She was floating. She was upside-down. She could see the thin black lines above her, thin, criss-crossing lines of branches, outlined in white, faint gray behind. She could feel tiny dots of cold on her cheeks, softly, gradually. The brightness didn’t hurt. The pressure was fading.
She had seen an old educational film from the 1950s that compared the circulatory system to a series of pneumatic tubes, carrying vital documents from one end of a modern office building to the other. Being a child of the 1980s, she had had no idea that there had been a time when capsule pipelines were common infrastructural items in most modern cities. Being three years old, and having never seen such a thing, she misunderstood the metaphor. She thought, as a child, that the circulatory system actually worked on the same principles described in the film. She thought that blood was a gas, pressurized, flowing through tiny tubes running up and down the body, sending oxygen to all the cells.
When she was four, the headaches started. Sudden onset migraines, sometimes lasting for two days, sometimes three. The headaches brought an extreme sensitivity to light. The doctor told her parents that it was a common early warning sign for an oncoming migraine. Her preschool teacher, Mr. Abrams, kept a pair of dark glasses in his desk with a post-it note with her dad’s cell phone number. She knew that when the light started hurting, she should ask Mr. Abrams for her sunglasses. When she asked for her sunglasses, Mr. Abrams knew to call her dad to come pick her up. She never told anyone that she could tell when a headache was coming even before the fluorescent bulbs in the classroom forced her to squeeze her eyes shut. The first symptom was never light sensitivity. The first symptom was the pressure.
It was like the gaseous blood in her pneumatic circulatory system was forming clouds. She pictured a deep black cherry Kool-Aid cloud drifting up from her back, up into her neck, and thickening in the base of her head. More and more gas, more and more pressure, her head like a balloon, but like that time when they made a piñata in arts and crafts by covering a balloon with papier-mâché, the blood cloud didn’t have room to expand anymore. There was a big, fluffy cloud of blood expanding in her head, and soon the light would hurt, and soon the pressure would grow until it started causing cracks on the inside, and then there’d be pills that didn’t help, and the vomiting, and the throbbing, and applesauce with cinnamon served in bed, with the lights off and the curtains drawn.
On her fifth birthday she was learning how to ride her new bike when she fell off the curb into the street and scraped a large chunk of skin off her leg. She had never seen her own blood before, and was so confused she forgot to cry. It wasn’t whistling out of her shin like steam in a teapot. It was oozing, thick, syrupy. Her mom soaked it up with a washcloth and sprayed something on it that made it feel like she was melting in acid. She had a faint scar for years, but it faded.
When she was seven she was in the car with her mom when they visited a bank drive-thru teller, and she watched her mom put her deposit slip into a canister and slid it into a chute that made a whooshing sound. She saw the canister fly up a tube, and then saw it fall inside the bank window. Nobody, not the bank tellers nor her mother, seemed to think this was as amazing as she did. “That’s like the blood stream,” she said. “Like in that film, yes,” her mother replied. For years after, whenever her mother went to the bank without her, she would sulk in her room.
She was eight when she cut her hand. She was in the woods with a friend and he had a pocket knife and she was using it and somehow the blade folded in on her fingers. She had seen blood enough times by now not to be surprised, but it was a hard image to shake, the idea of blood as a gas. She stared at her fingers, three deep gashes across her knuckles that looked like little mouths. Flexing her fingers, the wounds opened and closed, and it looked like her fingers were breathing blood. Straighten, close, inhale, blood stops. Bend, open, exhale, blood gathers, like a bubble, until it gets too heavy, falling off the fingers, through her other hand cupped beneath, spattering the oak log they sat on.
Blood seemed so heavy to her. If she was full of blood, she felt she should be heavier, weighed down with iron and sludge. It was her secret truth she carried, that her blood only turned to liquid when it met with the air. The rest of the time, she knew, it was light. She could hear it whooshing around inside when she plugged up her ears. She could still feel the pressure building up, the blood rising to her head in a dark red cloud, just before her headaches started. Filling her head to bursting.
When she got her first period, she giggled. She never told anyone why.
She wondered what happened to the sled.
She had felt the pressure building, the cloud forming, funneling up her spine and filling her skull from back to front. She’d said “Not now, not now.” She’d left her sunglasses at home. She’d forgotten how snow reflected light back in dozens of angles, so it was like the sun was in the ground, in the trees, on the roofs and sidewalks and buried cars. She closed her eyes.
Floating. She couldn’t hear anything but the quiet sound of snow hitting snow, a gentle hiss, almost a sound by virtue of not being a sound at all. Almost sounding like a tiny leak in a balloon. Gas escaping slowly through a tiny hole. She stared up at the trees, and felt warm.
I’m going to break a personal taboo and tell you about a dream I just had. I normally shy away from anything but the most passing reference to my dreams, because I know something that shockingly few people seem to understand: that other people’s dreams are incredibly boring. Listening to other people’s dreams is like hearing a drunk try to describe a joke. Not tell a joke, but describe one.
Anyway, that said, let me tell you about this dream I just had, skipping all the bits that don’t matter. In the dream, I walked into a hardware store to buy some glue and duct tape and a few other things, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that fully two walls at the front of the store were devoted to comic books. I was thrilled to find a new issue of Phonogram, as well as a Phonogram CD featuring tracks from the bands referenced in the comics (as well as an all-new Los Campesinos track recorded specifically for the compilation). So I got my glue, and I got some comics, and I got a CD as well.
[As an aside, I recognize fully that the point of this essay could well be that I think about Phonogram too much for someone who isn't Kieron Gillen. Or Jamie McKelvie. (There are probably days I think about it more than McKelvie does.) In reality, I just like comics about bands and the music scene way more than I actually like bands and the music scene. Hell, most of the comics I've written (still sitting in the drawer, likely never to be seen again) are about bands, going to see bands, watching bands break up, and all the common experiences in the music scene. So it's only natural that Phonogram fills a particular vacant spot in my brain, namely standing in for an entire genre of comics I've always thought should exist but could never get off my ass to make myself. But that is, most definitely, another story for another day.]
Now, for whatever reason, this dream got me thinking about a discussion that was first becoming popular on the WEF (and other comics discussion sites) ten years ago; namely, what comic book stores should be doing to get new people in the door. Then, like now, the most intriguing answer to this question, at least for me, is that the question is wrong; comics don’t need more people walking in the door, comics need to become ubiquitously available. [I should probably tell you straight away that this whole conversation, while certainly an important, even necessary conceit, bored me, then and now, about as much as hearing about other people's dreams. Even then, when it was "the important" discussion. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that the way to get people into a comic book store is to have the best damn comic book store known to man, and pimp the hell out of it. Over the past ten years, people like James Sime and Andrew Neal have proven that formula. But again, another story for another day.]
So, I was thinking about how hard it is for non-comic stores to get comics on their shelves. And, because in my dream the example was being set by a hardware store, I thought about things I buy in hardware stores, and how I would go about getting them on my shelves (my rhetorical shelves, seeing as I no longer own a comic book store). And I thought about ULINE. Over the years, I have placed several orders with ULINE, both as a store owner and as a private citizen. They sell boxes and tape and shrink wrap and displays and trash cans and, well, primarily hardware and supplies best suited to a shipping company or warehouse. Important stuff. They deal primarily in large, bulk orders to businesses. Yet the process of getting an account with them was as simple as filling out an order form, entering my credit card information, and clicking “submit”. They don’t care who they sell to — money is money. They do have a check box in their order form that will tell them if the order is being shipped to a residential address, but that’s so they know the best way of shipping (and know not to send a large pallet on a tractor trailer when you don’t have a loading bay).
But here’s where ULINE excels, at least in this argument — they have tiered pricing. Order small amounts, it costs just about retail price (usually a bit less, but not by much). Order in larger amounts, and the price goes down. Order in huge bulk amounts, the price goes WAY down, to the point where it would be perfectly practical to use them to order stock to sell at retail.
Comics should be like that.
You know how hard it is to get a DIAMOND account? It involves credit scores and business IDs and phone calls and certified checks (seriously, when I ran my store I would have to go to the bank every week and get a certified check in order to get my order; after, I think, a year DIAMOND allows you to switch to a regular business check). As any comics retailer will tell you, the DIAMOND website is just about the least intuitive site ever created, and ordering from it (or even just finding a product on it) is mind-numbing. And that’s for the people who have decided to focus their entire business on selling a product they can only get through DIAMOND. (This is where the argument of ten years ago would devolve, justifiably, into a discussion of how terrible DIAMOND is. That discussion can be found anywhere else online, so I won’t go into it here.) So while there might be plenty of non-comics stores that have some interest in stocking a selection of comic books, most would run up against DIAMOND and decide against it.
[Here I should mention that for the first two years of JIGSAW, when it was a comic shop and art gallery in NYC, I didn't have a DIAMOND account, and instead got all my comics through COLD CUT and private small press distribution, as well as the occasional "fell off the truck" deal with friendly creators whose books I couldn't get because they were published by Marvel, DC, or Image, who are all exclusive to DIAMOND. It was, in fact, impossible to keep a broad selection this way, and one of the motivating factors for moving the store was so I could afford to get a DIAMOND account, and have enough space to put it all.]
As this is stretching on a bit longer than I’d intended, I’ll skip the bit where I contemplated the perfect match that is comics and hardware, what with single issue comics being cheap, disposable, and the perfect length to read on a break on a construction site (how great would that be to see a line of guys in hard hats reading comics on their lunch break?). I fully recognize that the comics industry is so far in the hole in terms of “how things are done” that changing the system is next to impossible. And I know that the business is built around pre-ordering and exclusivity and all sorts of things that, while idiotic, are just status quo. And I know that DIAMOND can barely get their distribution correct as it is, so adding customers would cause more problems than it would solve. And, and, and.
But picture a different world. Where there was a website where a customer could go and buy the new issue of PHONOGRAM for full price with nothing more than their credit card. A world where that very same website could sell 50 copies of the new issue to James Sime at his normal retailer discount. A world where the owner of that hardware store could decide to try having a selection of comics for his customers to read, and could get a good discount without having to jump through hoops. A world where the ubiquity of comics wasn’t such a weird idea.
All I’m saying is that it was kind of a nice dream.
The following is transcribed from a print-out left rather casually on top of a pair of shoes in the middle of the floor. One can only guess its intended recipients have all stepped over or around it over the course of the day. Much of the text was hastily marked out, but we’re fairly sure we have been able to reconstruct the entirety of the note here for the official record.
Gentlemen of the Lab,
–by which I mean Milton, Lump, Frank, and Regibor, should you all find the distinction of “gentleman” to be as spuriously applied to you as I–
I had cause to contemplate a chronometric device today in the course of my studies. Drat, I should start earlier. Transcription start again.
Before I attempt to detail the results of a seemingly casual observation I undertook this afternoon, I must first recount the situation I found myself in upon waking this morning. As you all well know, my robotic spider legs require recharging from time to time, and I often find it convenient to park myself over the wireless charging station just before bedtime and simultaneously gather a few REM cycles. Well, last I recall, I had done this last night after clearing up the mess left from our Jigsaw π experiment. So you can imagine my surprise and confusion upon waking, finding myself lying on my side underneath a workbench in the lab, covered in maple syrup and — no, actually, I think I’ll leave that bit out. Transcription, delete the previous sentence.
So you can imagine my surprise and confusion upon waking, finding myself not in the charging dock but under a workbench in the lab. I likely don’t have to tell you my first thought was of shenanigans, that one or more of you were pulling some sort of hilarious jape to blow off steam following our difficult month of videos. Indeed, I myself had contemplated substituting hydrogen for helium in our planned celebratory event as a mischievous joke — imagine the subtle difference in the buoyancy of the balloons! But soon I ruled out pranksterism, as it was then I caught sight of the surveillance feed from outside the building.
Doubtful I have to tell you gentlemen that there appears to be a great deal of snow sitting outside these walls. Snow that, by Feynman, I swear wasn’t there when I went to sleep.
It was, of course, at this point that I had cause to seek out and examine the lab’s chronometric devices in some detail. At first this brought merely confusion, as the date clearly read “February Third”. In several different languages. I was momentarily terrified that the completion of the Jigsaw π experiment had been a horrible dream and that we would have to undertake the daily video project all over again. Granted, this thought gave some comfort, for I also recalled a very vivid dream about pancakes, and thought that this might explain the maple syr– dammit. Transcription, delete that last sentence as well. Mustn’t talk about the maple syrup. It’s not as embarrassing as the feathers, but– DAMMIT. Transcription, delete THOSE two sentences, please. Must remember the recording. Okay.
But though the thought of having dreamt the entirety of Jigsaw π was disturbing, it was nowhere near as alarming as the moment when I noticed the year. Brace yourselves, gentlemen, for if you have not yet discovered this, I promise it will come as quite a shock. The year is currently 2010. 2010! I, for one, found this very upsetting, and was determined to find all of you to aid me in undertaking a grand experiment to uncover the manner by which we were delivered eleven months into the future.
Here I fell over, as my spider legs, sensing low battery, ejected me rudely and ran off to recharge. Rather undignified. It’s cold here, on the floor. When constructing this new lab, I really should have put in underfloor heating elements. I seem to recall seeing them on an old episode of This Old House. Something to keep in mind for the next time we renovate. Transcription, file the previous sentences regarding underfloor heating under Kranium’s personal notes, and remove them from this memo document.
So, gentlemen of the lab, I put it to you that we have been asleep for eleven months. To think of all the technological advancements we have missed in that time. The cultural events. The political developments. To think, we weren’t even here when the year changed from 2009 to 2010. It must have been horrid; not being around to correct the misapprehension that we were entering a new decade, countless websites and magazines must have published “Best of the Decade” lists. We could have stopped it, gentlemen. But alas, Lord Somnus had other plans for us.
Getting to the point, gentlemen, I propose that we set about the purpose of discovering what happened to us. Was it some horrible accident? Some toxic fumes leaked from the sublevels? Perhaps an old experiment come to haunt us? Or some other outside force? Gentlemen, we cannot even be certain of our safety until we have clearly assessed the forces behind our Rip Van Winkle activities. We must gather together and set our minds to this discovery, by whatever means — oh, my legs have come back. You certainly took your sweet time. Transcription pause. I really must reprogram you to let me down more gently in case of emergency recharge. Better yet, I should just place a passive induction station under this spot near the lab monitor. Help me up, front right leg, just bend there — hrmph — get the — hurgk — must have put on weight while I was asleep, it’s a bit — no, there we go — okay. Well, at least now I can review the transcription –
Dammit, transcription, I told you to pause. PAUSE, I said. No, stop — stop taking down these — dammit, Milton is the only one who can get this damn program to work correctly. Milton! Right, if I could find Milton, I wouldn’t need the blasted note. TRANSCRIPTION, PRINT NOTE. I’ll just hand-correct the — PRINT MEMO. PRINT. PRINT NOW. PLEASE. Dammit. MILTON! COME FIX THIS TRANSCRIBER PRINT
jonesy :: 2 February, 2010 6.23pm
filed under: blather :: Jigsaw, snow, writing ::
It’s snowing again here. It’s notable from the standpoint that I grew up here, and growing up we almost never had anything close to serious snow. Years of half-inch dustings frustrated the young me, who wanted nothing more than a mid-week vacation, enforced, where maybe we’d get to light a fire in the fireplace.
Granted, I mostly just wanted to avoid school. I enjoyed playing in the snow to an extent, but even then I would contemplate wet, clammy socks, runny noses, sharp, tingling fingertips, the blindness that comes from glasses fogged up with my own breath. It was an act of will to play in the snow, even then, though one easily made. Because it happened so rarely.
After I spent several winters in Boston, the magic of snow wore off pretty quickly. In Virginia, snow was typically a novelty. In New England, it is far more ubiquitous, a given that inches will pile up every few weeks, and cars will get frozen into large, gray cocoons of ice. It didn’t take long to start hating the stuff, especially when I was riding my bike in a blizzard to go open the video store, passing cars the whole way, fishtailing and cursing my fingerless gloves.
Once I left Boston, I left behind my hatred of snow. I didn’t live in snowy regions. Even when I was in New York, it was hard to hate the stuff, though that might have something to do with my being drunk on red wine and bourbon almost the entire time I lived there. I’d actually forgotten what it was like to hate snow until two feet of it dropped on Charlottesville last month, leaving me stranded at home, alone, with no shovel, and a gammy foot, threatening to cancel Xmas.
So what’s that got to do with creating things? I have no fucking clue. It’s snowing again. It’s supposed to accumulate. More snow on top of the snow we got last weekend that canceled plans, and more snow coming this weekend that will cancel more plans. I sat down to write about my own stalled-out creative process, and out came three hundred words about snow.
Maybe it has something to do with The Shining.
I was actually just thinking about that as I was getting out of the car with my milk and bread. (Which, by the way, I was going to buy anyway today. It’s not like I panicked and went to the store; I was going to the store, and it started snowing before I could get there.) The snow has definitely made me pretty stir crazy. Not just the snow, but the relapsing problems with my foot that prevent me from walking great distances sometimes. Before, walking a couple miles in the snow wouldn’t be a problem. Now, it is. Or can be. Or maybe it’d be fine going out but coming back would be hell. It’s not knowing, I think, that has gotten to me, has built a mindset where I feel completely trapped. I shouldn’t walk, so I can’t walk. And the snow means that confines me to my house until the plows come down my cul-de-sac. Trapped.
Which is all well and good when you don’t have to be anyplace. Like when I was a kid, and looked forward to being trapped, because I didn’t really want to go to school, and it’s not like I had anything else that had to be done. Trapped can be a great excuse for a party, or for a day of rest, a day of meditation. Trapped can be happy, peaceful, fun. But me, if I have the least amount of work that needs to be done Out There, even if it’s days away, the snow now gets me feeling a little paranoid and nuts. The Whatif monster hides behind my chair and whispers at me. Whatif I can’t drive? Whatif I can’t get to work? Whatif I get trapped here and can’t get anything done?
I haven’t been writing much. To be fair, I haven’t been writing at all. I wrote a way-overdue thank-you note to my aunt today, and I think it was the first time I’d done anything more than update Twitter since the Richard posts. I… I have been feeling trapped. Creatively, I mean. Stir-crazy. Like I can’t go anywhere or do anything. Like a part of me isn’t working correctly, and it prevents me from getting anything done. I suppose there’s some hope if I figured out a way of turning a long, contemplative journal entry about snow into a metaphor for my lack of product, but then, I always did have a weakness for such things.
Jigsaw Season Four was halfway written. Ten episodes scripted, albeit in need of polish. This is past tense. I kept on not writing, and not writing, and doing everything but write. It finally dawned on me why — it wasn’t that I was lazy, it wasn’t that I was lacking discipline. It was that I didn’t think the new episodes were funny. Oh, they’re interesting, and ambitious, and the structure is way better than previous episodes. They push my writing to a place I’ve never gone, and the plot is as detailed and intricate as I’ve ever written. But they’re just not funny. Like, at all. To me, anyway. There are jokes, and there are moments that are quite good. But overall, I look at what I’ve got and I just don’t care.
It dawned on me that, as nobody was paying me for these things, I could just throw them out. Sure, I was quoted in the paper as saying the new season would start… nowish. Sure, it’s been a year (!) since there was any sort of regular Jigsaw thing. These are facts that make me feel guilty, pressure that certainly ups the stakes in my brain. But I’d rather be late than suck. Actually, I don’t even care if I suck. I just want to suck in a way I enjoy. Right now I have the luxury of doing that.
Although, that may just be a justification. At this point, I’ve been trapped in the snow so long (metaphorically if not literally) I don’t remember what it’s like to… not wear boots? (Feel free to leave better allegories in the comments.) For better or for worse, I’m going to force myself to write more. Starting today. With this. That you have just read.
I don’t pretend to know if anybody is paying attention. But then, I’m used to that with the show. For now I’m going to force at least 1000 words out every day on this blog. Some of it will be Jigsaw related, some of it may be media reviews, some may be short stories, some may be random head-pounding, and much will likely be utter crap. But I assure you, after a few weeks, I’ll have a better idea of when the new season is actually going to happen, and what it’s likely to be.
For now, I think I’ll go drink some red wine and watch the snow.
Sara makes with the awesome. Also, how’s that for a price, folks? One drink and then whatever you feel is fair AFTER you’ve seen the show? I mean, it’s just ridiculous! You were gonna drink ANYWAY. Our biggest problem will be if people drink their entire wallet and can’t pay us anything for the show. So folks, for the poor, sleepy actors, save back a couple bucks. If you hate the show, you can always get one last beer at the end.
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