So in order to be able to view yourself as an actual, viable, valued human being, you have to fight Batman. He stole your girl, who left you amongst accusations of cowardice. But he won’t fight you. Unless you give him a reason. You can think of two options:

Option one. Outing Bruce Wayne as Batman.

Man is that a dicey situation. See because here’s the thing: why would anyone believe you? What you have is a hunch, an instinct. It’s something that serves you well as a reporter, but still what you have is just slightly more than a reasoned guess. You have no photos. No copies of receipts for like large quantities of Kevlar charged to WayneTech. Not a single researcher or amanuensis will go on record re: the staggering number of quote military-order prototypes unquote that are decidedly cheiropterous in shape. Other than the staggering amount of money it must require to be in possession of such fabulous toys, you have nothing more than oblique links between B.W. and BM. Well other than maybe and the whole his-parents-were-murdered-right-in-front-of-him-and-so-his-psyche-simply-must-be-scarred thing.

Which of course brings up its own thing. The scarred-psyche thing. By all appearances Bruce Wayne is a relatively simple man in possession of an inhibition-cancelling pile of inheritance-cash. He lives in the fast lane because he can. He appears to be a playboy because $5,000-a-night callgirls are to him like the rest of us going to a movie or a ballgame. Simply put: he seems like pretty much what anyone who has a ton of money and virtually no reason to be responsible for anything would be.

Except for the Batman-thing. Which if you’re right is pretty much downright proof of said scarred psyche. Forget about the part where his dresses up like a nightmare and takes personal, violent responsibility for the metaphorical cleaning of Gotham’s streets. Think about Bruce Wayne. The man. He’s made an entire persona out of himself. Every single thing he does is calculated in some way to preserve not his self but the other he created. This is a man who has literally subsumed his self to an other, but in this case it is an other of his own creation. There are levels of psychoses here that would take teams of Freudians and Jungians years to unpack. All monkeys/typewriters/Shakespeare allusions here apropos. And you want to poke it with a big stick?

Option two. Getting Batman’s attention the best way know how.

Your knowledge of diamonds is at a lifetime-high. You’re surfeiting with info re: cut and clarity and carats and color. You know good diamonds. You also know all the places that sell good diamonds. You’ve been to most of them repeatedly in like the last month or so as you sought out the perfect ring for a woman who spent the time you spent diamond-ring-hunting slowly spurning you. You know where they are. You know what to look for. In short, you’re primed to become a diamond thief.

Not that you care about the diamonds. You know that the word  fence has an underground meaning. You know that on the streets diamonds are called ice. That’s all you have. Or care to know. The diamonds aren’t the point. You wouldn’t sell them even if you knew how. Who to go to. All that matters is that you get Batman’s attention. That you fight him. That you somehow let him know the real reason you’re fighting him. That somehow your she-broke-your-heart-and-pretty-much-crushed-your-soul-but-you-still-love-her-so-much-it-literally-causes-you-pain-when-you-think-about-how-she-could-have-been-your fiancée finds out that you fought for her.

So you do. You start at the jewelry store furthest from where you live. In the dead of night you dress in black and you break in – having researched basic break-in methods available though decades of news stories in your employers’ archives – quietly, disabling the alarm in a clever fashion that will enable you to re-engage it after you’ve left. Meaning that about five minutes after you’ve left with the store’s best ice in a black satchel dangling from your shoulder the alarm goes off. GCPD converge, you read at work the next day from the police report, and find no one. Street value listed as more-or-less through-the-roof. You don’t smile. You feel no pride. Only that you’ve begun.

The trick is to be just enough of a pain in GC’s gluteals to get Batman’s attention. You keep going. Every couple of nights. A different store. You start grabbing headlines. There isn’t an upscale jeweler in Gotham who isn’t researching tighter security methods. You best everything they toss at you. You become a master of closed circuits, deadbolts and motion sensors. You don’t have guests to your townhouse because there are black satchels filled with the highest-quality diamonds stashed all over the place. You learn to function on little more than four hours of sleep per. Nights when you don’t rob a store you research robbing stores. The black bags are labeled so when this is over you can return the diamonds, also probably at night, circumventing security. You’ll become an obverse-thief.

A month goes by. Two. No sign of the Bat. Three months. You start robbing stores you already robbed. Now you’re taking anything: garnets and sapphires, onyx. You don’t care. The money’s not the point. You’ve stopped viewing Gotham’s Finest as any kind of legitimate threat. You wish you could fence some of the ice just to have the money to buy another townhouse to store all the jewelry you’ve stolen. But nothing. No Bat. You know that in the past he’s come after jewel-thieves. But there’s the problem of escalation, as they say. He can’t have the time to care about your let’s-face-it attention-getting antics when he has to chase after a flagrantly homicidal clown.

So you escalate. You take a hostage. Some janitor. Comes in and sees you. You taser him. While he’s out you tie him up. You call the cops. Make demands. You’ve already made a fortress of the place. They’re not getting in. They’ll have to kill the janitor to get to you. But send the Bat and you’ll go willingly. But only to him. You have a bone to pick with him.

Not that she’ll come back, you understand. Not that you really even want her back that much. Not that you don’t. But this is about your redemption to yourself. About you finding yourself valuable. Worthwhile. It’s not about the cowardice, alleged or otherwise, anymore. Not about standing up for what you believe in, let alone standing up for her. This is about standing up for yourself to yourself. You’ve devoted your life to a life of crime in order to get the attention of Batman and have now purposefully put a life in danger so you can then fight the Caped Crusader even though you know you have no chance of winning. Unless you do this your entire life will be worse than meaningless. It will be indifferent. If the entire world and all the lives within it were a seven-course meal, your life will be the parsley, is basically the metaphor your mind turns to. Without this you feel that you will cease to feel. You will consider yourself undeserving of human emotion, effort, understanding and empathy. Unworthy even of release, your punishment will be to live through this anhedonic state until natural causes claim you when they will.

Unless you redeem yourself.

Unless you fight Batman.

Unless you get his attention.

So you’ve turned to a life of crime.

And put another life on the line.

Because without it your life is less than meaningless.

So…question:

Are you a bad person?

Okay. So through a horribly unforeseeable situation you’ve hung your very self-worth on fighting your would-have-been-fiancée’s new boyfriend. Who happens to be Batman. You’re pretty sure. It’s a hunch, but a well-reasoned hunch. You are, after all, a reporter. A journalist. And he’s sort-of a friend. You don’t golf together or anything but his social standing and your occupation have the two of you running into each other every couple of weeks. You exchange pleasantries and on three distinct occasions have had what could be considered full conversations. A nice guy, Bruce is. A bit plastic. But pleasant.

But still. You just know he’s Batman. The logic is so staggeringly simple you can’t believe everyone from J.L. Gordon right through the GCPD dispatchers don’t have it figured out. He’s rich beyond the collective wild-wealth imaginings of every person ever. He’s incredibly physically fit. He’s the smartest person you’ve ever shared O₂ molecules with. And he has that massive trauma in his past: his parents gunned down right in front of him. He was like eight. Some swarthy petty thief in the night. Never caught. If you went to any Freudian and asked for a profile of a masked vigilante whose goal is to scare the ever-living excrement out of every criminal ever, this is what you’d get.

Yet no one seems to know. Not even your would-have-been fiancée, you’re betting. It’s the one secret you kept from her, outside of the past month’s ring-shopping. And here you’ve resolved to fight him. Your sphincter spasms just thinking about thinking about it.

You know how terribly mangled Batman’s victims end up. In the interest of a long series on the costs – financial, political, civic, psychic and emotional – of letting Batman run relatively untethered in Gotham, you’ve had an SPSS-prodigy of an intern keep stats on the amount of money having gone into medical treatment, repair and/or realignment for those of Gotham’s criminals unlucky enough to get The Bat’s attention. Medical treatment of the incarcerated is, after all, provided by tax-payer dollars. She, the SPSS-prodigy-intern, even just last week gave you numbers re: costs of criminals’ healthcare v. costs of the much lauded and desired and debated Gotham-to-Metropolis metro bullet-train. It was on a nice 4’ x 6’ full-color, laser-printed-poster with pie- and bar-graphs. The train costs demonstrably less. By like half.

So you’re not entirely under-informed when it comes to the amount and types of damage an encounter with the Caped Crusader is likely to net for yourself. Forget cowardice and your tendency to avoid confrontation. This is simply flagrant physical damage on a radically heightened scale. You check your co-pays’ percentages against your savings account. You fill out the little card in the HR dept. that lets them take x amount of dollars from each check and put it in an account of your designation. You don’t know if this account will be for recovery- or funeral-expenses.

There’s a temptation to workout. To buff up. Maybe find some sympathetic pharmacist who’ll take a kickback for some tactical-nuke-level anabolic steroids. You consider everything from Richard Simmons to PX90. But you understand on a like cellular level that you have no chance beating Batman. Even if you ingest nothing but methandrostenolone for breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight snack and end up stronger than Batman he’s still going to outsmart you. Out-experience you. Out-maneuver you. Out-endurance you. This guy’s spent more time fighting criminals, ruffians and madmen then you’ve spent sleeping in your entire life. No matter what you do, you’re going to be bested. You’re going to bleed. To sum up: he will essentially present to you your ass for your own personal consideration.

It gets easier once you accept that. That night you sleep better on the sofa she left than any night since. She left the bed but the you sleep on the sofa because nice thing about sofas is that if you try hard enough you can convince yourself that its back is a roughly 98.6°body.

You figure out that the point isn’t to beat the Dark Knight. You realize that all you have to do is actually fight him. You keep thinking about the word murine; you understand you’ll have to do more than just be willing to fight. You’re going to have to throw a punch – probably the only one you’ll get in. But that’s all you have to do. You don’t have to win; you merely have to fight. And preferably get as few bones broken as possible. If your would-have-been-but-hopefully-once-this-is-all-over-will-again-be-your-soon-to-be fiancée sees that you’re willing to overcome your own alleged cowardice to fight for her – and not fight just anyone but Bat-friggin-man – then she’ll no doubt see that the one thing that was always a problem isn’t such a problem anymore. You estimate that the situation can be resolved in less than maybe thirty pain-filled minutes.

But then of course there’s a problem. Of course there’s a problem. If you hadn’t been missing her so terribly much you’ve have thought of it. The problem. It’s every bit as obvious as reasonably imagining an obscenely rich ten-year-old privately vowing to fight Gotham City’s criminal element until he dies trying. As obvious as the fact that this isn’t really about getting her back anymore. Yeah, sure you want her back and everything. You miss her and think about her with every waking breath. Her parents call, check up on you. They consider you family, they say. They want to keep in touch no matter how this turns out. But it’s not really about getting her back. It’s about you standing up for yourself and for something you believe in. It’s really about you. And her, too. But mostly you. But there’s a problem:

Batman won’t fight you.

At least not for that reason. Batman doesn’t care that you want your would-have-been-if-she’d-just-waited-another-hour-or-so-for-you-too-get-home-fiancée back. This is simply not something that affects Batman’s world. Now, steal a truck full of orphans and gas them up and set them to running around Gotham in clown masks just to create some havoc as a distraction so you can get her alone to yourself for an hour. Then The Bat might care. But he will literally expend zero energy caring about your own personal relationships if they involve no criminal activity.

Bruce Wayne won’t fight you either. Or, at least, he won’t talk to you. You somehow seem to have been unceremoniously removed from the guest-lists at the gatherings at which you’d have previously encountered each other. If you could get outside of your own head enough to think about your job, you’d realize this is a problem. But you can’t. All you can think about is this thing. This thing where you have to fight Batman not just because he stole your girl and you really rather desperately want her back. But also because you will feel forever worthless, lame and ineffectual as a human being unless you go through with it. Not only your self-perception but your perception of other’s perceptions of you hang precariously in the balance. And self-worth just forget about it. Unless you step up and fight. Your value not just as a human being but your value to yourself is really what’s on the line here. That without going through with it you won’t even be able to kill yourself, which the resultantly low self-worth would more-or-less demand, because you won’t consider yourself valuable enough to be tragically afflicted enough to the point of suicide. It’s not that you’ll hate yourself. It’s that you won’t consider yourself valuable enough for anyone – even yourself – to like or hate.

But he won’t fight you as Batman. Won’t talk to you as Bruce Wayne. So other than marching up to Wayne Manor and demanding revenge in the most gluteal-pain-inflicting ways, your options are limited.⁽¹⁾

Let’s first say that you’re in love with a girl. Amazingly incredibly head-over-heels completely. In love. You’ve been with her for maybe years. She’s your best friend, your confidant. The person upon whose abdomen you rest your head when weary. You spend staggering amounts of time in each other’s presence. People notice. They think it’s weird, though neither of you do. In the past you’d have been one to notice and think it’s weird. But not now. You miss her terribly anytime she’s not around when you go to bed. The two of you rarely fight.

In short: everything’s great. And like every time everywhere everything’s great, there’s one thing that isn’t great. Let’s say she wishes you would stand up for things a bit more. Maybe you sometimes let things slide – you’re occasionally a push-over – and then sort of complain at length about it to her and she dutifully though lovingly listens but can’t quite ever let go a few words re: you need to stand up for yourself and what you believe in. But there’s just something in your nature that tends to roll with the punches, to let things go, to remain unfazed, to shrug things off. But not in that good way of Stoics and Zen Masters. More like in the way of someone who maybe belongs somewhere outside of the chordate phylum. You are what job-references would call non-confrontational.

But it’s just one thing. Everything else is so great that you begin thinking marriage. This is natural. You stop by her parents’ house one evening and ask them for permission to marry their lovely daughter. Permission granted. Enthusiastically. You swell with pride a touch when her dad shakes your hand.

So then let’s also say you have the kind of job that affords you the kind of money which makes ring-purchasing not a big deal. As in you can’t quite afford anything but can afford most things. You wrestle a bit with whether to have her choose a ring that she likes or whether to maintain the surprise element. You didn’t quite swear her parents to secrecy but were incredibly relieved when her mother said she’d keep it quiet. So the surprise-element’s investment is already there, seemingly endorsed at least by the distaff side of her family, and you decide it worthwhile to keep it.

Now suddenly you’re spending an inordinate amount of time in jewelry stores. You give yourself a crash-course in cut and clarity and carats and color. In a month you’re telling the counter-clerks things they don’t even know about their own diamonds. Facts verified when the stores’ owners and resident lapidaries confirm your statements. You’re not contentious about it, merely pointing out small things rather than tossing out accusations. You visit every jewelry store not only in your neighborhood but throughout most of the city. You avoid pawn shops and stores in some of the seedier neighborhoods. Within another month your prodigious knowledge of diamonds is nicely coupled with a similarly prodigious knowledge of the area’s diamond-sellers.

Of course you’ve had to lie to your hopefully-soon-to-be fiancée . Because you’ve been spending a lot of your evenings both not at home and not with her, you’ve crafted stories about workload and deadlines. Let’s say you’re a reporter. A journalist. Since lying is inherently confrontational, you’re not very good at it. Also, despite the cause, you feel terribly guilty re: lying to this lovely creature whom you love so much it literally pains you to spend so much time away from her each day. All of which means your lies are poorly told. She is somewhat suspicious. You tell yourself it won’t be much longer; your survey of the best diamonds in the city’s best stores is nearly complete. If she would just hanging in there, this’ll be over inside of a week. Two at most.

But then she confronts you about it. All the lying. Your behavior when she accuses you of mendacity is exactly the kind of behavior that someone with something to hide would exhibit. You’re aware of this as you do it but are unable to stop yourself. You neither cop to lying nor deny it, something she points out in a high-volume and finger-pointing sort-of way. You say you wish you could tell her what was going on, that you understand why she’s upset. You say you’ll do whatever she wants so she’ll stop being angry. This angers her even more because all she wants is some type of resolution to this situation, not just to bandage it up for now. The argument ends unsettled. You sleep on the sofa for the first time since college.

It’s the very next evening that you find the perfect ring. You pay cash. You rush home. There is traffic because it’s Friday and it’s dinner time. Still, you rush. In romantic-comedy fashion you abandon your car mid-gridlocked intersection and run home. You jump piles of litter that may or may not have homeless people underneath. The ring’s box’s box shakes in your front pants-pocket and jabs you occasionally in the scrotum.

You finally make it home, sweating. Your suit is ruined. You take the elevator up. You try to burst in through the door. But it’s locked. You dig out your key. The ring’s box’s box falls out of your pocket. You scurry to pick up and secret it away. You unlock the door and run inside.

It’s dark. And mostly empty. There’s note on the table. She’s left you. She says she loves you dearly but cannot waste her time with someone too cowardly to tell the truth. She doesn’t say the word cowardly. More like it’s sort of laced between every line. More of an impression from the gestalt of the letter.

And…she’s met someone. While you were gone all those evenings. She didn’t mean to…but she did. There’s no indication, oblique or direct, of how far she’s taken this nascent relationship but of course you there sweating bullets in your ruined suit with a white cardboard cube in your left hand imagine them having big-screen-entertainment-type sex. Her mouth agasp and fingers digging into his flesh. You think something like well if she’s happy

…but then you consider the two instances of the word murine earlier in the letter, both quite clearly meant to describe yourself. Before you get to the last paragraph you’ve resolved to kick this person’s ass, whoever it is. Man or woman: hell will be paid. You will show her that you’re no coward. You have a ring in a box in a box right there in your left hand that was meant for her and you’re going to give it to her right after you literally fight for her.

As a sign of good faith and prospective friendship, she’s written his name. You know him. He’s a mutual friend of you both, staggeringly wealthy but not pretentious about it. Something of a playboy, you both’d always thought, but a nice person with good values. And while you appreciate her honesty, you know something about this man that she doesn’t. You know this because you’re a reporter and you’re incredibly good at your job. You know this because you are capable of looking at things in a big-picture kind of way.  Able to put pieces together in such a way that even people like the mayor and the police commissioner are not.

This is how you know – even though she probably doesn’t – this is how you know that the person you’ve just resolved in a deeply personal way to cause serious gluteal pain as a way of redeeming yourself to both her and yourself…the person she’s left you for is Batman.⁽¹⁾

This week I’ve been more tired than usual, probably the result of two consecutive weekends in which Ashley and I did a lot of stuff,^[1] as opposed to my usual lying-around-and-reading, lying-around-and-watching-tv, and lying-around-and-playing-video-games approach to weekends.

This sort of long-term tiredness leaves me without the energy to fight off earworms. I just have to let them do their thing out no matter how long it takes, which I imagine is how Mrs. Sting feels quite often.

Because everyone loves lists,^[2] here’s a list of songs I’ve had stuck in my head this week:

• Baby Got Back
• A Whole New World from Aladdin
• Angel of the Morning^[3]
• The Indiana Jones theme^[4]
• Pasties and a G-String^[5]
• Bust A Move
• Disposable Heroes by Metallica.^[6]

This list, more than anything, pretty much gives me all the reason I need to make myself sleep-in this weekend.

Today’s DailyPost prompt is:

If you had to debate a version of yourself that was ten years younger, who would win?

This one’s easy: ten-years-younger me would win by a long-shot.

That’s not a good thing though. The most fundamental difference between me now and -10y me is that that guy had absolutely no idea what the aphorism ‘choose your battles’ means.

Well, that’s not quite accurate. -10y me took that phrase and said, ‘I choose all battles.’ Because clearly he was brilliant that way.

But he would win. Because I would just walk away⁽¹⁾ and put my time and attention into something more worthwhile. And he would consider that a victory.

Around 11 last night, just as I’d lied down on the sofa to go to sleep,⁽¹⁾ from outside there came the sound of…well, it was hard to qualify. It sort of sounded like a car hitting another car, but without that cataclysmic component of metal working against metal and glass losing its composure right there in front of everyone.

I sat up and looked out the living room window but didn’t see anything right away. This turned out to be because I hadn’t put my glasses back on.

After I put my glasses on I saw one of the neighbors walk out to the street and pick up a loose hubcap.

Someone, it seems, drove down our street and veered into a couple of parked cars. The damage was relatively minimal to both cars: some scratches, busted tail-lights, a partially mangled bumper. In fact, from the debris I found, I think the offending vehicle took more damage: busted glass, pieces of body-metal, and I think part of a headlight bezel.

It’s such a shitty thing to do, the hit-and-run. It’s selfish and just a mean thing to do to someone.⁽²⁾ But worse in my opinion was the attitude of responding officer.

He took about ten minutes to show up. Obviously by that time whoever did it would have been long gone.⁽³⁾ He got out of his car and just surveyed the damage, talking to one of the car-owners with some basic questions. He didn’t even bother to look at any of the scattered debris until I showed some of it to him to point out that it wasn’t a black car but a maroon one with a fair amount of rust. He did nothing that could be in the least bit construed at investigative.

Even worse, he got a little pissy at one point. The general assumption was that the offending driver’d been heading south, since the parked cars he’d hit were on the west side of the road. The officer said, “Well if he was going that way the damage would be on his passenger side. I was told it’d be on his driver’s side.”

One of the car-owners responded that the damage was on the driver’s side. The officer said, “No. His passenger side.” Apparently when the woman had initially called the po-po she’d not understood the question properly, which I feel was understandable given the circumstances. But the officer was very snippy about it: “That means we’ve been looking for the wrong vehicle.” His tone was derisive and sardonic as he called this new info in to the dispatcher.

When it was all over, someone tried to give the office a bag filled with the debris that we’d picked up. He didn’t even pretend to care. “That’s not going to do me any good. If we find the car, we’ll let you know.” Which we all knew basically meant that they were never going to find the car. Not that it matters greatly because insurance would cover the damages of both the parked cars, but it would have been nice of the officer to pretend he cared. After all, he’s there to protect and serve, right? Part of service is at affecting that you care, even when you don’t.

I hope they find the guy and I hope someone busts him for his hit-and-run.⁽⁴⁾ More than that, though, I hope the officer finds a bit of compassion somewhere and stops treating the people he serves as though we’re all wasting his time.

Work today went something like this:

And I really really really really really wish it were more like this:

Because then I lead I could stand in the bg with Boba and the Stormtroopers⁽¹⁾ and have a good laugh.