361

I believe I've been reasonably faithful, so far, in my counting of the days for the post titles in this COVID-19 series. But at this moment, since it's coming up on one year of Living Through It, I find myself trying to remember where I chose to start counting. Theoretically it should be easier at this juncture to count backwards from the anniversary, whenever that may be.

As my kids never fail to remind me, they woke up as per normal and went to school as per normal on a Friday the 13th in March of 2020, and came home at the end of the school day like any other school day, but that turned out to be the last time any of them had a normal in-school day. I don't think that's where I started counting, though. For me the last partially normal day was Monday March 9, when I went into the office but was sent home about halfway through the day after our home office decided to shut down out of an abundance of caution - not because anyone who worked for my company had gotten sick, but because there was one reported case of COVID-19 in an employee at a different company on a different floor in the NYC skyscraper where our home office is located. Therefore, Tuesday March 10 was Day One of me working from home, and the beginning of what I variously referred to as 'quarantine', 'lockdown', 'shutdown', 'WFH 4eva', 'I feel like there aren't any rules anymore', 'what are discrete units of time anyway', etc. At least I'm pretty sure that was the beginning. It's easy to lose track of things.

The bino's birthday happens to fall just past the middle of March, and his birthday party in 2020 was one of the first casualties of the upheaval. We were supposed to take him, his sibs and a handful of his friends to the local indoor trampoline place to celebrate him turning seven, but we opted to cancel it. Actually if memory serves we optimistically believed we were going to 'reschedule' it. Surely the panic over this novel coronavirus was a tad overblown by the media. Surely we weren't on the cusp of a once-in-a-century historically bad pandemic. Surely we could follow the guidance of leaders and health experts and flatten the curve. Surely the worst thing we'd be dealing with come summer was trying to explain to people that maybe we did overreact in the spring and maybe we reacted appropriately and it worked, but we'll never know for certain, and better safe than sorry, right? Surely?

Yeah, no, as it turned out. Little girl also didn't have much in the way of a birthday celebration in April. We did get some friends together for my wife's birthday in July, at an outdoor venue with almost nobody else around. Nothing much for the little guy in September (though he's not into big birthday parties anyway) and I insisted on nothing more than some nice takeout for my birthday in October.

So all of this is top of mind right now because, as I said, the one year anniversary is imminent, but also because this Friday, two days hence, we are going out to celebrate the bino's eighth birthday. Not at the trampoline place! We know the pandemic isn't over, it's not like it had a one-year expiration date. (Weirdly the trampoline place is still open for business, which on the one hand makes me happy, because venues going out of business due to the pandemic sucks. But on the other hand, just doesn't seem like the kind of place I want to take my kids to just yet. Other people obviously feel differently.)

Instead what we are doing Friday night is going to a drive-in movie. Should be fun! My wife took two of the kids to the drive-in a few months ago, and they had a good time. The food delivery to the car (because this is at the Alamo, of course, a theater I am entirely thrilled to support financially) was excellent, and the bino is probably looking forward to that more than the flick itself (Raya and the Last Dragon). His actual birthday isn't for another couple weeks, and that's when he'll get cake and his presents, so the celebration is taking over a goodly chunk of the month of March. But after missing out last year, and enduring the entire 360-some days since, he's entitled to a bit of that, I reckon.

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (6) - New Beginnings (Part One)

So there I was, in the summer of 1985, just getting into the groove of a regular comics buying habit. I was ten, almost eleven, old enough to be given $5 every Saturday morning to do with whatever I pleased, and also old enough to be trusted to ride my bike halfway across town to a convenience store that sold candy and soda and comics. A new issue of Spider-Man came out once a month, which meant if I went to the store every Saturday, one of those times I’d be able to get the newest Spider-Man, but the other three weekends I’d have to choose something else to read. Or maybe nothing! Marvel comics cost 65 or 75 cents an issue at that point, so my $5 weekly bacchanal might consist of one comic, one can of Coke, and a Milky Way bar, or two comics, a package of Twinkies and a bottle of Yoo-hoo, or no comics, a 7-Up Gold, a bag of Combos, and a couple packs of Garbage Pail Kids. One never knew, but I’d almost always have change left over for my piggy bank back home.

Anyway, I biked over to the store that fateful day and I saw the most garish, attention-grabbing cover I had ever seen in my young life. A searing pinkish-magenta background with almost a dozen superheroes exploding toward the viewer! Said heroes garbed in a riot of colors, including an orange-clad yellow-caped strongman and another in quadrants of yellow, red, blue and green! An ominous, dark figure looming in the background! And a logo promising that this would be the greatest epic ever:

This issue cost $1.25 all on its own, but I had to have it. It was arguably worth the cover price purely based on the fact that it was a double-sized extravaganza kicking off the maxi-series, though I would argue it had artistic merits of its own which also justified the cost. Because the Squadron Supreme series, I was about to learn as I turned its pages, was about heroes failing. Not failing in act two only to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and prevail in act three, but having already failed when the stakes were highest. It was a story about picking up the pieces after an unimaginable loss, trying to put things right, and arguably making things worse and failing again.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Behind the cover was a splash page where Hyperion is trying and (you guessed it) failing to prevent the Squadron Supreme’s satellite headquarters from plummeting to Earth. He settles for a controlled crash in the ocean.

Then he meets up with some of his teammates who all look like they’ve been through hell, costumes torn, expressions somber. The story moves around to other members of the team in different locations and gives a sense of how bad things are around the US and the world: food shortages, power outages, violent anarchy. The entire Squadron assembles in an older HQ in the mountains and compares notes.

Here, I will note, they recap how they got to this point, defeated and taking stock of a world on the brink, and footnotes explain that this was a storyline in The Defenders about three years earlier. I was unaware of this storyline (Defenders was a cool, weird series I learned to appreciate later but hadn’t gotten into at all as of age ten-almost-eleven); for that matter I was unaware of any of the Squadron’s previous appearances or incarnations, which I talked about in a previous installment to provide context to you the reader even though I lacked it myself. At any rate, the recap did its job just fine and I got the gist. It made sense that there had been a storyline in the standard Marvel continuity where heroes from an alternate Earth had been brainwashed by villains who conquered that alternate Earth, then turned their sights on the main Marvel Earth and the Defenders had to defeat and unbrainwash the alternate heroes, then go help them liberate their alternate Earth. In that storyline, the Defenders saved the day, standard superhero stuff.

Mark Gruenwald, the writer of the Squadron Supreme limited series, was a genius to me for seeing the potential in a sequel to the Defenders story, told from the alternate Earth’s point of view. It’s one thing to say that a parallel world was subjugated by an intergalactic despot when that’s just a colorful bit of backstory on the Villain of the Month. But to then return to that parallel world and center its heroes as the protagonists was a bold stroke. The thing about ongoing monthly superhero adventures is that they maintain the status quo and the villain’s plans to conquer the world never come to fruition because the good guys prevail in the end. Gruenwald dug deep into the possibilities of breaking that mold, and I found that utterly captivating.

And then of course what made it even better was the fact that this was clearly a riff on DC’s biggest superheroes. I immediately realized that this was what that house ad I had taunted my brother with really meant. OK, fine, so Marvel hadn’t acquired the rights to Superman and Batman and Green Lantern. But Hyperion is clearly a re-skinned Superman, Nighthawk is unmistakably Batman by another name, Doctor Spectrum is Green Lantern with his sector ID filed off. Except it’s even better than that, because if Marvel had started publishing Superman, people would more or less expect him to remain Superman with all of his tropes and trappings intact. Gruenwald, by using characters that were minor in the grand scheme of Marvel things, was able to have his cake and eat it too, telling a Justice League of America story that went truly off the rails, where Superman breaks up with Lois Lane forever and winds up falling in love with Wonder Woman, where Batman in his civilian identity is elected President of the United States, where Black Canary dumps Green Arrow for Hawkman which drives Green Arrow crazy enough to electronically brainwash Black Canary, get caught out, and become a villain. This combination of messing with DC archetypes and doing with them what DC would never dare do was extremely appealing to a partisan like me who had long since chosen Marvel over DC.

Back to the issue itself: the heroes are all grappling with the fact that yes, with the Defenders’ help, they punched away the problem of the supervillain, however, this did not solve the corollary problems the supervillain’s conquest caused which have left Earth a post-apocalyptic mess. Those problems, the infrastructure collapse, the riotous lawlessness, can’t be solved by punching. But can they be solved by superheroes in any way? Power Princess comes from a place literally called Utopia Isle, so she at least has a blueprint for fixing the world. Tom Thumb is an off-the-charts technological genius. The Whizzer’s superspeed lets him cover the entire globe to gather intel and coordinate efforts in real time. They feel responsible for letting the world down and want to atone, not just by restoring the way things used to be but by making a better world, free of crime, free of poverty, free of all of mankind’s ills.

Well, most of them want to. They debate this for a while, with Amphibian doubtful that it’s feasible and Nighthawk fearful that the only way to succeed will be to take over the world themselves, because a world devoid of problems is also a world devoid of freedom. This was pretty heady stuff for a ten year old! But I was enthralled by it all the same. In the end they vote, ten in favor and Amphibian and Nighthawk opposed. Amphibian accepts the outcome. Nighthawk rage quits, but he does agree to arrange a press conference where two things will happen: Kyle Richmond (Nighthawk’s secret ID) will resign as POTUS, and Hyperion and the rest of the Squadron will reveal and abandon their secret ID’s and announce the Utopia Program.

The rest of the issue is the Squadron squaring away their personal lives as they are about to dedicate themselves to being round-the-clock world savers, and Richmond plotting to assassinate Hyperion at the press conference because he assumes the Squadron will abandon the Utopia Program if they lose their superman leader. The press conference happens, Richmond resigns, Hyperion gives a speech introducing the Utopia Program, and Richmond has a gun in his pocket loaded with an argonite bullet, aimed at Hyperion’s back, but at the last minute can’t pull the trigger, not because he second-guesses his suspicions, but because he doesn’t want to go down in history as the man who murdered the world’s greatest superhero. So the Squadron unmasks and the Utopia Program begins.

It’s a lot for a single issue, even one that’s double-sized, but that’s a good thing because with the whole debate-to-near-assassination arc for Nighthawk it feels like it tells a reasonably satisfying story while also setting up the longer narrative. It’s a fantastic first chapter of a novel.

What’s crazy is that I was so hooked by issue #1, I wanted to ride this train so badly, which meant definitely getting to the convenience store every month, on the specific week that new issues would come out, for an entire year. You will be shocked to learn that this proved impossible for a ten/eleven-year old. After re-reading issue #1 so many times it almost disintegrated, I managed to pick up #2. Then missed #3. Then got #4, which did a pretty good job of bringing me up to speed on what I missed, then got #5 and I think maybe #6? Then I hit a rough patch where I missed several issues, but I did manage to come back at the end and see how it all wrapped up in #12. I honestly cannot remember if I got my hands on #10 from the newsstand, or if I acquired it some time later to retro-fill the gap. Because that’s the thing about this pivotal maxi-series: it hearkens to a time when I was evolving from ‘casual fan’ to ‘devoted fan’ but had not yet reached the higher level of ‘obsessive collector’. We will get there, my friends. We will get there.

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (5b) - Starting Over

One of the things I really wanted to write about under this overarching theme was Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme limited series, because it was such a major touchstone of my early comic book appreciation (not to mention other themes and motifs that would become pervasive throughout my many geekdoms), but I felt like I needed to set it up a little first, and apparently the whole notion that my brother and I were consciously oppositional in those days (Yankees vs. Mets, Cobra versus GI Joe, Marvel vs DC) wasn’t enough in and of itself to contextualize how cool I thought it was that Marvel did a pastiche of DC’s big guns. I also felt compelled to explain the idea of parallel and alternate Earths, some of the creative genesis of the Squadron Supreme as a potential intercompany crossover, and the concept of a maxi-series. I think chasing down these various rabbit holes was something I embarked on with the best of intentions, but ended up derailing me a bit.

Oh and then over seven freaking years went by?!?!?

I mean, the derailment happened right around Christmas time in 2013, and judging by some of the work-related posts from January 2014, I was entering one of the periodic actual-things-to-do phases (as opposed to bored-and-blogging-to-look-busy phases) which meant if anything was going to fall off, it was going to be a recurring long-form series that I wrote ahead of time, in addition to other random daily posts, and scheduled to publish on Sundays. And then I have to assume enough time went by that I lost all momentum for Marvel Comics: My Untold Story altogether. And a little over a year later, by early 2015, I had lost a lot of momentum for the blog itself. If memory serves this was due to a combination of focusing more on my original fiction and trying to get published in various zines and anthologies, plus joining FB, originally because it was a promotional requirement for one of said anthologies, though eventually I did get into it and found it scratched the social media itch formerly addressed by my blog. One more year and change later and it’s mid-2016, I’d changed jobs, and actual-things-to-do was the standard operating procedure, sending this blog into deep hibernation. Alas, poor Parenthetical Asides, we knew you well.

But everything comes back around eventually! And there have been a couple of recent developments which brought Marvel Comics: My Untold Story back to the forefront of my mind. One is that I’ve gotten deeper into podcasts during the Year of the Pandemic, and in particular I’ve really taken a shine to Marvel by the Month. Another is that, after years of wishing it would happen, my eldest child, the Little Guy himself (he’s 12), has finally embraced the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including watching every single movie (many of which I’ve happily sat down and rewatched with him) and now being as obsessed with new episodes of WandaVision on Fridays as I am. I even managed to parlay that into getting the Little Guy to read some of the source material comics that I still own, which will doubtless be fodder for one of these posts.

So excessively long intervening passage of time be danged! Let’s get back into Marvel Comics: My Untold Story and let’s finally dig into why Squadron Supreme hit me so deep - next time!

275

Although I have a big ole soft buboe in my heart for the Plague Doctor (so much so that I bought a figurine ornament for my dork Christmas tree this year) I think the most enduring symbol for the Long Pandemic Year of Twenty-Twenty may be this:

But then again that may just be particular to my family.

I mentioned a while back that the early lockdown days reminded me of snow days but another specific overlap element was the stocking up on non-perishable food, which is one of those things I (usually) only think about in the winter. It's a great privilege to live in a time when we can pop out to the store at the drop of a hat for whatever notion grabs us in the moment. Except of course when it snows, as the inclement weather does not care about your sudden craving for Sweet Chili PopCorners. Nor does it even care about your legitimate need for household staples such as bread and milk and soap and (sigh) toilet paper. Toiletries will keep indefintely, bread can be frozen, but milk, that's the tricky one. All the moreso in a house with several children who eat lots of breakfast cereal and drink milk by the glass, not to mention adults with robust lifelong coffee addictions.

Enter: shelf-stable milk!

Of course the difference between the pandemic and a blizzard is that blizzards come and go. You never know if the blizzard is going to live up to the hype until it actually arrives, so sometimes you overprepare for it, and sometimes under. If you get caught underprepared, the worst case scenario is that you suffer a few days without some basic necessity, then the roads get cleared and the stores reopen and you restock and you think "I'll never let that happen again!" and then you promptly forget all about it until it does. Unless maybe, maybe, right after the blizzard you buy a few shelf-stable milks just in case. Whereas the pandemic has been an ongoing concern for, let me see, somewhere between nine months and an eternity, by this point. Which is plenty of time to really think things through and make adjustments to the actualities of life-as-she-is-lived. Some people are over it, but my nuclear unit is still taking reasonable precautions, staying home, wearing masks when we do go out, but really minimizing the amount of going out at all, including popping out to the store. And given the aforementioned ongoingness, we've had plenty of time to realize that we can just about stock up on a week's worth of groceries at a time, except for the milk, which means it's a good idea to always have some shelf-stable boxes on hand, in the all-too-frequent case of running through last week's fridge milk before it's time for the next run to the grocery store. Not only have we had time to realize this, we've had time to implement it as a standard operating procedure. So this has been a very Parmalat-heavy year.

The twist, of course, the punchline (because of course there's a twist and a punchline, isn't there always?) is this: 2020 has also been a year that has really brought home how hard it is to keep two adults and three kids happy with the same limited at-home options. There are a few very basic foods and meals which everyone in our family genuinely likes. Beyond that, we generally have to content ourselves with two-out-of-three. That is, two out of the three kids will eat a dinner, as prepared, and be reasonably content. The third kid will require serious cajoling just to eat the mandatory single bite ofe every element, and then will eat something else entirely. Occasionally there' something which only one kid likes, with two dissenters, probably about as often as something that gets approval from everyone. By and large, it's two-out-of-three.

AND APPARENTLY THIS EXTENDS TO THE MILK! I personally can't tell the difference between the shelf-stable milk and fridge milk, especially once the s-s gets opened and, you know, put in the fridge. Cold, it all tastes the same. But try telling that to my kids. To be brutally honest I have stopped dedicating brainspace to cataloging each and every predilection. I think it goes something like this: the eldest refuses to drink the shelf-stable milk, or use it in cereal, or anything. The little girl will use the s-s milk, grudgingly, if we are out of fridge milk. And the bino LOVES the s-s milk, will ask for it by name and prefers it over the fridge milk, so sometimes we have both open fridge milk and open shelf-stable milk taking up space in the refrigerator at the same time. Not a state of affairs I ever expected to have to contend with, but again, that's pretty much the most apt descriptor of 2020, anyway.

A radio drama in two acts

ACT I

(Interior of family car, night. En route to martial arts class.)

ME: Rock and roll for the road, boys?

LITTLE GUY AND BINO: Sure.

(I turn on the radio, already dialed in to the modern rock station. "Meant to Live" by Switchfoot is playing, halfway through.)

BINO: Dad, this is not rock.

ME: What? Yes it is.

BINO: Nope.

ME: Fine.

(I switch to the dinosaur rock station, just as "Wayward Son" by Kansas begins.)

ME: Is this rock and roll?

BINO: (with unshakable conviction) Yes.

ACT II

(Interior of family car, later the same night, after martial arts.)

(I turn the radio on, the dinosaur rock station is playing commercials, so I switch back to the modern rock. "Hey Ya" by Outkast is playing, halfway through.)

ME: Is this rock?

BINO: No.

ME: What is it, then?

BINO: (same unshakable conviction as earlier) Funk.

ME: Do ... do you just put all music in the five categories from Trolls World Tour?

BINO: Pretty much.

ME: (under my breath) He's not wrong, though.

CURTAIN

232

Two hundred and thirty-two days is not nothing. The U.S. has been dealing with all of the primary, secondary, etc. effects of a pandemic for seven or eight or nine months, and some things we've gotten accustomed to (some of which might even weirdly be changes for the better) and some things we haven't. Most things that were going to happen have happened, all at once in a confusing jumble at the beginning, and the passage and repetitions of time merely allow realizations to come clear. But every once in a while there's a new first, and yesterday, I had one.

I am in no way shape or form a fashion-forward individual. I tend to conform to expectations, and am quite content to clear the lowest possible bar of socially acceptable attire for a given situation. I can get dressed up for a wedding or a job interview and know what I'm about. I can do casual-but-nice for family gatherings where there might be photos taken. But left to my own devices I go for comfort over all. I am 100% that guy with a vast t-shirt collection who wears cargo shorts for 2/3 of the year and blue jeans the other 1/3.

Recently it has been brought to my attention that some people do not find blue jeans comfortable, as they are too restrictive. Compared to pajama bottoms or yoga pants, I agree they are certainly more restrictive (and, Gender Injustice Alert, it goes without saying that women are instructed by society to wear jeans that flatter and accentuate their curve, as opposed to the baggy-ass broken-in denim I prefer). But whether it's hardwired into my proprioceptors or just the result of years of habituation to my go-to pants, jeans are in my maximum comfort zone.

After the first few months of my office being closed for social distancing, I hit upon a pretty standard routine: I wake up in the morning and get things rolling in my pajamas. I help the kids with their breakfast and start my workday, unshowered and not yet dressed. If I have any meetings, I leave my camera off. Around lunchtime I exercise (the treadmill in the basement feel more and more like one of the best investments my wife and I ever made) and then, finally, take a shower and put on grown-up clothes. Which, again, means cargo shorts and a t-shirt, or maybe a polo shirt if I have any afternoon meetings with people I want to project bare-minimum professionalism at. This worked pretty well through the summer and early fall, and I certainly had plenty of pairs of cargo shorts to rotate through (tbh, I rotated them on a weekly or fortnightly basis, not daily, but still).

Yesterday was pretty chilly, which would normally be my cue for the switch from cargo shorts to blue jeans. But for the first time in longer than I can remember, I just didn't want to put on jeans. Didn't have it in me to deal with a zipper, I guess? Instead, after my midday ablutions, I put on a gray polo shirt and black sweatpants. Because why not, right? Comfy, cozy, and no one is going to see my from the waist down anyways, right?

What I had forgotten was that I do not wear sweatpants in public, unless there is some kind of medical reason, and have not done so since probably fifth grade. OK, no, I hadn't forgotten that, but I had forgotten that on Monday nights my boys have martial arts class and I drive them and sit in the school while they train, which meant I was going to either wear sweatpants in public (which, again, I Do Not Do) or else change out of the sweatpants after dinner (which, ugh). A strange situation in which to find myself, but then again, this is a strange year, an unending string of stranger and stranger days.

So yeah, yesterday, I had a personal COVID first: I left the house and spent time in a public place while wearing sweatpants. And lived to tell the tale! Who knows what other uncharted territories I may explore before this whole thing goes away?

228

Last night I was finishing up the kitchen cleaning before bed, which mostly consists of doing the dishes. (My wife had already done most of the task, so emphasis on "finishing".) The dishwasher was full, with no way to fit anything else in, even if I had undertaken some aggressively Teris-style rearranging, so I was handwashing. And I imagine that happens on a regular basis to everyone, especially with the larger pots and pans. But in this particular case it was pots, pans, a bowl, some measuring cups, some drinking cups, a bit of Tupperware ... if not another full load for the dishwasher, at least a good start of one. And you may ask yourself why I didn't just leave it all in the sink, and in fact allow it all to be said good start on the next dishwasher load the following day. To which I would answer, that's what I'd been doing all week. Dinner last night hadn't been crazy elaborate, generating more dirty dishes than usual. We're just (and this is the minor revelation that prompted me to compose this post) constantly dirtying dishes these days. I wanted to record, for posterity, that one of the stand-out attributes of this whole coronavirus quarantine lockdown office closure school closure gauntlet we're running is the feeling that I'm constantly either folding laundry or doing dishes. All. The. Time.

First world problems, as always, I know, I know. And not all of it is directly attributable to the pandemic. The little guy is not so little anymore, he's 12+, a tween, growing and eating constantly like a teen. His younger siblings aren't that far behind. But on the other hand, they are at home every day eating lunch at the kitchen table and using plenty of plates and silverware to do it (the little girl especially has a fondness for Chicken and Stars soup). And I'm home too, no longer a growing pre- or mid-adolescent but certainly prone to stress-eating. I try to do as much of that off paper towels as possible, but there are always some contributions to the dish pile from my quarter. Meanwhile my wife is trying to be conscientious about packing lunch when she goes to work, and there's no excuse not to have plenty of groceries in the house, so that's the Tupperware in high usage.

Meanwhile, I've been (humblebrag alert) exercising more since I'm stuck at home, and I sweat like a pig at Bacon-Fest, so that's several extra outfits a week going into the laundry. My wife has been working at a barn in exchange for horse-riding lessons once or twice a week, so she also has dedicated outfits for that which require laundering after each use. The kids, as far as I can tell, just wear the same amount of clothing as pre-shutdown beforetimes ... oh except that the bino has recently started taking martial arts classes, so that's another uniform in the wash, too.

That's it, random observation about how spending way more time confined to the house leads to more housework. More deep insights coming soon!