February 22nd, 2021
*scuffing shoes on the pavement, hands in pockets* just once i wish the brave mujahideen fighters of afghanistan would dedicate something to us, y'know?
I think I have created a perpetual motion machine in the form of an exercise bike that’s currently being shipped back and forth between Troutdale, Oregon and Niles, Illinois. Due to a humorous clerical mixup that was in no way caused by my own impatience and is entirely the fault of the bastard fuckers at Discover, I accidentally ordered two exercise bikes. Now me, realizing this error, I decided, “oh this whole-ass other exercise bike hasn’t arrived yet, maybe I should get in contact with customer service so that they can reroute it back to their warehouse and we can all have a nice little laugh about it.”
I want to stress here and now that you should never, ever do anything to try and course-correct the wheels of commerce.
Basically what I’m discovering is that the for-profit shipping industry is a complete fiasco nightmare and that by trying to head them off at the pass so that I didn’t need to deal with returning a ~130lb bike to Vancouver, British Columbia myself, I’ve apparently kicked off a series of foibles that is making it so this bike will never arrive back at its warehouse. As of writing this my delivery has left the beautiful state of Oregon, traveled all the way across our Great Plains and into my home of Illinois, gotten flagged for return, been sent back to Oregon—and this is where things get fucked up—then was shipped back to Illinois across those selfsame Great Plains and currently languishes in Niles, IL in the course of several weeks.
Anyhoo I’ve taken to idly checking the FedEx tracking page for it every couple of days to see where it is on its eternal journey between Troutdale and Niles and even though my parents are clearly annoyed that I think this is so funny it is honestly kind of really funny. May God’s love be with you, exercise bike.
The Movie Zone: First Blood (1982)
I took the plunge and watched the first Rambo movie on Valentine’s Day and it’s pretty all right. A positively baby-faced Sly Stallone plays John J. Rambo, a Vietnam vet who finds out the only other surviving member of his Green Beret unit died after his tour of duty because he got cancer from Agent Orange and then things just get worse for him from there.
They’re gonna need more cops in here to get ole Rambo on the back foot
Mistaken for a drifter while walking into the town of Hope, Washington, he’s picked up by small town sheriff Will Teasle (Patton Oswalt’s favorite punchline, Brian Dennehy), hassled and eventually booked for vagrancy by the rest of the Hope, WA police department, which includes David Caruso of CSI: Miami and Chris Mulkey, best known for playing Hank Jennings in Twin Peaks. The cops hassle Rambo so bad (even after they find out he’s a completely insane Green Beret which feels like peak cop behavior) that he has a PTSD flashback, beats the shit out of every cop in the station and escapes into the wilderness outside of town and the cops stupidly attempt to apprehend him.
Me on my way to my homies’ places to tuck them into bed once this COVID shit is over
This is the high water mark for the movie, personally, because it involves dickhead cops getting in over their heads and immediately getting completely washed by someone who’s even more insane/violent than they are. I think even a few years ago I would have thought it was kind of a forced escalation that the cops are immediately running into the woods with assault rifles trying to capture one guy but funnily enough the modern world has caught up with First Blood after 39 years and so pretty much everything scans.
Eventually, Rambo’s former commander Colonel Sam R. Trautman (Richard Crenna, looking very severe) tries to convince Sheriff Teasle that it’s a bad idea to continue agitating a green beret whose entire purpose during the Vietnam War was to out-Vietcong the Vietcong, and this is confessedly where the movie kind of loses me. The National Guard gets called in during a really weird, slapstick scene where they blow up the mine shaft Rambo’s taking cover in with a rocket launcher and they assume he’s dead. Rambo (not dead, unsurprisingly) then hijacks a truck with an M-60 machine gun in it, gets in a shootout with Teasle and is eventually apprehended and released back into the care of Col. Trautman after giving a kind of weird blubbering speech about how they weren’t “allowed” to win the Vietnam War which is, uh…interesting.
The Viet Cong are torturing Rambo because his little mustache looks like shit—they don’t even know he’s a soldier
I do want to note that Brian Dennehy does a great job as Teasle, and it’s really funny to watch him, even up to the end of the film, grab a gun and be like “I think I got a shot at taking down this expertly-trained guerrilla fighter who’s roughly half my age and twice as bloodthirsty.” The movie gets a lot of points for its strong anti-cop stance, but its flavor of anti-war sentiment is still a little too “respect the troops” for me to fully get behind. I don’t have to respect anything! Fuck you, Richard Crenna.
The Comics Zone: Octopus Pie by Meredith Gran
Back in January I decided to reread Meredith Gran’s Octopus Pie because I’d never actually finished it and *affecting a cool, suave manner that’s both mature and disarming as I sit backwards in a chair* Things Weren’t Going So Great For Old Borky On The Brain Front And He Needed A Little Pick-Me-Up. Even with that being the case, I gotta admit that getting to return to the internet of my youth, if only for the week or so my re-read took, made me feel way better than I had for a while prior, regardless of whatever sludge I still got knocking around in the brain pan.
Octopus Pie is the story of Everest “Eve” Ning, a perennially down-on-her-luck 20something who finds her life upended entirely when her shitty boyfriend James breaks up with her over the phone and forces her to find a new roommate in the process, that new roommate being Hanna Thompson, a pot-smoking baker/small business owner who Eve hasn’t seen since Pre-K.
Would you believe that hilarity ensues? It does!
This is the same face I make when I stay up until 4:30 in the morning editing a Substack newsletter that was supposed to come out on February 17th and still set my alarm for 8 am
I won’t spend too long laboring over the plot of the comic since it was a decade-long endeavor for Gran and the story goes a lot of places (and Gran’s own chapter write-ups are really funny), but Octopus Pie has everything—romance, heartbreak, goofs, spoofs, insanely choreographed fight scenes, a secret cabal of baristas called The Order of the Ristretto, the sad story of the band The Shaggs, a man going to therapy to work through his issues, and the line “we’re just building little nests in the ruins of our parents’ dreams,” which is the clearest distillation of millennial “NO FUTURE” mindset I’ve ever seen.
My only issue with the story of Octopus Pie which honestly feels a little ridiculous to even bring up given the scope of the project and the talent involved is that a lot of Eve’s story is informed and shadowed by her regret about whether she made the right decision not to move to Chicago with her childhood boyfriend Park, with whom she reconnects with over the course of the story.
By the comic’s conclusion Gran’s storytelling skills are sufficiently honed that she manages to pull this one out with more context, but while it’s happening it feels a little ridiculous that Eve would rather be miserable and suffer in Brooklyn (seemingly) just for the cultural cache associated with living in New York than move to Chicago, where, I gotta tell you, you could probably be just as miserable if you really tried. Hell, you could probably be more miserable here than in New York, so really that’s just proof that Chicago is actually the greatest city in the world and the MTA wishes it was even half as shitty as the El.
Problematic hunk Will LeBlanc singing Rae Sremmurd’s “No Type” is just one of the many dated references in OP that make me feel like I’m roughly the age of the mummy who goes “OUGH!” when scientists rebuilt his vocal cords
That minor criticism aside, I think Gran does a wonderful job teasing out the nuances of being a certain type of person in their 20s with a friend group of ambitious but kind of self-obsessed people (which I think most of us are in our 20s). She also smartly phases out the weed and hipster jokes, even though I’m old enough to still be charmed by remembering when those felt like incisive cultural criticisms and not extremely dated jabs that make me feel like I’m 4,000 years old.
Early in Octopus Pie, Eve feels split between her nerdy high school friends and her post-college friend group. A clever trick Gran pulls is that eventually Eve’s high school friends exit the picture so that she (Gran) can focus on the characters she finds more interesting, but eventually pulls it back when, later in the comic, Eve finds out that her high school friends have been getting married and moving on with their lives without her—much like what actually happens with people you fall out of touch with in real life.
I don’t think you could blame anyone for phasing characters out of a story that’s being told basically for free over the course of a decade, but the way Meredith Gran uses it to show how the friendships in your 20s, which seem so solid and unbreakable and easy to take for granted at the time, are already splintering and fragmenting without you realizing almost as soon as they’re done forming.
Spending your 20s in the heat of the Obama presidency was basically being in a detenté where you wanted to say this to at least one of your friends 24/7 while knowing you can’t because it could just as easily be said about you—we were living in the end of history so all there was left to do was pass judgment and play-act at being grown up
To that end, A big twist late in the comic concerns Eve’s roommate Hanna breaking up with her longterm boyfriend Marek, largely over their differing views over whether to have children. It’s a huge shock while you’re reading, but by the end of the comic when Hanna’s friend (and Eve’s on-again/off-again lover) Will talks to Hanna’s mother about it, she basically says that Marek and Hanna’s relationship was very sweet, but it perhaps had only lasted as long as it did because they weren’t really communicating about what they wanted long term.
Ironically in spite of this, the last chapter of the comic is a big bash to celebrate our girl Eve, and just about all the characters you’ve come to know and love get one last moment in the sun and everyone gets a little moment to give that ever-elusive sense of closure.
When I was younger I resented feeling like I was going to be stuck in the swirl of the same peoples’ lives forever, and even as groups of friends started drifting apart I took it for granted that we’d all come back into each other’s orbit sooner or later and even as it became less and less likely, I was always confident that someday they’d be where they always were, waiting for you at the same lame house party you didn’t want to be at.
I was wrong about that, and I pretty much figure now that once people pass out of your life they’re gone for good unless you fight like hell to keep them around. But it’s always nice to live the fantasy of the perennial return and reconciliation that defines your 20s—if only for the duration of a webcomic.
The Sweetie of the Week: Cosgrove from Freakazoid!
ACAB means ACAB, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t appreciate Ed Asner’s perfect performance as Sgt. Mike Cosgrove from Freakazoid!, the show that correctly predicted that the internet would make us all insane.
The Digestif: “Brothers (For Matt),” Mark McGuire
My friend Walter introduced me to this song a few years ago when we did a music swap and I’ve been listening to the intro a lot recently because I’m a sucker for home recordings being played as the intros or outros to songs. Doubly so in this case just because the amount of sadness I hear when the older voice gets all small when he says “just…keep away” after reiterating to the two kids he’s talking to that they should be nice to girls (which is true, you gotta) hits me like a punch in the stomach every time.
I guess this was kind of a sad one but tough shit! Life is sad and you gotta acknowledge it sometimes. Be good you creepy little cheepies—and if you see an exercise bike on your travels, let it know there’s a warehouse in Troutdale, OR that’s worried sick about it and just wants it to come home.
- Da Creep