3/24/05 7:05 PM: "There are no bad ideas! There's just a lack of will to execute them!" -- Charlie Harper, Two and a Half Men

Apologies to The Diabolical, but I was completely remiss in doing anything to commemorate the passing of the equinox. Plus, it's been ... god, a month since I posted a blog. Mea culpa. It's been mad hectic over here.

BOOKED: So, as noted, the final, edited version of The Crown is off to the publishers. It was a massive load off of my mind. I also found out at Wizard World Long Beach (which I'll discuss in a minute, and no, I won't call it "Wizard World Los Angeles" any more than I'll stop calling UCLA "Cal State Westwood") that my other publisher has pushed my release to November. Which is a huge pain in the behind, since I was planning on promoting a September release book at Wizard World Rosemont. I'm as close as I get to being vexed about that.

On a more chipper note, I think I met the artist who'll be working on my Speakeasy project ... I just can't tell him (or anybody else) that he's the guy. He's so freaking good ... it's killing me. Ah well. This is the nature of the business, and Adam knows better than I in this realm. I also brought a really cool new artist who I met at Comics Ink (thanks Steve) to Speakeasy, and they should be coordinating some new opportunities. I wish my boy Allen Gladfelter would reach out for me, so I could hook him up the same way, but oh well. All things in time.

MORTY: According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Seinfeld actor Barney Martin has died. This somehow makes me sad.

SO I WENT TO WIZARD WORLD LONG BEACH: ... and it was okay.

The photo you see is wunderkind Joss Whedon after he climbed on the back of actor Nathan Fillion. I have never seen a group of people who seem to be so happy working together as the cast of Firefly/Serenity. It was weird. That's kind of the way things went this weekend.

I did several write ups for Comic Book Resources (the Wildstorm/Vertigo panel, DCU: A Look Ahead -- a real experience, Avi Arad and Chris Evans, and Joe Quesada's regular Cup o' Joe Q&A) chronicling the major stuff, but couldn't write about the real dramas (the Darwyn Cooke/Axel Alonso/Nick Barucci dust up ... and I got to meet Cooke, he's a super swell guy), or the fact that Image's Eric Stephenson didn't seem miserable for the first 'con I've ever noticed. I didn't report on Jai Nitz (another swell guy) relating his horror stories, or nudging John Dokes for "ethnicizing" the Quesada panel for a minute, or how Heidi MacDonald finally recognized who I am, or getting to hang for brief, wonderful moments with the insanely talented and very funny Bill Willingham. Why? Because I was doing news reporting, which is a bit drier than, well, blogging. Also, I focused on Speakeasy, so it was the first 'con I didn't spend chasing Marvel or DC editors and trying to get some face time. I'm more of a mind to stick to the Too Short route ... especially if my man Jamar Nicholas gets our 'con one-shot done for San Diego. I'm about business, not begging.

I mean, every week day, people see my writing (I was very pleased that Ross Richie said he liked my work, just from what he sees) on CBR, and more on UGO every week (one in every ten men online visits UGO, doncha know). I'm a pro, my fiction chops are nothing to sneeze at. I just wanna do the work now, you know?

next year they threaten to move the whole shebang to LA proper, and my boss Jonah has a great piece on the pros and cons of that idea.

DIE ALREADY: So I've decided I want Terry Schiavo to die.

Yes, it's true -- I want lots of people to die, for a wide variety of reasons. However, when Congress gets involved with subpoenas and spending the taxpayer dime (which even I contribute some to, despite my best efforts to the contrary), it starts to eat up my TV time, and that sickens me. I mean, when somebody gets paralyzed by gunfire in south Los Angeles, where are these guys? Better yet, when Abner Louima or Amadou Diallo were crying for their lives, where was the outrage? One of my favorite columnists, Jon Carroll, wrote recently (and yes, it's so good I have to quote extensively) ...

Schiavo's sad case is not unique; feeding tubes are pulled every day in the United States. Patients are intentionally given overdoses of morphine every day in order to relieve their suffering. Sick people choose to die, and say so, and they do die, aided or unaided. This is the cycle of life.

Sometimes the media gets wind of one such story, usually involving a relatively young white person like Terri Schiavo. Press conferences are held. Doctors are consulted. The courts get involved, which is regrettable but necessary. And then the evidence is heard, and a decision is made, and a life is ended. All lives end -- the idea that human life is sacred is not, alas, supported by the evidence.

Politicians become involved in direct proportion to the amount of media publicity. They proclaim piously that they believe in the sanctity of life, which is code for "I'm still against abortion." They align themselves with a socially damaging faith-based theory that opposes even contraception, because every sperm is sacred. (In that belief system, the stain on Monica Lewinsky's dress is holy in the eyes of God.)

The panderers and the publicly pious created a nine-ring circus around a private family decision, and they used a helpless young woman as a pawn. They did so apparently without conscience and without regret. Congress subpoenaed Terri Schiavo in an effort to prevent her feeding tube from being removed. President Bush flew in dramatically from Texas to sign a special emergency bill allowing a federal court to intervene in the case.

Did any of them care about Terri Schiavo for the first 14.5 years of her vegetative state? They did not. Did they offer to pay for the extraordinary expense of keeping her alive? They did not. Did they sit by her bedside, read her books, play her music, bathe her bedsores? They did not. There's nothing to be gained from unpublicized compassion.

There are elderly people all over this country dying every day from simple neglect. People just forget about them. Maybe Congress could subpoena them! That way, when they didn't show up, they'd be in contempt of Congress and someone would have to go find them and at least change their sheets and give them some hot broth.

There are children in this country dying every day of preventable diseases. Would George Bush care to fully fund all family clinics, so that a baby would not die simply because it cannot be given antibiotics in time? Would George Bush care to spend as much money fighting HIV-AIDS in the African American community as he does building large bombers? Yeah, I know, it's a tired old liberal argument, and it's been discredited because well, you're gonna have to remind me again why it's been discredited.

Never mind. Let's just concentrate on people in persistent vegetative states. I have no idea how many people fit into that category -- let's say 25,000. If every life is so damn sacred, then all these people must be allowed to live and live and live. With enough government support, they could outlive those of us in persistent animated states. What a triumph for the human spirit that would be.

And let's not hear this blather about quality of life. It's quantity of life that we're after, just more and more living humans in various states of distress, but all of them joyously alive as God intended, until they die, also as God intended. But never mind the second part! Let's keep cranking out the comatose! Put them all under the care and the protection of the Congress of the United States, the fine fountain of loving-kindness

I can't say it any better than that.

Let me say this for the record: in my case, pull the damned plug. I don't wanna be kept alive in a vegetative state, or a coma, or what have you. I don't want years of physical therapy to rehabilitate my body to a percentage of its normal efficiency. If I get tagged by fate, I'm going down. You can donate all my organs to whatever, as well, I don't care. Just so you know.

BLAST FROM THE PAST: So I've started reading my old high school classmate Phoebe's blog, and wow. A lot of the negative things I used to think about her ... well, I feel like an ass for thinking them now. It just reminds me that we are all walking a difficult road. She seems to be a good place, with her husband and son, and I'm happy for her ... because it doesn't look like it was easy to get there.

THE JON MELON CAMP: I'm amazed with how much I'm enjoying blogs. I didn't check back in on the one from my ex Antoinette, even as I heard she was sick, because I was given the impression that she didn't want to hear from me. I'm glad she's better now, in any case. I also only have blogs to use to catch up with my dawg Mikey, who just operates in a different geographical area than I do, making our friendship a challenge. It's weird, being interested in what other people think for a change. But my elder brother just told me, "change is good," so I suppose that's a possibity ...

THE GOOD LIFE: I sometimes wish I had the cavalier attitude about talking about my love life that characterized the late nineties. Suffice it to say that -- despite some irksome setbacks -- I am doing insanely well. I have a strange sense of longing, as one thing is not going according to plan, but outside of that I am ecstatic, and that carries over into much of my life. So I've got that going for me ...

SILENT RUNNING: So you've been reading all along, have you, 220? That's interesting. It might explain the timing for some of the more ... unusual conversations we've had, eh? Strange that you don't just ask me ... but then again I found out that a self-absorbed Nigerian woman combed the search function of this site to confirm that my brother was comforting me in the twilight of my failed marriage, not believing that his bond to his brother would be greater than his desire for her (ah, the things you learn from site logs). Maybe you're not the "get it out in the open" type. Well, I'm sure that if we continue with "the talk" things will follow their inevitable conclusion.

WHITHER FEFE: I'm so sick of starting to like something only to have it disappear or fail to live up to my expectations (which should teach me not to have expectations, but somehow it doesn't).

I really like the music of Fefe Dobson and she's quite a conundrum -- early 20s, Canadian, Black, rock singer. She's super interesting, and I was stunned at the selection of singles. She never penetrated the ideaspace of ... well, I live in LA, which does a great deal for setting the tone of global pop culture, and she barely crossed my radar. I think she's better than that. But then again, I'm wondering where the hell Dionne Farris is, confused that more people don't recognize the genius of Will Downing, and waiting for Craig David to grow up and do something important.

This also leads into a funny bit about me -- a woman recently told me that "Black people" don't use the term "making out." Now, I'm Black (and super ghetto according to most of the people I know), and I use it a lot. I'd almost rather make out a lot than have the amount of sex I have now, because it's a space of unadulterated intimacy and affection that would be wholly reciprocal. I was then told that "oh, this from the one who sings rock music." As if Black people didn't sing and enjoy rock music. Sorry, Chuck Berry, Bad Brains, Bo Diddley, Corey Glover, Mos Def, Vernon Reid, Ice T, Fishbone, Little Richard -- you're all being excised from the freaking race.

I got the "you talk too proper" jibes that any smart Black kid will get growing up. I can mangle syntax and misconjugate verbs with the best Ebonic speakers in the world (and my spoken tones are often a lot closer to that than my written ones, which make more use of my vocabulary). Now my ethnicity was being called into question?

The older I get, the more bored I get with the simplistic lyrics and song structures of most "R&B" music. Yes to John Legend, no to Bobby Valentino. Yes to Jill Scott, no to Brooke Valentine. I mean, I like the beats, yes, and I may even sing along. But when I look at what I choose to play, it's more like, "I tried to be perfect/ it just wasn't worth it/ nothing could ever be so wrong/ it's hard to believe me/ it never gets easy/ I guess I knew that all along." Even my hip hop has to be smarter -- less Snoop Dogg, more Talib Kweli, less Dr. Dre and more Kanye West.

So I'm gonna start singing "Ordinary People" and "A Different Corner" and trying to learn "Let Me Go" by Three Doors Down. Maybe even "Mr. Brightside" by The Killers. But I'm surely not gonna apologize or mitigate who I am to be somebody else's half-informed idea of "Black."

MUSICALS: I'm singing a lot less, due to other stuff going on (ask me about being "Panther"-powered, it's a hoot). I don't like that -- I wanna pick a night and start singing again, as I'm not doing it as much, just going to work and letting other people sing. It looks like it'll be Sundays. We'll see how that goes.

It's weird that music plays such a big role in my life, and I've been giving it so little time recently. Then again, I've been giving no time to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas after working up my pimping and weapon skills.

That's enough for now. Time to close with a quote:

"I've learned that the best thing in relationships is to avoid people." -- Andy Dick