The nice thing about Rikkard's Red is that when I drink enough of it such that my blood becomes distilled in the succulence that is beer... If'n you cut me, it'll still look kinda like blood. ;)
I point something out about the number of something or other of otherness to Steve, the apparently significant thing being that the eventuality of said number was 25.
Steve, who has had as much sugar and pasta and beer as the rest of us (including beautiful Patrick Moreau who blushes more easily than oft mentioned heroine), begins scribbling madly on a barroom napkin about how 25 and 23 and 2 and 3 and 5 and, yawning deliciously in anticipation of the look that is about to dawn on his all-too-olive face, say "yeah, yeah, Hail Eris, All Hail Discordia" and wander off to find someone to play that nasty song about suffocation again.
Out of the corner of my eye I watch him blanch.
In my drunk-enough-to-believe-anything moments, I was quite confident of my ability not to burst out laughing as he stomped over, determined to find out if I'd meant what I'd said.
And the tear-stained lilt in his voice as he asked "now do you understand about the randomness?" and my eagerness in explaining that the randomness was what I'd appreciated all along, but I couldn't understand why he kept it so damped.
And tonight, this weekend, mushrooms and birthdays and the comic book convention on Sunday where John is liquidating his childhood and my memories, I sat behind the turn of the door while his girlfriend eagerly read out prices as fast as she could so that each book could switfly be priced, put away, and left behind...
And while she droned, excited at the $20?!? and $60 tags on brilliance, I hid behind old oak, and in the creak as it swung back and forth beneath my weight I sniffed another goodbye to The Crow, to Lobo, to Etrigan... Imagining The Crow in his broken-doll dance, unlacing the ungainliness of his boots and hopping on Etrigan's bike and ordering the fates to bite him.
It made no sense, as I held the spine carefully taught, as I breathed out over the pages, just in case. They're Property Now. They're Merchandise.
They can't be my friends anymore.
But hey, at $60 a pop, wouldn't you sell your friends?
My comics are "worthless", pitted and stained despite the boards that were supposed to help them outlive me. Mildewed from undescribable bathtimes, crunchy in places where something random happenned to them.
Eris' comic collection, and I love every tear and dream and fist-in-the-air they wrung from me.
And if I've no room left for them, they're going into the arms of someone who's not yet slept in the arms of The Swamp Thing, who hasn't cheered Molly, or Spider Robinson, or Grendel, on.
They're not lining themselves up in long white boxes with dollarsign labels on their frozen toes, to buy an ignorant girlfriend a new pair of boots.
But I'm drunk and procrastinating, so what do I know, eh?