Do you ever just

Damn.

Do you ever just have days where everything is terrible, and you're terrible and work is terrible and life is terrible and you just want to stab a pillow with a knife and listen to it rip?

That's where I am today.

When I leave work tonight, I'm going to sit in my car and scream like Troy Barnes used to scream.

An ascending crescendo of building madness.

Just like that.

There's Something About...

Garth Ennis.

So his comics resume includes:

Preacher
Hellblazer
Hitman
Crossed
The Boys
Punisher

And others. And he's written some pretty gruesome shit.

I mean.

I mean there was meat fucking in Preacher. That's not a euphemism, there really was a dude who had sex with large piles of raw meat. Little guy. Liked Nazis, I think.

And Crossed.

Every time I think about Crossed, all I can think about is that someone got bitchslapped with a dismembered horse's penis in that book.

That's mostly what you think about when you think about Garth Ennis' writing.

But then you keep reading his stuff, and you find little things. These tiny little things. He likes Christmas and Superman and women, and it all comes through in his writing.

More often than not, men are the victims in the stories he writes. Men suffer the fates that women often suffer in fiction; in comics, and in a lot of his writing, everyone winds up getting what they deserve in one way or another.

Look at Preacher. Look at Tulip! Look at Kit in Hellblazer! At Debbie in Hitman! Garth Ennis writes vulnerable women who sometimes make bad choices who can also love like crazy and beat the crap out of the men they love.

These are old books, I'll give you that. I don't remember much from the Boys aside from a few glaring things; Herogasm, and Wee Hughie getting sexually assaulted and Butcher being...well...Butcher. That story was more about politics and conspiracies than it was about people a lot of the time. And it does start out with Wee Hughie's girlfriend getting exploded pretty hard. And Crossed...horse's penis. That's...that's pretty much all I remember from Crossed.

But Punisher! Look at Ma Gnucci! She was a piece of shit, because women can be pieces of shit.

I don't know. I've been thinking a lot about all the one-off issues Ennis would write where John helped ghosts on Christmas and Tommy stood on a roof with Superman, and Jesse spent time with his long-lost mom (OMG JESSE'S MOM YOU GUYS).

I don't know.

I just can forgive Ennis pretty much anything because he writes so much horrible shit but at the same time, there's so much heart to his horrible shit.

Recommended Reading:

Hitman Tp's vol 1-7
Preacher tp's vol 1-whatever the heck the new printings go up to I can't remember
Punisher: Welcome Back Frank
Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits, Bloodlines, Tainted Love

Oh! A Blog!

So I'm trying to encourage a friend of mine to start a blog or a Twitter or both. 

He's terribly clever, and he should write all of his clever in a place where others can see how clever he is, because let's face it, the man is damn clever. 

Look, okay, don't you get it, he's like totally clever.

But in doing so I was like "Wait didn't I used to do blog things? Aren't I clever enough for the blogging?" 

Sure, I am. 

I've tried this before. I've tried to have blogs with themes and things and tried to make review blogs and, and sometimes I blogged for school back when that was a thing that I did. 

And I had a Livejournal once upon a time that I updated with all of my feelings, because when you're young, feelings are super important and you're not an adult who's like "Pft. Who has time for feelings when rent is due on Friday and you're out of sanitary pads and you owe a lot of money to credit cards and also work is eating you alive. There's no time in my life for feelings." 

Also Livejournal is pretty Russian now, and we've all migrated to Tumblr and are lost in a typhoon of Chris Evans .gifs (hard G people) and SOCIAL JUSTICE. 

So I've had this Blogspot blog just kind of lying around collecting dust and I thought "oh right this is a thing that exists and maybe I should make use of it." 

So here I am making use of this thing that exists. 

One time when I was really young and the internet was shiny and new, I had a Deadjournal. Maybe that still exists too. Who knows. 

The point is, blogging and I can do that. See? I'm doing it right now. It's just like riding a bike, which by the way I can't do that anymore. The last time I was on a bike I fell off, and I felt so depressed about it I cried, and my brother, who is King of the Cyclists, was like "Leigh. Seriously, it's okay. Just- just try again." 

I did. But I failed again. I'm just not meant for bike riding. Walking, I can do. I do a lot of walking. bicycles are evil. They're like...two evil wheels and evil handlebars. It's funny though, because when you're a kid and you learn to ride a bike (first the trike, then the bike with the training wheels, then a grown-ass person's bike), you feel so proud, even though it's kind of boring. Like, you're just riding around in your neighborhood and back in my day (*shakes cane*) there were no Mp3 players or Ipods or smart phones that you could put into your bike basket and listen to while you rode. That would have made bike riding way better.

Not that that's a good idea, because who are we kidding, you put your ear buds in and then you don't hear the car coming up behind you and then you're a pavement pancake.

That feels like a metaphor for life. 

Eh.