A blog about a bit
of everything, written and edited from 6 AM to 8 AM every morning.
About me and my life, about the world surrounding me, about whatever
comes to mind in the wee light of the morning sun.
Coffee | Morning
Work | Steve Ditko | Kingdom Hearts
|My Morning Cup|
I wake up early, I
have to and I want to. Waking up earlier than necessary brings with
it a lot of benefits, but it brings with it a particular problem:
energy. I don't go to sleep early enough—and often not well
enough—to wake up with any degree of productivity. Fortunately 15th
centuries Yemen monasteries have brought forth a miracle solution to
such a problem, the fabled bean of everlasting energy: coffee.
Obviously coffee
isn't the be all-end all to waking up and being productive, in fact
running on caffeine alone has negative side effects I'm sure—like
how cranky I become when I don't have it—but it's the easiest way
to get up. A Hamilton Beach Flexbrew basket full of Maxwell House
Original ground, an unmeasured amount of water from my favorite
California originating coffee mug, fondly nicknamed the “No Good
for Nobody” mug, two teaspoons of sugar, and enough milk to turn
the coffee to a tan color similar to my wife's skin is literally all
it takes to give me the energy to make it through to lunch time. Again,
definitely not healthy, but workable.
A sweet aside, the
original name of this blog was intended to be “The Morning Cup.”
Fortunately for me, before I wasted anytime making a series of posts
and then realized the name was already taken on multiple accounts, I
decided to Google (yes, that linguistic nightmare that is technically
a real term) the terminology. The Morning Cup appears to be any
number of blogs, podcasts, talk shows, monthly newsletters, and
serial books. Probably best that I don't name my blog after them all.
The current name, Carpe Mane, is obviously a cruel mutilation of the
Latin phrase Carpe Diem, but the actual idea for the name “seize
the morning” originates from a ridiculous business idea never
spawned during communication between myself and a few friends: carpe
nocturne, a late night coffee bar.
|The Madrugada|
Yes, I just Googled
alternative terms to “early morning” and found a word of Spanish
origin that I fancied, and slapped it on this section header, so sue
me. The gray dawn, the twilight hours, daybreak, this is a time most
valuable to the yard worker who dreads the heat of yard work. He who
awakes at 5 AM finds himself with time to tend the fields before the
sun might tend his skin, feel free to quote me on that, I might make
it more poetic in the shower some day.
The problem with
Summer is, at least in the southern states, it becomes too hot by
midday to do anything outside until the evening, and by then there
are mosquitoes, horseflies, and God knows what else buzzing about for
a drop of sweet human nectar. But there's this sweet period, between
4:30 AM and 7 AM, when most of the bugs are inactive and the sun is
not yet high enough to scorch the skin off your body like a zombie in
the Sahara. This is when we make the
most of the day, we weed-eat and mow and pluck weeds and stomp down
molehills. Also, rake, when you have a magnolia tree it becomes
important that you rake frequently, or else you find millions of huge
leaves in your yard, and all of your neighbor's yards.
I
have come to value “the Madrugada” more and more over the last
several months, not just for the economy of working before the sun
starts working, but also for its solitude—this is a time to listen
to audiobooks, to busy the hands, and yes, with Carpe Mane now on my
mind, to employ the fingertips.
|The
Strange Amazing Artist Laid to Rest|
I'm
not a particularly good socialite, I don't follow trends, I don't
keep track of current events, and sadly enough I don't know when my
favorite people die—heck, I don't know who some of my favorite
people are. So it is with delayed sorrow that I recognize the passing
of a great man who created much of what I love in the comic book
world, Steve Ditko.
Honestly,
I don't know much about the comic creation process, I know that I
like Marvel more than D.C., and I know that Stan Lee's name goes on
basically everything Marvel does. I only even know that Steve Ditko,
the original artist for Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, passed because
Twitter told me so last night. Shamefully enough, when I first saw
Marvel's Tweet bidding the genius a fond farewell, referencing him
only as “Steve” I too fell into the modern movie-goer trap of
thinking they were killing of Steve Rogers—Captain America. I was,
of course, quick to reconcile this by Googling “Steve Death” and
finding that Mr. Ditko died. I recognized his name immediately,
though I wasn't entirely certain why.
The
fact of the matter is, I don't know who drew The Hulk, Ant-Man,
Captain America or Iron-Man. Well, I know who wrote
at least one line of Iron-Man comics, because Orson Scott Card dipped
his quill in there, and I know my authors fairly well. It's not until
a man like Steve Ditko dies that I recognize him as the originator,
at least graphically, of two of my favorite comic book heroes—Dr.
Stephen Strange and not-so-doctor-until-recently Peter Parker. I'm
sad to know that Mr. Ditko has left this world, however I'm glad to
know that he had the impact that he had, regardless of the fact that
he left Marvel for Detective Comics Comics (that's not a typo, it's
stylized D.C. Comics and the “C.” stands for Comics, I will
likely always refer to them as such).
|A
Kingdom for my Child's Heart|
This
probably wouldn't be on my mind so heavily if it weren't for a nice
four hour visit I enjoyed with my sister and aunt last night. My
aunts (plural because I have three, although we are technically only
referring to one in this recollection) have often been my favorites
in my family. This isn't to say that I don't appreciate most
of the raising my parents did—a long tangent for another time—nor
the influence my grandparents had, it's just that my aunts have
always been the...doting types? I suppose that may be right in some
cases and wrong in the others.
Maybe
what familiarizes me most with my mother's sister (she only has one,
my father has two) is her fondness for modern entertainment
mediums—yes, I refer to video games—a hobby not entirely shared
with my father's sisters. If there's anyone I have fond early
childhood gaming memories with its her, she beat Super Mario 64, read
stupid long non-voice-acted text bubbles, and helped me understand
controls. So its no surprise to me that when we have a chance to
catch up one of the topics on her lips is the revitalization of my
favorite childhood franchise: Kingdom Hearts.
This
child of Square Enix and Disney was probably my first true foray into
a role-playing game (I had played Quest 64 for the Nintendo 64, but
that hardly counts, I didn't know what was happening) and probably
served to spark my interest in that particular genre. Of course, I
wasn't such a dolt that I didn't recognize the faces of Final Fantasy
characters, though admittedly I wasn't certain until a few years
later that the original characters were in fact originals—I was
fairly certain for a time that Ansem was a secret boss from the
original Final Fantasy, how precious. What was delightful about this
conversation though was the topic that always comes to mind whenever
someone tells me “Kingdom Hearts 3 comes out next year.”
It
was supposed to come out 10-12 years ago! I realize of course that a
portion of this thought is my adolescent brain assuming there was
little work involved in a game's sequel coming to fruition, but let's
be real, these guys had, at the time, 13 full-length RPGs under their
belts at least (Kingdom Hearts 2 released in 2005, shortly before
Final Fantasy 12 in 2006, so I could count 11 Final Fantasys and two
Kingdom Hearts), so surely a 14th
one couldn't be far behind. To further mislead my simple mind,
Tetsuya Nomura(at least I
believe it was this absolute genius) had stated in an interview that
Kingdom Hearts 3 was in production, and while the PlayStation 3 was
on the horizon, he hoped to release the game on the PlayStation 2,
for the sake of the audience already following along. Skip ahead 14
years and approximately 11 sequels or remakes (it's a bit hard to
count given the sheer number of times some of these games have been
“remastered”) and we finally have Kingdom Hearts 3, the
long-awaited third entry in the trilogy, releasing on January 25,
2019...on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
I'm
not upset, just disappointed.
|Farewell|
That's
it for today's Carpe Mane entry, thank you so much for reading and I
plan to be back tomorrow morning, maybe with significantly less to
talk about, four total topics (as anyone would know from my
complaints about writing a weekly business column for the Commercial
Dispath) is a lot to come up with on a regular basis, but maybe we
can pull off three tomorrow, with a bonus nudge toward the day's
breakfast drink of choice. Maybe we'll have an Irish Breakfast tea,
or an Earl Grey? Who can tell.
Here's
a little teaser for one topic tomorrow, in my signing off:
T-T-F-N,
ta-ta for now!
C.W.
Sherman
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