Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

It was an unseasonably cool day in the city yesterday, feeling more like mid-autumn than the latter half of summer. A thick blanket of gray clouds dominated the weather, keeping the heat away and covering the city in rain and mist. For me, this is like an early birthday present. I decided that I would forgo my iPod on the walk home from the gym, the better to hear the soothing sound of light drizzle on leaves and the gentle susurrus (look it up) of tires on wet pavement.

I was having a good walk, enjoying the weather while contemplating the definition of insanity. There are two versions.

In the criminal justice system, when a person “pleads insanity,” it means different things depending on which state you’re being tried in. The definitions vary, but all demonstrate the narrowness of scope that is characteristic of law. Simply put, did the defendant understand that what he was doing was a crime at the time he was doing it? Did he understand the ramifications of his actions? If so, he is sane. Sure, it’s crazy to eat people, no argument there, but as long as you’re committing cannibalism in a way that suggests that you understand it to be a crime, you’re legally sane.

In purely philosophical terms the definition of insanity is much broader. Sanity is a social contract. We call ourselves sane because we all share the same perception of reality. I see a tree, you see a tree, your neighbor sees a tree, we all call it a tree, and we’re all sane. The guy who ambles by and calls it The Great Fire Dragon Radio Receiver of Southern Alaska is crazy. Probably. People who eat food are sane, people who eat things that are not food are insane. You get the idea.

It’s a fairly long walk from the gym to my home, and about seven blocks from my destination this meditation was interrupted. A portly, middle-aged Mexican-American came out of nowhere and started talking to me. The suddenness of his appearance was startling, as if he’d materialized a few feet behind me and then Power Walked the rest of the way. Even more disconcerting was the way he chose to engage me in conversation. Most people greet others with sentences like, “Hello,” or “How are you doing?” or “What is up?” This man chose to open up with, “You know, I am gay and am going now to see my boyfriend.”

“Oh,” I said, because what the hell else do you say to that?

I looked the man over. He was wearing khaki shorts and a cream-colored sweater. I’ve always felt that long-sleeved clothing looks dumb when worn in combination with shorts. Dumb but, given the weather, not crazy. The man, who introduced himself as Sextavio, also had a huge earring in his left earlobe, which suggested a somewhat antiquated interpretation of homosexuality. His speech was heavily accented but fluent, rapid but not pressured. In general he seemed friendly and benign, and also drunk out of his mind. His breath was like the inside of a martini glass. From the way Sextavio was talking, you’d think we’d been engaged in conversation for at least an hour, as opposed to, say, one minute.

We walked on. He complimented me on my friendliness. I didn’t want to continue this conversation, but I also didn’t want to be the guy who reinforces the idea that nobody says hello anymore, so I grunted in an affirming manner. This, I hoped, would be interpreted as, “Please leave me,” but instead Sextavio heard, “Please tell me about your family.”

“Joo know, I had a brother who had polio. Is okay to be different.”

I can only assume that he brought this up on account of my funny walk. Let me tell you something. I’ve heard a lot of different theories on my walk over the years, but polio—as in iron lung, 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—PO-LEE-OH, is a new one. It rockets to the top of my list, along with, “He’s just eccentric.”

The only thing that could have stunned me more than this sentence was, as it happened, the one that Sextavio uttered next. “Joo wanna come back to my plaze?”

“No, really, that’s very kind of you but…that is…no thanks.” In retrospect, I’m not sure why I was so nice about this. A drunken stranger had come out of nowhere and was now propositioning me in broad daylight. I mean, really, I don’t think it would have been absurd to strike him across the face. Given his height, poor physical shape, and presently impaired motor coordination, I probably could have pulled it off. Incidentally, these are the kinds of odds I need in order to succeed in a physical altercation.

The great scientist and philosopher William James, writing on the perception of time, once remarked that sometimes his walks seemed to go by in an instant, and at other times it felt as if the journey from the pub to his house took hours. Let me tell you, when being propositioned by a talkative drunk on the way home from your gym, the walk takes an eternity. At this point I was thinking of us as two people on concurrent journeys, walking in parallel but certainly not, God forbid, together. Eventually—where by “eventually,” I mean “after several days”—we reached an intersection at a supermarket. Here I stopped walking, because we were now a few blocks from my cross-street and, harmless as Sextavio seemed, I didn’t want him to know where I live.

He continued talking, mostly about how America treats its immigrants, and how it’s so unkind and nasty, and people really should be better to each other, don’t you think?  And also his brother, the one with polio, committed suicide a few years back, he doesn’t know why. Very sad. Clearly, it was time for me to make my exit.

“Listen, it’s been…uh…nice talking to you, but I have to get going. I’m supposed to meet some friends.” As lies go, this is not very convincing. I considered other falsehoods, like maybe claiming that I needed to get some food shopping out of the way. However, this raised the possibility of accidentally allowing a lecher to accompany me on my errands. My fake errands, mind you, ones that I didn’t want to do in the first place.

“Oh, daz very nize. Is important dat joo keep jour frienz cloze.” What Sextavio actually said went on for at least a minute (or perhaps a year), but I can’t recall all of it. He capped this cadence of speech with, “Lemme walk joo home.”

“No, that’s fine–I mean–I can handle it by myself.”

“Okay.” There was a pause. “Joo wanna come back to my plaze?” He punctuated the question with a wink, as if perhaps, prior to this moment, he had been too subtle.

“No,” I said, finally adopting a harsher tone that I think put him off. To my horror, we continued walking in the same direction. Sextavio explained that he wasn’t trying to walk me home, he just lived a block away. I quietly thanked God that he’d have to turn onto his street before he saw mine. At the next intersection he stopped and said, “This is where I live,” and proceded to give me his precise street address and apartment number, in case, you know, whatever.

I wasn’t sure how to terminate our largely one-sided conversation. It seemed rude to simply discard the jolly drunk, walking away in misanthropic silence. After all, he had accompanied me for a good portion of my walk home and his only real offense was being a little too friendly. He extended his hand, and I shook it, at which point he clasped his other hand over mine, and sang me a short poem.

No, I do not recall the words. I do, however, recall that several small groups of people walked right by us during this exchange. No one seemed to be staring, but I can’t imagine that they missed the tableau of a skinny white guy with a backpack, holding hands with a man who was serenading him in heavily accented English.

Once Sextavio was out of sight and definitely not following me, I walked the couple of disturbingly short blocks back to my apartment. Many thoughts ran through my mind; first and foremost among them was, Did I just hallucinate that?

I mean, really. Did a stocky, drunk Mexican-American actually come out of nowhere, strike up an awkward conversation, and proposition me multiple times in the span of fifteen minutes? Has it finally happened? Am I now David Sedaris? I don’t see Sextavio anywhere, so when you think about it, where’s the proof that he existed, just now? Maybe I was, in reality, hit by a bus on my way home, and my brain, now in its death throes, is doing everything it can to fabricate the remainder of my life. Will the waking world soon fall away to reveal an infinite chasm that is both nothing and everything? I’m waiting.

There are few moments in life that will literally make you question your own sanity. This was one of them.

Joss Whedon should suffer for what he’s done to me. A friend of mine was kind enough to loan me the trade paperbacks of Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, and I’ve been hitting the bottle hard ever since.

I haven’t dived this deep into the Marvel Universe since I was eleven, maybe twelve years old. My introduction to the X-Men came courtesy of my uncle. Like my grandfather (his father), my uncle is a pack rat. While my grandfather held onto tax returns from 1970 and newspaper clippings that were probably printed along with a Gutenberg Bible, my uncle was a quintessential comic book collector. At some point in 1992, the bulk of his collection ended up in my parents’ basement while he moved his family to Long Island. He had everything worth owning, including original copies of the Dark Phoenix Saga. Naturally, I was told that if I so much as thought about these comics too hard, let alone touch them, they could incur damage, but this did get me interested enough to track down some trade paperback versions.

As it happened, FOX began airing the immensely successful X-Men animated series that same year. My friends and I were taken by Storm (one). It was a real Beast of an obsession (two!), as if we had Nightcrawlers scampering over our meninges, inducing a brain fever (too much?).

Considering what a huge dork I was am, and considering that I had recently been granted an immensely generous four dollar weekly allowance, things could have gotten ugly fast. Luckily, my group tended to stay away from the actual X-Men comics. This was the early 90s, and it was a definite low point in the quality of comic books. Long-running titles were atrociously written, incomprehensible to new readers, or trying way too hard to reach out.

Instead, my friends and I found an outlet for the mutant craze at a local indoor flea market. My memory has shattered this place into just a handful of surviving fragments. There was a Goth Magic Shoppe near what I thought of as the front entrance, which sold incense, henna tattoos, and crystal figurines of gryphons and wizards. There was a guy who could airbrush just about anything onto a white Hanes t-shirt. This was also the place where I picked up a pair of sunglasses tinted an obscene shade of red, so that I could pretend to be Cyclops. Finally, there were the comic book guys, and if memory serves (which, granted, it often does not), they made Comic Book Guy look eerily accurate.

This being a flea market, the comic book guys dabbled in other items as well. I yawned when they tried to pitch me (hah! wait for it!) baseball cards (see??). Baseball cards were already in decline, and even though my dad had proudly collected, sleeved, and boxed entire seasons’ worth of NHL Upper Deck trading cards, the interest was not exactly genetic.

I’d like to pause now to relate a small epiphany I just had regarding my father. I had always assumed that I got my dork powers from my mother’s side of the family. This is where the comic book collecting uncle resides, and combined with my mother’s line-quotingly strong devotion to the original Star Trek, it seemed only logical (stop me before I kill again!) that the genes came from her. Now I’m confronted with the memory of my father collecting trading cards, and not baseball cards, like a normal human being, but hockey cards. As if he was some kind of Canadian. Apparently my father is also a huge dork, just one that obsesses over sports instead of superheroes.

In a calculated effort to separate a twelve year-old from his allowance, the comic book guys trotted out packs of Marvel Masterpieces¹. These were trading cards that depicted the Marvel Universe’s greatest heroes and most notorious villains in stunning detail. It seems almost criminal that there was never a card for Professor Xavier, but I suppose it’s hard to do a good action shot of a wheelchair.

It’s difficult to say why I liked the cards so much. The art is the main feature, and I’m pleased to see that it holds up well with the passage of time, for the most part. Take this rendition of Nightcrawler, for instance. It’s ethereal, almost Impressionist, and a fitting artistic choice for a man who can vanish in a BAMF of smoke and instantly reappear somewhere else. Unlike most of what the comic conglomerates put out in the early 90s, these showed real care and attention to detail. You could say they were items of quality. You could also say that these were the first real commodities that me and my friends purchased independently, and in trading them amongst ourselves, we got our first taste of power, leverage, and value. “Value,” is, of course, a highly subjective term. Outside our little bubble, the cards were not worth the paper they were printed on, literally. These trading cards would lead almost directly to an extended addiction to Magic: the Gathering, which, beyond the cool art, also came with a game. It also came with industry-sponsored magazines² that listed the current market value of the cards, which pretty much ruined the fun for everyone.

I thought I had left this life behind me. I thought I had graduated from Xavier’s School For Gifted Youngsters, aside from the occasional Hugh Jackman-laiden Hollywood iteration. Apparently I was wrong. It’s extremely easy to be drawn back to this world. Comics (and things inspired by comics) represent a series of moments reduced to their bare essentials. The beauty of it is that you can add whatever you want into the gaps between the panels. At twenty-six, you can take the bones of Joss Whedon’s excellent (as always) writing and add any number of complex social subtexts into the book. At eleven, you do something arguably much more important. You add yourself.

In the next exciting issue: Wolverine!!!

1. I have to be honest with you, I didn’t actually remember that they were called Marvel Masterpieces. All I remembered was that I had a small collection of Marvel trading cards. Googling “marvel trading cards” got me close, but I knew that wasn’t quite right. I eventually remembered that one of the fancier cards (a Dyna-Etched rendition) was for a guy I had never heard of, and it seemed like a waste of highly advanced hologram technology. The guy was named Meanstreak, and I’ll bet you’ve never heard of him either. This at last gave me the clue I needed. I knew I was looking at the right set of cards when I saw that colorful rendition of Beast moving through a laser grid, above. That’s the craziest thing about living in 2008. Combine a murky smear of memory with Google, Wikipedia, and flickr, and suddenly you’re omniscient. ∧
2. In my brain’s continuing efforts to freak me out, I distinctly remember owning the exact issue featured in the Wikipedia entry. ∧

The image at left is a slice of the course listings for the fall class registration.  The course in question is “Real Analysis,” as taught by Professor Weiner.  This is exactly how the course appears on the registration website.  If God exists, s/he has an amazing sense of humor.

Let’s say you’re sitting at home, taking a rare extra day off at the start of the New Year, just relaxing, having a nice time. You know, maybe being a little productive, maybe filling out some grad school applications online, trying to get a few little things done here and there. Nice and easy.

Then you realize that you’ve mixed up one of your application deadlines, and the application you’re currently working on was due yesterday. In the irretrievable past. At left is the face you would make in that situation. It is the face I made.

I’ve done the best I can under the circumstances. Online application has been submitted, e-mails have been sent to who I hope are the right people, and the physical materials are resting comfortably in a large, as yet unmailed envelope. WHY DID GERALD FORD HAVE TO DIE?

If he was alive, the post office, IT WOULDN’T BE CLOSED TODAY.

UPDATE:  All is well.  The University’s web page said that most deadlines are January 15th.  My department’s sub-website said it has a special deadline of January 1st, thus initiating my panic.  However, the sub-program to which I am applying within the department within the University notified me that its own application deadline is still January 15th.  Crisis and attendant stroke avoided.

I have a theory that if God exists he has a great sense of humor. Today at Newbury Comics, I was browsing the CD rack and noticed a little tab divider for Ozzy Osbourne. He was adjacent to a tab for the Osmonds. Coincidence? Only if you believe that God takes himself seriously. It’s beautiful, in a way, believing in a world where Ozzy Osbourne and Donny Osmond could peacefully coexist, like an enormous shark wearing mittens.

Also, did you know that Google does music? It was news to me.