Tag Archives: The Office

This is why I don’t read comics anymore, in case you were interested. You’re not interested? Yeah … I hear you.

I used to love reading comics. Up until about four years ago, I spent the majority of my income on buying them. But then one day I found myself pretty fed up. I realized that I wasn’t really enjoying the bulk of my purchases. I came home from the comic book store one day with a bag full of mags, and I started leafing through all of my recently bought titles: the Amazing Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, X-Men, etc. And I just started thinking to myself, am I seriously still reading Spider-Man comics?

There’s nothing wrong with reading Spider-Man comics. I’m not trying to say that I had this moment of self-doubt because I suddenly realized that Spider-Man isn’t cool. I don’t care about what’s cool (well …) What I was thinking about was that Spider-Man has been around since the 1960s. And here I was still spending way too much money on reading his continued adventures. I had been a pretty faithful reader of Spider-Man since about the second grade. And over the years I had been given the collected works of all of the stories that were written before I was born. So with over forty years of Spider-Man stories stuck somewhere in my head, why was I still buying these books every week? What could possibly happen to Spider-Man now that hasn’t happened at least twenty-five times already?

And that’s basically how I stopped reading comics. I just finally understood that everything that the big comic companies were doing was just a rehashing of stories that had already grown stale probably close to a decade ago. I think that the powers-that-be were finally coming to grips with this little problem also. Towards the end of my dutiful reading, the publishers started to tweak the storylines in dramatic ways. Like Spider-Man revealed his secret identity to the public. It was in the papers. Or the Hulk turned red instead of green. Sounds cool right? Injecting some fresh ideas right? But these high-profile publicity stunts reeked of desperation.

And sure enough, while the characters may have changed briefly, superficially, the collective history of everything that they’ve been through was just too entrenched in popular culture to enact any meaningful, significant change. I remember about two months after I had seriously kicked the habit, I started going through some withdrawal symptoms. I found myself at bookstores, not comic book stores, just you know, like Barnes and Noble, my hands trembling as I browsed the chronically understocked comic book racks. I wasn’t going to buy anything, I swear. I just wanted to see what my old friends were up to while I was gone.

I’m not going to bore you with the extended details, but I remember standing at a bookstore one day while I was taking a three-hour lunch break from my mindless office job, leafing through the current issue of Spider-Man, reading about how this big fundamental change that took place in his life, his unmasking, his coming out to the public, had just been completely erased, like it never happened. And the creators couldn’t even think of a plausible or creative storyline to justify the whole world forgetting about his big reveal, so they wrote something absurd involving Spider-Man making a deal with the devil. Poof. Everything went back to normal. It was all a dream. Come on! At least make an effort to keep me wanting to be involved. But no. Spider-Man is still just a guy, perpetually in his twenties, swinging around New York, fighting the same bad guys, dating the same girl, quipping the same wisecracks since the 1960s. I don’t know, but it sounds like Spider-Man is trapped, stuck in a terrible purgatory, doomed to relive the same cheesy exploits, week after week after week, forever.

Can’t they just let anything end naturally, realistically, with the tiniest bit of respect? Everything today that was even once remotely great or interesting is dragged out entirely too long. The Office is still on TV, a shell of its former self, unfunny, unoriginal, just begging to be cancelled. But they’ll never cancel it. Dwight Shrute’s great-grandkids are going to be stuck selling paper on NBC, getting pranked by Jim and Pam’s great-grandkids. And they won’t even be new pranks. Just the same old pranks. Green Day is still around making terrible CDs, formulaic ballads and anthems that barely echo the once original recordings of almost a generation ago. But you know that Billie-Joe Armstrong isn’t going to stop touring. He’s not going to stop wearing eyeliner and singing “When I Come Around” to sold-out stadiums.

Somebody at Marvel Comics should write a story where Spider-Man is just sitting in a chair directly opposite the reader. The whole issue will be conversational, from Spider-Man to all of us. He’ll thank us for reading, he’ll reminisce about all the great times we’ve had together. It won’t be sad. We’ll always have our back issues. But then he’ll say goodbye and swing off into the sunset. And that will be it. Last issue. No more rehashed stories. Somebody, please come up with a new character that we can run to the ground for the next forty years.

It sounds like a good plan, but that last issue would probably fetch a really ridiculous price on the comic book market. And publishers would confuse that market price with demand for more Spider-Man. And not even a month later there would be rumblings and rumors about the Spider-Man relaunch. And he’d be back. And he’d be fighting the Green Goblin. Or Mysterio. Or the Lizard. Or the Shocker. Or Venom. Or his clone, evil Spider-Man. Or his clone’s clone, evil-evil Spider-Man, which, by the standard definition of double negatives, would actually be a good Spider-Man. So they’d team up and there would be two Spider-Mans for a while, but then the clone would die.*

 

*That clone storyline actually happened in the comics. Twice. Once in the seventies and once in the nineties.

Don’t forget about this post after you’ve read it

I’ve been thinking about how I’ve never seen any good movies or TV shows where someone loses their memory. Sure, every once in a while, a series will have a standalone episode where a main character comes down with what appears to be a permanent case of amnesia. They struggle to face the world, which they no longer recall, all while being guided back to some sense of normalcy by friends and family members constantly trying to free their memories. But then just as the situation looks all but incurable, just as the whole cast makes amends with their new situations in life, the memory loss is reversed – “Oh I’m sorry,” the doctor might say, “I was looking at the wrong CAT scans. You’re going to be fine!” – and never mentioned again in any subsequent episodes.

No, I want to see a TV show where a main character loses their memory, but it doesn’t come back at the end, and it becomes a reoccurring theme as the series goes on. I find it pretty hard to believe that nobody’s come up with this already. Just imagine how much longer a tired and stale series could be kept going. Right now I’m picturing Dwight from The Office becoming an amnesiac but somehow still keeping his job as a paper salesman. Everyone could play all of the same pranks on him from earlier seasons, and even though we would all know the expected outcomes, Dwight would fall for everything all over again as if it were the first time he were getting tricked. It would be hilarious. If they rotate cast members, or just give a new cast member amnesia every season, they can theoretically keep the show going indefinitely. I really wish I had some connections in show business.

Sometimes I wish I could experience amnesia, but only for a little bit. I would really love to be able to go to work and not just automatically run through my day like a mindless robot without ever even thinking about what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. Maybe I would be fascinated by my surroundings. Maybe I’ll go to work tomorrow and just pretend that I have amnesia. Customers will ask me if we have Coke or Pepsi products and I’ll just answer back, “Coke? Pep … si? What are these strange words you speak of sir?” And my customers will feel so bad for me that they’ll leave me great tips. And my boss will feel so bad for me she’ll give me paid sick leave. And my coworkers will miss me so badly that they won’t know what to do with themselves. But then when I return from my sick leave, I’ll just pretend like the whole thing never happened. I’ll act all confused, “What amnesia?” but then theorize that I must have gotten another case of amnesia, but this amnesia made me forget all about the first amnesia, thus having a weird sort of paradox effect, returning me back to normal.

I hope that in the future we can temporarily induce amnesia for anyone willing to pay for the experience. I’m envisioning clubs where people might go and spend some money to forget about their lives for a while. There’s going to be this great game that people play, where two friends or a couple go into a room. One of them has had their memory temporarily wiped, but the other person, who actually retains their memory, will act as if theirs had been erased also. The point of the game is that a group of the couple’s friends will be watching the whole interaction either from some sort of a live feed, or maybe right there behind a two-way mirror. As the two people in the room act all confused, the group of friends will all be taking bets trying to figure out which one has amnesia and which one is faking it.

Now that I’m thinking about this, now that I’m actually writing it out and describing it, it sounds like a lot of fun for everyone involved, except the person who has actual amnesia. For that person, it sounds like a very confusing, very harrowing experience. I’m sure they’ll get some sort of a discount. But then couldn’t they just check their receipts to see who paid more and thus end the game really early? Oh wait, amnesia, duh, they would have forgotten all about the receipts. Well, the real amnesiac anyway. The other person will just have to pretend. Have I made this clear enough? I’m reading it back and now I’m wondering if all of this talk about memory loss hasn’t triggered in me some sort of temporary self-induced amnesia, because I’m feeling a lot more confused now than I usually am when I’m writing these things. But that sounds a little dramatic. I think I can remember everything. Except for like years zero through three of my life. I don’t remember those at all. No memories of getting breast-fed, which is probably good, because those would be weird memories to carry throughout life. But that still sounds like classic amnesia to me. That counts, right?

I think the best amnesia anyone could ever hope to come down with would be a type of very selective amnesia that comes and goes in waves. “Rob, did you remember to take the garbage out?” “What? Who are you?” Stuff like that. But then ten minutes later it will have passed and I’ll remember that The Walking Dead is going to be on in half an hour. And when it comes on it would be all like, “Rob, you promised we’d watch Glee tonight!” And I’ll just say, “Where am I? I’m so confused!” I’m making it sound like I’d just be this huge dick, but it would really be a serious medical condition, worthy of everyone’s sincere sympathy.