Things a Writer Thinks About*

One of the things my family and I did on Sunday as a sort of post-stripe (I got my first belt stripe in the martial art I practice) celebration was go to the bookstore to stock up on winter reading. We did our usual used book circuit, which includes HalfPrice Books and Sixth Chamber. I spent much of Sunday resting my aching muscles on the couch and reading various Avengers comics.

Since then I've been struck by a bunch of strange observations about various superheroes. Like, how many superheroes must smell like Icy Heat... or, how do you suppose Peter Parker explains all his bruises? Do you think he just does what Bill Henry -- who would occasionally show up to Wyrdsmiths with a black eye -- would do and mutter, "soccer" or "rugby," and lets people just assume he's not out crime fighting in the streets on his off hours? Or why is it that no one pulled this skinny, nerdy kid away from his Aunt May and asked him, "Do you need a SAFE PLACE???!"

Seriously.

I read one of Brubaker's Marvel Age issues about Pearl Harbor and the Invaders, and that just really got me thinking about my grandparents and about all the strange things Captain America probably says/does/eats because of the era he grew up in. My grandparents always had coffee after dinner ....and ate bread with butter, like as a side dish. I'm being told on FB that much of this is probably ethnic (particularly my example of liver and onions), but you've got to figure there's something that Cap used to ask Jarvis to make for dinner that had the rest of the Avengers groaning.

Also on FB, my friend and fellow writer Jon Hansen are having fun imagining the weak coffee he probably made at Avenger's headquarters and exactly how insane that made Tony Stark.




And does he smell like Old Spice?

I mean, you could not go into a grandparent's bathroom without seeing that white bottle with the blue ship on it. And old people just smelled -- not like "the man my man could smell like" -- but like my grandpa'a Old Spice!

So, yeah, this is the kind of thing I spend my days thinking about.

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*excerpt x-posted from LJ.