Nor was he Batman.
He was (is) a horrifyingly real person, this deranged individual who took a dozen lives during a 12:01 a.m. screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado.
“I don’t want to know this man’s name,” Dan Slott posted early Friday on Twitter. “I don’t want him to gain any kind of notoriety. He should vanish from history.”
Like a lot of people, I’m with Slott, and I won’t be referring to the perpetrator by name here. Even the least sensationalized news of the shooting has to do just that as a matter of factual reporting, of course — the kind of reporting, sadly, that was in short supply early on, leading to erroneous associations on the part of more than one news outlet between the shooter and political movements on both sides of the spectrum.
The other night I had a rather strange dream.
I have strange dreams often, as I’ve mentioned here before — you can see all of my dream posts if you’re intrigued by what follows — but the strange thing about this one was how of-the-moment it was. Upon waking it would be the 4th of July and my blogging buddy Teebore’s next installment of his issue-by-issue X-Men analysis would be published; both figured into the dream. Sometimes I’m more surprised by dreams that relate to my actual everyday existence than those in which I’m playing for the Phillies or meeting Queen Elizabeth or hanging out with the Avengers.
When this dream began I was drawing, an activity in which I rarely engage anymore
in waking life as it’s a lot harder physically than it used to be, yet one that I occasionally find myself pursuing in dreams — perhaps to keep those creative muscles limber, if
only inside my head. That drawing, centered on Superman, was getting to be rather intricate, too, I realized as I was inking it (n.b., “inking” = the stage of applying black ink by pen, marker, or brush to finish line artwork for reproduction once it's been drawn in pencil).
At times like this I’m glad that I don’t believe in Hell, ’cause I’d probably send myself there purely by virtue (or actually, vice) of being snarky to the kids in my family.
We’d just started to watch the 4th of July display earlier tonight when I told my cousin’s 9-year-old daughter L that fireworks were made by catching fairies, strapping them to small rockets, and shooting them into the sky.
“Do the fairies get hurt?” (L said this with a sly smile, playing along. She’s a smart cookie — loves reading, has a high BS meter.)
“That’s why we clap so hard during the finale,” I replied. “We have to bring them back, like with Tinkerbell in Peter Pan.”
I am now on Twitter.
I’ve just sent the 20 characters above as my first Twit, in fact. (Like I said a couple of posts ago, I can’t accept “tweet” as either a noun or a verb when it comes to Twitter. It’s not called Tweeter. It’s called Twitter and so using the service is “twitting” or Twittering and the messages are Twits or perhaps Twitterings.)
My Twitter handle is @BrianLamken. I found out quite a while back that @blamken
was already taken; I rejected @blamsblog or something else along those lines because that would look weird when people use my handle to refer to me as a person — “still waiting for @BrianLamken to show up” — and @BrianSanerLamken is too long.
I don’t expect to Twitter out many Twits of my own for a while, although enthusiasm may get the better of me. Eventually I’ll be promoting the blog and other stuff when
my online activity increases, fingers crossed, and I’m sure that the more I follow other people on Twitter the more I’ll want to join the conversation. For now, I’ve signed up mostly in the name of checking out the feeds of friends and acquaintances and folks I admire without having to click through from their own websites and such to catch up.
I won’t make any promises but if you follow me I will very possibly follow you.
Related: Twitter-Pated • Spamalittlemore • Uh-Oh
![Andrew Garfield in costume as Spider-Man, mask in hand, with his head replaced by that of Garfield the cat and text reading 'With great power there must also come great lasagnability' [sic: luh-zan-ya-bil-it-ee]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSefTwOXCJm50xWFoPohPNd9Rwb4UmD63E-6PwdAOzjnhb2ZYQ8mRKAht0RjPvLwty94NXgN7-_lDmuBbO8-kheQsXh5ZUx9fbyiTCFV-6q3VUrn4Zt6AVxVmuyDDk0Wd5dv0fn3BVEQhU/s1600/SpiderManGarfield-Lasagnability.jpg "''I hate Mondays and also the guy who shot my Uncle Ben.''")