EPISODE 428: THIS YEAR MY COSPLAY IS ANXIETY

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

It’s that Comic-Con time of year, and I’m writing you from the Jesuit parish in San Diego which year after year has for some crazy reason agreed to let me stay here without ever once even asking if I’m going to be wearing a costume, a topic that never seems to stop being interesting to everybody else.

(This year I’m telling people I’m going as Introverted Nerd Desperate to Feel Things and/or Connect. “Ah yes, a perennial favorite of the Con,” someone in my house responded. Which is fair.)

I’ve had this dream for a bunch of years of offering Mass at the Con – cosplay readers and Eucharistic ministers, maybe a Star Wars procession of the gifts which ends with Chewie finally getting the medal no one gave him at the end of A New Hope. You know, all the good stuff.

I even petitioned the Con a couple years ago to see if I could get space; no luck. But this year I got to do two Masses at the UC-San Diego Newman Center, which a couple of my Jesuit friends serve at, and I went all in – super hero-themed homily; Peter Parker as the greatest comic book super hero of all. On the spot I even came up with a Gremlins reference, which was clearly an inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

It was actually a pretty great Sunday to talk about super heroes. The Gospel was the story of the Good Samaritan, the person who sees the man suffering along the side of the road and decides to help him while the priest and Levite rush by. Almost every super hero story is much the same, the story of someone who for some crazy reason decides to stop and help strangers in need. They’re preposterous tales, really – how do any of those characters actually make a living? Pay for an apartment? Maintain relationships? And yet, based on how many different versions there are and how much the movies about them make we’re clearly no pun intended super-invested in that story. I have no idea why, really. It’s like we all grew up with our own Uncle Ben constantly reminding us we have a responsibility to give back before we ignored his advice and were accidentally responsible for his deaths, or something.

(There’s a comic out right now called Spider-Man: Life Story which imagines Peter Parker/Spider-Man living in the real world and growing older -- each issue takes Peter forward a decade. And I’ll tell you what, his life is a total nightmare. His powers + his uncle’s wisdom hanging over your head right alongside your sense of responsibility for his death=no fun at all, baby. It’s like Hamlet lived out over 80 years.)

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​Pretty much the only version of Venom I would ever watch.
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Someone came up to me after Mass and said, “Hey, you know Game of Thrones?” Umm, maybe slightly… “There’s that part at the end where Bran meets Jaime and we think he’s going to condemn him and so does Jaime but instead he says ‘All your decisions have led you here.’ Isn’t that an amazing image of God’s mercy and acceptance?”

As you know, I invested a lot of time this spring in watching and thinking about Thrones. And to my mind over the course of eight seasons Bran went from one of the most interesting, brave and hopeful characters on the show to a spooky ghoul creature that says only the creepy things. Him as king is the silliest of silly; he even pretty much says he’s going to spend his time warging Drogon.

But that idea the guy had, that Bran’s words offer the kind of radical acceptance of our life choices that we hope for from God’s mercy – it almost makes Bran seem like relatable, you know?

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As I’ve been driving today I’ve also been listening to Conan O’Brien’s newish podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, where he invites interesting people to come talk about their lives. The episode with Stephen Colbert is just outstanding, basically two soldiers realizing there is someone else who understands what they’ve been through (where ‘what they’ve been through’ is mostly growing up Irish Catholic); I also listened to the Lin-Manuel Miranda episode that I mentioned here a few weeks ago, and basically came to the conclusion that Lin-Manuel Miranda is the best case scenario of what happens if you allow yourself to experience life without any protective shielding. I don’t know how it is he is able to be so present to the world around him and receptive, but there’s something really wonderful about him.

The best moment of my listen so far, though, comes from Conan’s conversation with the comedian Patton Oswalt. Oswalt was going on and on about how messy the sugar/milk counters are at Starbucks, like not just messy but weirdly so, like there was just a pitched battle here over the creamer. “If we can’t clean up after ourselves at Starbucks, we’re never going to have a Mars colony,” Oswalt concludes.

Loved that so much. ++ Speaking of Starbucks, in between Masses today I was chained to a Starbucks stool trying to finish something I'm supposed to turn in, um, just about now actually. At one point I was in the restroom, and no sooner had I sat down than someone started pounding on the door. Like, pounding, repeatedly, over and over. No words, just crazy amounts of pounding that continued no matter how much I yelled there's someone in here.

I walked out with a pretty full head of steam. There was this very mild-mannered seeming woman standing there. "Was that you knocking?" I asked. "Yes," she replied. "You know, you could have let us know you were in there."

"Um, I DID," I said. "Over and over."

"Really? Well we didn't hear you," she replied.

"Lady, that is not my fault," I shot back, as she led her son into the bathroom.

How dare she assume the worst of me, I thought to myself, just as I noticed that her son, clearly the one who had been pounding on the door, had some kind of mental disability.

I feel pretty confident somewhere a Good Samaritan is throwing food at pictures of at least me, maybe she and I both.

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Last week I mentioned that AOC meets Greta Thunberg interview that was in the Guardian. It had that idea from both of them that if you get out there and do something, it can be a huge personal boost even if it turns out to be not quite the thing you wanted. “Hope is not something that you have. Hope is something that you create, with your actions.”

And for some reason halfway through the latter Mass I had to today I suddenly realized, Hope is like Gremlins. With just a little action, it immediately multiplies.

++ LINKS ++

Millie Bobbie Brown Gets Me In all the Feels

The Simpsons Intro as Russian Art Film

My favorite way of Telling This Short Story

And finally, the Australian musician Nick Cave on What God Sounds Like

Perhaps, God would have the combined voice of all the untold billions of collected souls, an assembly of the departed speaking as one -- without rancour, domination or division, a great, many-layered calling forth that rings from the heavens in the small, determined voice of a child, maybe; sexless, pure and uncomplicated -- that says 'Look for me. I am here.'

As I was driving back from dinner tonight I saw planes flying into San Diego International Airport. The weather had gone from clear to misty, and the beams from the planes’ lights almost seemed to be floating independent of the planes themselves, like the mist had captured each ray in its own fog-form of amber. It made the city seem like a magical land with its own strange laws of physics.

It's like Calvin tells Hobbes: "There's wonder everywhere." Whatever this week may want to demand of you, take some time to stop and look around.

See you next week.