The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I just had to write a check, and then a cover letter, and put it in an envelope, with a stamp, and now I have to haul it out to the mailbox and send it.
The number on the check? 1009, and I’ve had the account for like five years. Who the hell still writes checks? Why do they still even call them “checking” accounts?
Weird.
So we left on our vacation yesterday.
Today was a Driving Day; get from northern Indiana to Louisville, with a stop in Bloomington along the way. I haven’t been in Bloomington for years, so it was great to get back into town. Also, we got to explain what “college” is to the boy. We only really had time to eat lunch and tour the southwestern part of campus, but that’s where most of the fun stuff is so it worked out.
Wright Quad! The window to the left of the door there was my dorm room the only year that living in the dorms mattered. I considered trying to swing by my apartment my junior and senior year and then realized I probably couldn’t find it without thinking hard.
Some things never change; there are still shoes dangling from damn near every overhead power line. Don’t ask.
Some things do change: The Von Lee used to be a movie theater. The building is still there, and it’s still the Von Lee, but it’s apparently a Noodles now? Which I feel may be a bit of a demotion.
Sample Gates, the unofficial doorway to campus. My favorite Sample Gates story has nothing to do with me: my brother was going to propose to his fiancee (now wife) there, but had to rapidly abort and find another location when someone else was already proposing when they got there.
Most of the buildings on campus are made from southern Indiana limestone. I always enjoyed this quote, especially the odd hyphen in “master-spirit.”
My wife, a journalism major, poses with Ernie Pyle, an IU grad. The boy appears less certain about him.
The Student Building. It’s not called that for any clear reason that I was ever aware of, but I’ve always loved the clock tower. 
Herman B. Wells and his Missing Cane. This statue and the flowers around it are new since I was there. The pained look on the boy’s face is because that’s a bronze bench and it was hot outside; to his credit, he allowed us to photograph him before remarking that he was partially on fire. 
Immediately behind where the last picture was. 
The mighty Jordan River! Shut up it is mighty.
I am aware, intellectually, that I have the sky and clouds at home, and that the sky at home is the same sky that I look at when I’m in Bloomington, but I swear the skies are prettier down here anyway. God, I miss this town.
We swung by my mom’s childhood house in Bedford at her request and I managed to stealth a couple of pictures of the house without the current homeowners noticing. I remember this hill being a lot steeper and taller, but that’s what 30-year-old memories will do for you:
I played on this rock a lot as a little kid. Couldn’t resist having the boy take a picture there. 
WOO KENTUCKY.
Today, I shall pet a giraffe.
Let’s not bury the lede here: if you haven’t already inhaled the 8 episodes of Stranger Things that Netflix made available a month or so ago, you owe it to yourself to do it right now. I’ve watched enough Netflix original series to confidently state it’s the best thing they’ve ever done. It’s worth paying for Netflix all by itself. Sign yourself up for a month and consider the $8 or whatever they charge a rental fee for this one show. It’s well worth it. This goes double if you are just past or nearing 40 years of age and you associate the 1980s with your childhood in any way.
I don’t even know where to start, guys. Stranger Things is roughly what would happen if Stephen King and Steven Spielberg had a TV-show baby together and then Wes Craven and Robert Englund raised that baby together, but only after having a custody battle with Gary Gygax and deciding that he could have the kid every third weekend of the month. I have nearly nothing bad to say about it other than that there is a little romance subplot that might maybe be a tiny bit unnecessary. Maybe. I dunno. And I occasionally felt like the kid on the left in the picture below had some unclear motivations for some of the things he did. That’s it.
Let’s start with the cast:
I don’t know who any of these actors are. In fact, other than Winona Ryder, who plays the mother of the missing boy that kicks off the mystery of the entire series, I can’t name a single actor in the series. They’re all unknowns, at least to me, and in all honesty it had been enough time since I’d seen Winona Ryder in anything (and she disappears completely enough into her character) that if her name hadn’t been in the opening credits I wouldn’t have recognized her either.
The kids– all four of them, but most particularly the young lady who plays Eleven (on the right) and the tubby kid in the hat in the middle– are magnificent. The adults are great. The older teenagers are great. And Ryder turns in the performance of her career.
I won’t get too far into the plot. A young boy goes missing, and a young girl with mysterious powers escapes from a Gubmint Facility in a small town in Indiana. She ends up taking refuge with the friends of the missing kid, and hilarious and/or horrifying hijinks ensue. The show has mysteries wrapped in mysteries, and they don’t bother to solve all of them by the end of the series (in fact, they introduce two more prominent ones in the show’s last few minutes) but the resolutions they do provide are satisfying as hell. By the halfway point it was clear that there were a number of ways for this show to End Wrong; I’m happy to say it didn’t. I don’t know for sure that there’s a second season coming, but I sure as hell hope there is. And, weirdly, even if they never answer a few of the show’s questions and it’s a one-shot season? That’s okay. They earned the right to end the show on a bit of a cliffhanger (sort of) if they wanted to. Ending with some things for the fanbase to keep talking about after the season is a good thing.
Another thing: at eight episodes, this thing is perfectly paced. I feel like even a thirteen-episode season would have felt padded out, and at eight they’ve trimmed all the fat they might need to out of their narrative and it feels like every episode contributes meaningfully to the overall arc of the show. The show’s a masterclass in direction and pacing, folks.
I can’t wait to see what everyone involved in this show does next, honestly. Do what you need to do to see it.
Semi-serious question: anybody wanna buy about four or five thousand comic books?
I’ve been collecting comic books since I was nine years old. Never once in that time have I actually gotten rid of any, and I’m finally hitting the point lately where I really don’t think that my current collection is going to be sustainable for much longer. Mind you, this is not an “I want to stop buying comic books” post– I don’t. I just don’t feel like I need to have all the ones that I currently have for any longer. I’ll probably end up holding on to maybe fifteen to twenty percent of my collection out of sentimental or story value, but most of what’s left I feel like I can get rid of fairly painlessly.
The problem is I don’t want to just throw them away, and any other method of getting rid of comic books doesn’t actually work very well. There’s basically no market in back issue comics any longer– search Ebay for “comic book lots” and you’re going to get a wasteland, although I can’t really believe Ebay is still in business anyway, so maybe that’s not worth much as a data point– and for the most part I don’t have any books that have massively inflated values over whatever their cover price is anyway. My local comic shop doesn’t want them, at least partially because for the last seven years they sold them to me, and they certainly don’t want them back. Libraries won’t deal with comics, and at that point I sort of run out of ideas. Pawn shops? I kinda doubt it. Secondhand places? The nostalgia store in the mall? I’d be surprised.
What’s triggering this is that if I want to keep my collection in any sort of reasonable shape I need to go through and rebox everything about once a year or so. Now, I can just buy new boxes as I go and toss shit into them, but that means that if I ever actually want to find anything ever again it would take eons. I have sixteen longboxes and three shortboxes– so call it seventeen longboxes– of comic books; a longbox holds about three hundred books, give or take.
(Just did the math. The first sentence of this post originally said “three thousand.” Gah.)
Anyway, if I want them to be in any kind of order where I can actually find them again, about once a year I have to buy a couple of new boxes and then spend a day or two interfiling all the stuff I’ve bought over the course of the past year into the collection– which is complicated as hell, because there’s never remotely enough room in the boxes I have, and I have to sort of start from one end and work my way back, moving every single comic I own at least once while I’m putting the new stuff in with the older books. It’s a bloody obnoxious mess and it becomes more obnoxious every year. And judging from the two four-inch-high stacks on my desk and the three full shortboxes next to me, I need to do it again like right now if I don’t want to be buried in these things– and I really don’t want to be buried in these things.
I should stash them all in the basement and not worry about it, but I’m worried that if I do that it would trigger an immediate basement flood– it’s too humid down there for comic books as is– and I’d rather throw them away then lose them in some sort of home disaster. Which is probably kinda stupid but whatever, that’s how my brain works.
So, yeah. Anybody planning on opening a comic book store and want some quick back-issue stuff? Hit me up. Or just come over and steal a bunch of them. If you can get past the dogs you can have them.
Just leave me my Iron Man books. Those, I’m never giving up.
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