I am fully fucking aware that, lead times being what they are on comic books, this was definitely written, if perhaps not completely drawn, before the Current Unpleasantness actually began. But once we realized we were going to publish it during the Current Unpleasantness, and that it scans as really fucking unsubtle given the Current Unpleasantness, maybe we reconsider the entire fucking thing? Because I don’t need this shit in my life at all, much less in a medium that’s supposed to be fucking escapism:
And fuck me dead if this very same Fantastic Four comic book doesn’t use vampires as a persecuted minority that Doom is scapegoating later on in the damn issue. Using Doom as a stand-in for the shitgibbon is one thing. Using vampires as a stand-in for trans people is deeply fucked up.
I recognize that there is literally no way that Marvel is gonna reconsider or reschedule any of this, but I wanted to register my protest anyway.
Got a new book from Amazon today, and the damned thing was mis-bound, with the cover a good quarter inch or more off from where it was supposed to be. Ultimately it’s no big deal, because I can just exchange it, but I’ve never seen this in a new book before. (Entirely possible that this is because Amazon specifically has never sent me one; no brick and mortar bookstore would even let these make it out to the floor; they’d have been damaged out immediately once they came out of the box.)
I survived my first day back, although I do mean “survived” in the most specific meaning of the term, certainly not one that implies any teaching took place. I foolishly neglected to take any drugs before leaving the house other than my antibiotics, which meant that the first thing I did when I left work was go to a drugstore and buy the methy kind of Sudafed, the one you have to ask for and have your ID scanned. I do actually have an ear infection, according to my school nurse, but she says the antibiotics I’m already on will take care of it. We’ll see!
Let’s see, what else? Spent the evening fighting off the urge to buy another fountain pen or two. My rapid cycling through obsessions and hobbies is fucking breathtaking, y’all. I need to become obsessed with saving money for a while. The world economy is about to tank (mental note: save $1,000 as quickly as possible, withdraw it in cash, and keep it in the house) and even if that wasn’t the case (or if I wasn’t already first against the wall as an atheist, outspokenly liberal teacher running the gay kids’ club in a rural area of a red state) my kid is gonna be driving in a couple of years. You’d think I’d at least be able to sock money away for a car.
Alternatively, we’ll be scrounging the wastelands for food in a couple of years, so why not buy fountain pens now while they’re still being manufactured?
I do a trivia question every week. It’s usually a history question of some sort, and the stakes are low; you can get the answer any way you want except for asking me (it’s literally impossible to cheat) and if you get it right you get a piece of candy on Friday. If you get it wrong nothing happens. Some kids do it every week, some when the mood strikes them or a friend offers them the answer, and some will pretend in late May that they never heard me mention it.
I usually theme the questions at least a little bit, and since it’s Black History Month I figured I’d highlight some figures from history and see how many the kids could identify. My building is pretty diverse, which I’m not using as a code word for “mostly Black,” I mean genuinely pretty well-mixed. That said, I’m not really expecting many of them, if any at all, to immediately recognize that fine gentleman up there; my theory was they’d either take a picture of the picture and ask some adults or do a reverse Google Image search, which I believe has been the process for the handful of correct answers I’ve received so far.
(Yes, I know “Who is this?” is not a trivia question in the classic sense of the term. Shut up. It’s my game and I can do it however I want. Next week will be Mae Jemison, I think.)
Anyway, the insistence from the first several kids that gave me answers that that was either MLK Jr. or fucking Steve Harvey has me questioning my sanity. And it wasn’t like it was white kids being clowns, either. At least one Black student asked me in apparent seriousness if it was King. I’m not supposed to give them help one way or another but I needed to shut that down immediately if I planned on surviving the week.
So. Without any research or double-checking, do you know who that is?
Let’s see. I was home sick again today, my son has been so sick in January that he’s made it to school for all of three days so far with a sinus infection that either just won’t go away or isn’t a sinus infection, and the scumbag in the White House released an EO that more or less starts the countdown until I get fired or am forced to resign.
Oh, and the Internet appears to have found yesterday’s post; I’m kind of surprised there aren’t any comments beyond my usual folks so far. Given the number of page views it’s definitely being talked about somewhere. I continue to really wish WordPress had more robust tools for referrals.
I swear to you that I have spent the entire day thinking it was Saturday, and I have a dentist’s appointment tomorrow that I am going to forget about, which is upsetting because they got me in as a favor because my work schedule and the hours they’re open really don’t work together at all. It has been a bewildering day; TikTok banned itself and then unbanned itself and thanked Trump for the unbanning that it did on its own instead of the guy actually in the Oval Office who said he wasn’t going to enforce the ban that the House and Senate passed and the Supreme Court ruled was constitutional, which is a whole giant mess, Diamond Comics went bankrupt a few days ago and I didn’t even hear about it, and I have five hundred pages left in Rhythm of War.
It is going to be three hundred degrees below zero for the next three days and I’m fully expecting to not have to return to work until Thursday (Wednesday might be a two-hour delay instead of a cancel, but it’s gonna be a cancel. Tuesday is kaput.) which probably explains why I don’t know what day it is. I have some school shit I should do tomorrow. We’ll see if any of that happens.
I don’t like Mike Tyson. Mike Tyson is a rapist. I don’t like rapists.
Like a whole lot of people who generally don’t care about sports in general or boxing in particular, I’m planning on at least attempting to watch the Tyson/Paul fight tonight. Why attempting? Because who the fuck knows when the thing is going to start, and Tyson in his prime kind of specialized in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-sorry-that-guy’s-dead-now fights that you could miss by going to the bathroom at the wrong time. I don’t really want to watch the entire undercard, which could be a couple of hours, so I’ll mostly be relying on the Internet to give me an idea when the actual main event itself is going to start.
I am, I admit, more than a little conflicted about it, and I’m mostly writing this post as a way of thinking out loud rather than making a unified and coherent argument. Generally when I find out someone I was previously a fan of has turned out to be any of many different varieties of sex pest, that guy is removed from my consciousness as thoroughly as I can. Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, and Bill Cosby, to pick two fairly recent examples and one not so recent, are all dead to me. To hell with all three of them. I don’t vote for politicians who are sex pests and in fact default whenever possible to voting for women precisely so that I don’t do it accidentally.
It is entirely possible that this entire post, and a lot of the “thinking” that I’ve been doing about it over the last few months, is about me searching for a way to justify watching this fight. To find a way that oh, this one doesn’t count. And maybe that’s all that’s going on. I’m not sure that that has to be a problem, to be honest! We already had a Netflix account; any tiny percentage of however much my wife spends a month on Netflix has already been earmarked to Tyson without my approval or consultation. I think I might be having a different conversation were this a pay-per-view type of event or something that Netflix was demanding a surcharge for. I am not a fan of Tyson’s; recognizing that he is either the best boxer or the second-best boxer who ever lived depending on how you feel about Muhammad Ali (Tyson has said multiple times that Ali would win if they were both in their prime) is merely stating a fact and not a fan’s opinion. Other than playing hours upon hours of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! as a kid I’ve never engaged in any particular “fan” activities toward the guy. I don’t think he’s a good guy, and I don’t want to be like him, and I don’t want my kid to look up to him or want to be like him or think he’s a good guy.
What I want is to watch him beat the piss out of Jake Paul, a loathsome human being, and someone who is a loathsome human being now, as opposed to a rapist who went to jail for his crime, served his time, and for the most part has kept his nose clean since then, and who has definitely not been accused of any further sexual misconduct since leaving jail.
Just because I want to see him punch Jake Paul’s nose around to the back of his head doesn’t mean that I want to take part in literally anything else that he does. And, you must admit, Mike Tyson is kind of uniquely qualified to be the guy who punches Jake Paul’s jaw clean off of his fucking smarmy face. There is no one else who it would be more satisfying to watch do that. It is possibly true that this is because I can’t name any other boxers!(*) But still.
But Tyson also hasn’t done the kinds of things that we want perpetrators of sexual violence to do in order to obtain “redemption,” whatever exactly that thing is. There’s been no attempt, to my knowledge, of any attempt at restitution, or an apology, or even admission of guilt. And there may have been more than one victim, which wouldn’t be surprising at all. There’s also his whole relationship with Robin Givens, which (I don’t think?) involved sexual violence but certainly was abusive.
But again: did his time, has stayed out of trouble since then, and I’m not directly supporting him by watching this fight, and I think he sucks as a person, and and and and and I’m not sure any of it really matters because I so badly want to see Jake Paul beaten until he’s two-dimensional so maybe I’m just letting my standards slip this one time because these are kind of unique circumstances, I’m not perfect either, goddammit, and my wife’s watching it with me and she’s even a whole-ass woman! So there!
I’m gonna be so pissed if Paul wins.
(And, not that I’m the first person to say this, but I feel like it’s worth repeating: while he’s definitely going to make an asston of money with this fight, it’s not the best career move for Jake Paul, if we’re willing to call his boxing a “career.” If it’s a fair fight, he’s going to get the shit beaten out of him, and if he wins, half the audience (including me) will be screaming that the fight’s fixed and the other half will not be impressed because Tyson is nearly fucking 60 and the young strong guy is supposed to win a fight with a guy who is nearly sixty years old.)
(*) Okay, I can, and some of them might even still be alive, but none of them are as mean as Tyson. Watching George Foreman turn this guy into hamburger and then grill him up would simply not be as much fun, I’m sorry. Foreman is nice. Relatively speaking.
Anyway. Are you watching? Are you also morally conflicted about it, or at least pretending to be on the Internet so you can go do what you wanted to do in the first place?
I don’t think I’m recovered from the election yet, and I think yesterday’s illness may have been more along the lines of a panic attack than an actual illness. I have been edgy and stressed the fuck out all day long, to the point where I haven’t been able to read because I can’t focus on anything enough to do it.
I genuinely don’t know how I’m going to make it through another four years of this. I really don’t.
(Hits “publish,” opens BlueSky, discovers Trump has apparently named a Fox News host as Secretary of Defense.)
The big bastard is still not out of his box, and … I dunno, maybe tomorrow? My kids did really well on their test today; that’s good, I suppose. Everything else going on in my head involves thinking about how society would be way way better if literally like three people either died or were divested of all of their worldly possessions or both, and I don’t really want to put that on the internet right now, so maybe it’s best if I just go play a video game on the big bastard’s older, smaller brother and continue to minimize my Internet time.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 