I didn’t end up joining the National Guard. Instead, I went to a state college, the University of Connecticut. There, I studied English and was press ganged into a business minor that we all agree was a mistake in retrospect. One of the first things I did after graduating college was begin a blog, complete with Patreon. I wanted to do something that was for me, something to get my foot out the door, out of acidemia, and towards the criticism I had grown to love over the years.
My initial effort was a blog series I called Fearful Symmetry. It was a Spider-Man project that focused on JM DeMatteis and Mike Zeck’s Kraven’s Last Hunt. Of course, it wasn’t actually about that. Rather, I used the comic as a lens to look at the late 80’s, the dying gasp of the era. I talked about the Black Monday of ‘87, the death of Joseph Campbell, various television and movies that I had grown to love. It was a walk through a dead thing, wondering what could be found.
The name Fearful Symmetry comes from a William Blake poem about the nature of God’s creation. How He is able to create both the wonder of the lamb and also the horror of the tyger. About who shapes the world and those within it. It was also the original title for Kraven’s Last Hunt. I wanted to engage with the history of the story and, in doing so, engage with the world around it.
Looking back, the blog series was a bit of a messy affair, very much an author trying to find his voice through talking in other people’s. Some of the cases I made don’t hold up to close scrutiny, and I probably spent too much time exploring dead ends that had nothing to do with anything. There were a lot of things I would do differently with the project than I would do now, especially with my writing style. But for a first effort, for trying to get something done every day with little to no hope for success, it was a good stepping stone. And there are even some entries that make me smile.
I would try many times to create a follow up to what I did with Fearful Symmetry. Other pieces exploring the character of Spider-Man in-depth. But for various reasons, it never happened[1]. The closest I’ve come is, of course, this article. It’s not a complete follow up to the work I did there. While there’s a degree to the personal with this piece, it’s never to the extent of writing a eulogy for my Grandfather a year after he died. This isn’t a narrative about realizing I’m depressed and want to kill myself. It’s not even all that experimental with fictionality, form, or structure. It’s just a piece on Spider-Man.
I barely have any memories of life before 9/11. They’re flashes of incidents that don’t connect to one another. I remember briefly living in Florida where I went to pre-school in a trailer. I remember coming to Connecticut for the first time, walking around my grandparents’ home like an alien planet. I barely even remember the day 9/11 happened. I was six years old at the time. All my stories are glued together with other people’s memories. My parents told me we went to the beach, that we could see the towers fall.
Sometimes, it feels like I’ve only known the post-9/11 world, can only think in those terms. That my mind can only see the world through the context of how it changed after 9/11. Be it the youthful desire to join the military or the more adult despair at how my country has burned the world. Even then, some of those memories are foggy. I was writing an article about my relationship with religion (which didn’t get picked up), when I remembered my family deciding to no longer go to church. I asked my mom why we stopped, and she told me that the churches in the area were a bit too gung-ho about the War in Iraq.
Other memories of the world are much clearer. I remember walking to the library after school and seeing a pair of kindly old ladies handing out flyers about how Barrack Hussain Obama was the next Hitler. I remember going into the City with my family and walking past a tee-shirt with George W Bush that said “Miss me?” I remember a summer afternoon spent binging the entire first season of 24 with my mom. I remember reading A Horse and His Boy with nary a thought towards its more unfortunate implications. I remember hearing stories of Abu-Ghraib. I remember going to a military base for a Boy Scout Jamboree when I was 15 and receiving a gift bag from the US Army as if this was Comic Con. There were other kids there who were 12. I remember several people make snarky remarks about a filmmaker they called M Night Shamalammadingdong. I remember watching South Park sneer at the prospect of being Anti-War as being inherently Anti-American. I remember being in a middle school classroom with a map of the Middle East, but never once getting a lesson on it. I remember being in a car with my Nonna on my way to the dentist and seeing a Muslim man walking around minding his own business. I remember my first thought upon seeing the man being “Does he have a bomb?”
Shortly after starting this piece, I went to the former location of the World Trade Center. I had some free time and figured “What the hell, I’ve never been.” There’s a mall there, though it close to closing time when I went. Most of the stores were slightly ghostly in appearance. There weren’t many people in the mall either. Most were trying to get to the subway downstairs, which I didn’t realize was there until I left.
I exited shortly after to walk around the nighttime City. I like walking in the City. Even before COVID, there’s an openness to the City. It’s a large city, one that requires taking the subway to most places. And yet, it’s not like Los Angeles in that walking isn’t fully worth it. Rather, there’s a sense that the City is best understood through walking it, through witnessing the architecture, the strange occurrences, the people. The people most of all. Because we’re all we’ve got in the end.
A memory comes to mind of a conversation I had in a Starbucks at Union Square during the May before COVID. I met with my former boss to discuss a paycheck that ultimately took two years to be received. Our conversation got to a point where we talked about the City. She noted quite plainly that there was a massive shift in the feel of New York. That you could walk down the street and find dozens of hole in the wall bookstores or people playing music on the streets and in the subway. You can still see them, but they’re less visible. Nowadays, you only see police offices with machine guns. It’s all gentrified.
That’s ultimately the way in which things changed since 9/11: everything got cleaned up, the grime painted away. You can still see the ghost of what was there before the collapse, before the fall. If you know where to look. But what’s there now is nothing more than a pale imitation. One I love and love dearly, but its absence is deafening. Maybe the world will change again to something that captures that spirit.
Long ago in an American winter.
“But the country’s disintegrating. What’s happened to America? What happened to the American dream?”
“It came true. You’re lookin’ at it.”
-Alan Moore, Watchmen
8/6/2021-8/5/2022
With thanks to: Mike, Asher, Darren, Dave, Frezno, LI, Ritesh, and Steve
[1] Bar one that was a shitpost about Spider-Man’s taste in anime and another about him pooping. But those don’t really count. They’re not long form engagements with the character. Since finishing the first draft of this article, I wrote a piece on the relationship between Spider-Man and horror for the magazine PanelXPanel. And then again for Shelfdust on, fittingly enough, Kraven's Last Hunt.
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