Thu, 19 May 2005

Owen: Comix
When Owen was in middle school he had a foolproof system for stealing Conan comics from The Iowa Distribution Center, which was a generic dispensary of generic drugs, generic foodstuffs and bulk grains, which wasn’t yet a hip thing to do, store-wise, stuck somewhere between the advent and the proliferation of the local yupified whole-grain all-natural neighborhood grocer. IDC was just across from Ben-Jakob’s junk dealership, where next to a rack of ten-cent paperbacks where Owen picked up the bulk of his education Ben-Jakob wrote a monthly newsletters to his notions of current fiction; always unreadable and crammed with minute schematics for “fictive strategies” by which nearly any book would reveal a hidden meaning — generally the impossibility of mediated communication, which struck Owen as gypish in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on. That didn’t keep him from picking up a copy each month, as when folded in half it provided an optimal carrier for stolen comics. Owen always picked up Sophisticated Gadabout Comix, which later corroded into an abysmal corporate shill after Infernal Press was bought out and bulk-replaced with graphic design BAs guaranteed to draw Jephed Manyana in that month’s ad-heavy fashions and write Mashed Potatoes as “really super into” the twenty-hour work week the House tried to slip into the ass-end of…I’m rambling. The point is Owen grabbed Sophisticated Gadabout and the Conan comix, when they had either particularly weird-looking demons or scantily-clad warrioresses, which was generally the case. Owen snuck out the back door, never well-guarded; who’s gonna steal wheat? Owen would walk slow and steady over to the playground at Our Lady of the Clotting Stigmata, always empty on the weekends, pleased as punch to sit on the merry-go-round (well, it wasn’t a merry-go-round according to the nuns, who called it the Wheel of Fortune and tried to make certain questionable moral lessons stick through visual and visceral example) and try to make his brain a more interesting place to live.

One of the odder things about buying books at Ben-Jakob’s is that Ben-Jakob not only read all the books before selling them, but made extensive notes in the margins and end-pages as to the validity and quality of the statements made; many people didn’t care for this at all but Owen was fascinated, as the notes added a second palimpsetic level of interpretation, which invariably made absolutely no sense. This was ignoble with interesting books and made uninteresting books suggest a level of interestingness so insidious it could not be stated directly, or even indirectly. This was all fine and good until Owen had to write book reports, in which Billy and Susie were actually personifications of Clara and Pascuel Rosas, once-married human cannonballs who dueled over the heads of rapt and terrified audiences, slashing at each other with each pass with rapiers, until a miscalculation by Pascuel the two collided mid-air, the bodies and swords falling into the scattering crowd below, leading to an outlawing of shooting people out of cannons (but not, Owen gleefully noted, shooting people *with* cannons), which made both strict cannon-based and variant catapult and rocket-strapped projections quite the rage with the young people for the next few seasons, which is how it was that the only Rosas offspring, Manuel, came to the states and took up the familial occupation with the World’s Most Depressing Circus, utilizing his profession in order to tell the story of his parents’ deaths, bringing him into tightening romantic spirals with his assistant Kristin, who played the role of Manuel’s mother in their re-enactment. This essay, like most of Owen’s others, got solid failing marks until Owen stopped telling the secret histories of the Scholastic Book Club series and just copied information off the back.

Owen kept the real reports for himself. He still has them in a series of spiral notebooks in a box in his closet. Sometimes he cribs details from them when he tells stories today.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #