Just got finished watching a documentary called Dear Mister Watterson, about the creator of Calvin and Hobbes and the impact it has had on people’s lives and on the medium of cartooning, so it’s time for me to talk about it.

First off, don’t get too excited, like I did. Watterson does not appear in the film. I admit, I leaped to that conclusion based entirely on the fact that it was 100 minutes long and surely he had to appear in there somewhere, right?

But no, of course not. He is intensely reclusive and doesn’t talk to anybody. As a writer and an artist myself, I respect that decision, although as a fan and a human being, I find it intensely frustrating because we all want to worship our heroes in person or at least gaze upon them from afar.

Because he’s such a recluse, this is a rare sort of documentary : one about a person who does not appear in it. Berkely Breathed of Bloom County fame said that Watterson was the Sasquatch of cartooning. You might see a footprint here and there or other signs that he’s been through, but only two or three people have ever actually seen him.

An exaggeration, of course. I know from the documentary that he gave a speech at a cartoonists’ association dinner once, and presumably he did not do it Wizard of Oz style, so they got to see him at least.

But it gets the idea across.

Like I said, I respect his decision to not engage his public directly and to speak entirely through his work. I can’t guarantee that I wouldn’t do the same if I am in his position some day. Part of me would always want to be friendly and engaged and to make beautiful moments for my fans in the way that only the famous and beloved can do.

But I am also extremely reclusive, and I don’t know which side would win. I sure as hell would not want total strangers knocking on my door wanting a piece of me. Fuck THAT noise. That would be completely unacceptable. I am not a spontaneously friendly person who is always ready to drop whatever he is doing to be with people.

I am, instead, a person who needs considerable recharge time after being “on”, and people would have to respect my boundaries as I have clearly and publicly defined them or I would become increasingly hard to deal with.

That is why I have always wondered if I would get a reputation as a curmudgeon or even as some sort of fan-eating ogre if I was ever lucky enough to be a famous writer. If the wrong things happened, people would see my dark side, and it can be pretty damned dark, especially to people who are used to my sunny side.

In my life as it is now, I have all the alone time I need, and interruptions are almost never a surprise, and so everybody sees my sunny side most of the time. And that is exactly how I like it. I don’t want to have to get all loud and pushy and sarcastic with people in order to maintain my boundaries, but at this point in my life, it seems highly possible that what others would find to be perfectly normal socialization would make me go all stormy.

I’m working on that.

Then again, I am feeling grumpy lately. I am still working on integrating the fiery side of my personality, with all the anger and passion and motivation, into the rest of my otherwise soggy muddy self, and that means getting in touch with my anger, and damned that makes things more complicated.

About Calvin and Hobbes itself : some of the people in the documentary had started reading it when they were Calvin’s age, and I am totally jealous of them. I did not discover C&H until my later teens, way after I was in Calvin’s age range, and so I could never have the same sort of relationship with it as someone who grew up with it.

Heck, the strip started in 1985, when I was already 12. Hard to imagine it being a product of the 80’s and 90’s, isn’t it? It just seems too innocent for such a jaded time.

But even if I had been the right age at the right time, I never really identified with Calvin very much. I was a quiet, serious, well-behaved kid for the most part, and I never lived in a world of my own imagination where I was Spaceman Spiff, or really played any sort of make-believe games like that.

I just read books and watched television and played video games.

I do wonder sometimes if I was an unnaturally boring kid. But I know that I was just too timid (and too practical and sensible, to my detriment) for that sort of thing.

I did wander around exploring my neighborhood sometimes, so I was not entirely dull. And once I had a bike, I would take trips to other parts of town, usually in search of video games other than the ones at my local arcade, but sometimes just to see what was there.

But as the years went on and the bullying came into the picture, I become increasingly agoraphobic, and the time I spent outside of the house got less and less.

The only way in which I ever identified with Calvin was those rare moments where he was just a little too smart for his own good or otherwise showed signs of having problems related to being a smart kid in a world not made for smart kids.

That is totally me. I always got good grades, because why not, it’s not hard, but I often knew more than I was supposed to for my age and gave people very mixed messages with my child’s body and adult’s mind.

Still a kid at heart, though, and that was hard for others to see.

Anyhow, talk to you tomorrow, folks!

Tonight’s entry titles brought to you by Cat Stevens.

Yeah yeah, I know he’s Yosef Islam now. Well fuck that. He’s Cat Stevens to me.

Orders an extra large pizza from Fresh Slice tonight. Boy, they are not kidding when they say extra large, the thing is huuuuge. So big that two slices filled me up just fine. The box with the rest of it in it is currently taking up 80 percent of the bottom shelf of our fridge.

So I got like, three more meals of quality pizza to go. It’s great to be able to get the kind of high quality pizza that I knew and loved in Portland, Oregon. Sure, it’s a lot more expensive than Domino’s or Little Caesar’s, but it’s worth it.

And it’s not like, crazy expensive. It cost me 25 dollars (30 with tip) for the bigass pizza and some cinnamon strips. Divide that by four, and it’s $7.50 a meal. Not too bad. When I get Chinese food, I pay roughly the same amount for two meals’ worth of food. And I never feel ripped off there.

It’s good to indulge yourself now and then. We need joy and hope and pleasure in our lives.

And in my case, physical pleasure also helps ground me in reality and help me to cope with that feeling of detachment and unreality that plagues me and makes me feel existentially insecure.

One small disappointment : they have pesto, but they treat it as a topping instead of what it is supposed to be, an alternative to the usual tomato or white sauce. So I can’t get a pesto pizza like I got in Portland. There has to be another sauce, white or red, underneath.

I can see why they do that, because as I learned the hard way in Portland, when you use pesto (which is just olive oil and Italian spices) as your base sauce, the toppings tend to slide around and will slide right off the pizza unless your driver drives very very carefully.

But still. Wah.

Saw an amazingly forgettable movie called Outlander recently. No, not the TV series coming out this year about a 1945 war nurse who ends up in 1743. Nor is it the anime series with the hunky male bear-type alien. (That is seriously all I remember about seeing the first episode. I know there was some sort of space princess come to Earth to abuse some hapless Earth dude, but mostly, it’s Outlanders = Sexy Bearish Alien. )

No, this is a 2008 movie starring Jim “Jesus” Caviezel as a generic American action hero type, in this case a space marine who crashlands his space ship in 907 AD (??) in Norway, accidentally bringing a monster called a Moorwen with him.

Note : He appears to be entirely human. Nothing alien about him. And yet, it’s 907 AD. So apparently, somewhere in space humans have interstellar travel while also being at a Viking tech level.

And yup, that makes absolutely no fucking sense. Goddamned time travel. The movie really should have called “Vikings Versus Aliens” because that is clearly what the elevator pitch was.

In fact, the movie telegraphed just how little it cared about being science fiction by having our space marine hero lose his cool space gun within minutes of crawling out of the crash, thus making sure there is absolutely no science fiction in the rest of the movie, give or take an admittedly well done CGI flashback sequence about how our hero’s people wiped out the Moorwen in order to steal their planet.

Science fictional content issues aside, the main overwhelming sin of the movie is its total lack of originality. Everything you see in it, you have seen in other movies. In fact, it reaches almost Avatar levels of derivitiveness.

The main character has practically no personality, either. Honestly, if it hadn’t been, in passing, a Viking period piece, I doubt it would have kept my attention long enough for me to finish it.

And speaking of things I don’t finish, let me tell you about A Fantastic Fear Of Everything.

Right off the bat, the movie disappointed me, because the description said it was about a man who, due to research into 19th century serial killers, has become completely paranoid and convinced that there are murderers and assassins lurking everywhere, just waiting for him to drop his guard so he can kill them.

Sounds interesting, right? Wrong. Because it turns out that the whole serial killer research is disposed of in the first ten minutes and the rest of the movie is just Simon Pegg being really scared in his brownstone and the “hilarious” hijinks that ensure from there.

That is literally it. The thing that made me give up on the movie entirely was the moment when he accidentally crazy-glues a butcher knife to his hand minutes before he has to go to a Very Important Meeting He Simply Cannot Miss.

At that point, I could see where the movie was going and I did not want to go there with it. It would just be more painful unfunny inane sitcom slapstick, and if I didn’t like it when Pegg was alone, I sure as hell wasn’t going to like it when it started involving other people.

Fuck THAT noise.

I should also add, though, in the interests of full disclosure, that my giving up on the damned thing half an hour in was also influenced by the fact that watching Simon Pegg being all crazy and freaked out all the time was triggering my own anxiety issues, and that is seriously the last fucking thing I need right now.

I have been in mental states similar to his character’s, although not quite as severe and without the murder based ideation, and I really don’t want to go there for an entirely worthless and unrewarding kind of comedy.

So two thumbs way down for me. Outlander sucked but at least it didn’t trigger my issues, except possibly my issues with unimaginative film scripts.

Well that’s what’s up with me today, folks.

How about you?

Talk to you tomorrow!