I GOT SOMETHING PUBLISHED!!!

www.titangraphicnovel.com is the website for the book, an Original Graphic Novel (or OGN) out now from AH Comics.  It’s 96 pages of awesome, drawn by my good friend and former highschool classmate Andy Stanleigh. 

There’s a fantastic YouTube trailer that my friend Patrick Scopick cut together for me, available here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huYJITbzgkU

Anyway, There is so much more to say I don’t even know where to start.  The National Post ran a brief excerpt from the book today Tuesday August 23, in the Comics Corner of their Arts section.  I’m unbelievably happy.  I have to go buy more copies of the paper, so I’ll leave you with this for now.  But thanks for sticking with the blog even though I haven’t been a very good blogger, I’ll get into it more regularly now, promise.  Any questions or comments shoot them over and follow me on twitter @alphabetkid

-M

To recap, I broke up with someone, dated a bit, had a shit Halloween, met someone I really like, had an excellent Christmas, fell in love and somewhere in there wrote a movie and came up with the concept for another movie (both with my screenwriting partner).  I have not written a word of the novel that I posted a chapter from here last time I posted, but I will, it’s on my list of things to do, just, you know there were other things to get done first.  Oh, I also got downsized, spent two months bumming around doing all kinds of crazy shit and then got a new job which I am very pleased about.  Also the year changed and we are now one year closer to the end of the world, whether that be 2011 or 2012 (awful movie by the by) or some time eons hence when our star goes supernova and obliterates our little blue world. 

I hope all of you have been okay in my absence, I can’t tell you how happy I am that 2009 is finally over, it was the worst year of my life in just about every way imaginable.  2010 is going to be a great year, I can feel it in my bones, in my fingertips, in my heart and in my soul.  I wish all the best for you and yours, and I’ll get into something like a year end recap or a list or something next time.   That’s almost certainly a lie, a month from now I won’t feel like making a list I’ll do Oscar picks instead or some bullshit.  Check back frequently, I am going to post three times a week from now on.

-m

Feel free to critique whatever you like, I’ll ignore most of it anyway, but I’m always curious what other people think.  And if nothing else, trust that there is a point, I already know how the thing ends, just have to get there.

Chapter 1

            “I love you,” he whispers to the dark, not sure if she is awake or already dreaming.  “I don’t know what I would do without you.” 

            “Liar,” the voice in the back of his head says, “liar, liar, pants on fire!”

            “Shut up,” he says to himself, to the voice that taunts him.  He says it too loudly, she stirs and rolls, but thankfully doesn’t wake. 

            “You do to know what you would do without her, you can lie to her if you like, but you can’t lie to me.  You can’t lie to yourself.  If you lost her we’d go crazy.”  The voice holds the hard ‘e’ sound from crazy spinning it off into an irritating whine before it begins to sing the theme song from the Love Boat and David feels more at home.  He wasn’t used to the voices in his head talking to him at that point, it happened only rarely and it usually sounded like someone he knew.  This voice was different, it didn’t sound like someone else, it sounded like him, his real voice, the one he heard in his head when he was thinking or talking, not the voice that the rest of the world heard when he spoke, but his true voice.  He rolls over and spoons the girl in the dark and hopes the voice in his head was wrong, or at least he hopes that he never loses the girl.  He’d seen enough movies, the boy always loses the girl, that’s the point of the second act, and if you didn’t lose the girl you couldn’t get her back for a happy ending at the end of the third act.  He knew that, but he hoped reality was different, for the first time since he had discovered Hollywood he hoped that his life wouldn’t play out like some hack-written rom-com.  For the record, it wouldn’t, but he didn’t know that, not even the voice in the back of his head knew how it would all work out, not then.

David woke to the sound of running water and teethbrushing.  The light slanting in through the venetian blinds told him it was still morning, a nice change, he thought.  He stretched and yawned and rolled over to look at the alarm clock: 6:30am.  She must be on set today, he thought, she never gets up that early.  He closed his eyes for a second, and then felt her lips on his forehead.  He smiled and reached up to pull her back into bed with him.

            “Morning babe,” she said, “thought you were still sleepin’.  Sorry I woke you, I gotta get to work, the car’s downstairs already.”

            “Mmmmm, don’t go, call in sick, stay in bed with me.”  She laughed and pushed him back into the silk sheets. 

            “Can’t do it, hun, they need me today.”

            “Just for a little while then, like twenty minutes, less if we don’t worry about you.”

            “Nice, very nice,” but she was smiling.  “Not all of us can get to work in forty seconds flat, Mr. Cross.  Some of us need things like cars.”

            “It’s a limo, it’ll wait.”

            “But the director won’t.  Baby, I’m sorry, you know I’d rather lie in bed with you all day, but I signed the contract, now I gotta go to work.  I’ll see you tonight okay, come back after your show.”

            “Okay,” he sighed, knowing he had lost that battle. 

            “Say ‘hi’ to Book for me, remind him about the party on Saturday, I know you guys have to work, but it’s not like you can’t be back in LA in no time flat, okay?  Have a great show, I love you.”

            “Love you too.”  And she was gone; all that was left was a hint of perfume on the air.  David debated going back to sleep but sleeping in her bed when she wasn’t there just wasn’t the same, besides he had been forced into a four minute conversation which was two minutes longer than he was usually capable of pretending hadn’t happened.  So he got up and jumped in the shower. 

It was barely seven in the morning and he was already showered and dressed.  He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.  It was too early to wake Book up, too early for just about anything but making movies, and he didn’t do that.  He opted to go for a walk down the Santa Monica beach instead.  It was early, but the surfers were already coming back in getting ready to put on shirts and ties and suits and go to whatever day job they maintained.  A couple homeless people were lying on the beach half asleep or still drunk from the night before, they looked like piles of clothes an army surplus store might be throwing out, which is probably what they were wearing.  David walked by without hardly noticing them, which would have surprised him just a few short years before that.  He was holding a pair of Italian leather shoes in his hand, a ball of socks stuffed into the toe of one of them.  His pants were rolled up to the middle of his calf muscles.  The waves danced over his feet, erasing his footsteps as soon as he had made them, leaving nothing but wet sand in his wake.  He was invisible here.  No one would ever follow his tracks. 

The first time he had seen that ocean, the first time he saw any ocean, he had been about twenty miles farther south.  It was night, a full moon was floating somewhere behind a thick layer of smog and cloud cover.  The sky seemed to glow even though the sun had set hours before, it was as if the heavens were smouldering, a bonfire the morning after the party, all orange coals and smoke.   He had walked or ran most of the way across the country, his feet were so sore they almost wouldn’t hold him any longer and as he crested the ridge over the highway he saw the ocean.  It was a glistening black with rolling lines of whitecaps that crashed on the beach, it was so loud, so magical.  He had never seen anything like it in his life.  For a moment the world stopped and he stared into the blackness of the water and realized there was nowhere left to run.  He had literally come to the ends of the Earth.  He stepped off the grass and fell face first into the sand. 

            He crawled over the sand, forcing his limbs to carry him into the water, it was cold and tasted like tears.  He let the waves carry him out, felt the undertow pull at the rags he had been wearing since his escape.  He stripped them off and lay back on the water riding the waves as they crested and rushed headlong into the beach.  For a moment, a minute, a lifetime, he debated swimming out into the black abyss of the sea and being done with it all, let them find him then, he thought.  But as appealing as that idea seemed the voice in the back of his head, which at the time sounded a lot like Christian’s voice, wouldn’t let him.  “You’re not going to do that, and you know it,” it said.  “Don’t be such a coward, David, they can’t find you, not here.” 

            “But if I got out, they can too.”

            “You’re better than them, they don’t even know to look for a door, how will they ever pick the lock?”

            “They know to look for a door now, I must have escaped somehow.  John’s a brute and a bully, but he’s not entirely stupid, he’ll be looking.  And our fathers knew where the door was all the time, that’s how they got there in the first place.  They’ll come for me, and it doesn’t matter what spell I put on that doorway, they’ll find a way through it, it’s just a matter of time.  The water is so cold, so big, I could just get lost in it.”  It didn’t occur to him to be self conscious that he was fighting with a voice in the back of his head, he had been doing that for almost as long as he could talk.

            “David, you have to live your life,” the voice that sounded like Christian said from inside David’s mind, “because you know I can’t.  You don’t owe me anything, but please brother, don’t do this, go, live.”  Christian’s voice receded into a hoarse whisper that David could no longer make out as a large wave picked him up and fairly threw him back onto the sandy beach. 

            “Well then,” he said, laughing for the first time since he could remember.  “I guess that makes that decision for me.”  He rolled over and lay naked on the sand, staring up at the fiery ember clouds and the hazy yellow circle of the moon.  “So what the fuck do I do now?”  But no voice answered his question and for a while he just lay on the sand enjoying the solitude and the sounds of the ocean.

            “Should have gone with the first plan,” he says to himself as a crest of water soaks through the bottom of his Versace pants, “wouldn’t have met the girl, but then all the rest of it wouldn’t have happened either.”  For a second it seemed as if he was back on that same beach, on that same night, and the wind and the ocean said together: “Coward,” but then he was back and it was daylight and time to go wake Book up.

I’m in Richmond, VA, and it’s July and while this may not be the old south you think about when you think Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, or even Streetcar Named Desire or whatever, Richmond is still kinda old south.  Definitely south of the Mason Dixon, definitely historically important, but also definitely fucking hot.  Let me say that again, it is FUCKING HOT here.  I already wrote some of my impressions of walking around Richmond the other day, but this is a bit different, picture all of this coming out of my mouth with a thick southern drawl, the words falling out of my mouth real slow like, cause in the south everything’s a bit slower.  The heat here isn’t actually that bad, but the humidity is killer.  I mean like it might kill you.  You walk out of some nice AC onto the street and it ain’t like you hit a wall, that would be too impersonal, the humidity here isn’t a wall you slam into it’s a 400lbs man sitting on your chest as he eats a bean burrito and giggles.  I’m figuring out that there’s a reason no one runs here, and it’s cause you will die.  You want to run in the south you join an gym and go find yourself a nice tread mill in a building with air so cold you can practically see your breath, cause you sure as hell are not running outside. 

This is all a bit cliche, but in the south, or anywhere when it gets this hot, but I’m in the south right now, so we’ll go with that, tempers flare just a little bit easier, people stay calm just a little bit less, and everything seems like it’s personal.  It’s fun to watch so long as you’re removed enough from the situation that you aren’t going to get dragged into it yourself.  I just watched a fiftyish black man scream into the intercom of an apartment building for what must have been 10 minutes, I couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, but I was glad I wasn’t involved, cause that dude was angry. 

Anyway, I think I had more to that thought, but it seems to have evaporated so I’ll let it go from there.  But just before I go, a quick update.  What I really really really hoped to get out of this vacation was just some time away, time to think, time to recharge my batteries and put certain things to rest and I hoped that after all was said and done I would have something to say again, something to write, but more than just that, the desire to write it.  And I do, or I’m starting to.  For the first time in months I want to write again, which is pretty fucking awesome.  I don’t know what I’m going to write yet, but I know I have something to say again and the will to write it down and that’s all I’m usually looking for.  Thank god, the last piece that has been missing is in place and I feel like me again, all of me.

-m

Today I saw the Lincoln Memorial.  I’ve seen it before, twice to be exact, but this time was special.  Long time readers, or friends will know that a couple years back I took a road trip with a buddy of mine to literally find America, or at least to see all the things I had theretofore only seen on television and in movies.  I saw New York (a city that immediately felt like home and one I will go back to as often as I can), Washington DC (an odd city of monuments to past glories and white marble) I saw the Moon Tower in Austin (from Dazed and Confused), I went to Vegas, I saw Mount Rushmore, and so many other things besides.  It was an important trip, a great trip and one that for various reasons was not quite as fulfilling as I had hoped, but that’s another story.

I don’t know why I wanted to see all these things, or rather I’m still not sure my reasons for wanting to see them are the real reasons I wanted to see them, which is a bit oblique, and deliberately so, I’m being facetious and serious at teh same time.  That was a hell of a run on sentence.  Neil Gaiman says something about this sort of thing in his novel American Gods, which is about a great many things and is a fantastic read if the ending does leave you wishing for just a little bit more satisfaction, but I digress.  What he said had to do with America and points of power and roadside attractions and the idea that people could feel things, these points of power and they would make the world’s largest rubber band ball and charge people five bucks to see it in one of these places of power.  I went to see some of these places of power, a bunch of them actually, and if I could change anything about that trip it would be that I would have seen more of them, not just the big ones, but the little oddities along the way that I passed doing 80 in the middle of the night without ever knowing they were there.  The only thing I did see that I wasn’t satisfied with was the Lincoln Memorial. 

The first time I was in Washington I was maybe 9 or 10, it’s a bit foggy in my memory, but I do know that I knew what the Lincoln Memorial was (I’d read about it in a comic book) and that at the time of that first visit it was closed for cleaning/repair and I did not get to see it.  I also remember my dad driving around DC looking for the White House and being completely unable to find it, but that again is another story.  The Second time, the time that was part of the road trip and looking for America and all the rest of that, would you believe, it was also being cleaned, and while it was not closed it was covered in Scaffolding that fairly completely obstructed my view of the massive statue. 

All that is really just my way of pointing out why today was special, and important and yadda yadda yadda.  I saw the Memorial, without scaffolding, and now I am happy.  Also had a great dinner at some Italian place a friend recommended to me and in general had a good day.  It was fun spending the day with Tarfia too, and exploring strange new places, or rather rediscovering places we had both been before.  We also went to Arlington and saw JFK’s grave and the tomb of the unknown soldier, where we witnessed the changing of the guards which was also very cool.

I’m in Richmond Virginia visiting some old friends cause I needed a break and they were kind enough to let me come stay with them for a couple days.  I drove down yesterday in my new car, which was fantastic, if somewhat dark, lonely and very very rainy.  Richmond is, as far as I’ve been able to tell from my admitedly short tour through the city last night and hour long walk this afternoon, a city sort of divided.

It might be the outsider perspective, maybe native Richmondites don’t notice, but the city seems to be dying from the inside out.  I walked for blocks and blocks without seeing a single white person, and not that that’s a bad thing, although it is a bit shocking to my far more multicultural sensibilities.  I passed block after block of empty storefronts, closed businesses, boarded up showrooms.  I felt a bit like I was in Detroit again, and I didn’t expect to find that here.  And that’s what I mean about the city dying from the inside, there’s something wrong when local businesses can’t make a living in prime retail space, hell there weren’t even any chain stores in the part of town I was walking through.  I walked for over an hour and didn’t see a single business that looked like it was selling anything I would want to buy, and very few businesses at all until I hit the large office blocks down by the river, but even then there didn’t appear to be any retail or restaurants working.  Just empty storefronts and parking lots.  I’ve never seen so many parking lots.  I can’t even begin to tell you.  What I want to know is where are all the people who are parking these cars in these massive parking lots?  What are they doing here, because I couldn’t find anything to do.

There was also that class race thing that I always notice when I’m in the southern US (well except for Florida, but that’s because the only time I’m in FL I’m at Disney or Universal and the class/race thing doesn’t really impact theme parks).  Admittedly it was lunch time while I was walking around, but there were an awful lot of African Americans just sitting at bus stops and perching on stoops with no aparent place to be, and for every well dressed professional looking black man, I saw fifty others in wife beaters and old jeans smoking cigarettes and basically doing nothing.  What is that about?  I don’t pretend to be an expert on Race relations, not in my own country let alone in someone else’s, and I have no solution that doesn’t sound pretentious or naive, but seriously, get a fucking job.  When I did walk far enough to find white people they looked like most of the people I work with, dressed in business cas, walking with a sense of purpose towards this office or that, basically they looked like they had places to be and things to do, which would make them the polar opposites of the aformentioned stoop perching African Americans.  Maybe my view of race relations is coloured by the fact that I am a middle class white male living in a country that is significantly (though not entirely) less racist then our neighbor to the south.  Maybe being white means I can’t or won’t understand.  Maybe being male means I’ll never quite get suffrage either, who knows.  But what I do know is that life is what you make of it, and carrying a chip on your shoulder because three hundred years ago someone you are barely related to was taken hostage and sold (and fuck that is a deplorable thought, but it was three hundred years ago) might not be the best use of your time or energy.  That’s just my two cents, what the fuck do I know.

Anyway, I’m in Richmond, I think I’m going to go see Roanoke, because it interests me, have to hit DC only to see the Lincoln Memorial (again, but that’s a whole other story and probably a whole blog post about that one thing) and I’ve been told I have to go to Williamsburg and Jamestown, though I don’t know exactly why.  Would also like to see the beach while I’m here.  It’s been too long since I was in an Ocean.

Anyway, I’ll report on my vacation as it happens, at the moment I’m going to settle in and read a book for a bit while I wait for my hosts to return.

-m

Martin Streek started working at CFNY when he was still a teenager, and given the timelines and the way these sorts of things work that made him 40ish last Monday.  His bio at the Edge website was almost certainly only half true, so you can discount the fact that it said he was 55, I don’t believe he was that old, unless he had failed a number of grades in school.  So far as I know the only job he ever had was working for The Edge, which he did for 20+ years.

Last spring he was fired, or let go or whatever euphamism you would like to use for, as far as I can tell, no FUCKING REASON AT ALL.  He didn’t get to say goodbye, he just vanished a month before Edgefest, his bio was removed from the Edge site and his time slots were given to other DJs.  No one talked about it, it was like a dirty little secret.  I’m guessing, and this is just a guess, he either pissed off the wrong person, or was a victim of Corus making a decision about direction and branding and whatever and deciding that Martin no longer fit the corporate mold.  Corus is the huge entertainment conglomerate that owns CFNY. 

Now, I’ve never had a job longer than a couple years, and I’ve never been fired, so I can only imagine what that must have felt like for Martin.  In all the years I listened to him, all the years I would run into him at clubs the only thing I can honestly say about him was he loved his job more than anything, save music, which he loved in a way that is usually only possible for a 14 year old.  Martin never got old, he still loved his music the way we all did in highschool, when it was important, when we cared, before 9-5 bullshit bogged us down and we got old.  I think that certainly it took a toll when he was told he would have to grow up, when he would no longer be the longest running DJ on CFNY.  I think Martin had a lot of demons, but I think that is what ultimately pushed him over the edge, so to speak.  This isn’t to say it is the management of Corus Enntertainments fault that he did what he did, but it stands to reason someone is going to blame them, and that’s not too far fetched. 

It’s not the way I would want to go out, but like I said, I wasn’t there. 

That’s my 2 cents, and probably a couple other people’s 2 cents too, just for good measure.  I maintain that this sucks more than I can put into words, and that I am deeply saddened by his sudden exit not just from radio, although that pissed me off, but from life in general. 

65 people checked this blog yesterday looking for answers to a question we are all asking and to which there probably is no answer.  That’s the biggest day this blog has ever had, and that should say how much he meant to so many of us.  Remember the man, thevoice and the music and the halloween costumes and fuck the rest.  None of the rest matters.  Don’t be angry and don’t look for answers, use that time to remember him, put on London Calling and kick back and remember.  Do something good with that energy, don’t scrounge it on wasteful things.

I’m listening to London Calling now, and I’m sure somewhere Joe Strummer and Martin are looking down at all of us while they chat about killer guitar riffs and awesome bass lines.  Keep a seat warm for us up there, we’ll see you again one day.

That really has nothing to do with why I’m writing this now, though.  This has been a fantastic week for me personally, and yet it has also been a very sad week for me too.  For any of you who don’t know Martin Streek, former DJ on 102.1 the Edge (or CFNY depending on how old you are) a local Toronto radio station, and the only one I listen to, killed himself a couple days ago.  Now I’m sure you’re probably thinking that’s too bad, but really, it’s not like I knew him why would it be overly sad.  And that’s the part I’m not 100% sure of myself. 

Over the years it seems that a great many fantastic things that have happened in my life have been done to a soundtrack made up largely of bands I first heard on the Edge, and since Martin was my favorite DJ a lot of them were heard with his voice introducing them or commenting on them.  I think in some ways I can link almost my entire musical taste to the music that he played for me first.  He loved the Clash and NIN and Queens of the Stone Age and was just so passionate about music.  I was playing his live to air broadcasts long before I was old enough to go to the clubs he was broadcasting from, and when I became old enough I tended to frequent the clubs he played in.  Whiskey Saigon and Joe and of course my all time favorite, the Phoenix.  I met him a few times, I doubt he remembered me from time to time, but he was always very friendly and would talk to you like a normal person, which I always thought was about the coolest thing in the world.  I even played a game of pool against him once, a very long time ago, he won, but bought me a beer anyway. 

When I look back at the last couple decades of my life his voice is a constant refrain in the background of my best memories, my most fun times, and I’m just sorry he’s gone.  He loved Halloween, I think even more than I do.  He loved music and made other people love it all the more for his enthusiasm and spirit.  I can still here him saying “nice” after a hot set by DJ Dwight at the Phoenix, or breaking some new band on the Thursday 30. 

This isn’t probably getting the point across that I was trying to make, so I’m going to cut it out here, but first, my condolences to his family and friends and fans, I missed him the last time I was at the Phoenix, and I miss him now too.

Rest in peace, Martin, thanks for the music.

-m