Tag: Roger

Len Wein, egg salad and other things

Arthur wants to know:

Have you ever run across anything about YOU that you didn’t know about?

Nah. I get Google alerts for Roger Green but it’s usually some Brit or another, although it might be a Denver musician or a high school teacher in Texas.

Just recently, someone told me there used to be a New York state assemblyman named Roger Green, as if I didn’t know. I started adding my middle initial or name to distinguish myself from him, for he, like so many other state legislators, got into legal and ethical problems.

There was a time I used to write more regularly a blog for the local newspaper. Since I was usually behind in my reading, I’d discover that the paper had excerpted part of my post, not from reading the paper, but from people telling me they saw it.

Jaquandor inquires:

Favorite Len Wein character?

#1 would have to be Swamp Thing. I know it better from the Moore-Bissette-Totleben period that Wein edited. But I discovered the Wein-Wrightson origins after that.

#2 is probably Storm, which he and Dave Cockrum developed in Giant-Size X-Men #1.

Interesting that you asked the question on the very day there was a Final JEOPARDY! answer about Len Wein.
Only the defending champion, who had been in third place, got the correct answer, which got her the win.

So Wolverine is probably #3.

But I also liked the characters he wrote that he didn’t create, such as Spider-Man in Marvel Team Up.

What do you think of egg salad? (I thought it was gross for years but I’ve recently converted.)

I ALWAYS liked egg salad. You NEED mustard if it’s to be any good.

When I was a kid, I ate it on white bread, or as we called it in those days, bread. As an adult, I developed a preference for it on seeded rye.

I like almost anything with eggs, BTW. When I’m eating out, I often order an omelet, not because I can’t make one myself – I surely can, and have since I was about 10 – but because I usually don’t have the variety of ingredients I’d need to keep fresh on hand.

Music: There Will Never Be Another You

The painting in the background with the guitar was by our father.

Marcia, the younger sister, in very many ways, has become the keeper of the flame, not only for the history of the nuclear family in which we grew up back in Binghamton, NY in the 1950s and ’60s, but for the extended tribe as well.

It’s logical. She was the only one who moved to Charlotte, NC with the parents. Leslie and I were already ensconced in college, though of us lived down there for brief periods in the late 1970s.

After my father died in 2000, Mom and Marcia took care of Marcia’s daughter Alex and each other, though as time marched on, Marcia and her daughter were tending more to Mom until she died in 2011.

She still is tending to our parents’ memory, as she has access to decades worth of photos and other material.

As all three of her kids knew, my mom LOVED Nat King Cole. She had a whole bunch of 78s of his, but I have no idea whatever became of them. There were some items in my maternal grandmother’s house, the house my grandma and mom grew up in, and where my sisters and I spent a lot of time. The stuff went into storage and ultimately disappeared long ago, including some photographs of mine.

Marcia was musing about my mother back in November, just before Mom’s birthday. Our mother particularly loved Nature Boy and other familiar tunes by Cole. But neither Marcia nor I had heard him perform There Will Never Be Another You. It’s become one of Marcia’s favorite Nat King Cole songs. And I can hear why.

BTW, neither she nor I ever really learned to play the guitar, though Dad and Leslie did. The painting in the background with the guitar was by our father.

LISTEN to There Will Never Be Another You

Arturo Sandoval

Nat Cole

Doris Day

Happy birthday, Marcia!

Mother’s Day 2017

Mom in her red wig period.

HA! I was looking at my May posts I completed, and I assumed I’d written a Mother’s Day something about my mom. But I was misremembering. I had written about my sister Marcia for her birthday this week, and that post is largely ABOUT my mom.

So I decided the heck with it and picked some photos off Marcia’s Facebook, most of which I don’t believe I’ve posted before.


Here’s my mom with HER mother, Gertrude Williams, and my sisters Leslie and Marcia, in her red wig period.


My mother with her mother’s people, the Yates, including Gert (2nd left), her aunts Charlotte and Deana. I have no idea what she’s looking at. This is in Binghamton, NY.


Mom with our family friend Betty, probably at the latter’s home near Binghamton.


I could ask someone who Sammy is, but this predates my father being on the scene.


Mom with her middle granddaughter, Alex, Marcia’s daughter, in Charlotte, NC.


Mom with her eldest Yates cousin, Raymond.


Mom with her eldest child, in Binghamton.


Mom with her eldest child, in Charlotte.

I will say that, unlike THIS mom, my mom hardly ever swore, and not just in front of her kids.

Roger is 64

“Misery depresses you. Ignorance depresses you. Persecution depresses you. Violence depresses you. Corruption depresses you.”

FantaCo. Photo by Tom Skulan.
FantaCo. Photo by Tom Skulan.

A picture from the 1980s, when I was working at a certain comic book company in Albany.

Anyway, it’s my birthday, when I don’t blog. But I rather liked this quote a friend of mine posted on her Facebook page several months ago, from a book I read and movie I saw (1.5 times – long story.) You can muse how much of it is actually applicable to me.

“You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don’t like bigots, bullies, snobs or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate.”

“Consciously, sir, consciously,” Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. “I hate them consciously.”

“You’re antagonistic to the idea of being robbed, exploited, degraded, humiliated, or deceived. Misery depresses you. Ignorance depresses you. Persecution depresses you. Violence depresses you. Corruption depresses you. You know, it wouldn’t surprise me if you’re a manic-depressive!”

“Yes, sir. Perhaps I am.”

“Don’t try to deny it.”

“I’m not denying it, sir,” said Yossarian, pleased with the miraculous rapport that finally existed between them. “I agree with all you’ve said.”

― Joseph Heller, Catch 22

Eleven years of blogging

I have long suggested that blogging, for me, is some sort of therapy.

Should-I-See-A-TherapistEleven years of blogging? If I knew now what I knew then, I’d probably do it anyway.

A month and a half ago, Ken Levine wrote a post called The link between successful writers and mental illness. Yes, there is one.

Andreas Fink at the University of Graz in Austria… found a relationship between the ability to dream up ideas and the inability to turn off that function in the brain that is always thinking…

We writers are constantly making associations between external events and internal memories. Make it stop!

Another study claimed successful individuals were eight times more likely as “regular” people to suffer from a serious depressive illness…

Lots of successful scribes have battled with extreme depression. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Twain, Dickinson, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill – just pick any writer Woody Allen reveres.

The theory as to why there is rampant depression is the following: We think a lot, we’re often isolated, and we tend to be narcissists. And that’s for the good writers. Imagine how much worse it is for [crappy] writers.

I don’t know that I’m a good writer. I DO know that I suffer that function in the brain whereby, even in sleep, my mind is processing what I want to write. And when it’s the case that I don’t have time to do so, the brain, the mood, the temperament gets…skewed.

I have long suggested that blogging, for me, is some sort of therapy. You all are my public shrink. Well, maybe not, in as much as I started writing before anyone was looking. Perhaps you’re all part of my group therapy session?

Maybe seven times this past year, I reposted older material, including three of the four Black Comic Book posts (one’s still to come) that were SEVEN posts when I first wrote them. I imagine this year will be the same use of older material, more or less. When I hinted at doing this a couple years ago, a few of you feared that it would be too familiar. I trust that I’ve allayed that particular fear.

As you know, I often write ahead in my blog, but, because of annoying things, such as LIFE, the number of posts in the queue is down significantly, 36% from the peak. This means that one of these days, I’m going to wake up, realize I have no post prepared, and will scurry around looking for a picture of one of my cats.

In any case, today represents my 4,019th consecutive day of blogging, which surely PROVES a certain mental illness. I plan to continue to “lie on the couch” for at least another year.

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