter what, we want to just exist. Not existing is against everything everyone ever strives for!

Fine, you win. I’ll believe whatever you want me to, just keep those skeletons away from me. They give me the willies.

As far as I’m concerned, infinity is the last roadblock, and it’s the last construct to tear down. Infinity isn’t really a “time”. It’s a state. Once you remove the time aspect and think of it as a state of being (er, not-being), it becomes a little…less scary? Maybe not entirely. But we’re getting there!

– You don’t actually have any ideas on how to make your existential crisis actually work for you, do you?

Not as such, no. But banging out this post has certainly helped me put some of my thoughts out of my head! That helps. Sorry you read it, though. You should go back to a state of being where you didn’t click the link to get here.


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