A Thirst For Vengeance
Posted by 7th on November 18, 2005

It's dark. I'm asleep, dreaming dreams too far removed now for me to remember. I'm in the 6th grade, and am asleep in a cramped hotel room at the Holiday Inn in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, sharing the room with four other boys. I was chosen as one of five delegates to represent my school at the 1987 PRIDE Convention, an anti-drug symposium at the Atlanta Convention Center sponsored by Students Staying Straight.

A burst of intense pain in the upper left side of my face jars me awake. I can't see anything, but I feel a sort of weightlessness for half a second, just before I hit the hard hotel room floor. Something heavy falls down over my chest, and begins hitting me in the face, over and over again. No words are said, no threats made real, no explanations given. I count each blow without even raising a hand to stop it. One, two, three. Finally, after I've been hit in the face so many times that my face is numb to the blows, the unseen assailant rises up off of me, and turns on my bedside lamp. My swollen eyes adjust to the light, and I recognize my attacker. It's Jason. He sneers down at me, spits in my face, and returns to his bed without saying a word. I watch him go, and drag myself back into bed and turn off my lamp, squeezing my left bicep with all the strength I have to keep from crying through the pain in my face, not willing to give him the satisfaction.

The next morning, Jason's mother, who has come along as a parental guardian, takes me to the side and proceeds to question me as to the prior night's events. She doesn't want to determine why her son attacked me so to choose a proper punishment. She wants to know why I attacked HER son and forced him to defend himself after I apparently called her a "b-i-t-c-h."

I turned and looked at her with my double black eyes, and told her the truth. "I never start fights. I woke up, and Jason was hitting me. He never said why. I never called you a name. I never said a word to him. He just doesn't like me, I guess. I didn't hit back because I was afraid of getting into trouble."

"Well, you're in trouble regardless. I think we'd better call your father and have him drive down to get you before you cause more."

"I didn't do anything. I don't see why I should leave."

"Can you give me a reason why you shouldn't?"

I looked her dead in the face. "How many bruises does Jason have?"

She looked at me for a moment with an expression of pure disdain, then rose from her seat and left me sitting there. Nothing further was said to me. I stayed, and Jason had nothing further to do with me, and I had nothing to do with anyone else.

The next day, we all went to Lennox Square Mall, and I bought several music tapes to listen to on the way home (I can't even remember what they were, though I think one of them was Bruce Willis's "Revenge Of Bruno" album, just because it was on clearance for two dollars.) I stopped at the arcade to play a few games. While I was trying my hand at the Krull game, I set my Camelot Records bag next to me. A kid walked behind me, and stopped to watch me play.

"Do you like this game?" he asked.

"Yeah, it's pretty good. It reminds me of Robotron."

"Yeah, me too." The kid turned, and left just as quickly as he came. My last man bit the dust. I bent down to pick up my Camelot bag, and it was gone. I stood up, and immediately realized what had happened. I ran through the arcade looking for the kid, but saw nothing of him. I'd been duped. Rage started to build up inside of me. My dad always told me to swallow it, to bury it, keep it under wraps, but this, coupled with the prior night's unprovoked beating was a combined anguish that was more than I could subdue. I turned to the first inanimate object in my viscinity (a sitdown Star Wars Arcade machine) and started laying into it, cursing that kid under my breath with each punch, hitting it so hard my knucles began to bleed.

Within moments, a security guard grabbed me by the arm, twisted it around my neck, and physically threw me out of the arcade, my smashed knucles leaving red streaks as I slid to a stop atop the white tile floor. "Don't come back kid," the guard yelled at me, "or I'll have you arrested!"

I got up, brushed myself off, looked to make sure none of my classmates or teachers had witnessed me being bodily removed from a place of business, and spent the remainder of my shopping day in the mall bathroom, washing the blood off my hands and soaking them under cold water, and crying silently, hating myself for being such a scared little weakling. I kept my hands in my jacket pockets for the rest of the trip, and never spoke of what happened in that arcade to anyone.

In 1967 Marvel Comics released the first issue of a comic that was essentially a complete remake of a character by the same name made popular in Magazine Express comics during the 50's. The character was The Ghost Rider (known in later years as the Phantom Rider, after Marvel turned the name over to the infamous demon biker.)

On the brink of death, Carter is rescued by Flaming Star, a medicine man of the local Comanche tribe. He heals Carter and, seeing in him as the fulfillment of an ancient Indian prophecy, gifts him with numerous "magical weapons," the most potent of which was a naturally luminescent dye that, when applied to anything from fabric to horse hair, guns, and just about anything else, glowed in the dark. Carter crafted a costume from material dipped in this dye, but left the inside lining of his cape black, so that he could drape it over himself and give the appearance of having vanished into the night. He called himself The Ghost Rider, and began to seek his revenge.

The year I entered Kindergarten, my parents knew there would be trouble. I was a full four inches shorter than the next shortest boy in my class. I weighed a good 10 pounds less as well. Standing next to the other kids, I looked at least a year younger, when in all actuality, I was half a year older due to my birthday being in December.

I was, I am told, an outwardly friendly little boy, but shy at first around other children. The notes on the back of my Kindergarten report card state that "Michael tends to spend much of his day painting, and avoiding the other children. Sometimes, I find him sitting tucked into a corner, watching the other children play. We need to find out what it is that Michael is so afraid of."

Truth be told, I was afraid of coming up short (no pun intended.) My mother was fearful that, being so small, I'd be the constant target of bullies. My father disagreed, citing that he himself had been a short kid and he fared fine. Still, he was eventually convinced by my mom to give me a sort of Kindergarten level crash course in self-defense. What he essentially told me was this: "If anyone ever insults you, just ignore them. Don't insult them back, don't get mad, just pretend they aren't even there. In fact, just turn around and walk away. If they grab you from behind, drop your right shoulder down and to the right, and elbow them in the mid-section. Then, if need be, kick them between the legs as hard as you can, and then run and find a teacher."

From Kindergarten through the 7th grade, this was my essential fighting style, though I rarely even engaged in the ball-kicking. I pretty much either ran away, or tried to ignore whoever was giving me a hard time until they either lost interest or beat me until the teachers came. I know my dad was just trying to cater to my mom's fear of me getting the short end of the stick in a fight, but it left me emotionally stunted to expressing my anger or sense of self-preservation. When someone called me a name, or threatened to hit me, or what have you, I had a tendency to just freeze up and give no reaction. And I never was afraid of being hurt, or being called a bad name. All I feared was my father's disappointment if I got into a fight, and lost. I saw my Dad as a fighter, an indestructable super-hero made real, a man who came home nightly with bloody knuckles and the shape of human teeth carved into his night stick. How could I face him if I proved to be a weakling? Better to not fight at all than to come home defeated... Better to be viewed as a nothing than a failue. Not in his eyes... anyone's but his.

In the early 1970's, Marvel decided it would remove the MPAA seal of approval from its comics, thus disregarding the industry ban on vampires, demons, and other occult topics. What resulted was a rebirth of the horror comic for a brief stint during the 1970's (this was the time period that saw the Tomb of Dracula comic's first release, where the character of Blade first debuted.) In 1972, the character that would come to be the poster boy of this revival made his presence felt.

Johnny eventually comes to lament his choices, and at the end of the comic, seems to sacrifice himself to put an end to Zarathos's time on earth. And so once more, the Ghost Rider vanished, his thirst for vengeance unquenched.

During my seventh grade year, I had a lot of problems. My grades were dropping due to my lack of interest in schoolwork. My father finally gave up on punishing me with groundings or cancelled allowances or belt whippings. he finally sat me down and said "I've tried talking to you, and I've tried punishing you. There's nothing else that I know to do. In the end, you won't be letting me down. You'll only be letting yourself down."

I shrugged it off. I knew I could get my grades back up to snuff within a half a semester if I cared enough to do so. I just didn't bother, not until the last possible minute, when I finally pulled out a passing average (3.2 GPA for the year.) I was becoming angrier by the day, but with no idea as to why. Gym class became a trial for me. The other boys started calling me Gorilla and Apely (which later led to Grape Ape, which was being havily re-run on USA's Cartoon Express at the time) because I was the first kid in school to develop chest hair. This didn't bother me too much, as I considered it a sign of me become a man sooner than anyone else. No, it was the other new nickname that got to me, coined by Jason, the same kid who'd so bravely beat me up in my sleep the year before.

He called me Crapley.

I don't know why that bothered me so much. It shouldn't have, considering that it wasn't technically even my real name (My father changed his last name from Bell to Capley, his mother's maiden name, after his father walked out on them.) Still, it burned like fire in my brain every time he called me that. I'd clench and unclench my fists under the cafeteria table as the others all laughed at his witty little wordplay, twisting my pants legs into knots and visibly trembling from the effort to restrain myself. but I never struck him, not once. I knew if I did, I'd just be proving his mother right, and I didn't care to give her the satisfaction.

But it was only a matter of time before some of that hatred building up in me found a way out. That year, the big rage was black sneakers, a trend started by Reebok. It seemed like every kid had a pair of these black Reebok high top sneakers. Every kid but me, that is. I was still wearing Z-brand K-Mart specials that looked like 70's era jogging shoes. I remember going home and begging for a pair of these shoes. Finally, my mom asked if it would be all right for her to find an off-brand equivalent, as Reeboks were simply too expensive. I gave in, as usual.

My mother rushed up to K-Mart and bought me the first pair of black hightop sneakers she could find, a pointy-toed pair of pleather tennis shoes that more resembled lace up and velco ballet slippers than anything else, produced by Sergio Valente (their logo was of a bull's head) a company I'd never heard of before. My mother seemed genuinely excited about them, but I was less than enthusiastic. The pointy toes on these shoes made it appear like I was wearing black plastic cowboy boots. But I couldn't NOT wear them, not after I had agreed to let her buy off the brand.

So off I went to school in my cheap, barely held together Italian rubber cowboy sneakers. I managed to get all the way to Ms. McCabe's algebra class without anyone having anything to say. And then the biggest dork in the entire class (whom we'll call George) had to open his big mouth.

"Mike, those look like girl's shoes!"

All of a sudden, everyone's eyes were upon me (or it seemed so at the time.) "What did you say?" I asked.

"I said you're wearing girl's shoes."

"No I'm not."

"Yes you are! Look at those pointy things! They look just like Misty's!"

"Shut up."

"You shut up! Those are girl's shoes!"

I stood up from my desk and looked down on him, my hands closing into fists. "Shut the fuck up, George!"

"What are you going to do, Crapley, hit me or something?"

That was the proverbial straw. I felt my heart rate shoot up higher than I'd ever felt before, the skin of my face feeling like it was on fire. I grabbed the front of George's shirt in my left hand and yanked him towards me while I drove my right fist into his face with every ounce of strength I had, letting go of his shirt right at the moment of impact. Blood sprayed from his mouth as his head rocked backwards, a few drops of it falling onto a blank sheet of his notebook as his eyes rolled up to the whites. The rest of his body followed the backwards motion of his head, the momentum causing the desk itself to topple over on its side, taking George with it. And before I really had time to realize what I'd done, I was standing over his semi-conscious form, my right fist stained in his blood. For the first time in my life, I'd struck someone without having been struck first.

My friend Mikey stepped up behind me and took me by the shoulder. "Jesus Mike, what did you do?"

"The stupid four-eyes said I was wearing girl's shoes," I remember saying (which was a really hateful thing to say, since I myself wore glasses until I switched to disposable contacts my 9th grade year), and then turned and looked at him. I have no way of knowing what expression was on my face that day. All I know is that Mikey jerked his hand away, as though I was poisonous to the touch. He more or less stopped talking to me after that incident. I can't say I blame him.

Before the teacher could return from one of her seemingly endless mid-class coffee breaks, I grabbed my bag, left the room and ran to the bathroom to wash George's blood off of me. I don't know what else went on in Mrs. McCabe's classroom that day, because I never went back. For whatever reason, no one, not even George himself, turned me into the principal. It went unmentioned. Whatever it was Mikey saw in me that scared him so badly, I can only assume the others saw it too. I'm sure that frightened me more later than it did any of them that day... not because of the fact that I'd allowed myself to lose control, but because of how much I enjoyed it.

Needless to say, I never wore those shoes again.

In 1990, Marvel released a new Ghost Rider comic. This new rendition told the story of Dan Ketch, a quiet young man whose sister is brutally murdered without reason or provocation. One night while wandering aimlessly, Dan happens into an old junk yard, and finds a seemingly brand new motorcycle lying partially hidden under a junk heap. As he approaches, a strange symbol on the gas cap begins to glow. Without knowing why, he touches the gas cap, and a horrifying transformation takes place. Dan's skin melts off, his clothes replaced by a spiked, black leather cycle jacket, torn, faded jeans and black leather riding boots. The flaming skulled creature that rises from Dan's ashes like a skeletal, demonic phoenix has no name, no personal desires. He knows only one thing. "Innocent blood has been spilled this night!" He climbs aboard his flaming motor cycle, his chain whip in hand, and rides off into the night. He is the Spirit of Vengeance. He is the Ghost Rider.

As opposed to Zarathos, whose main weapon was hellfire itself, this Ghost Rider's primary weapon is a chain link whip that is almost sentient in its usage. It can strike in multiple directions and at multiple targets, and even break apart into its individual links and strike at enemies like a cloud of throwing stars before snapping back together again. But his greatest weapon is something he comes to call his Pennance Stare. He grabs a tormentor of the innocent, and stares into their eyes, inflicting upon them all the pain and sorrow they ever caused others in life, all in one maddening, almost eternal moment. This often leaves his enemies insane or outright brain dead, which gave him an almost unheard of modus operandi in modern mainstream comics. This was a hero who not only punished the guilty. He often executed them.

Things finally came to a boil my 8th grade year. I'd somewhat managed to calm down, having finally found a group I seemed to fit in with (punk rock enthusiasts) and an actual sport I didn't feel self-conscious about engaging in (skateboarding, though I wasn't overly good at it.) I grew the typical (at that time) skateboard haircut, which was essentially a bowl cut with the front bang hanging over my right eye. All my shirts were of punk bands like the Misfits, Dead Kennedys, and of course, my beloved Descendents. One of their songs had become a sort of mantra for me, a little ditty called "I'm Not A Loser":

We weren't called punks back then. The punk movement (the ORIGINAL punk movement) had died out in the seventies. We were called "skaters," though I never really thought of myself as one.

An older lady who was some sort of schoolboard shrink took me under her wing and brought me into this group of misfits who gathered once a week to discuss their problems. She did this under the auspices of needing my help with the group, being a calm soul to talk to these kids on their level and keep them from losing control during the sessions. These days, I wonder if she only told me that to get me to come, thinking I might be insulted if I realized that she thought I needed to attend as much as the rest of them.

I saw little point to these meetings. The others just sat there and complained about how much school sucked, popping "whitecrosses" until they had hyperactive reactions and knocking themselves out trying run up the wall. I recall one session where the other students didn't even show up, so this shrink pulls out a copy the computer game Loom from LucasArts and asks me to boot it up on the Apple IIe and "figure out all the hard parts for me." But it got me out of class for a couple of hours a week (besides the time off I was getting for my weekly gifted class) so I was cool with it.

I was getting along well with my newfound group of buds, even going so far as finding the kid who would come to be my best friend for many years after, a short, blonde-haired kid named Brandon who seemed to always appear tired from the dark circles under his eyes. And then there was Jason Scott.

Jason Scott was the biggest kid in school. He wasn't fat or extremely muscular, he was just immensely tall, having failed two years so far and well on to his third. He was over six feet tall and pale with a bright wirey patch of red hair. He looked for all the world like a tall, slightly more muscular Ron Weasley.

He wasn't the smartest kid in class, by any means, but he was friendly enough, always smiling about one thing or another. He and I got along really well, as my sarcastic sense of humor was well-developed by then, and he loved nothing more than a good laugh.

He was also quite a brawler. Through various fights on school property, he'd established a reputation of being one you didn't mess with. This was mostly due to his height, because he towered over every other boy in school, and hence had a much longer reach. And he used it in fights to his advantage.

Unfortunately, his most glaring character trait was his staggering gullibility. He believed just about anything anyone told him, which often got him into trouble. And as fate would have it, he made the mistake of believing something someone told him about me. That someone would later prove to be the same Jason who beat me up in my sleep two years prior. He told Jason Scott that I had been carving his phone number on cafeteria trays, along with the caption "For a good blow job, dial this number."

So there I sat, eating my lunch, when Jason walked up to me and said "I heard about what you've been doing, asshole."

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean," Scott said, and punched me full force in the side of the head. The pain was almost staggering. My right ear started to ring. I sat there momentarily, somewhat shocked by it. I started to detach from the moment like I had so many times in the past. But then Scott punched me again, this time in the arm. I winced, sucking breath in between my teeth. I stood up and took a step back. "What the hell are you doing?" I asked.

Jason replied by punching me dead in the face, his knuckles raking across my bottom lip, in turn raking it across my teeth and tearing a wide gash, blood spraying from my mouth. To this day, my lower lip is slightly humped there. Were I to pull my lip down, you could see three parallel lines where my lip was crushed against my teeth.

I spun around from the force of the blow, and Jason wrapped his hands around my neck and started to choke me. I tried reaching behind me to get at him, but his arms were too long. I couldn't breathe. I started to black out. I instinctively followed the instructions my father told me as a little boy. I bent over at the waist, and dipped my right shoulder down towards the floor. This pulled Jason towards me and down across my back. My arms were too short to elbow him in the solar plexis, so I reached behind me and dug my fingers into his eyes as far as I could push them. He screamed and let go of my throat. I took in a deep gasp of air and turned to face him, the taste of blood in my mouth, the heat of my anger boiling on my skin.

Jason punched me again, this time knocking my glasses off my face and across the cafeteria. I turned to watch them go, and saw my friend John pick them up off the floor for me. That's when I saw the other Jason, watching the whole fight and smiling broadly.

It was more than I could bear. My lip started throbbing. My head was pounding. Everyone was looking at me (or again, so it seemed.) I turned away from the other Jason's satisfied grin, and all sound ceased. There was no talking, no yelling, no ringing in my right ear. There was only Jason's perplexed expression as I turned to him, blood dripping from my face, and smiled.

He threw another punch. I lowered my head, allowing him to punch me in the forehead (the hardest part of the skull, don't you know.) Knowing I wouldn't be able to get a punch in to his face due to those apelike arms, I dove for his midsection and almost took him off his feet with a badly placed shoulder tackle. I commenced to punching him over and over in the chest and stomach, trying to knock the breath out him, yelling in gutteral incoherencies as I laid into him. When that didn't seem to be doing any permanent damage, I switched tactics and began slamming both fists into his crotch over and over again in a sort of reverse double axe-handle type maneuver. He began to scream, punching me ineffectively in the back while I stayed hunched over, my face hidden from him as I repeatedly punched his jewels with one hand as I kept my left arm wrapped around him, preventing him from getting away.

He backed off, and tried to run. I wrapped both hands around his waist, linked my fingers together in a tight knot, and used them to pull my head into his stomach, finally knocking the breath out of him. In that one moment, I recalled every fight I shrugged away from, every name that I'd ever been called, every punch I'd just stood there and taken instead of defending myself. I did it again. And again. And again. And again, my anger growing with each blow. I let go of his waist and threw my head up suddenly, connecting with his jaw. His head shot backwards, then fell back forwards in a sort of half-stumble. I stood up straight and raised my fist. Just then, a flock of hands were upon me. An arm wrapped around my throat, another pulling my left arm behind my back. I fought against them, not even knowing that one of them was Mr. Smith, the shop teacher (who would die horribly as the victim of a drunk driver a few years later) and a good friend of mine. "I'm going to kill you Jason!" I screamed, over and over again. But I wasn't looking at Jason Scott, who was also being held down by teachers at that point. As they picked me up off the ground and carried me out of the cafeteria, my eyes were locked on the other Jason, who was looking back at me, no longer smiling. He and I were the only ones who knew who I was really threatening. "I'M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU!"

Mr. Smith threw me into the boy's bathroom and told me to clean myself up before taking me to the principal's office. I was informed that the police had been called.

I walked back into the boy's room and looked at myself in the mirror. I was covered in my own blood. I hadn't so much as scratched Scott, but I felt a sense of a volcanic eruption having just taken place. I looked at my reflection, upon an expression I'd never seen on my own face. I rared back and punched the mirror, a spider web of cracks sreading out from the point of impact. I gasped, and took a step back, looking at it, that bloody, cracked mass of brokenness. I looked down at my still closed fist, and for the first time in my life, realized that I had power. I had strength. I wasn't small, or a weakling. I didn't have to run away from a fight. I could fight back. I could defend myself. I could avenge myself upon anyone who tried to hurt me, and I could do it well.

The cops didn't even bother to fill out a report. They got one whisper of my last name, and left without saying a word. So there I sat, beside Jason Scott in the principal's office.

"Mr. Scott, why did you attack Mr. Capley?"

"He's been carving my phone number on cafeteria trays and telling people I give good head."

"Did you see him do this yourself?"

"I...no, I didn't."

The principal turned to me. "Did you ever do this, Mr. Capley?"

"No fir," I said, my bottom lip now swollen to twice its normal size. "I don't eben know his hone nubber."

Scott turned to me. "You don't?"

I shook my head. "He lied to you."

All sign of rage and anger fled from Jason's face. His eyebrows rose to the top of his forehead, and he looked at my ruined lower lip. "Ah jeez Mike, I'm sorry man."

"Hoget about it."

With the exception of Ben, the kid whose head I ripped open when he tried to attack me (again because someone had lied to him), right up through my senior year, no one ever tried to pick a fight with me again. In being the first person at my school to not be beaten bloody senseless by Jason Scott, I'd earned a level of respect. I wasn't looked on as a scrapper, but as someone who could more than hold his own.

When I was a kid, I was a big reader of comic books, but not a respector of such. I read them over and over until the covers fell off, and then kept on reading them until the pages fell apart. I probably ruined a couple of thousand dollars worth of comics in those years, not ever knowing that such things were collectable, or one day, possibly worth a lot of money.

I stopped reading them around when I turned 11 or so, and didn't pick them up again until I was in my junior year. For some odd reason, I had the urge to start collecting something. I'd grown tired of doing model cars, and every other hobby I'd mastered and lost interest in. So one day on a whim, I drove down to the old Enterprise Comics Shop that used to be on Highway 58, just past the Highway 153 turn off, and opened up a folder. My folder contained the name of every title I collected. Once a month, I'd drop by Enterprise, and empty out my folder. I collected DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, and Image. Of all of the titles I collected, however, none held my favor like that of Ghost Rider, the Spirit Of Vengeance.

I don't know what it was about the character. It just appealed to my internal sense of justice, I suppose. He broke the concepts of right and wrong down into one simple, underlying principal: those who hurt the innocent shall be punished.

I collected every comic with Ghost Rider in it that I could find. I went out to Wilson's Leather and bought my first black leather cycle jacket. I even entertained the idea of trading in the ugly old Ford Escort my dad had bought me as a first car for a used motorcycle. But then I remembered the fact that I was 11 before I ever learned how to ride a bike and decided to err on the side of caution.

I spent hours in classes I hated drawing Ghost Rider all over my books, on my jeans, anywhere I had an empty space. I recorded the episode of the Fox X-Men cartoon where Wolverine has his mind scanned and for a brief second, Ghost Rider appears on the view screen and watched it over and over, just to see those few brief seconds.

Insomuch as the Descendents were my teenage voice, Ghost Rider became my totem. He represented in my mind the kind of stand I wanted to take in my life. My friends chided me over it, asking why, of all characters to love, why I'd get behind a rehash of an old horror comic. Why not someone a little more lively and upbeat like Spider-man? Because all Spider-Man did was complain about how with great power comes great responsibility while he cracked quippy one-liners and shot webbing at people. Spider-Man would never consider impaling the Scarecrow on his own rake like Ghost Rider. He'd never think that jail or prison time simply wasn't enough for some crimes. He'd never be able to really do what was sometimes both neccessary and inevitable to balance the scales.

But Ghost Rider could, and without hesitation. He was like a vengeance machine, a ghostly T-800 Model 101, who had one singular goal, and nothing would get in his way of it. He didn't crack jokes. He didn't succumb to the human weaknesses I dealt with every day of my life. He got things done. He swallowed his pain like it was a fine dinner and asked for more.

I was a far different person then. Around 23 or 24, I had an attitude shift. I can't really say what caused it. It might've been moving out on my own, or my eventual move to Florida. All I really remember in that regard is sitting in the sand at Neptune Beach in Jacksonville, watching the light from the setting sun cascading over the water, the ocean breeze blowing across my face, and feeling wholly and utterly at peace for the first time in my life.

Two years later, I met my future wife. Two years after that, my son was born. I am happier and more content than at any previous point in my life. I no longer feel like the outcast, or the frailest kid on the block. After a failed attempt at earning a degree in 1994 (something that greatly saddened my Dad) I went back to college, and graduated last July. I'm now continuing on for my bachelor's degree. I only wish he could've lived to see it.

The time for my rage has passed. Oh, I still get hot under the collar every now and then, but not near the way I was in my youth. I get angry, I might pound my fist on the table and utter a foul word or two, but I get over it very quickly. I let it just blow over me. I take things in stride these days.

But that's not to say that I don't hold grudges. I know I'm too old for that, but I still do. I can't help it.

Back in 1994, during my first failed attempt at college, I ran into my friend John, the guy who grabbed my glasses for me when Jason Scott knocked them off my face. I asked him about the OTHER Jason. It seemed that he'd had some kind of deep change of heart, was married, and became a born again Christian.

I don't really care. I still hate him. I probably always will. I know forgiveness is divine. But when have I ever aspired to divinity?

So I see now that Nicholas Cage has a Ghost Rider movie coming out. From what I've read on the official home page for the film, the story line is from the Johnny Blaze Ghost Rider, but the look and powers is from the Dan Ketch rendition. Oddly enough, I have no problem with this, as I like them both. This movie has the potential to be another great action/horror film like the first two Blade films. On the other hand, it could also be an overly campy piece of garbage, like Spawn or the third Blade film. Still, I shall watch it with great anticipation.

Last summer, I sold my entire comic book collection to a comic shop dealer for 75 dollars. (The collection booked at over 3000.00, but apparently one can't pay much attention to the prices in the guides. Those prices are just what shop dealers will charge you, not what they're actually worth, it would seem.) I stopped collecting years ago, and they were just taking up space that could be used for something else. I don't regret selling them in the slightest. I remember every story, every line, especially the Ghost Rider books. I didn't need them anymore.

One constant through both series was a struggle of self and the concept of oneness. Johnny Blaze fought for control of his own life, and Dan simply fought to keep a grasp on his own sense of identity. In either case, Ghost Rider represents the struggle within each of us to control what we can, and prevent (if possible) what we cannot. He stands for that part of us that witnesses a wrong, and longs to make it right. The inability to resist that temptation leads to the John Wilkes Booths and Lee Harvey Oswalds of the world. For the only real difference between us and Ghost Rider is that, while he can see evil as an absolute, our perception of what is good and what is evil is relative to our own opinions and experiences. When we see a man on the news, a monster who kills and rapes children, we may wish it were possible to be the one to throw the switch. We may say to our friends "Boy I'd love to happen by him in a dark alley." But we don't live in a world where such justice, such vengeance, is allowed.

But sometimes, just sometimes, don't you wish you did?

-=7th=-

P.S. Just to get back into "OMG I LOVE COMIC BOOK MOVIES LOLLER$" mode, click HERE to see the trailer for next summer's Ghost Rider, starring Nicholas Cage!