TYPICAL GIRLS... ARE SO CONFUSING: Here are two X-Ray Spex songs I'd never heard until tonight! "Good Time Girl"; "Peace Meal." The latter is... bubble-gum vegetariana plus Heideggerian "factory farms are concentration camps" awfulness. All I can say is that the X-Ray Spex were usually a lot better than that. Still, I'm a completist with them.

I still remember that August week in Rehoboth--the week I turned thirteen, or maybe fourteen?--when I failed to learn to ride a bike, uselessly called out a t-shirt retailer on his homophobia, rode the Ferris wheel, entered the Haunted Mansion (it still smells the same ten years later), won a neon parrot at Skee-Ball, had a half-donut with a cigarette stuck in it for my birthday cake, purchased the black lipstick I would need for the coming year from the Halloween store, and bought my first X-Ray Spex cassette. Also wore a stuffed frog on my head, if photographic evidence can be trusted.

I'LL BREAK YOUR FACE. If I have readers who wonder why there are comics, or what comics might possibly add to other narrative forms like movies and paintings and symphonies and novels... I think this video might help. Imagine if you could have the broken-faced panels and the action, while still controlling how fast you flipped the pages....

Imagine if you had God's camera, and you were drunk--or in ecstasy, or caught in memory. Comics exist because we want action and suspension, sin and repentance, contorted faces and identity, all at the same time. Comics are time and judgment combined. Comics, because they're endlessly re-readable and because you control how fast the page turns (if ever), are ecstasy as addiction. The panel is the sublime moment--unintelligible without its context, yet importantly separate from that context--and when you turn the page you place that sublime moment back in its necessary context of narrative: sin, and repentance or the lack of it.

We may love comics because they take us out of time. But if we want to understand them, we have to release them back into time. This is why comics are like music: Comics are time and eternity held together in one hand.

This is why comics are like regret.

ROMOPHOBIA--THE WORST DISEASE: Speaking of things I haven't read yet, the Cigarette Smoking Blogger has posted her senior essay: "Decadence, Christianity, and Oscar Wilde's Conversion to Catholicism." I've been putting it off for fear that reading it will cause me to explode from sheer awesome.

(Was a bit conflicted whether this post title was the best possible punk reference; would also entertain nominations of, "When Two Heavens Clash." 1877, and we are going mad....)