Heroines and Heroin

So, I started watching the sci-fi television series Heroes recently. It’s dark. It never really lets up; I find myself making a lot of comparisons between Heroes and Lost, and one major difference is that the latter tends to have more heartwarming and optimistic moments (though it seems like this has decreased as the show has progressed). One similarity between the two, which makes both of them more enjoyable, is the broad spectrum of personalities in the shows and how we are supposed to (and how we do) feel about them. The thing I noticed about Heroes, is that when being introduced to a character for the first time, they sometimes ostensibly seem like “the bad guy,” but over time, after getting to know this character, I find a place for the character in my heart (see Brain). The only character that Heroes marks as actually completely, objectively, and entirely evil is Sylar. Characters like Nathan Petrelli and The Man with the Horn-Rimmed Glasses I found to be complete jerks at the start, but now I feel sympathy for them, cognizant of their suffering. This is also true for me in regard to Lost‘s Sawyer and… just him, I think. Sawyer seems less like a douche than he was in Season 1. But as I just have realized, there are more set-in-stone evildoers in Lost I think; Charles Widmore and Ben will never get too much sympathy. There were maybe a couple episodes that by revealing Ben’s background made me feel sorry for him, but it just wasn’t enough to warrant perpetual sympathy.

Perpetual emotion machines.

Recently I finished reading Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, another chapter in the Dulouz Legend. It was amazing, and definitely more depressing than the other Kerouac I’ve read. He lives on a mountain in Canada as a fire watchman for two months at the start of the book, and while he’s on ground-level for the remainder of the book, it feels like he left something behind. Kerouac both questions and embraces Buddhism, Christianity, and religion throughout the book, while he travels with the Beats & Co., through America, Mexico, Tangiers, France, Dictionopolis, etc. There are a ton of Beats and writers in this book compared to his other work that I’ve read, and you really get to know each one pretty well (they hang out with Salvador Dali, too, it’s sweet).

One such writer you get to know pretty well is William S. Burroughs, famous for his obscene novels, heroin abuse, and the bullet he put through Joan Vollmer’s face. I have already started re-reading Naked Lunch, a terrifying journey through Burroughs junk-infested, political, depraved vision of the world. Terrifying is no exaggeration. In Desolation Angels, Kerouac talks about having nightmares from reading it (called Nude Supper in the book, due to some lame publishing issue which made him change the names of people, poems, etc. in his books).

So ya.

My favorite crayon as a child was Vivid Tangerine.

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