1 I wish the week went as fast as the weekend.
2 This one flew.
3 I remember visiting Caitlin and Josh up in Sac, and something about the building of shelves.
4 I remember going to Home Depot and buying things: pieces of wood and tools and things.
5 I also remember being up to my ears in papers, pencils, and alligators. I heard the sound of tape measures, voices, drills and saws. I didn't see much.
6 When you teach, you sometimes carry your desk in your car, and then you carry the entire thing on your back. You see nothing.
7 In my imagination I walked a pack mule through the hot streets of Laredo.
9 Happens. We lose track. We disappear into a dry sea of papers, grades, and names. Our necks ache. Someone pulls us away. We need a laugh. It is essential.
10 We did get goofy and do some guitar and singing on Saturday night.
11 Watched a little teevee and ate some fun stuff late.
12 We laughed a lot.
13 Caitlin opened the closet and everything smelled wonderfully new; it was that carpentry smell of freshly cut wood and new shelves.
14 She built shelves in her closet.
15 I loved it. I put down the school stuff and we continued to laugh until we got sleepy.
16 I awakened yesterday morning, went outside to watch the sun rise, and hurried back to doing still more school stuff.
17 At one point Josh and I discussed how cool Batman was. We talked comics. I loved comic books when I was young.
18 The conversation brought back memories of walking to the Rexall drug store when I was a kid in South City. That small store had THE comic book rack, which squeaked when you turned it. The squeaking became the sounds of magical lands, other dimensions, goofy laughter, and eye-popping comic-book covers. The pages smelled of news print and musty imagination.The effect was magicaI. I checked the rack periodically for new editions of Action, Adventure, Detective, Superman, and nearly all things DC. The early days were DC.
19 Back then we had to walk across our version of a sandlot in order to reach the drug store. Ours was a hard-hit dirt lot with sticky weeds and chunks of buried cement for bases. They lay crooked, but perfectly packed in and surrounded by hard dirt.
20 That lot of land led to the Colonial Bakery, a small factory that stood a distance away, somewhere along what one might call the right-field line. The roof of the bakery shot steam in the air, but its real joy was the smell of warm bread it sent across the field and through our neighborhood.
21 On bake days the entire neighborhood smelled of freshly baked bread.
22 That was usually a cue to take a stroll across the lot, past the bakery, through a sewer or two, and back up a small hill that led to the See's Candy store that stood at the corner of Spruce Avenue and El Camino Real.
23 The stoplight at that corner had a crosswalk leading straight to the doorway of the Rexall and the rack with what seemed like hundreds of comic books.
24 I would look at all of them, many of which I had already read. If the day were lucky, I would come home with a brand new edition of Adventure Comics, a Porky Pig, and maybe even a Giant Batman Annual.
25 The Giant Annuals were the best purchase for the money. For a quarter, you could get four or five comic books all rolled into one.
26 Of course they were simply repeats of older ones, but sometimes I'd get lucky and get a few I hadn't read.
27 If you were a real comic book aficionado. you didn't mind reading the same story over and over. Nothing since has matched it. Maybe nothing ever will.
28 Moving on, Part One: I knew when I began writing this that I would never have the time to bring that nostalgic past to my kind readers, but the smell of the weeds, the long, lazy walk, the wonderful fresh-baked bread at Colonial, and the final stop all danced through a brain that was becoming blissfully sleepy.
29 It became fun last night Googling around and fishing for the pictures. It became like and Expressionistic '30's film, especially with Batman swinging through oversized puppets in a giant puppet factory, or a half-page close-up of the Joker's smile.
30 By the end of the night I closed my eyes and typed the remainder of today's DN.
31 I did so without looking. I wanted to see the orange and blue Rexall sign, the blackbirds perched on he wires above the town, the hill with the wonderful words South San Francisco The Industrial City facing everybody south of it.
32 That was my childhood.
33 It was swell.
34 I still visit there every couple of weeks. My Dad has to go to dialysis in that same area. I always think of that Rexall, and of all the people I met there: Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Ma and Pa Kent, Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, and Alfred the Butler.
35 I would get home and bury my head in those stories, which took me to other worlds.
36 All this was written with eyes closed. I would open them to make certain I wouldn't have too much editing in the morning, but I didn't care. That's how I wrote this last part last night.
37 I drifted through a time zone.
38 The sounds of a Garbo silent danced through my brain. I wrote with Garbo working sound and lights.
39 It was primal.
40 I'm not EVEN gonna lie.
41 My head was literally in a cloud, the Cloud that is my chair.
42 Old music. Strange yet enchanting, like Garbo herself.
43 I had to do this.
44 I had to chase the school down the street. When it flew into the sky, I hurled piece of cement at it. It flew off unharmed.
45 My school became the town bully last week.
46 I did a dandy job of ignoring it last night, of bringing in blurry memories of the other day and night, and blurred thoughts of the wonderful laughter and love we enjoyed.
47 Oh and a dreamy walk through the comic-book mists of time.
48 I gottago. It's morning. I have a Ricky Nelson singing It's Late through my headphones. Last night I had no idea what this stuff would become, but you know? I didn't really care.
49 I literally wrote it in my sleep. Here is literally how it ended. This is the uncut version of an exhausted guy falling into a blissful sleep:
50 Take off our shoes.
51 Kick back and enddddddddddddddddddddddddddddkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.
52 I opened my eyes just now and saw the above.
53 I swear to you that's what it said.
54 Immago now.
55 Hope this rocked your day. Or gave you a baby Joker's smile at best.
56 See you again.
57 Peace.
~H~
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