When you can... sense things like I can, time slows down. The passing seconds are frozen moments in time; life becomes a series of comic book panels... Spider-sense is like freeze frame on a VCR: it seems to slow the action down to a crawl. Me, I'm ten steps ahead of the game. That's why my jokes are so funny -- it feels like I've been working on them for hours. Every reaction seems rehearsed... In these few moments, a million thoughts go by... I hear a pounding noise. Everything's happening like lightning now. And it's just as I crest the nearest building that my heart begins to slow, and I realize what the noise is. It's someone else's heart trying to outrace mine.
- Paul Jenkins, Spectacular Spider-Man #2

"The Secret Window to Regret"
Kate sent me a tape of all this stuff she recorded Freshman and Sophomore year. It was a great gift, so of course, I'm going to start badmouthing it.

Like most people, I hate the actual sound of my voice. In my head, I sound vaguely British, but apparantly in real life, I've got a scratchy voice that sounds like I'm perpetually phelmed up, and I can sing "It's Not Easy Being Green" with the best of them. And I look nothing like I picture. When I'm looking in the mirror or getting photgraphed, I have what I consider an acceptable smile. But when I smile out of actual joy, I am repulsed by what I see.

(And what does it say that I don't like the way I look when I'm really happy? Oh irony of ironies!)

This tape has some awful things on it. I do the Silly Negro Dance. I go on for, like, ten minutes about my father being killed by a Big Giant Bee. I sing "Colorblind" like an 80's hair band. These things will haunt me to the day I die.

But what really gets me is that I can see young, stupid, freshman Clark bebopping along completely unaware of the horrors in store for him. I can't warn him about the outrageous things he'll do when drunk. I can't tell him about the Terrible Night of the Comment, or the insanity of that Mock Trial trip to Middleton, Tennessee. I have to watch him sit there with that goofy smile on his face forever and ever.

I guess I'm still too close to my college years to look back at them with nostalgia. I can do that with high school now, but when I look back at Mizzou, all I see are the things I regret. In five or six years, I'm gonna love this tape to death though, aren't I?

I really need to get out of this town. I've been back here a little over a week and it feels like it's been months.

"The Secret History of Brent Jones, Part Two"
In the last week before he moved out, Brent started declassifying things. Over the course of the previous month, he'd come to this ridiculous notion that honesty was the best policy or somesuch, so he decided that it was time to reveal all of his strange secrets.

Now, none of this was stuff that I really needed to know. Most of it had nothing to do with anything that'd happened in the last five years. You could even go so far as to say I didn't really care, but that's okay, he didn't care if I cared, he just wanted to be able to say certain things out loud. Get it off his chest. Confess. Probably some of that lapsed Catholicism creeping up on him.

Really, it wasn't a big deal. We'd just be sitting in the living room, watching TBS' Non-Stop Comedy Block and munching on one of those delicious Freschetta Brick Oven frozen pizzas when he'd suddenly blurt out something like, "I used to hide in the Spanish room in the morning until this girl I had a crush on came by to open her locker."
You know, nothing too shocking, really.

I only bring it up because I realized how closed I am when my father asked me what type of music I like and I felt like I couldn't give him a straight answer. So now, I can see why it seemed like such a big deal to Brent to devulge the tiny minutiae of his crush on Little Miss Baker. What a lucky bastard.

"The Secret Origins of Supervillains"
Blame it on Stan Lee.

The first I ever heard about serious characterization of the bad guy came from comic books. I mean, it always seemed to me that writing bad guys was easy. They were evil, plain and simple. They do what they do because they just want to do bad things or because they were crazy. One or the other. No real thought behind it. Just have the good guy trounce 'em and call it a day.

To tell you the truth, I still usually write with that type of mentality. In the Little Black Duck, Karl Bloomsday was always coming after the Duck for no other reason than he was just an abrasive asshole. In "A Life Less Extraordinary," The Sandman wants to pound on Spider-Man because he's a granulated Grendel, and that's what he does for petesake. Plus, I only had eleven pages to work with. It was either vaguely express my daddy-issues through an examination of Peter's relationship with Uncle Ben or explore the Sandman's motives for being a dirtbag (Ha!) and I went with the former. Sue me.

Stan Lee would tell you a different story, though. His goal was always to write the villain in such a manner that the reader could almost sympathize with them, or to at least give them some sense of ethics, skewed though it might be. Doctor Doom was the power mad megomaniacal dictator with weapons of mass destruction squirreled under the floorboards of the Latverian Embassy, but he'd never lie to you and when Doom gave you his word, Doom kept it. Stan, for all his faults as a storyteller, always wanted to create a fair and balanced account of whatever world he dreamt up. The idea was to make the reader understand that if not for a slight twist of fate, Otto Octavius could have been as heroic as Peter Parker, and if not for a similar tiny twist in the other direction, Spider-Man could have been as vile and venomous as Doctor Octopus.

Now, in my lackluster worlds of fiction, sometimes I remember to do this and sometimes I don't. I think my work's better when I remember, and that's why "For All the Laughter That Lies Ahead," which focuses on the Joker and what keeps him going through his incarceration at Arkham Asylum, remains my favorite Little Black Duck Tale. (That, plus it's pretty short.)

In my actual life, however, I never forget this lesson, and it's become a major source of my insecurity. I can never tell myself that I'm the better man, Eddie Vedder. There are few things I feel I deserve more than the other guy, and when it comes to any kind of competition, my assumption is that it's probably best that I just step aside. It never seems likely that I will succeed where another man failed, because look at me: I'm The Boy With Spider-Man Sheets.

I've turned myself into a joke.

"The Secret Life of Altar-Boy"
And while we're on the self-indulgent subject of both my secrecy and insecurity, can I also share with you another strange compulsion?

I try to exude this very zen mindset of Whatever happens happens, man, and we're all dust in the cosmos, like it doesn't bother me that Kate Jeffries is gone and with her my entire social life, or that I don't care whether or not I get hired at that crappy movie theatre, but it's clearly not fooling anybody. Despite my desperate attempt to seem centered, I end up bouncing off the walls anyway. The only difference is that I don't feel like I'm allowed to tell anyone why. I feel like I've got to pretend that I'm all right with all the craziness that happens, because if I don't, everything's going to fall apart because I'm the only one who cares enough to try and keep it all going. I'm convinced that if I showed how bothered I am by any of this, no one would help me. They'd just say "See, I told you so." I think that if I show the slightest doubt, everyone else will take it as a sign that my heart's just not in it, and they'll give up on me and I'll lose everything because of my brief lack of faith.

Perhaps that's some of that lapsed Catholicism creeping up on me. I was an altar boy, you know, and half the time I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do, but I was afraid to ask because I thought Father Jim would dropkick me for incompetence...

I'm afraid, and I'm afraid to be afraid and it's all just so... lonely. That shouldn't be such a surprise to me, because when you think you've got to do everything on your own, a certain sense of solitude should be expected, and yet I'm overwhelmed by how alone I feel in all this.

And I'm disappointed that on the cusp of twenty-two, The Boy With Spider-Man Sheets still ain't the man he needs to be.

"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburg, "Michigan seems like a dream to me now..."