I got my car washed today at a place in Katy. As I drove up to the carwash, I was met by a tiny little statue of a water drop. Cute, right? And then this little squeak squirted my car with his water gun. Absolutely fuckin’ adorable. More businesses should embrace 4D technology and movie theater gimmickry. Why should William Castle have had all the fun? Bring Emergo-Vision to Kentucky Fried Chicken and have a tiny chicken skeleton rigged to fly down from the rafters every time a customer enters the restaurant.
Thirty minutes before having my car washed, though, I was sitting in traffic having a minor existential crisis. I had just watched a horror movie (title embargoed) so maybe I was primed to consider my mortality but, as I pulled onto the Fort Bend Toll Road, I was suddenly struck with the realization that I would someday die - and probably within the next forty to fifty years, if not sooner.
Yes, I’m not an idiot. I’m 39 years old - of course, I already knew death would meet me at the end of my proverbial Wikipedia entry. It’s just not something I actively think about. Sitting in my car, though, I was suddenly awash with the deep certainty that there would be a day shortly when I no longer existed in any way, shape, or form. It’s like binge-watching a television show on Netflix and realizing you’re about to run out of episodes. Fifty years may seem like a long time but 39 years sure hasn’t. The first chunk of my life has passed in what seems like a blink. I don’t think I’m ready to die quite yet - at least not when a huge chunk of my day-to-day life consists of being squirted at by water droplet statues in a Katy, Texas car wash. I have so much I still want to do with my life - places to see, people to meet, opportunities to be had.
Is this what a mid-life crisis feels like?
Almost as fast as it came on, my mortality-induced panic attack ended. I’m sure it’s still there, though, lurking in my subconsciousness and just waiting to spring out when I least expect it. It’s like a rubber-masked-wearing teenager at a church-run haunted house - a spooky but inescapable reminder that the only thing waiting for you at the end is an exit sign and a woman offering you a glass of orange juice and a religion to panically cling to in the face of fear.
In other news, earlier this week I revisited Charles Burns’ outstanding graphic novel BLACK HOLE for the first time in almost twenty years. I had picked up the comic at Barnes and Noble during college - it was the first time the series had been collected in a hardcover format and I had remembered seeing Burns’ artwork in Wizard Magazine as a kid and was always intrigued.
The series, originally serialized between 1995 and 2005 follows a group of teenagers in a small town in which a mysterious pandemic is spread through sexual transmission. Recipients of the disease (nicknamed “The Bug”) begin to mutate - growing bulbous growths or tails or extra mouths. Cast off from their friends and families, these mutated children form a community as outcasts in the woods. Throughout BLACK HOLE, readers are introduced to a handful of central characters caught in a tangled web of unrequited love and unrestricted lust. Revisiting BLACK HOLE, I was struck by how predictive BLACK HOLE was when it came to the idea of toxic masculinity and incel culture. This is not to say that these concepts did not exist in the late ‘90s - they just didn’t have popular names and weren’t widely understood by a couch potato psychologist such as myself.
It’s neat to revisit a book two decades into your life and realize you’ve become a different person since the last time you read it. My change wasn’t as much physical as the characters in BLACK HOLE (no new tails, sorry) but inner - when I first read BLACK HOLE, I wasn’t too dissimilar from the lonely and sexually frustrated man-boys at the center of the graphic novel. I remember reading the book and seeing it as a tragic love story - a portrait of an unrealized connection. The teenage boys in BLACK HOLE are many things, but they are not particularly romantic. I didn’t know what love was as a 20-year-old. I only knew what teen movies had taught me and, brothers and sisters of the jury, John Hughes did not provide any great resources when it came to the concept of the human connection.
Reading BLACK HOLE now, the book left me feeling the appropriate levels of sadness and frustration and, surprisingly, nostalgia - nostalgic for a life filled with that degree of unstoppable passion and obsession that comes with being a teenage boy. Too much of that teen boy energy and you can become a misogynist. Just enough of it channeled in the right direction and you can conquer the world, or at least the world inside your head.
I’m a lot closer to my last days than I am to my teenage years but I’m grateful for books like BLACK HOLE that do a fantastic job of bottling up that angst and pain that comes with being a teenager. It’s fun to open a book, take a whiff, and be immediately transported back into the life of the person you used to be and not the person who has to sit in the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger and catch his breath after his mind sends him on a spiraling trip through the outer reaches of anxiety because he realized he might step on a rusty nail and die.