The story within the dream is that we all work in paper-- the whole family is here (they're not my family) and the occasion is one of unknotting history (this knot is not my history). I've arranged for everyone to meet at the shop (this isn't our business) so that the surviving members can each read a chapter & compare notes, whereby they may Figure Shit Out For Themselves. That's the hope, anyroad.
All five employees of the comic shop are confounded and not a little irritated, being summoned this way and presented with such a byzantine emotional undertaking. I don't want to tell my family how fucked they are, seems to be the point, and tearfully I leave them to it, wandering out into the night and walking the tumultuous, chunked blacktop streets.
I pass punk acquaintances of old: weepy loud soggy breakups, shouty infidelities, and pass shaking my head at all of it. Dessicated trees sloughing bark sag against the wind as crickets tune up for their nightly concerto, tall brown grasses whispering in the breeze.
The Whole Story my (adopted?) fam seem to've been left with is one wherein a generation or so ago my great-grandfather gifted a stolen inheritance to his kids so he could fuck off with another lover, leaving his former wife and children living on a patch of cursed earth, in a house once reserved for slaves. 'Not exactly subtle, subba-conscious,' I think, and carefully climb down an embankment built from old railroad ties.
When I eventually return to the shop I enter Another Dream: now that I don't know any of these people and the shop has changed hands, the entire stock is in a process of being reshuffled and reshelved. The staff has pared down to two people, neither of whom resembles anyone from my dream family.
Intently I browse, searching for comix I had reserved, but cannot find anything but proxies for the art I'm after: ugly, scratchy, elongated parodies of other styles, all of it by Dave Sim, seemingly, though I know he couldn't have drawn any of it. The style is best described as Reid Fleming's Bacchus by Steve Bissette, and the colouring is disgusting, all CG browntown besotted with smears of green and violet.
The shop has been trying to close for hours-- ever since the Previous Dream (it wasn't my dream) the crew has been saddled with restructuring & sorting stock (these weren't my interests). Nobody seems mad at me for taking so long to find my erstwhile purchases (whose books are these, anyway?) and the staff is actually fairly helpful. I eventually ask how on earth Dave Sim recouped enough of an audience to be in demand for all these fuckin' variant covers, and the clerks answer, "Good damned question."
The nicest clerk, who I have pegged as trans, happens to point me directly to the book I'm after. I'm prepared to use what little cash I have left on some lesser pamphlets of interest, about to ask them to hold onto the big b&w hardback of RFBbSB-- thank christ! it isn't coloured --when they offer it at a tremendous markdown. I take it, as grateful for the boon as they are to be rid of it, and depart.
No comments:
Post a Comment