Star Trek Into Darkness

Though this film's twists are a badly kept secret, those who have not seen the movie may find spoilers written within this review. Please be advised.

I won't bore you with the history that details my long adoration of Star Trek. I am as stereotypical as they come, straight down to having action figures and a tricorder toy when I was growing up. I was the TNG generation, but have since happily extended it to every branch of the franchise save Voyager which just never much connected with me. That being said and you knowing where I come from, let us move on.

I didn't *hate* Star Trek Into Darkness and that's really the most praise I can find for it. I suppose that is a step-up considering everyone alive knows I thought the last film was a train wreck for various reasons both legitimate and not. But yes, I went in expecting it to be the science fiction Ishtar and found a mildly distracting summer movie with no brains in its head.

If you saw the last film, its really more of the same. They minimized the weakest points of the 2009 film (Scotty's alien buddy is mostly absent this time, thank the fuck Christ) and adapted the characters into more formed if not complete figures that have some semblance of their original characters (which leads one to ask why bother rebooting?)

This time around, the caper is that someone has blown up an archive in San Francisco and later kills one of Kirk's friends. Kirk swears vengeance against this man - a traitor named Harrison - and races to the man's hideout first to kill, then changing his mind to arrest him. All is not as it seems, as Harrison reveals himself to be a pawn of Starfleet's brass and is in fact Khan (originally played my Ricardo Montlebon in the original series and Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan) who turns the tables on both Kirk and Starfleet to his own ends.

Its not a particularly clever plot or anything especially convincing past its typical dialogue sequences in an attempt to justify the special effects.

(I will say this one more time: liking the 2009 movie does not make you a Trekkie/Trekker. Stop that! The 2009 movie is to Star Trek what the Peter Cushing films are to Dr Who. In the end, you are a Trek-loving person based only on the time you have put into it, just like every other fandom, which is populated by die hards and fair-weather fans alike.)

The biggest strength I can find with it is that despite the BIG VILLAIN REVEAL (stomps foot three times) half way through the film - the film isn't a Star Trek II remake. It has more to do with my favorite Original Series episode "Obsession", where Kirk hunts down a sentient cloud vapor thats been killing people for years. Its a thin Moby Dick analogy, which the franchise will overuse as the years ago on but unlike the rest of its incarnations, Kirk actually learns something in this film and in that TOS episode. The big moral is basically "your desire for revenge will be what undoes everything else" and its learned by more than one character in this film. And thats something that should be applauded as its actual character growth and less about yet another action scene.

That is... if it was written by anyone else.

The writers on these last two Trek movies are akin to surgeons who opens you up, poke around to find the problem, doesn't fix or change anything and then refuses to stitch you up. Robert Orci, Damon Lindelof and Alex Kurtzman have every idea of what they want to do but no idea how to go about it. The result is an intriguing first half that explosively decompresses in the second half. Once the audience finds out that Harrison is Khan, it comes apart in such a spectacular fashion, I am at a loss to think of an equal. First off, and perhaps most importantly, theres no reason for it to *actually* be Khan, The writers essentially robbed themselves of creating their first "heavy" character (Lets face it, Nero in 2009 was a very bad/stupid foil and is a thinly cloaked attempt to legitimize the reboot by using a TNG bad guy) by making him the most recognized villain in the series (who is suddenly British? Why? ask people with functioning synapses) and thus robbing it of any individuality. There is no reason for Khan in the story except to pander to people who sort of know who he is but not enough to be angry about it (As someone else brilliantly pointed out: see also General Zod in Superman movies). Its the writing equivalent of product promotion.

There is also a 9/11 analogy involved this time around. Basically that the events of the previous movie push Starfleet into being a more military force and later on there is a ship that crashes into a city and so on. Now, how each person deals with this sort of plot point is on them but for me, it doesn't work. Its many years too late and its blundered about as badly as it was in 2006's Superman Returns. The United States no longer self-identifies with the 9/11 events in so much as needing direct analogy; we're in a post-9/11 world, not a current one. And so, as art should be a product of its time, I'm at a loss as to what the meaning was to do this. A good friend of mine suggested this film was about how the events of 9/11 didn't matter as much as our response to it - a point which I agree on - but even then, its a point which is nearly a decade too old. Why are we being told this *now*? And its especially redundant since an entire season of Enterprise dealt with this in 2003. They're ten years too late once again.

(And for those keeping score, the three writers behind this newest film are responsible for the following: Cowboys & Aliens, Prometheus, the Lost TV series, the Michael Bay Transformers series, The Island, The Legend Of Zorro and one of them produced the horrible movie Eagle Eye. Has the human imagination ever before produced such a wasteland of unmitigated shit? Coleman Francis's films are suddenly looking a bit better.)
 
As to the bad guy in this film, and I realize that I'm against the grain on this but Cumberpatch was awful. He over enunciates every word, acting only with how he moves his mouth. When Hugo Weaving did this for the Matrix movies, it was with a bit of camp in mind but this is played straight and without anything "behind it". This time, it reminded me a lot of Bruce Payne's bad guy in the hilariously awful Dungeons & Dragons movie: overly preening and as threatening as a case of indigestion. I am not threatened because someone has a deep voice, I am threatened by *presence*, which this character (and actor, by proxy) had none of. Kahn in the original incarnation was more about physicality and intellect while Benedict is simply a talking metrosexual head. As a character and as a bit of acting, Into Darkness understands nothing about what Khan is suppose to be - which is telling of the story as a whole. If you can't get the villain right, wheres the jeopardy? (Hollywood: when guys go to an action movie, the villain shouldn't be someone your girlfriend finds attractive. We're not threatened by boyish men whos faces and jawlines look as streamlined as a speedboat. Character actors with years of experience on stage and screen carry way more weight than a thirty-something model beauty. Remember William Sadler in Die Hard 2? Or what about Christopher Walken? )

And I walked out of the theater thinking of that line from Star Trek VI: "Is it possible, that we two, you and I, have become so old and inflexible that we have outlived our usefulness?".

With these last two films defining the series (and directed by someone who has repeatedly said isn't into Star Trek either) I do not know if Star Trek is "my thing" anymore. I don't think I can identify or even agree with the story choices and writing style these films are going in. To borrow from a Chris Hedge's book subtitle, these films seen to be "the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle". Yes, this film did have something to it - something to actually SAY - but it wasn't nearly enough; the movies before 2009 (well, perhaps not Nemesis or First Contact, we can argue about that later) had stronger moral statements. This is more about "lets make things explode in space and if we have time, we can squeeze some moral stuff in". The message is the thing, always - and though it had more message than the last film, that isn't nearly enough to call it Star Trek either.

I'm not as angry as I was when I left the theater in 2009 but maybe I've simply grown so disappointed, anything would look better now?

That Time I Wrote To Susan Cooper And She Replied

Some back story: Susan Cooper is the greatest living fantasy writer in the world. Forget Rowling or George R.R. Martin; thats like comparing a candlestick to a star. She's been compared in the same breath to Tolkien and Lewis. Her "Dark Is Rising" cycle is written for young adults but also asks of a working knowledge of Arthurian Myth, Norse Mythology and Celtic Mythology. It is, in no small way, exceedingly literate, especially for such a young audience. Most kids hated reading the (first) book in 7th grade English while I completed the entire series in mere months.

(I was once an incredible reader. By the fifth grade, I had been tested as having a "post-college reading level" and would tear through science fiction novels three or four at a time, often finishing a book a week and once finishing an entire novel in under three hours. Now? I'm lucky if I read two books a YEAR.)

Anyway, when I was writing to John Williams a while back I stumbled upon the notion of writing to Mrs Cooper as well, since her novels served to fill a very important part of my growing up. My letter follows, then her reply which I promptly received merely a week later...

===

Dear Mrs Cooper,

I consider it the privilege of a life time to have the chance to write to you. I’m a little giddy to be honest because I had no idea you accepted mail. Along with Robert E. Howard, I don’t think there is a writer who had a greater influence on not only my reading but in how I perceive the world around me.

I first read The Dark Is Rising cycle back in middle school, which is now half my lifetime away. I cannot say how it happened into my hand, save either magical means or (perhaps) my mother feeding me any book she could find. Stomping around with a copy of “Le Morte d'Arthur” strapped to my back by grade seven, she was hard-pressed to find anything that I found up to snuff. To say that your books agreed with me would be an insult to their power; I can say with some certainty I finished the entire cycle in under two months. I was a hellion for reading, something I seem to have lost with age and a full-time job.

And with age comes a certain cynicism and cynicism is now at a premium in this era. Everything is a rehash, reboot, recycle. What little I’ve experienced of Harry Potter made my insides twist like I’d eaten bad oysters. Movies are increasingly tedious and predictable with few morals and ever-more robots with machine guns. I look at how a generation behind me is experiencing what passes for art or writing or music and I am reminded of the subtitle to a Chris Hedges book – “The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”.

And so, by proxy, by disliking the cynical – I too have become cynical. Oy gevalt.

I’ve since decided to disconnect (as much as I can) from that frustrating world and, in a sense, partially regress to being a child again. And so I am very pleased to say I’ve sat down with your books this winter and have been enjoying myself immensely, as if for the first time. That young boy that would read about Will Stanton and Bran in front of a bay window during a steady snow is doing the same as an “adult” – though perhaps with a dark porter instead of hot chocolate and Bernard Herrmann instead of Pearl Jam.

It was as if I was meeting childhood friends all over again and the boy who went stomping through acres of woods after a good snowfall or in the blister of summer was still pleased to get lost in something and have an adventure. And it is very strange that something from so far past has as strong a hold on me as Rilke or Neruda or any other writer I discovered in college or elsewhere. Perhaps because the books are about such elemental concepts, they fulfill an elemental desire in all readers? I do not know for certain, only that they do fulfill something deeply unmentionable. And so, perhaps this letter to you is an abject failure - because what I feel and sense about them is so much more than what you're reading. (Please know that this letter is somewhat roughshod and “finished” after so many drafts, that I'm done trying to get it perfect and will concentrate on making it right.)

But in any case, I cannot thank you nearly enough for what you have brought to my life twice now. Thank you, thank you, and thank you. It is a great comfort to find that powerful writing remains timeless and as sweet as ever.

Enclosed you’ll find a SASE though feel no obligation to use it; it is there merely as option. Again, thank you ever so much. You’ve deeply changed this one person’s life for the better.

Most sincerely, 

Justin

===

Dear Justin,

Thank you very much for your letter, and your kind words about the books. If your mother did send you to them, I should thank her too.

Don't give up hop for your generation and its successors. Yes, theres always a lot of rubbish out there, much of it best-selling, but there always was. In all the arts, theres always a lot of candy, which gives pleasure, relieves depression - and then vanishes. But also theres always a little of the other stuff, which lasts.

I was a judge for the National Book Awards this* year, for "young people's" books of course. We read 325 books (each submission costing its publisher $150 I believe) and most of them were candy. But I kept about 35 of them for my grandchildren to read, we had five finalists, and just one book (the winner) really gave me hopes for the future: it was William Alexander's "Goblin Secrets". His first novel. So now I'm wondering how on earth I find the people like him who are out there in the worlds of music and painting - but I do know they exist, quietly, as they always have and will. 

So hang in there - keep looking! And thank you so much for being on the wavelength of the "Dark Is Rising" books.

With best wishes, 

Susan Cooper

* well, no - last year!

That Roughshod Letter I Sent To John Williams Yesterday

Feeling I've spent too much time on obsessing over getting it perfect instead of getting it out into the world, I hastily finished my letter to John Williams and sent it out this past week. It was a little rougher than I had like because I also finished a longer (2 pages!) letter to author Susan Cooper who routinely accepts and responds to her mail. I don't expect contact with Williams and in fact my cover letter (to his agent) says as such.

While I'm disappointed I didn't smooth out the wording, it's enough that I put a couple of months into a page to finally force myself to see I'd never get it perfect. So now it's just a matter of forgetting about it and hoping it gets to his hands somehow by the grace of god or a bemused mail room lackey at Gorfaine / Schwartz.

===

Dear Mr Williams,

I am writing to you today as a humble admirer. Though I could not thank you enough for how your music has detailed my life if given a whole novel, I hope this one brief page gives some glimmer of understanding.

Music may very well be the most expressive of religions. In prayer, the Pilgrim pleads to be heard, and yet in music it is the Pilgrim that listens. The audience becomes the Divine, as the composer prays, hopes to be understood through his craft. Nothing is so ennobling or as close to Man's best joys as music. It goes beyond description and is thus pure experience. I have found nothing else in life short of love as magical or as humbling. 

Your music is chief amongst others; it encompasses all things with a talent unequalled. From your concert works to television and film, I can think of no one else who could craft such pain like "Abandoned In The Woods" while also arriving at the endless optimism in the end credits to Spacecamp (a personal favorite) or your Olympic fanfares. So often, life's constant struggles make our world seem a prison from which we are only freed with the right movement or melody. I do not know how, but music is more powerful than any four walls can contain.

Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. There may never be enough words for it, even if I used all the world's languages twice over. I have not only found new worlds because of your music but have come to understand myself better as well. Again, thank you and the best to you and yours.

Most sincerely,

Justin Bielawa

Amanda (Not Her Real Name), Epilogue as Letter

We exchanged emails. Very professional, even cool in temperature though she used the term "not effusive" which may be more accurate than I like. She was very accepting of my news on maybe moving across country this year, though her reasoning wasn't said. We agreed that random contact isn't the best idea but we're keeping the door open in case one has something to be heard by the other and that's where it's left. She was flighty about seeing each other one more time but she didn't say no either.

So I took the time and the winter storm to write a few last words and post them. She'll read them, I'm sure but what I hope is that she'll read them again and again and maybe it'll grab hold of that woman who was so "effusive" back then.

Oh well. It's the best I can do and it's not even half of what the situation deserves. I suppose as always I am at the mercy of the person's interpretations and not my own clarity.

===

How about how many times have I written this letter? Well, I've finished it a couple of times and started it dozens more. Unfortunately, it never comes out as I want and I think it's because it's all so complicated in my heart. So, truthfully, I'm done trying to get it perfect and will concentrate on making it right. This is it then; this letter is an abject failure because what I feel is so much more than what you're reading.

I miss you so very much. There's no other words for it, so all I can do is repeat it. I miss you so *very much*. A day doesn't go by where I don't think that to myself and mean it a bit more than the day before. And yet I know that every time I say it, it doesn't undo the shame I feel for letting you go so long ago or the fact I cannot remedy any of this. Your absence is the same as if I have lost a limb or an eye: even if I am not thinking of you, my quality of life is detracted for it. Something in everything is lost to me when you aren't in my life.

Life without you does not seem much like living to me. It has been so long, I feel like I've outlived you. Like you died, and I am left behind - and yet there is no promise of ever meeting again. But we're both alive (alive, perhaps, but are we living?) and I live in hope that there is an answer to all this. To go on without you has already proven to be a private Hell for me. I will keep going for as long as it takes, even if its after I've been shoveled into my grave.

So what are we going to do about this, you and I? All I know is that I will waste my life if its not with you, that to so much as consider anyone else is a disservice. It is as if I am trapped on an empty sea facing a shoreline I can never reach. Why is it, my dream of so many years, I cannot be with you? How is it I must lie apart from you, from us? Will our separation improve the world? Will the moon reach higher or the birds to sing brighter? I do not see how. I don't see how this can be anything but a very private grief. But if that is all have of you, I'll carry even that.

I can't explain it better than that. I've tried because I've erased this a couple of times and I'm still not satisfied with it. But there it is in all its roughness. My love for you stumbles as words but not in feeling. Everything is between the lines and between now and my seeing you again.

I consider myself full of great fortune to have known you at all. I've never seen a sunrise to match your looks or found a person in any other life to match your graces. All I can bring to match any of your natural gifts is my appreciation, and my thanks and perhaps that this pale letter in apology in that the sum of me is not worth a fraction of you.

Please remember these small things: I will always love you and carry you with me. You will always have a place with me. That you will always be safe and cared by me for no matter what you may think of the rest of the world. That something inside of me belongs only to you and that it weeps inconsolably for you in the dark of every night we don't speak. That the old feelings of my hands in your hair at the train station or your breath in my ear or the gentle sounds you made when we intertwined on my couch - they are all sacred to me and that I ask to experience them again. I feel unfulfilled without experiencing the gifts only you posses. And though they may not be yours to give now, I will wait for them for as long as it takes. I have never said anything in my life I've believed more than that last sentence.

I think you have my phone number. You certainly remember my email (and even if you forgot it, my "professional" one is my first name with my last name and a period between, at the same email host) and Skype and some other things. Maybe when you're awake at one in the morning, you'll read this and remember and consider emailing me or texting. And you should, because my answer will always be "yes, please do" no matter how silly or slight you think it is, it will probably change my world forever to hear a handful of words from you. A man can be a man by himself but he will know nothing of Manhood without the love of the right woman.

I hope to hear from you one day, in this life. And if not then, I take sure comfort that because so much of what I am is because of you, that I will find you across that wide river we must all cross, many years from now. Perhaps then I can know a time with you, as I have spent so much of it without already.

Amanda (Not Her Real Name), Part 5

I'm writing this in 2013. A year after that she told me to fuck off.

What happened between now and the last entry isn't much. A pile of emails. A lot of bait and switch, where she'd beg me to let her go one day... and then she'd get drunk and text me a week later or call me from a bathroom in a half-sob, wanting to hear my voice. The last "real" time I talked to her, I was actually driving back from Boston. I had hit a dead zone unknowingly and at some point on I-95 my cellphone went off with a very sad, almost whimpering voicemail. I've kept it on my phone since and fuck you if you think I'm going to delete it.

It's one of the last things I have from her. One of the only things.

We had traded some stuff via Amazon at one point: she sent me stuff important to her and I sent her the same. She sent me some if her favorite CDs and a pair of books, I replied with a Star Trek book I adored in middle school (Imzadi) that I thought she'd like to read with me (Trek is "banned" from the house), as well as some of my favorite movies ever (The Fountain, The Thin Red Line) and a copy of Holdridge Conducts Holdridge. I even tracked down author William Gibson (her favorite) while on a book tour and had him sign a copy of Neuromancer for her.

I'm pretty sure everything I just listed is in a landfill now.

What happened is easily explained and, I'll freely admit, most of it is my fault. For lack of a better word, she "dumped me" on my 30th birthday in March. I don't know if it was intentional but I can't see it being coincidence either. Too exact a time frame. And I wasn't entirely disheartened because she'd been fickle before and she'd always come back. She'd backed away three or four times before, for no discernible reasoning and so this time seemed like more of the same to me.

Between March and December, I didn't hear a word from her. I emailed her twice, both times drunk and rubbing snot into shirtsleeve. The third time, right before Christmas, I had fallen into the bottle and was drinking vodka or rum like it was tonic water. I have never had a drinking habit before, and this one crept up on me. Being drunk was a nightly thing and it was hard to judge how bad it really was until the next morning. So in a moment of drunk logic after not hearing from her for months, I sent her some stuff from Amazon despite any better judgement. It was just two Kate Bush CDs.

She flipped the fuck out.

She wrote that even if she was single again, she would never date me, that any future contact would be collected as evidence for the police, that I was a creepy person doing creepy things. Hello, shame spiral, it's been a while since you came around.

In hind sight, I don't blame her. I was pushing. But she'd come and gone and come back so many times already, I was expecting it all over again. And obviously, after that last email from her, I never contacted her again. I don't look her up on Google, I don't bother having anything to do with her aside from typing this stuff out. I pretty much go on with my life as best I can. A day becomes a month becomes a year. The pain doesn't dull so much as you just learn to live with it when it gets bad; most days are okay, others make you want to shut down and hide under the covers. I never do though.

Decided it was time to go into therapy. After a bunch of sessions, the doctor looks at me and says, flat out "There's nothing really wrong with you. You're just the most lost person I've ever met in my life." Like its the punch line to the driest joke ever.

Months pass.

Last Friday night, my friend Lauren texts me at one in the morning. I roll over to respond and check my email while my eyes are still half shut. Amanda. There's an email from her. My body reacts to it like I'd drank a pot of black coffee. I sit up and I'm not sure what to expect, hoping its not just a spam email.

Four words: "I still love you".

No idea of context or reasoning or timing. I want to write back but am unsure how to respond to a woman who threatened to send a lawsuit to my door. I cautiously word an email saying as much as I want to reply, I can't unless she rescinds her threats, and from the email address she had sent it from. It was clumsily worded but professional.

I've still not heard back. It's now been 72 hours.

Amanda (Not Her Real Name), Part 4

March 6, 2010

We make plans. They unravel. We try again. She backs off. She says even talking to me feels like cheating. Then she says that she's coming down for a friend's birthday but that we can't see each other. That its too much and too overwhelming. I tell her I understand but my words bite harder than hers. I do understand - but I wish to Hell I didn't.

A week later, some dreary Friday evening, I'm curled on the futon watching Minority Report and drinking crappy Merlot. Thats what its come down to: acting like a goddamned frenchman. She texts me to say shes sorry, to see if I want to have brunch tomorrow morning. With no one else. That we don't even have to eat, we can just wander around New Haven again. Time and location is forthcoming, but it would only be for two hours or so and I'd have to get her to the train on time.

Morning comes around. Quick breakfast, shower, shave and I'm out the door early. A couple text messages between us and she's running late going with her friend to drop someone else off. I get there an hour early (bad habit of mine: fear of driving somewhere unfamiliar. Makes me get places way ahead of time) and kill time at a parking lot. Notice a chip in my windshield from the drive down on 95; not especially bad but a good enough nick with a half circle nickle around it.

I get a call, saying she's just pulled in and that she'll be out in a minute. By the time I'm at her door, she's half way across the front yard and into the passenger seat.

"Hi."

Her voice is high and gentle, like someone sighing upwards an octave. Theres a certain tense expectation to how she talks, how shes turned her whole body to face me. Before I pull out from the sidewalk and into traffic, she says "Wait, are you dressed up? Why are you dressed up?"

"Because," I tell her with a stupid grin, "You can't be the only one who looks good." Though I didn't really dress up. Charcoal slacks and a new collared shirt. Well, okay, maybe I did dress up a little. And I meant to, because just seeing her was important enough to do something like that.

We drive around and get lost on the turns on and off the highway to get to the center of New Haven. She laughs as I feign frustration at our mutual inability to find any familiar roads. We end up right back to the same strip mall next to Yale where the movie theater use to be and Barnes And Noble takes up two thirds of that side of the street. We duck into the used CD store first, lamenting how they're slowly becoming a thing of the past. She walks up to the soundtrack section and stops, looking at me worriedly.

"What?"
"No, nothing. I just knew you were going to walk here."

We thumb through the stacks of CDs and duck briefly into the vinyl. We pull out some fun stuff but leave only so empty handed that she curiously puts her hand into mine and grips gently, as if testing. I look at her and she leans closer, shuffling her feet.

We walk into Barnes And Noble and we go right back to looking at the books we did last time. She pulled out some books on punk music, I flipped through a copy of Mencken's America. We traded quips and details and books. We have another 45 minutes before the train shows up. She grabs my arm and we race down to the bottom floor and go through the humor section. We giggle like school kids over Our Dumb World. She gets closer as we get midway through the book, her hair smells a little like shampoo and a lot like ... well, if you've ever walked through a wheat field, you know that smell of earth-fresh grain. (Otherwise, just imagine something really pleasant and earthy.)

The book goes back on the shelf. I gently take her arm and she puts her head against my chest. She's the perfect height for a dancing partner; the top of her head fits just under the bottom of my chin. She gets flustered but doesn't move.

"No, wait, stop... people will see us!"
"Like you're ever going to see these people again. Like they matter. Like they matter more than this."

I finally put my hands in her hair and she softly goes limp, saying nothing. I can hear the fabric in her shirt stretch, slide, wrinkle as she tries to curl closer. Imagine trying to hold in your hand the thing in the world that most wants to hold you. Its not something I'm use to at all, but its something I wish I had more of and more often.

"We should go."
"Yeah, we should."

Neither of us moves.

I pull out away but keep my hands on her arms, guiding her to walk next to me out the door. Back at the car, she takes out two dollars and forces it into my hand. To pay for the parking. I try more than once to stick it back into her hand and she refuses, I relent. My hand again ends up in hers and she traces the veins on the top of my hand. She says something under her breath and then dismisses it when I ask her what it was. I call her gorgeous, she wraps her arm around mine and clings as she puts her head to my shoulder. It was like Linus with a blanket: she felt completely safe with me and I felt completely happy that she understood that kind of physical affection. We probably looked like "that couple" to the woman at the parking booth.

The train station is ten minutes away with traffic. She points out the chip in the windshield and I tell her I got it today, on the way to pick her up. Her eyes widen and she apologizes profusely, saying she wished I never picked her up if it was going to crack my windshield. I tell her that I don't mind, that it'll just remind me of spending an afternoon with her. The corner of her mouth curls up but her eyes get more worried, more consoling.

Her train is late. We sit down on the furnished wood benches at the terminal and watch the arrival and departure sign. I say it reminds me of the end of Say Anything and she giggles to herself, apologizing for reasons she doesn't share. Her hand is glued to mine so hard someone's palm starts to sweat and I'm not sure if its mine.

She doesn't look at me, but instead shuffles as close as she can get without putting her legs across mine, and then she says "I love you so bad." And now I feel like that elderly couple you see sitting around at McDonalds during early mall hours or the kind who feed pigeons in the park and still look at each other with that odd glow of all-knowing youth still in their eyes.

On the station platform, she puts her bag down and my hands instinctively go through her hair again and she coos without making a sound. Like morning fog gently passing over water, she says "I love you so much - but I feel like such a bastard for saying it." and I squeeze her, hugging her harder than before. Her arms lock into my ribs, then my back. She digs in like she's holding on from drowning - or at least like she's in missionary position.

Details falter here. I ask to kiss her and she quietly looks away and says something I can't hear. I nudge her chin up and go for it all the same, with or without permission. Her hands leave me and I wait for her to push me away but instead she tries to frantically find a place to grab hold of me and she balls parts of my shirt up in her fist. I think about leaning back - the movie music should kick in soon or I should at least be Frederic Henry, ready to jump on that train - but realize she's so nervous and weak-kneed she'd probably stumble. She breaks it off and then puts her face into my shirt, muttering embarrassments about kissing in front of other people.

We kiss again. And a third and fourth time. Each one a little shorter and she becomes a little more desperate after each. She buries into me like a tick, she grips, grabs, pulls at me. I've never felt such an overwhelming physical want projected from another human being. Not even in the sexual way but in the sense that physical force alone could get me to never move. "Dear God stay," she said with her fingertips, dug into my back, "Don't go away again."

Details come back right around here. The train pulls up and she stutters "I...I... I have to go."

"I know." (Yes, I used a Han Solo line. No, I didn't mean to but its amusing in hindsight.)

She gets on the train slowly, looking back time after time. Waving the last time before she disappears into the passenger car. I watch the train pull out because it reminded me of when she said not to watch her go into her parent's house and I did anyway.

I get a text message two minutes later - "You've ruined me."

That Time Chuck Palahniuk Replied

October, 2006: The Letter I Sent To Chuck Palahniuk

Piss, shit or fuck.

Given that everything has already been done by Jesus or written by Shakespeare, I find myself properly unable to express myself completely. I’d like to blame those two – but I don’t like to take the easy outs the rest of my Nintendo generation seems to want to. I like difficult situations that define instead of easy answers to redundant questions. I hate rote, but work at a university. Figure that one out.

Enough of that. I’m writing to you as you are one of the last great bastions of western intellect and this is my awful, amateur attempt to save my goddamned eternal soul. Since leaving high school in 1999, I’ve felt largely disconnected and dissatisfied with the majority of everything everywhere. At first, I figured it was just my being shat out into the real world – and keeping busy with large quantities of Sam Adams and fucking a bunch of girls kept me from thinking too heavily on it. Now I’m 25, facing down the barrel of 2007 and have done nothing with my life. No higher education, a menial job, no girlfriend. Unless the afterlife smiles upon a respectable film music collection – I’m pushing zilch.

At the risk of sounding like some terrible rock cliché, it all seems for naught. On one hand, I’m pulled toward the extreme of living some impossible romantic lifestyle as some kind of wandering journeyman. Maybe Chris McCandless had the right idea. On the other hand, I also feel the pull to be a working, shitting, drinking human being that is personable and well-known. The mess of the situation is like Travis Bickle, Willy Loman and Holden Caulfield all rolled into one confused mix. I feel singularly like one of the lost masses.

Everyone tells you that you need to have a career and a wife and a fairly nice car. However, I can’t seem to get my hands around it for reasons I don’t understand. Everything is dissatisfying. People my age seem soft-minded and square-jawed. Either I’m too mature for my age or being unsociable is the new NBC Today Show buzzword.

You want goals? How about my being here a year from now. You want recent accomplishments? How about getting through the last year.

I won’t regale you with the boredom that details my everyday life, save to say I haven’t fucked a woman in a year, I spent the majority of my money on music, I regret quitting smoking and am generally fed up with a whole lot of things. I sense a lot of such things in your books – a protagonist as much afraid of the world as he is being the Übermensch (though I don’t think I’m a Nietzsche-esque creation).

Am I missing something? Twenty-five and still living at home. Am I wrong in being dissatisfied with so much? Is it truly too much to ask for some great moment or crisis to occur, just so I can find out what I really am? Where was that wrong turn I made? Is life always hope with empty meaning?

I’m not asking you for answers, per se. A direction, perhaps. You seem to be an anwser man of sorts and I probably seem as lost and disjointed as this letter.

I truly appreciate the chance to write to you, knowing you’ll read this and give me an honest anwser – be it a “fuck you” or a “fuck that”.

Many ernest thanks to you in advanced for your expected reply and the best of everything to you and yours.

======

November 22, 2006: Chuck's Reply

Dear Justin,

Wow... you want answers from me? After I wrote "Survivor"?

You at least have a pretty nice family, or my guess is that you'd have fled at 18. They must make it pretty comfortable, or you'd be out on your own now. Maybe they like keeping you around.

I hope by the time this arrives you're feeling better. Maybe even regretting your letter, a little. Things are always at their worst just before they change. We seem to have to reach a crisis - suffer enough pain - before we'll abandon our old way of being, and risk something really new.

The trick is always recognizing this and holding on. Yes, life is unstable and slippery and gets sucky fast - but that also means it can get better, really fast.

To help tide you over until better times, I'm sending an early Christmas-like stocking package. Here's some retired book tour stories to fill your head with more darkness. And other sundry stuff to make a mess when you get the box open.

At your age, I was terrified. My worst fear was becoming the cautionary tale my family would tell for generations: Whatever you do with your life, don't end up like Uncle Chuck. I could see myself dead in some Marla Singer downtown hotel room. That said, picture yourself dead. You're dead and rotted and everyone's stopped crying and started to forget how you looked. You are gone.

Now, worst case realized, what does that give you the freedom to do? Give yourself ten days to resolve everything - like you would before a suicide. Tell everyone you love or hate them. Give away stuff. Let go of all the shit you hold on to. My bet is that ten days later, you won't die.

Thats just a secret method I use myself. Like doing your own Human Sacrifice. Die without dying. Then get born. And just in case no one else says it: Merry Christmas.

I'll shut up now,
Chuck Palahniuk

Amanda (Not Her Real Name), Part 3

For over a year, we trade emails and texts. Several times a day. Sometimes twice, some times fifteen times or more. She tells me about how scared she is in her relationship, that her boyfriend is passive-aggressive emotionally abusive. He would never raise a hand to her, but he'd shame her for not loading a dishwasher the way he likes it.

I help as best I can, but tell her theres nothing anyone can do unless she leaves him on her own.

We talk on Skype. Sometimes we talk on the phone. She's the first woman, the only woman to ever use the exact words I've wanted to hear without my goading or leading her to them. She says "I love you" with all the same intensity as a love struck teenager and all the wisdom of someone who has hurt their entire life.

She tells me secrets no one else knows. She tells me about how all her friends disapprove of her boyfriend and how she thinks it won't last. That all my advice is matching up with what everyone else has said already and that she should leave. She goes as far as trying to figure out how'd she move back down here or I up there, balancing out where to live and affordability and her dog.

I'm now carrying the weight and responsibility of a relationship I am not in, so some other asshole can tread water a little longer while the ship sinks. I see this and don't care, I just want her to call me again and again and again after that.

I pick up the phone to call her and she's on the other end without my dialing or the phone ringing. Or she's sitting at her computer at 2 am wondering what I'm doing and an email from me pops up right then, asking her what she's up to. A close friend dies and I call her for comfort; the cat she had since middle school died hours before. A billion tiny moments like this. Too many to count. All supernatural in feeling, all unexplainable to logic. It scares her but she's intrigued, I just revel in it as a sign that everything would work out.

And it did for a while.

Goodbye To All That

Goodbye to longer summer nights, cricket serenatas and long conversations in the dark. To tiki lamps and being the last people at a party, talking to the girl you'll never meet again.

Goodbye to the memories of the 1990s, when we lived in a brighter age. When Pearl Jam was still new, when sci-fi television wasn't pretentious garbage, to hearing Mark Snow's music on Friday night.

Goodbye to that weird, suburban alpenglow during afternoon trips to playgrounds. To laying in the grass with beautiful red haired girls in blue-and-white sundresses. That transition between high school and whatever path brought us here, now beaten to a thin cloud of passing dust.

Goodbye to cool morning sheets, the windows open, the maple leaves touching the screen window as they fall. To weekend morning breakfasts with pancakes and bacon. To long Sundays that dragged on until the dread of Monday crept up right before midnight.

Goodbye to falling in love heedlessly. To that girl who knew that way to look at you and smiled shyly as she put a lock of her hair behind her ear and the warm smell of youth as she put her chin on your shoulder. To not knowing any better and not caring. To being broken hearted and still have the time or the willpower to pull yourself together.

Goodbye to Sousa marching bands at gazebos and comic books for a dollar twenty-five. Goodbye to that sick-sweet smell of hiking trails and tree lines now long gone. To sawdust, asphalt and gravel; grass, tall weeds and blackberry bushes. Classic car shows. Baseball cards. The cat or dog you grew up with. Old suburban legends. Friends you've never seen again.

Goodbye to all that. We were right when we were 16. And nothing here is important anymore.

2012 Was A Bad Year To Be Spider-Man (Spoilers)

I grew up in something of an unpleasant household. If you've ever seen the movie Ordinary People, it's not entirely dissimilar. My mom was full of fake emotions and cold smiles, her live-in boyfriend is a total goddamned tool (and looks like Richard Belzer) and I was stuck there, in that. One of the only ways out was reading comics.

The first one I fell for was Spider-Man sometime in the early nineties right before the big comic book boom. Superman flew, which wasn't very realistic. Batman, though cool, wasn't as cool without powers. Spider-Man was something of a happy medium. He swung around, did amazing feats of gymnastics, ran his mouth at the villain of the month and could lift a car over his head. Sounds good.

I think my first issue was Spectacular Spider-Man #180 which was part of the relentlessly dark Child Within storyline. But despite the fact I was introduced to the wise-cracking wall crawler during a story with such light topics as child abuse, neglect and adulthood guilt - I fell in love with the character and how he moved through the plot. He swung around the city worried about the rest of his life, not unlike how I got around school worrying about home. He was always outmatched by the villains but always walked away, I'd scrap through some fight in the locker room and still make it home. We had similarities.

I read all the Spider-Man comics that came out then. My favorite was either "Amazing" or "Spectacular" depending on the storyline, with the generic "Spider-Man" title in third and the rather blasé "Web Of" title a distant fourth. It was a lot to juggle but thankfully my grandfather adored taking me to the comic shop every week. I have many very strong memories of swinging by T&S Comics and Cards and Dream Factory back in those days.

I ran with Spider-Man until about 1999, so it was a good eight years of my life. I picked up a lot of back issues and trade paperbacks. There was a point that I could tell you the writer and artist on any issue if you told me the title and issue number. My favorite artists was Sal Buschema; when I wanted to be a comic artist his Spidey art was probably my biggest influence along with Bruce Timm's designs on Batman: The Animated Series. I don't draw much anymore, but when I do, those thick blacks and square jaws come out all over again.

A couple years after high school, the first of the Raimi movies came out and I fell hard all over again. The first film (and very, very much the superior second) were goddamned love-letters to the fans. It was as if Raimi went into my brain and pulled out everything right and pure and wrapped it up to hand it to me. "This is for you," he said to me, in a way, not really, but sort of, "everyone will love it but only you will understand it completely."

Arrogant of me? Yes. But that is how deeply those three films spoke to me. I'm not some genius that sees them for what they are and no one else does - but my appreciation may run deeper than most.

This last movie, directed by Marc Webb, was a boring attempt to out tween all the bad supernatural romantic adventures of late. Think of Twilight, swap out the vampirism with spider-powers and you get the jist. However, in the making of the movie, they forgot it was about Spider-Man and not about Peter Parker having a severe case of Aspergers. The film is less about being heroic (and indeed does many unheroic things) and more about someone who is both somehow nerdy and attractively edgy, managing to get a girl (Emma Stone, the one bright spot in a flaccid film) he has no right to deserve because all he does is emotionally take advantage of her. (If you don't believe that last part, the movie ends with him saying "I can't see you anymore" and then 2 minutes later with "But I can't keep that promise" which is way too many mixed signals for anyone, let alone a teenager!, to decipher without an Enigma Machine)

It's obvious that the producers (the same people from the Raimi years) wanted to go left where Raimi went right. The Raimi movies were about heroics and responsibility and proper Horatio Alger themes: Peter gains his powers by accident, loses who he is to them, regains himself when he loses his Uncle to his own inaction and then has many other adventures (Note to self: Spider-Man 2 is more of an origin story than the first one. Make separate entry about just that.). There is also a light/dark segregate father dynamic (Norman Osborne versus Uncle Ben), the legacy of a family line (Harry vows vengeance against Spider-Man, Peter vows against vengeance by being Spider-Man) and all sorts of undercurrents and glimpses of understanding as to why the character has lasted as long as he has. Its almost a Hercules tale: the man with incredible strength and powers is only as heroic as his smallest deeds. After all, Spider-Man lays Norman Osborne to rest in his own highrise apartment.

The most recent film unbinds these ideas entirely. It is actively unheroic. The one example needed is how they handle Uncle Ben's death. In the original 2002 film, Peter watches his uncle die and in a fit of rage, chases the killer to a warehouse where he punches him repeatedly out of grief. In the new film, after Uncle Ben is shot, Parker dons a disguise and runs around New York for nights on end against blonde men who vaguely look like the one who killed his uncle.

The 2002 movie was a crime of passion.
The 2012 movie was an act of unheroic vengeance, willfully acting out for a long stretch of time (days? weeks?) against people of a certain stereotype.

That isn't heroic at all. That isn't Spider-Man.

And now for Amazing Spider-Man 700, where the nefarious Doctor Octopus has switched brains with Peter Parker. Thats right, old Doc Ock is now Spider-Man. I'm not sure why someone thought this was a good idea but I suppose the logic was it didn't sound quite as stupid as the Clone Saga? But the kicker is that Doctor Octopus (now seen as Spider-Man) kills Spider-Man. Well, everyone in New York sees it as Spider-Man killing Doctor Octopus but you get my point.

First off, thats all sorts of ugly. Spider-Man isn't The Punisher; he doesn't kill people and as evil as Doc Ock has been, he's never been much for murder either. He was more of a Mad Scientist type, so he was slightly more cerebral than, oh, The Joker or Sin-Eater or whatever. He was always more interested in making his evil plot work than filling body bags.

But the real point to be made here is this: as a plot, no one would care, but it is probably the worst and most terrible way to end a title after all these years.Your (real) hero dies. The villain wins and impersonates your hero and blah blah blah.

Now we all know this won't last. Peter Parker will come back by some horrible story plot with magic or Thanos or zombies or whatever the flavor of the month is. But did they have to can the book too? Look at the note they're ending the legacy on. Issue 700 is what closes out the title after over 40 years of running and was often Marvel's flagship book and it all amounts to a giant middle finger.

And I take it personally. I have to. I've invested a lot of my own identification (by proxy) in the rights and wrongs and trials of this character. I don't go so far as to say these people are the be-all, end-all and they're ruining the character forever but I do think they're harming it a great deal and pushing the character too far from its center construct. I do think another push this hard would end up making old Web-Head into something near unrecognizable. And where that character goes, so does a part of me - and I am not that kind of Spider-Man.

(Oh, and just in case it didn't occur to you: that means Spider-Ock is sleeping with Mary Jane which is some form of rape if you give it an even cursory glance. So, thank you Marvel and writer Dan Slott for being creepy. Ew.)