For a brief moment, I was a kid again.

Yesterday, in preparation for watching a film at the cinema about a cartoon character known as Iron Man, I scrolled through websites detailing a few storylines that encompass worlds and universes in one comic book series or another.

Although I was never geeky enough to keep track of comic drawing styles, character bios or inside jokes, I knew enough about the fantasy lives of fellow classmates who did that I could briefly carry on a conversation with those who read not only comic books and watched Saturday morning cartoons but who also consumed novelisations and books containing specifications of spaceships, weaponry and superhero powers.

A few of them transitioned to board games like Dungeons & Dragons — I detailed those people in a previous novel or blog entry and won’t repeat myself here — because fantasy and science fiction computer games didn’t exist, unless you can stretch your imagination and say that Pong was a game between gods sending universes back and forth across matter/antimatter timelines.

For the most part, our schoolyard games were either cowboy-and-Indian or space cowboy-vs-evil alien shoot ’em ups and chases.

2001: A Space Odyssey was released when we were too young to care and Star Wars arrived in our high school years when most of us already had well-established hobbies to occupy our thoughts.  Star Trek was an after-school show that, along with Batman and Wild Wild West, captured the attention of the average nerd in our early teens.

Now that I’m a middle-aged white guy who’s more likely to die of suicide than a car wreck, I can either further regress into a childhood I never really had or I can progress into an elderly adult I haven’t yet been, avoiding the mental illness pitfalls that lead to premature death.

To end today’s blog entry, I’ll provide an untraceable source of a quote by a semi-famous author:

“My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.

For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.

Falsely yours,
Henry Charles Bukowski”