The Real Question is: Can the Internet Still Handle My Salty Foot Stench?

Another way of saying what I was trying to say here, via Arab Strap's 'There Is No Ending':

If you can love my growing gut
My rotten teeth and greying hair
Then I can guarantee I'll do
The same as long as you can bear

Yeah, it's a love song for saps with smelly feet, but it's pretty amazing for all that. Especially the bit at the end which invokes a familiar parade of bogymen only to dismiss them with ease:

Bullies, burglars, paedophiles
Bird flu and passive smoke
(They're coming!)
Volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves
Heart disease and strokes
(They're coming!)
Terrorists with homemade poison
And factions everywhere
(They're coming!)
They're drinking in the street
And they could steal your home
And I don't care!

This is one of those songs which says, "Fuck fretting about the end of the world, we've got each other for as long as you want that to last", though it does so with a considerable amount of gruff charm. In some ways this is a soothing antidote to the constant panic and blathering 'Oh Dear-ism' of the press, but it also reminds me of the way Seaguy walks into a series of ever-smaller frames as he walks into romance at the end of Slaves of Mickey Eye.

Of course, David Fiore is right -- the decision to drop your defenses and team-up with someone is an important one, whether you're a comic book character or not. What's more, Cameron Stewart's art sells this idea in a page in which action poses are dropped in favor of battered intimacy:














On the page that follows this image, the panel barrier between these two characters disappears and the story comes to a halt. But given that this sequence occurs just after a sinister authority figure has asked Seaguy "what must we do to make you happy?!", the question remains: is this also the end of Seaguy's engagement with the outside world?

Well, maybe, but it doesn't have to be -- the important thing is that we don't lose sight of why our connections matter to us, why right now matters to us. It's not enough to guarantee anything big, but it's a decent place to start so long as you're willing to extrapolate. Remember: this isn't the end, of Seaguy or of this blog. That's in the future, sure, but for now we move on, to new adventures.













That little guy? Don't worry about that little guy. He's waiting, but you can't spend all your time worrying about Death if you want to get anything done.

(The above images are from Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #3, by Grant Morrison & Cameron Stewart et al. 'There is No Ending' is the last song on the last Arab Strap album, which was called The Last Romance, fittingly enough. Personally, I prefer to hear it at the end of their posthumous Ten Years of Tears collection, but maybe I'm just weird that way.)