Daily Archives: May 31, 2007

A New Superhero

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During my travels in the US I actually watched TV a couple of times, and one show I saw was about cephalopods. You’ve got your octopuses (if you want to get all snooty, don’t uses ‘octopi’, that would be a Latin plural on a Greek word. ‘Octopi’ is false erudition. The formal plural would be octopodes, with the accent on the top. But I digress.), your squids, and your cuttlefish.

In this television show they had some mind-boggling footage of cuttlefish, which have developed some amazing system that gives them muscular control over the color of their skins. They flashed colors and patterns across their bodies, sometimes one pattern on the side with the female (everything’s cool, baby), and an entirely different pattern on the side with the rival male (back off, chump).

Give fine enough motor control, a cuttlefish could play a movie on his skin.

It wasn’t until the second beer tonight that I considered what it would be like to have cuttlefish skin. Some people are worried about genetic manipulation, that it would lead to frivolous modifications of the human form. I’ve got my shopping list right here, and it starts with wings. Cuttlefish skin is right up there, though, probably even edging out gills and wheels.

Cuttlefish-man the superhero would rock. A master of disguise and ingenious at camouflage, he works out by displaying “tattoos”, then animating them running around on his skin.

I picture a superhero job interview that goes something like: “Cuttlefish-man? What the hell kind of name is that?” The interviewer looks up from the resume he is scannning to discover the chair in front of his desk is empty — until a pair of square-slitted eyes blink somewhere in the air over the back of the chair. Cuttlefish-man reappears (he would have to be bald, I suppose). “That’s what kind” he would say without a hint of smugness.

Science note: while invisibility is impossible (and even if it were possible the invisible man would be blind… Holy crap! what a great moment! The lab accident makes him invisible, but the point is completely meaningless to him because his eyes don’t work anymore! The light passes right through his retinas. It would go something like: *Lab Explodes* “Oh, shit I can’t see!” “Where are you?” “I’m right here but I’m blind, I’m blind!” “But I can’t see you!” “Dude, that’s seriously not funny. Help me!” He would imagine himself the way any adult who lost their sight imagined themselves. As far as his senses are concerned, he is completely ordinary. A blind invisible man would be the best superhero ever — uh, except Cuttlefish-Man, of course, who we’re talking about here…), it is possible to project an image that from a certain point of view is indistinguishable from invisibility.

Of course, it’s not all fun and games for the newest entry in the super-pantheon. Cuttlefish-man has inherited the shy, retiring nature of his namesake, which makes it awkward when he has to work naked. Bruce Wayne is bugging him all the time for skin samples, so he can develop his own “cuttle-suit”. He is awkward around women, worried that he’s going to light up like a billboard when she leans toward him over the table. That doesn’t actually happen — or, at least not very often — but his ears turn awfully red.

Thanks!

Late-Night Musings

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It’s one of those times, right now, when you see things and they seem somehow more significant, tied, in some intangible way, to a deeper pattern, some kind of secret that’s almost within reach but skitters away whenever you look directly at it. Those hints, those glimpses, could be anything, and in the end are nothing.

There are two marks on the doorway leading into the kitchen, one labeled “day”, the other, a centimeter below that, labeled “nite”. They are above me as I walk past, an artifact of the Soup Boy days, an empirical resolution of a debate with his girlfriend. Yes, you really do wake up taller than you go to bed. I knew that from adjusting the mirrors in my car twice a day (I do like to have the glass just right), but there they are, the two heights of Soup Boy. I wonder, if you measured carefully enough, if you would discover that gravity is winning. I wonder if the night is a short victory but we never make up the ground we lost the day before.

But it’s not gravity that’s the enemy, now that I think of it. Gravity just wants me to fall, it pulls on all of me equally. That’s what orbit is, not a lack of gravity but a constant falling, without ever hitting anything. It is not gravity that is crushing me, but the ground pushing up against my feet.

Before getting up to look around the apartment, finding things I’d stopped seeing long since, I caught up a bit with back podcasts of Writer’s Almanac. I tend to listen to them in bunches when I’m in a mood like this one. Poetry is always better when you feel adrift, when the Big Mystery is teasing you.

Earlier I spent the evening working on a bit of prose that I really shouldn’t be spending time on. It’s self-indulgent, pretentious prose, which is certainly pleasant to write, but I got no time for that kind of shit. (Except, of course for this blog.) It’s an odd marriage of a favorite anecdote of mine and some of the thoughts thrust upon me by Lost in the Cosmos.

The anecdote:

I was sitting in a café listening to two writers talking together. Also present were a couple of college students, female, obviously very impressed by finding themselves in a foreign city in the presence of Actual Artists, who were having an Actual Discussion. I sat a little back from the table, not commenting and at one point I chuckled to myself at something one of the other writers said. The girls sitting next to me looked at me quizzically; no one else seemed to notice the joke.

I leaned back further and said, “They’re not listening to each other. It’s two monologues.” She turned her ear back to them and realized that her Actual Artists were really just talking at each other. No information moved in either direction. She smiled and we shared the joke, feeling vaguely superior to the others at the table.

In that girl’s view, she was in the presence of Actual Artists, and some Other Guy, one who was mysterious, not a talker so obviously a thinker, one who saw through the games of the Artists, a man of penetrating insight. Was I also a writer? Why was I there? With a little chuckle I had gone from being unnoticed to being the towering intellect of the little meeting.

I was also the only one not hitting on the girls. I would have, believe me, but I couldn’t figure a way to do that without becoming part of my own joke. In the end it was pride that stopped me.

So the story I wrote is based on that, loosely. I was asking myself, “what if I actually was like the Other Guy the girl imagined she was sitting next to? What might have happened next?” There are some good bits in the scene (and some pretty lousy ones), although the characters surrounding the guy are far more interesting than the guy himself. That feels about right.

As I write this I hear the rumble of the night tram in the distance, cautious as it passes over the switches at Starostrašnická. I wonder who’s on it right now, where they’re coming home from. I wonder if they will remember this night, or would prefer to forget. I wonder if they are lonely.

Thanks!