Acid

People have been talking about Harley Quinn for years now. And like some Gen X hipster, I’m the person that says “I was there, I saw her being ‘born.’”

So, full disclosure, I have a few points to make before I go on to my main goal.
I’m a Batman fan. Always. Not a comic reader. Scandalous, sure. Sacrilegious. Yeah. Okay. But comic books are like anime. Crack is cheaper. This also goes for the games. That doesn’t mean I didn’t want to play them, brain masturbate over the previews, and feel like I truly missed out on an experience. It just didn’t happen.

I have not seen Suicide Squad. Not yet. It’s been out almost a month. I had some personal shit, and then there was the “Lack of Joker” murmur.

A very nice young man at my place of employment asked me if I had seen the Batman origination movies. At first, I was all, wow, this kid knows his shit. Respect. Then he started describing Penguin. Catwoman. “You mean the ones with Two-Face and Riddler in the same movie?” Excited, he said yes. “Uh, those are Tim Burton movies. I own those.” I thought he meant something older. Since people seem to be forgetting how old the concept of Batman is. I digress.

There are two things eating away at me about Harley Quinn right now. And one sub-point for The Joker.

First, the Millennial Love Worship.

Here is the best example that I have found. I present unedited and anonymous for effect:

“Harley Quinn and the joker do not have an abusive relationship. The comics portray it that way as in order to say love is beyond crazy, hostility binds two into one as does love. They push each other to their hostile limits as to see how much they can handle only to them show that their love for each other can conquer that. There’s so much more to their love than anyone can imagine. Their love should be a symbol to couples everywhere.”

I shit you not. Verbatim. God bless Facebook for showing us how damned Millennial Relationships really are. First, I love how Harley’s name is correctly capitalized, but not the Joker. He’s an afterthought to this person. What this person loves is Harley’s devotion, no matter what it is to. They love the intensity that they’ve been raised with. At no time have they not known superhero and comic book movies. I don’t know what skewed their view of relationships. But if I recommend viewing A Clockwork Orange, or The Cell, it’s a “trigger.” They idolize, and indeed Hollywood edited, what The Joker and Harley have always been. The dysfunction Gen X didn’t have the Internet to talk about. Did I answer if I think The Joker loved Harley? I will in a moment.

Second, the lack of Joker in Harley’s descriptions. This is the meat of the walnut. I studied before writing this subject, which has been under my skin (and hopefully tattooed on it one day) for some time. I didn’t want to go in with just my idea of Harley. Psychology Today did a good article on their blog, and girloncomicbookworld.com was a wonderful resource into how Harley changed according to medium and over time.

Through all the YouTube, blogs, sites, fan posts, steamy fan art, and general chatter, I noticed one thing.

No one mentions The Joker.

They “mention” The Joker.

Skip over him like a stone that at best was a catalyst, and at worst, a mere ripple in her personality.

One thing I will concede, she had to have that madness in her before she met The Joker. The abused will seek to be abused over and over again. Not consciously. Either out of familiarity, or the “at-least-they-are-better-than” syndrome. So, let’s follow Harleen’s story, either as an overachieving child in a neglectful and at the very least emotionally abusive home, or abandoned by a family member’s death, emotionally, blah blah. Everyone reaches the same conclusion. Nature and nurture had already played their Greek Tragedy on Harleen. Now she’s fascinated with the Joker. And everyone either voices this with an air of contrivance, or predictability. Really? After a decade of Criminal Minds, Tarantino movies, Call of Duty, and “bullying awareness?” A society that soaks itself in the fascination of what a good person does on a bad day (or, as I like to say, a bad person does on a good day) really wonders how easily Harleen was drawn to The Joker? Click the Legos. Take out all of other societal bullshit people project onto her, we would do the same. And we do. When we fight about which Joker is better.

Here’s the side note. Stop comparing Jokers. Just stop. Ledger’s Joker is not even the same person, let alone the same kind of Joker. I can go into a dissertation about psychosis, sexuality, and character contrasts. Instead, focus.

In a controlling relationship, and for Harley specifically, people assume that it’s one-sided. That The Joker feels nothing, maybe not even contempt.

This is a fallacy. The person being controlled will tell you “sure, it gets bad, but when it’s good, it’s great.” To the person who is the controller, the dominant, their love is a gift, a favor that’s to be paid back, the show of power they have over the submissive’s emotions. Those times when he feels genuine affection for Harley, he’s lost control, and those are the situations where he tries to kill her. It doesn’t matter who gets in the way, they won’t get in MY way.

The Joker needed a submissive as much as Harley was comfortable having a dominant. Being the responsible one, escaping abusive home life, sustaining your own well-being and pressure to not turn out like them, it’s being Atlas. A masterful dominant, The Joker saw that weakness in her from the start. For those two, it was love. Love in the sense of an emotional connection, in the sense of seeking out what the other needed, already groomed to the damage. Because she was used to being weak in relationships, she saw the affection she wanted to see. Because he was used to being able to manipulate everyone flawlessly, he was angered by the lack of control emotions take. He wasn’t expecting her to be eternally breakable.

For Harley, this control was freedom. A punch in the face knocks the world off of Atlas’ shoulders. Being slapped around removes the pressure of being a real person to that person you are being controlled by.

To Harley, that was the freedom she was familiar with.

So her life became just one choice.

Either become The Joker, or drown in the acid.

Midway

Nobody wants things for you
They want things from you
Nobody flatters you
They want to be flattered by you
No better than a port
Being plugged for
Desired content
Put a social token behind your ear
And pull it out from the other
You're supposed to clap
Because they think they passed
Through your mind
As effortless as a pinball
Insert coin
Pull lever
You can practice
Giving them what they want
They'll never stay long
There is always a machine
Better than you
More willing to play along

Great Courses

I don’t know about many other PAW’s out there, but, you’ve either not had the finances to attend college out of high school (like me), didn’t have the encouragement to do so (like me), were outright discouraged in some ways (like me), attempted to attend college in your adult years (like me), and either failed out of life getting in the way or financial issues. Like me.

With the debt crisis, general economic instability, social decay, and all the horrible events occurring in the world today, it seems like arguing over the value of an education is going to take a back-burner to the more pressing issues we have right now.

Should it? Maybe. Shouldn’t it? Should education always stay in the forefront of conversations as the only way to combat hate, ignorance, and xenophobia? Yeah. But I don’t feel right telling families in mourning what their priorities should be when I don’t live their lives.

However, we will get around to education again. Either as a talking point for class divide, or financial stability.

What we need to decide, as a society, is the value of education. Is it going to be an elitist marker that is just another divide between classes? Or is it something that should be accessible to everyone, no matter their goal, career, or ambition?
Of course, I favor education for all. Housewife? What mother and home caregiver cannot benefit from education on chemistry and psychology. Simple chemistry helps so much with baking and cooking, I’m surprised Alton Brown hasn’t done Great Course lectures, because that’s basically what Good Eats was, the science of food.

Jump right to my PAW Brethren and Sistren. You Poor, Angry, Writers who have no recourse for a higher MFA that seems to be the only requirement for some people to put out their manifesto of crap fiction that gets recanted later by its own author.

But I digress.

So, for those of us who value education for its enriching of life in general, Great Courses and it’s lesser known companion on the shelf, The Modern Scholar, are invaluable.

For writers, there really isn’t any one direction I can point you. Go everywhere. There isn’t a subject that can’t be explored.

The problem being, these are expensive. However, the public library offers most of these.

I’m obsessed with music courses. Composers in many eras (I have one or two I fan-freak-out over), fundamentals, biographies, operas, symphonies, I can’t get enough. It’s chocolate cake.

For all the pressing of The Teaching Company and Modern Scholar I’m doing right now, it culminates to this. You can get knowledge, inspiration, doors to technique can be revealed, you can identify with brooding and eccentric famous people, enjoy the work and never look at it the same again. You can’t help but transfer that to every part of your life, especially your writing.

But there are three things that get me through tough times that I got directly from these studies.

The composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, teacher to Igor Stravinsky, said “Inspiration is the reward of persistence, not a haphazard dependence.”

Liszt only gave a shit what his cats thought.

And finally, Berlioz. Berlioz came from a family of non-musicians. He dropped out of school and did whatever he could to be in the music world. And only as he could afford them. He even got kicked out of the Library of Paris Conservatory while studying because he wasn’t a student (yet), even though he was there during public hours.

I haven’t even covered all the courses there are on literature…

By the way, is that book done yet?

Begrudgingly Convenient

I had a library debt.

For a book I did not damage.

A year ago.

It made me angry for a long time. Anyone who knows me knows that’s just fucking ludicrous.

In the interest of full disclosure, I had several ulterior motives for paying it. Some were not clear to me until I went to actually do so.

As a Poor Angry Writer, I love my resources. Everyone should love their library.

But the library that charged me this paltry sum of 37.00 had many other sins. That I received it damaged. It was almost as old as me. They refused to return it. I had to force them to, and THAT’S how I got the fucking charge.

It looked like an elementary school library. Most of the floor covered in half-tall shelves you see for kindergarteners. An open story time area that made mid-day unbearable. Computer space that was hidden in the back where only perverts and Mormons gathered. I have no idea what it was about that library that Mormons liked… I always had to order something over, they never had it there. And a huge section where old people would just hang out, raid coupons, read the paper for free, and leave a mess. Awkward cafeteria tables with power strips duct tapped to them for computer stations. It was terrible.

So I held a grudge.

Then it became in my best interest to pay off the scourge. So I could go to a different library. At a new job, there is a library not far, and I could easily go to that one before work, drop stuff off after close. It would be nice.

So fine, amongst the fair amount of catching up I had to do with bills and errands, fuck it, I’ll do that, too. Out of my hair, I’m an upstanding citizen. What the fuck ever.

Then I go in.

And it’s nice.

They’ve remodeled the whole thing. Sectioned off rooms. No half shelves. More floor space given up for books. I paid my fee, and went browsing. Lo and Behold, they have two lectures I’ve been wanting to hear, the Great Courses series on The Symphony and 30 Greatest Orchestral Works. Looking around, it was 37 dollars well spent. When I went to check out, I got the Oh Shit You’re Gonna Expire, Mate!!!

The last staff was mean. And it sounds silly to say the word as an adult, but bitter, unhelpful, rude, and dismissive all fall under that category.

This young lady helped me cheerfully, like she was happy to work with books! And I’m fuck yeah, books!

Truth be told, I’ve missed the library. It’s invaluable.

Maybe, I could be a little less angry.

We’ll see.

The Slavery of Retail: No Personal Identity Allowed

When people complain about my recent (joyful) breakup with yet another retail employer, I don’t argue with them. But I try to explain. Everyone is understaffed and over-worked. They expect Mensa level application, Atlas force effort, and Roman fealty. And at the bargain basement price you thing they are passing on to you.

I don’t make excuses for bad workers, for people who don’t care to learn their job, or general apathy that is at best negligent and at worst prosecutable.

I blame the culture we’ve instilled into the concept of Retail.

Not just the “customer is always right” bullshit, or even “buyer beware.” Somehow, the business mentality of 80/20 has made Retail life insufferable.

For those not familiar with the 80/20, it’s called the Pareto Principle, or the Law of the Vital Few, which states approximately 80% of effects come from 20% of the causes. Business…gurus, I can’t think of a better word for how they treat business, like a new-age religion, actually call the 80/20 Rule a way of life, a belief. Not the statistic that it is. Applied on the ground level, from a Retail Grunt’s position, it translates into “Give This Screaming Bitch Whatever She Wants.” This is done for many reasons. To stop the screaming, much like a little child. To make the customer happy, if it’s possible (please keep in mind that some people enter a retail establishment to buy unhappiness the same way people like to haggle for cars). There is the concept of over-compensation. Which has a jingle type word, a buzz word, that reeks of paperback shyster psychology. Whatever it is called, it is the idea that giving a customer too much will make them feel like they owe the business their patronage. So, 80% of the business’ problems are created by 20% of the customers, and making them over happy is the only way to avoid any trouble whatsoever.

And customers know this. Instead of getting a problem fixed, or a right wronged, most retail interactions have become a used car lot sales haggle to keep the customer from trying to get over and get more than you, an employee, are allowed to give.

This obviously is not everyone. But I’ve got something to say about the 80% soon enough.

Now, this 20% will say and do anything. I haven’t decided if they don’t think about employees as humans out of conditioning, or if it’s some sort of subconscious let-go that they know it’s basically an adult Showbiz ball-pit and they can get what they want, quite literally.

The 80% are comprised of people who just like to look down on you. Throw their money on the counter like you’re a fucking whore. Tell you “I can tell how much you hate your job, it’s quite apparent.” Let their kids piss on the floor. The theft alone is staggering. And of all the more examples I could go into, this part lead to this: you have to take it.
In a retail job, you are at the bottom of the food chain. One “you’re fired” away from homelessness, maybe two steps away from hanging out with Homeless Jesus on the street corner. The customer may wield this knowledge like a child with a hammer.

But it’s your bosses that know they hold your marionette strings.

While all that bullshit, bullying, pandering, bowing and scraping, ass-sucking, and general fur smoothing happens on the public side of the counter, no one thinks about what happens on the business side of the counter.

I’ve recently been liberated from a company that doesn’t hire security, even though it’s standard in their certain sector of Retail. Product is allowed to expire, because there simply isn’t enough hands to rotate product. If you get a good boss, you are damned lucky. Because a bad boss will ruin the business, put you in a foul mood, and generally be a hardass about what they will or won’t let you do to get the interaction completed.

Here’s something that’s actually happened. A District Manager came in. I thought we sprayed for those, but we must have skipped the Orkin Man’s appointment.

I was going through a lot of personal shit. My best friend was going through a lot of personal shit that necessitated my desire to send flowers to a minor’s funeral. Relation were in town, and I was too ashamed for them to see how tiny my apartment is. So, not a year and a half after shit I have to still deal with, I had to dodge family, buy funeral flowers, and then I got to go to work to be yelled at by addicts, dodge physical assault of vagrants, hope this is the day we don’t get robbed. And the District Manager said to me, “you need to smile more.”

She had a trainee with her. Or someone, I don’t know who. I’m looking at this fucking manager, thinking about all this shit that is none of her business that’s going on in my life. Her roadie got it. The look on my face made a very concerned look on hers. I have a feeling if she had her say, the conversation would have gone differently. But it wasn’t a conversation. This manager spent the whole time talking. It was a one-sided speechifying event.

Not once did anyone ask why I wasn’t smiling, if unhappiness like reads on the face like that, it has a good reason to be there. No one cared.

We work with an epileptic. I didn’t know it for the longest time. One day, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her doing what I could only describe as an amateur pirouette. My honest first thought was, “wow, I’ve never seen her that joyful before.” And went about my business. Not five seconds later, the gossip train rolled right into my station. Watching, no one said anything to her. Just talked about her. After she left for the day, I said as loud as I could, “You know, if I happen to come to work with no pants and tell you my father is Sergeant Pepper, PLEASE ask me if I’m okay. You have my permission.”

Oh, yeah, this happened in a pharmacy. Where a Doctorate holder, two to four kids in school to be nurses, and people who have worked pharmacy for years decided to gossip instead of ask if their comrade with a medical condition is okay. The whole thing made me fucking sick. If I had known she had a small (rather elegant looking, I’ll give her that) episode, I would have just said, “you okay?” and she could have decided to take a break or communicate she was fine. But at least someone would have fucking cared.

So Retail allows you no personal identity. The demands corporations make are increasingly dehumanizing, and it effects the attitudes of those in minor positions of authority, and that’s how you get that poor, miserable, broken and unfeeling person behind that counter that could care less if you got your Vess soda on sale or not.

Food for Thought.

Stress

I've heard people say that stress was a good motivator to keep working. Keep the money coming in.
Great work if you can get it.
But I'm talking to my Tax Bracket 1 and 2 sistren and brethren. The minimum wage, low wage, no wage job holders who keep Aleve's parent company profitable. Stress, for us plebs, is a constant.
You figure out an outlet, some way to let off steam, release tension. For writers, it's calling the Muse. Wrapping yourself in Inspiration Bacon and wait in the trap to be eaten.
But sometimes Life overachieves. Gives your already diabetic stress level a fourth helping of getting-fucked-over.
It's hard to write like that. For me. Whether it's money, or job, or just the day to day uncertainty of health, wellbeing, and safety, stress will siphon off my creative source. I can't hear the Muse in all the screaming panic static. I think we both cover our ears and say "fuck this" and check out. Into a movie. A book. Nervous cleaning. Meticulous sorting. Meme hunting. Bed cover hiding. Whatever you gotta do.
Fighting stress is hard. Being so very broke, and not even as broke as you were, which was pretty fucking broke. People playing with your lively hood, with no basic dignity of caring how hard they are going to fuck up your life if you didn't catch them while they thought they were being clever.
Still, I punish myself when I feel like I can't produce. When the weight of the world presses down so hard, it starts to feel like it actually is extracting oil, that beautiful place words come from is hard to reach. Not unlike climax under same circumstances.
Forcing it out hurts, makes it disingenuous.
So, all really one can do is pick an escape that is your Inspiration Bacon, so you can lure your writing Patronus from the ether.
Because in times of great stress, Time already feel lost.

Resources: May Haul

I used to watch those YouTube videos of people and their monthly acquisitions. They are entertaining, even gotten some reading suggestions from them. But without internet service, this isn’t something I can keep up on.
However, I did manage to make a guilty pleasure trip to the thrift store and picked up a few great examples of treasures people throw away.
First, I got a Biology textbook. I’m a sucker for a 25 cent textbook. Plus, there is just something about reading a textbook for pleasure that makes it so much more interesting. I got what appear to be a series of three books on business. Those “Who Moved My Cheese” type books. Two are a set, one about their theory of business, the other a “fable” on how they implemented it. The third is about customer interaction. Normally, I don’t find these good reads. They are informative and fascinating. And expensive. I’m not sure if that qualifies as irony or not. But I got them for a song.
In my opinion, you can’t have too many copies of classics. Especially if you really love it. You need a “beater” copy. I have a nice leather-bound works of Shakespeare. That never leaves the shelf. Over time I have accumulated paperback works that get dog-eared, spine-cracked, highlighter marked, pencil notated, and otherwise abused so I can refer to and enjoy these works. So I have another version of Great Expectations. I also picked up The Great Gatsby. This I did not enjoy upon first read. However, after listening to lectures on it, and seeing the recent film (Baz Lurhmann was made to make that movie, by the way, it’s going to define that novel for our generation), I am intrigued to read it again. To see what I can glean out of it.
Then I got two of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 3 and 4. If it’s popular, and I can get it cheap, then I can try it on, see what the fuss is about, take a writer’s eye to it.
These last four are what made the trip worthwhile.
When picking out books like this, you have to stay sharp. Especially in a thrift store. People are more likely to toss books on how to write college papers, essays, legal terminology, MLA or other styles, you get the idea. So, I read the table of contents for relevance and interest.
Writing About Literature by Janet E. Gardner (2009) caught my eye because it’s about writing about writing critically and analytically, along with the works being used. The table of contents’ last entry is “Literary Criticism and Literary Theory.” Sold.
The Structure of Literature: A Guide for Teachers by R. F. Beauchamp (1969) is all about how to deconstruct and extract from great works. This book is so old, it has a Library of Congress Catalog Card Number.  Beauchamp organized several essays by others about teaching different aspects of writing. Plot, style, setting, thirteen total. Simple, succinct, and relevant. Sold.
Punctuate It Right! By Harry Shaw (1963) has an ISBN number. It meticulously goes through each punctuation mark and circumstance of their use. Dated, but looking through it, not much has changed. Except the wheel of metal letter arms striking a ribbon are now pixilated. Sold.
Profiles of Modern American Authors by Bernard Dekle (1969) surprised me. When I opened it up to look at the date of publication, I saw it was printed in Japan. It also has a Library of Congress Catalog Card Number and a Standard Book Number. It even says “Printed in Japan” at the end of the page. What attracted me to this was the 29 author entries, citing an excerpt of their work, and giving them a picture of their life at the time of that work. This book was meant to educate Japanese, either studying English or Literature, in an overview of American Authors. SOLD. Once in a while, you find really cool stuff like this, books that surprise you for their purpose or reach.
That was my Thrift Store Education on this trip. I’m excited to pick these up in earnest, and see what opinion or theory or point of view that I had not considered awaits me.
Any one in any given discipline knows you never stop being a student.