Happy 14th B’ak’tun! And how convenient that the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar should restart on Random Anecdote day. I glanced back through the archives and didn’t see any mention of the story I have in mind back when it happened, and therefore I’m considering the following to be both worth sharing and long overdue. But if I’m repeating myself, apologies.
Back in the summer of 2011 I went with one of my buddies to a late-night showing of Captain America at the local theater. My buddy was (and is) a Cap super-fan, so it was fun to share the geeking-out experience with him, not to mention that the movie was entertaining enough in its own right to be a worthwhile expenditure of time. (Seriously, how did I not get around to writing a review of the movie at the time, during which I surely would have shared the subject matter at hand?) After the movie ended, we wandered out of the theater and stood on the sidewalk a while and dissected what we had just seen, as geeks are wont to do; we had arrived in separate cars, so we did not have a shared drive home together on which to compare opinions. This is relevant because when you choose to have an enthusiastic conversation on a public thoroughfare, you really have no control over who might overhear you and join in.
So, inevitably, a random dude did in fact insert himself into our discussion, and it was very clear from the get-go that this was a pretty stereotypical member of my tribe who had come to see Captain America by himself. You may recall that, earlier the very same summer, I had gone to see Thor by myself, due to various circumstances which involved at least some element of choice. But I had also dragged some other friends to see Green Lantern and had specifically targeted my buddy as the ideal Cap companion, and I have always acknowledged that I am very lucky to have a fairly deep bench of friends who are either simpatico or at the very least indulgent (sometimes both) about making pop culture experiences into group excursions. I know there are lots of people who are into fringe-y things that feel extra-fringe-y because they don’t know another soul who shares their interests. I try to be sympathetic to folk in those circumstances.
At any rate, I believe my buddy and I had been talking about possible places that the Captain America film franchise could go in the future, with no doubt in our mind that sequels were totally inevitable, which is another one of those strange effects of the current Hollywood IP-exploitation setup, where actors are contractually locked in from day one with three-picture deals and every blockbuster film is assumed to be the opening installment of a trilogy (if not a septuology or somesuch). It’s very different from how things were when I was a kid buying 65 cent comics, is all. Our conversation-crasher felt compelled to point out that the earliest we might see Captain America 2 would be 2013 or 2014, which might all be moot if the world were to end in December 2012. I genuinely laughed at that, because it was so random. And because I’m never one to let a good joke go without multiple callbacks to really drive it into the ground, I proceeded to return to the subject again and again as we continued kicking ideas around.
The first time I re-introduced the Apocalypse gag, our new third wheel didn’t laugh, which I just took as the standard “hey that’s my joke” reaction. (I get that a lot because I am a compulsive quoter and callbacks are just about my favorite kind of joke.) But by the second or third time I hammered on the end of the world, he felt compelled to speak up, in all earnestness: “Please … please don’t joke about that, you’re kind of freaking me out.”
Which meant that when he had brought the subject up, he hadn’t been doing so in a ridiculous non-sequitor way (as I of course had immediately assumed), he had been doing it in a laughing-nervously-at-a-cause-of-legitimate-anxiety way. This random stranger was someone who, at least in some small, irrational but undeniable way, thought it was nominally possible that life as we know it might mystically, cataclysmically cease in about a year and a half. That’s a bit off, in my book, just like inviting yourself into strangers’ conversations is, just like going to the movie theater by yourself (when it’s not a matinee during your paternity leave and you can’t convince any of your friends to play hooky at your last-minute suggestion) is. So, default sympathies notwithstanding, there were three things at that point I knew for sure about the guy we had met outside the theater, and all three were at least scraps of red flags. Needless to say, my buddy and I politely extricated ourselves shortly thereafter to head to our respective homes.
Wherever that lonely Captain America fan is today, I hope he feels less fatalistic about the open-ended future than he did a year and a half ago about hurtling towards a cosmic finish line. And I hope all of you feel good about it, too! Some people are oddly comforted by thoughts of finality, and regard a reality where we define our own limits as overwhelming. Personally, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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