A Firey Retreat From The Stars

It struck me, while doing research for this io9 post, that my youth was filled with really, really bad American sitcoms. Not just the traditional Saved By The Bell – although I watched that and the New Class and College Years spin-offs, all of which ran on Sunday mornings at 9am on Channel 4 and were watched and beloved by many college students trying not to think too hard about anything after the night before – but shows even worse: Californian Dreams, or The Strange World of Alex Mack. They’d be shown at strange times, of course, the way that many American shows turned up in different time slots for British audiences (Buffy and Dawson’s Creek finding homes at 6pm on weekdays, same as the Star Treks, because that was apparently the stated “import television” timeslot, an alternative for the news bulletins on BBC 1 or ITV at the same time), but I’d always be able to find them nonetheless.

When I first moved here, I blamed by American Culture Hunger on growing up on Marvel and DC Comics; not just the stories, but the advertisements that promised exotic toys, television shows and foods (“What are these things you call… ‘Twinkies’?”), and I still think that accounts for a lot of it. But, as I looked up show after show after show on YouTube last week, I realized that the strange unreality of teen-centric American television programming had a lot to do with it, as well.

Which is to say, just another way in which the reality proved to be nothing like what I expected.

The Stories I Never Tell, Part 23

I am, again, crushed by deadlines, and in lieu of new content, thought I could share something that has languished in my “Maybe one day, if it’s good” files for more than two years, now. These are – despite appearances otherwise – quick notes to myself that I wrote after thinking about children’s fiction and trying to write a children’s graphic novel to pitch to a particular publisher. I never finished my thoughts -and, later, got very bogged down in process and format – and never pitched the project, but this idea still pops up in my mind, every now and again, reminding me that somewhere or another, there’s a story worth telling in here if I can manage to get to it.

RUMBLESTILTSKIN

Our heroine is Amy Guess: an 8-year-old girl, the daughter of two super-smart doctors (and sister of an annoying younger brother, who she’s sure is her parents’ favorite. But isn’t that always the way?), who always feels like she’s a disappointment. Her parents tell her that they love her, but why couldn’t she spend more time on her studies? Her friends at school talk about America’s Next Top Model and their new popstar crushes, but she can’t join in because her mom and dad don’t let her watch anything except for PBS or listen to anything other than NPR these days. One Christmas, while all her friends talk about what Santa is going to bring them, she’s forced at admit the truth: Her mom and dad told her as soon as she was young enough to understand that there is no Santa Claus. “Magic isn’t real,” they always tell her. “That’s why you should study hard and try to do well in school, so you can learn how everything really works.”

Then, on Christmas morning, she woke up and found that her house was empty, apart from her bed. No furniture. No family. Nothing, except for her and her bed.

And Rumblestiltskin.

“Don’t you mean Rumplestiltskin?” she asks him. Her parents made sure that she spent her fourth year reading old fairy tales and studying up on their origins and societal effects.

No, he says. Rumblestiltskin. Rumple is his brother, and he was dumb anyway. Rumble is a much better munchkin; he only tries to show people that magic is real. He’d been watching her family for awhile now, and had gotten mad by repeatedly hearing that they didn’t believe in magic, so he’s gotten rid of them. He’s stolen them all away and made it seem as if they didn’t exist, ever. The only reason he kept the 8-year-old girl around is because she at least seemed to think that maybe magic was possible.

Well, that, and one other reason.

If she wants, she can have her family back. She just needs to beat Rumble to do so. One game per family member.

I have far too many of these “90% complete in my head” graphic novel ideas; ask me about the one about the magician and the discovered diary one day.

Publishers, start your bidding, says he for cheap comic effect.

I Lost My Faith In The Summer Time

The news that Noel Gallagher has, apparently, quit Oasis makes me feel both sad and curiously nostalgic. Oasis have never been my favorite band, but they’re a band that I have a curious love for that’s as born of the fact that they were so omnipresent during a specific part of my life as it is of any particular song they’ve recorded; instead of being a band, they’re an experience, an event (or series of events) in a way that more pretentious, more interesting bands could only ever hope to be.

When I think of Oasis, I think of the release of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? and the fact that it was everywhere at the time. A friend told me in all seriousness that the reason he hadn’t bought it was that he didn’t need to; if he wanted to hear it, all he had to do was go into a store, and it’d be playing, or turn on the radio and flick between channels. I was in art school at the time, and it was played all the time there, as well, the only band and album that everyone could listen to without complaint (Well, maybe some complaint), our resident DJ and dance music fan commenting that the (shitty, lazy) line “All your dreams are made/When you’re chained to the mirror and the razor blade” was “so true, man” and describing the Beatles-but-less-so songs as “bangin’.”

Thing is, as much as the band members tried to make it otherwise with multiple and varied idiotic public statements, it really was kind of hard to hate Oasis. Sure, you could think they were dull, unoriginal and graceless, and all of that is true, but at the same time, they have this… heart? authenticity? dim-witted charm? something like that, that makes them oddly winning, nonetheless. They never deserved all the hype, the adoration and blind obedience that they were given, but at the same time, I can never really believe that there’s not some anti-snobbery pose involved with those who complain that they’re completely without worth, either.

For my part, I liked them when they tried to “rock” less and got poppier (“Whatever,” even though it’s even more ripped off than anything else they did, “She’s Electric,” “Round Are Way,” “Who Feels Love” etc.) and, of course,  Noel’s acoustic songs were generally enough to win me over easily as well. Being naturally contrary, I think they got more interesting with their later (less popular, arguably less relevant) albums, but that might just be because the production and arrangements got better even as they got bloated and more pointless. But nevertheless, if Noel doesn’t do his traditional about-face and rejoin the band within the next month or so, I’ll be sad that Oasis is no more; they were an important part of my youth, even if I’m not entirely sure why.

Ring Ring. Ring Ring. Hello?

If I am ever captured, for some currently unknown reason, by some currently unknown parties, and it is decided, for yet more currently unknown reasons, that I have to be interrogated and put through some unspeakably cruel psychological torture, then one thing about that whole scenario is known to me: Exactly what form the torture that will ultimately break me will take.

I shall be forced to wait for a phone call.

It sounds ridiculous, I know, but on the rare occasions when I know that I am going to be called by someone but I don’t know what time, and I can’t call them just to make it happen sooner – Usually, this will be some kind of “official” phone call, like a work thing, or a doctor, or whatever – the entire day before the call happens becomes completely wasted. Instead of doing anything productive, I start purposefully making myself “busy,” but it’s the kind of “busy” that means lots of small, ultimately meaningless distractions instead of anything actually useful. But, dammit, don’t those pillows need plumping?

After enough of this that even I’ve become distraught, I then turn to the more-unsuccessful-than-you’d-think theory of just staring at the phone, willing it to ring. Amazingly, this usually fails to produce the desired effect no matter how intently I gaze, but I fail to learn from my experiences, and keep doing it for far too long nonetheless (On the very rare occasions that it does ring at this point, I inevitably drop the phone in surprise).

Finally, I try and convince myself that the phone call is never going to happen: Oh, it’s 4 o’clock, that’s far too late, why would they call now? Oh, well, I think, and try to trick myself into acting as if everything is normal, just to break the strange pause I’ve placed myself on. It never really works, though: I can’t take a couple of steps without turning around, nervously, and looking back at the phone.

Which doesn’t ring.

The Forest, The Trees

Call me an only-partially reformed shitstirrer if you must, but with the news of Ted Kennedy’s death, I found myself looking at right wing political blogs to see how they reported the story. Michelle Malkin was respectful:

The U.S. Senator from Massachusetts succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 77 tonight. Put aside your ideological differences for an appropriate moment and mark this passing with solemnity.

There is a time and place for political analysis and criticism. Not now.

Same with Powerline:

With the passing of Sen. Edward Kennedy, we can expect the usual suspects — liberal talking heads, Senate colleagues and the like — to tell us how Kennedy was a giant of the Senate, among the most influential Senators of the 20th century, etc.

This time, the usual suspects will be right.

I was, I admit, surprised a little and heartened: Even in the insanely partisan American political landscape, there’s such a thing as respect for the dead! Even Malkin – who clearly disagreed with the man’s politics – offered up a somber, sober quiet disagreement that focused instead on the man instead of the politics. Score one for basic human decency, right? And then, I got to RedState.

RedState, for those who aren’t familiar with it, calls itself

the leading blog for right of center online activists… [It is] the most widely read right of center blog on Capitol Hill and is the most cited right of center blog in the media.

How do you think the “most widely read right of center blog on Capitol Hill” remembered Kennedy? Well, there’s this:

I can’t say that I’ll miss him. He, to me, represented all that is wrong with Washington — a kingdom of nepotism and worship at the alter of failed liberal policies that get repeated ad infinitum.

And, in another post, there’s this:

It is traditional, upon the passing of an important and famous person – however controversial – to find some good words to say. This is not an easy task in the case of Ted Kennedy, a man whose personal life ranged from alcoholism to debauchery to sexual harrassment to (sadly, uncharged) second-degree murder, and whose public career entailed the embrace of nearly every foolish, ruinous and cruel political idea of the past five decades and whose most enduring legacy is installing the bitterly polarized modern Supreme Court confirmation process.

There’s also this, in a third post on the subject:

However, it is also worth noting that Kennedy was personally and politically a hypocrite, that he wilfully slandered men more honorable than he in the service of legalized abortion (and in so doing poisoned the judicial confirmation process in this country, probably forever), and that he built a political career out of provoking class warfare despite having been been born with a diamond spoon in his mouth and having everything he ever wanted handed to him on a silver platter.  Insofar as he was a man of any religious faith at all, he was nominally a Catholic, a faith he besmirched repeatedly with the grave sin of scandal: a cornerstone of Kennedy’s entire public career centered upon using his position of leadership and prominence to present abortion (categorically defined by the Catholic church as a mortal) sin as good and normal, to say nothing of Kennedy’s many other failings which those who looked to him for example might follow.  In the later stages of his career, Kennedy was not content to rest upon his laurels, but spent most of his time making the world safer for terrorists.

Yes, three different posts attacking a man who’d died less than 24 hours before. If it’d been one post, that almost would’ve been better, but the fact that three different people piled on new accusations one after another just makes me feel sad, although that word is too small to explain it properly. I kind of want to ask “Really, RedState? Really?” but also kind of know that the answer would be “Yes, really, that man wanted to kill America and we’re not so sure that you don’t, either.”

I Had A Dream, Last Night, And You Were In It

It was the first time I was in Portland, years ago, and it was New Year. I can’t really remember what New Year it was; 2006? Who knows. All I remember is the dream, but even as I write that, I know it’s not true. What I really remember was waking up after the dream and just knowing, with a certainty that I can’t explain and don’t understand, that the word “pistachio” was the most important word in the world to me.

What little I really remember of the dream was that I had been told by someone that Pistachio was the thing that had made me rich, famous and successful. Or, perhaps, just happy. Pistachio – and what Pistachio actually was wasn’t even hinted at in the dream – was, somehow, the key to my future.

It was one of those dreams that you wake up and the world is different, as if that dream was somehow meaningful and magical and revealed all manner of secrets about the Way That Things Are… except that all this dream had really done was make me wonder what Pistachio really was.

Ever since then, “pistachio” has been my favorite word, my magic talisman. My iPhone is called “Pistachio,” and my computer, just in case. But I keep thinking that, one day, I’ll wake up after another secret dream and know exactly how to make my Pistachio dream come true.

Marriage Counseling, Marvel-Style

Introducing the best argument for Marvel Comics having ceased to do romance comics by 1987: The unedited subplot pages from Amazing Spider-Man #275:




Oh, comics. When will I ever tire of your ability to handle complex issues in a complex manner?

Eyes Bigger Than My Stomach

I am not, if truth be told, a big eater. It’s somewhat of a running joke, my limited palette and the foods that I have some entirely random and inexplainable dislike for (For example: Rice. As many have asked me in exasperation, who doesn’t like rice? The answer, it seems, is me and me alone, and I can’t even explain my dislike. It’s a texture thing, on some level, but also some bizarre intellectual thing as well. I am suspicious of rice, of the blandness and the size and the way it looks. I feel that it’s up to something, and any food that is up to something doesn’t get past my lips easily, unless it’s accompanied by chicken korma). I watch shows like Top Chef and The Next Food Network Star and just don’t understand why some dishes are supposed to be wonderful and others a crime against the culinary arts; it’s like a language that I know exists but can’t even make a guess about trying to understand. Food, in other words, is my Serbo-Croat.

And yet, I have all these food memories, despite myself. For years, when I was a kid, my favorite food was not just a cheeseburger, but a cheeseburger from one particular restaurant in my hometown, because I just knew that it was different and better than every other cheeseburger around. There was never anything I could explain about why that was – Was it sweeter, somehow? Was there a different type of cheese, or a different type of bun? I have no idea, even now, and yet I can close my eyes right now and remember the taste exactly. The only thing I could say, when asked, was that it tasted more red.

I remember, years ago, reading Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History Of The Senses and discovering synesthesia for the first time. I can’t remember what the examples were, in the book, but the idea of perceiving senses using other senses made perfect sense to me, because I realized that I’d done it all my life. Both taste and hearing are things that I visualize, without meaning to; I could never explain the way that the sweet potato gnocchi at Da Flora in San Francisco actually tasted, even though I loved it so much I wanted to have a second helping immediately and wouldn’t shut up about how good it was for days, but I could tell you that it felt like a dark red that faded into black at times, inviting and warm and comforting, without a second thought.

And yet, the way food actually looks? It makes no sense to me. Almost nothing I eat for the first time tastes like I imagine it should, after seeing it. My eyes and my taste buds are at war, it seems, trying to tell my brain the way that the world is. And, most of the time, my eyes, and my imagination, win that battle without breaking a sweat.

Where Am I? Why Do I Feel This Way?

And this one is for Sterling Gates.

When I was fourteen or so, Jesus Jones seemed like the coolest band in the world. Admitting this now, to be honest, feels more than slightly embarrassing, because looking up their old songs and videos on YouTube reveals that the opposite is actually much more the case:

Oh, this sincerity! The inability to lipsync!

And yet, it was 1989 (And, later, 1990! And 1991!), when the idea that Jesus Jones’ particular brand of indie pop was somehow the future, that it was finding some common ground between the pop that we knew and loved and was safe and familiar and the techno that was alien and more than slightly scary to the me I was then (Oh, how horrified I would’ve been to see myself eight years later, staying up all night to dance to David Holmes DJing way past the official curfew because no-one wanted to leave and we all just wanted to dance and dance and dance). There was such optimism and complete lack of threat to songs like “International Bright Young Thing” and “Real Real Real” that I couldn’t fail but be sucked in and tell myself that, yes, this is what the music of the future would sound like.

It didn’t last, of course; I started listening to other things as soon as the band’s first flush of success ended – even though I had liked them before their hits, starting back when a friend in school let me listen to “Info Freako,” from their first album and still my favorite song of theirs – and realized that there was more to life to Mike Edwards’ brand of electropop (In fact, it was around this time I started listening to REM, and that was a saga all by itself). But occasionally I wonder what happened to them, and what would’ve happened if they’d been as important to music as I once thought they were.

Lost En Route to San Diego

(While I spend this weekend writing the new Onomatoepeia, here’s last month’s.)

As I type this, I am ignoring the warning being delivered – in an entirely bored and unconvincing manner – by an air stewardess, telling us that the fasten seatbelt signs are no longer illuminated despite the fact that her announcement was interrupted by the tell-tale bing-bong of said signs being turned back on. You can tell, from the flat tone and dead eyes of the stewardess as she talks that the plane isn’t the only thing with an autopilot, but this particular one has quite clearly already been engaged.

(When I was a kid, the concept of an autopilot was ridiculously exciting; I imagined it like the parts of Knight Rider where KITT took over, as if the pilot would talk to the plane’s controls and say that he needed to take a break, and the plane would talk back and then engage turbo boost or something. Even today, I find something oddly and wrongly thrilling about the word “autopilot.” Isn’t technology great?, part of me says to the rest of me, and the rest of me just smiles weakly and nods and hopes I’ll shut up soon.)

I’m in the air, anyway. That’s what I really meant to say when I started this, that I’m flying, G. Willow Wilson-style, to San Diego for this year’s Comic-Con (And now you get an idea about when this was written, and can frown accordingly). This wasn’t the plane I was supposed to be on; arriving later than original estimate, as Kurt Heasley once sang, put paid to that plan and thankfully a seat on the next plane out was available. But there’s something about this particular plane that’s freaking me out, a little. You see, I’m not the only person on it.

Well, obviously, I’m not; since I abandoned by Donald Trump-esque life of financial debauchery back in the late 1990s, I’ve flown with the rest of you riff-raff even on flights across the world, when everyone involved would’ve rather I’d've been on a different plane altogether – I can’t help it, I cry when watching in-flight edits of popular Hollywood blockbusters, especially when they’re of the quality of Bring It On! and X-Men: The Last Stand – but that’s not really what I meant. What I mean is, I know other people on this plane.

There’s a weird feeling when you’re on a plane, thinking that it’ll be you and hundreds of strangers so that you can easily fall asleep and drool, if that’s what you need to do, because you’ll never see any of them again, and suddenly you see friends and familiar faces walking past you in the aisle, falling over themselves and their luggage. Maybe it’s because I’ve watched too many disaster movies, but by the time you’re on your fourth “coincidental” meeting of someone you know, you start to get nervous, as if someone or something has gathered you all together for nefarious purposes that surely can’t end well. You go from thinking, “Oh! It’s fellow Savage Critic Douglas Wolk!” to “Wait, Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover? What’re the odds?” and then, all of a sudden, it’s “Seriously, is that really Dark Horse’s entire publicity team? What’s going on?”

(Please note: I have no idea if it’s Dark Horse’s PR team or not. I don’t know what they look like. I just have a feeling, not unlike in Star Wars, when Darth Vader knew that Luke Skywalker was nearby. There’s a disturbance in the Force.)

I shouldn’t be quite so nervous, of course; it’s a flight to the San Diego Comic-Con from Portland, which none other than Comix Experience alumnus Jeff Lester can’t help but refer to as “Comicville” every time he mentions how jealous he is that I moved here – Although, in his case, it’s not the amount of comic folk that live there as much as the fact that it’s the home of the Waffle Window, which is literally the back window of a restaurant where you can purchase candied waffles with all manner of savory and sweet accompaniments, that causes his personal little green demon to pop out like Jeph Loeb’s Rulk can only dream of. We’ve covered the sheer weight of comic folk in the general population of Stumptown before, but suffice to say that it’s a city that greeted the news that Invincible Iron Man and Uncanny X-Men writer Matt Fraction would be moving there with what amounted to a collective shrug of the shoulders and disinterested “huh,” as if someone had just excitedly announced that the Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen was, in fact, disappointing when judged purely on a level of character development as viewed through the prism of the short-lived Dogma movement, which sought movies filled with a half-improvised “realism” performed by amateur actors so as to create an authentic and authentically disappointing viewing experience; there’s just an inevitability that Fraction would come to call Portland home. It’s like a comics black hole.

That said, I was nonetheless panicked when Fraction started twittering the joys of Jeff Lester’s beloved Waffle Window the other day, if only because it’s about two blocks from my house. In my defense, my reaction was less “OMG, famous comic writer Matt Fraction is so close to my house that, were my house to explode in some freak unlikely accident at this very moment, he would likely be hit by a fragment of flaming debris, possibly that Watchmen action figure that someone mysteriously sent me without any explanation whatsoever that I neither want nor need and yet find myself unable to get rid of because I have a compulsive need to keep all presents, even ones from complete strangers who thought to leave no means of identification with said gift, just on the off-chance that they would one day visit and ask where said gift was and I didn’t want to hurt their feelings,” and more “Stop talking about the Waffle Window, dammit! Then everyone will want to go and I will never be able to snag free samples of the delicious chocolate-covered pearl waffle!”

(Portland’s siren call to comic people spreads far and wide, I discovered recently. My eleven year-old niece visited this last week, and used any given opportunity to talk about her desire to become a cartoonist; we’d be hanging out, doing nothing much and suddenly she’d be filled with the spirit of comix to declare that she was going to become famous by making comic books – Weirdly enough, only comic books, and not comics, she announced at one point. Without the “books” suffix, she wasn’t interested, and found herself unable to even say the word “comics” without a sneer and shudder, if “books” wasn’t involved. After maybe the third time when she told me that just maybe I wasn’t aware that words and pictures when used in combination could create a potent storytelling medium with which a wide variety of tales could be told, I realized that she hadn’t come to visit my wife and I at all; she’d simply followed Portland’s Cosmic Comic Homing Signal.)

Bearing all of this in mind, perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised that the plane is full of people involved in some way with the comic industry. In fact, wouldn’t it be more surprising that a plane leaving from Portland and going to the city that’s holding the largest comic convention in the country opening on this very day didn’t have comic blood flowing through its passengers? And yet… and yet…

And yet, I can’t shake the weird feeling that I got when seeing everyone get on and recognizing them. It was like I had slipped into my very own comic-centric episode of Lost, and that the plane was destined to crash on some mysterious island in the middle of nowhere – Oh, alright, let’s just call it Alcatraz. SF is totally on the way, after all; we’re probably flying over it right now as I type – and we’ll be forced to live out some long-winded and improbable existence filled with smoke monsters, three-toed statues and assholes called Ben and Jacob.

The worrying thing is that Paul Tobin could kind of pull off the John Locke thing, if he shaved off the moustache. He’s got the hair, the charm and – more worryingly – the surprising ability to regain the ability to walk when in the presence of supernatural islands in the immediate neighborhood. I know, it’s not something you’d immediately guess while reading the latest issue of Marvel Adventures Spider-Man, but trust me. I’ve met the man, and he can totally step with the best of them just powered by the sheer belief that there’s probably a supernatural island out there somewhere. Probably the one that tried to eat all the original X-Men back in Giant Size X-Men #1.

But I digress.

(Actually, while I’m digressing, I’m now trying to figure out just who the comic equivalent of Jack would be. It’s a no-brainer that Mark Millar would be Charlie – the accent! The slight crapness! Come on! – and Gail Simone, clearly, would have to be Kate just because of the hilarious online fan mentality that only seems to be able to think of Gail when trying to think of women writers in the industry – Somewhere, Kathryn Immonen is crying, you insensitive jerks. But Jack? Who has that curiously unbecoming mix of zeal, self-importance and “occasional” 100% pure jerkiness? Are we going to have to give Joe Quesada a work out and a buzz cut to make this happen? That just seems cruel. Help me out, people.)

The consequences of such a crash could be catastrophic to the comic industry, however. Few people remember now that The Great Comics Crash Of The 1990s that most now think of as a simple metaphor for industry-wide near-collapse brought on by companies over-extending through a combination of greed and misplaced belief in the longevity and loyalty of an audience as much fired by short-term gain and fadism as a genuine love of the medium or its characters actually started with an actual plane crash, when a small plane carrying John Denver, the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly and Todd McFarlane’s desire to be a comic creator plunged into the watery depths of the Bermuda Triangle, as predicted in Barry Manilow’s chillingly melodic oracular dirge. If the plane I was on as I write to you now was to suffer a similar fate, I can only imagine what the consequences would be.

But since you asked: Even if you’re not a fan of Tobin, Coover, Wolk or arguably the Dark Horse publicity team if my entirely-unlikely psychic urge happens to be correct even though I have only met said publicity team a couple of times and can’t really remember what any of them look like – and if you’re not, then why not? They all do good work – consider that the comics community of Portland, Oregon, would be devastated by the disaster. Outside of their inevitable immediate response – a series of political comic books about the dangers of lax air safety laws that double as fundraisers for the new “WTF, Alaska Airlines, I Mean, Seriously” scholarship fund that would help wannabe cartoonists learn how to become creators and/or critics, with each issue themed around a particular victim of the crash – no-one from Portland would ever feel safe to board a plane ever again, meaning that San Diego would become a creator wasteland and Stumptown would take its place as The Most Comic Of All Conventions. The city of San Diego, as a result, would fall into disrepair and ultimately take all of California down with it, leading to the rest of America having to launch a full-scale attack against the apathetic yet well-tanned hordes threatening to infect the other 49 states, 28 Days Later-like. The country would become engulfed in a brand new, yet updated for today’s more horror-movie-centric zeitgeist, civil war that would shock and amaze the world… and that’s all before six people from our flight would reappear and hold very unconvincing press conferences about their experiences following the crash.

I think you can see why I’m worried.

And yet, there’s always the possibility that the remaining twenty minutes of the flight will be pain- and disaster-less. Just as Grant Morrison holds the magical ability to make his writing come true (Especially embarrassing for him following the release of those Spawn issues in the mid-90s, when he became an undead soldier of indeterminate race trapped in a war between religious forces with fancy speech balloons and computer coloring), maybe I have a similar ability to prevent what I write from coming true. If you’re reading these words, it means that I landed safely, and all is right with the world, after all. Either that or

Note: This document, found on a laptop recovered at the crash site of Alaska Flight 576 from Portland, Oregon, was unfinished, but contained a request that it be forwarded to Brian Hibbs in case of emergency. It is presented here as a tribute to the missing, presumed stuck on an island with lots of strangers who like to have flashbacks to their unusually interesting and intrigue-filled lives, Graeme McMillan. Namaste, as our Dharma Initiative colleagues like to say.