This has been a Jackass century

I don't know these people, and clearly most of them are irredeemable dickheads who would be absolute pains in the ass in real life, but I did feel genuinely sad when the last Jackass film wrapped up.

They always say it's the last one, but it seems like they really mean it this time, especially with the greatest hits aspect.

If it is the end, it really is the end of an era, because Jackass has been a constant presence in my life for the 21st century. I still think their films are funny, charming and occasionally really clever. And if it's ever taught me anything, it's that if you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.

It came in as the end of another era - Jackass was one of the last video tape phenomenons I remember. There really wasn't any of the internet video options we have today, so unless it was broadcast on television, the only way you could see the earliest Jackass films were on video, which could only be found down at the weird local skate/head store, or through a mate who copied it from another mate who got it from the ninth version of hell, judging by the quality of the final product I saw.

I still remember the one piece of footage that sold me on Jackass forever - it was the one where Danger Ehren dressed up as a football player, intercepted peoples' fast food orders and ran off with them. Which was mean and cruel and really, really funny, but the best part about it was the spiking of the food on the ground in front of the victim. Just so dumb and silly, and full of life and joy and celebration.

And it's this joy that has made it endlessly watchable. They have exquisite comic timing (nothing is better than the giant high five in the third film), some truly radical ideas (the bungee jump with Wee Man and Preston that actually pays off) and a fearlessness that it actually admirable (everything else). There is real pleasure in the laughter of the people watching their mates do terrible things to their scrotum, only beaten by the endlessly wonderful 'why do I have to be Steve-O' whine.

But it's the joy of the thing, the kick of doing something that makes your best friends fall on the floor laughing. The hugs and concern at the end of something properly painful, and the sheer glory of loving life and living it as hard as you can.

And we've grown old with them over the years, and each film has had its own vibe - I think there is a weirdly obvious order of quality in the movies and it's 3, 1, 4, 5, 2 - and we all feel those aches and pains, and didn't need to crash a giant shopping trolley to get them

And all the things that happen when you grow old, fall out with friends, or just lose touch, or there is genuine loss - RIP Ryan. All that partying is having a definite impact, and the hair is a lot greyer, even as Chris Pontius remains forever ageless, so maybe it really is time to call it a night. 

New home, same bookshelves

There is a lot of work in moving into a new house, and my wife absolutely hates the whole moving process. But I have to bite my tongue when she makes her entirely justifiable complaints, because I'm already so very bad at hiding how much I love it.

It's back-breaking and frustrating and I am getting way too old to lift all those boxes full of Judge Dredd Megazines. It's financially draining, and requires stupid amounts of paperwork, and you have to figure out the new rubbish bin times, and how you're going to mow the fucking lawn.

But I've lived in 42 houses in my life so far, and I'm not just used to the process, I'm actively into it. I love sorting everything out, I love figuring out the new configurations for the bookshelves. I love consolidating and sharpening the collection of nerd shit I have. I love working out where everything can go. Where it all fits.

We have finally moved from renters to homeowners, so we won't be going very far anytime soon, but I still desperately sorting out the massive piles of Comics Journal issues, and work out where they are going to go, as fast as I can. Setting out a little space on this piece of land for my pile of Doctor Who novels.

I almost got crushed by several bins of 90s music mags while sorting them out the other day. It would be a truly dumb and extremely fitting way to exit this world, but for a split second there I thought the last thing I would ever see was a NME cover with the lovely Louise Wener on it.

I'm making some real progress sorting all this out, but I still haven't felt the sense that this is my land, and instead of all my earnings going to a landlord, it's going into this property that can go to my kids one day. And everyone keeps telling me that I will be so invested in things like property taxes and interest rates, but I never gave a shit about any of that before, and have no desire to start now.

But I do recognise this feeling of getting all my shit together - and I've got a lot of shit - on a property that is a lot smaller than the past few places we've been in. It's a lot of sorting, of getting everything together and working out what I actually need to keep handy, and what I need to show off, and I'll never get sick of that feeling, no matter how decrepit my aging body gets.

Happy birthday, Evie!

I have now been a parent for exactly seven years today, and it has absolutely been the best seven years of my life, and it really has felt like it's been seven seconds.

Throwing hands with Doctor Strange

Sometimes, when I'm standing around waiting for something, I'll have my hands behind my back, and I'll make the hand gestures that Doctor Strange makes behind his back towards the end of the original Infinity Gauntlet, as drawn by the mighty Ron Lim.

I do it without even thinking about it, as an unconscious thing, but I haven't managed to open any portals with my mystical gesturing. Not yet, anyway.

Only Hollywood makes me cry

I've been a fool for Tarantino films since the start, when me and my mates all walked into Reservoir Dogs as innocent 18-year-olds, and all walked out cinephiles for life. His films are smart and witty and clever and stylish, and sometimes they get quite emotional - but the end of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the only one to bring me to tears. 

It was the last movie I saw before I became a parent - quite literally, the wife and I saw it the day before our eldest was born, and I spent a large part of the long run time hoping our little treasure would stay put for a few more minutes. And then the real life tragedy of what happened to Sharon Tate and her friends in that house is avoided, and the world of the film is just a tiny bit brighter because of it. 

The main characters' righteous violence against the Manson murderers who invade their home is initially hard to take, with big men murdering much smaller women with their flamethrowers, attack dogs and bare hands.

But when you know what really happened - that they carved up a heavily pregnant woman in the most horrific way possible, a dog biting off their face in this fictional context is getting off lightly. Watching it that first time, with the most pregnant woman in the world sitting next to me, I cheered on the carnage.

And when it's all over, and Rick Dalton is invited into the Tate household and greeted with love and hugs, it's heartbreaking. It's the ultimate Hollywood ending, where the good guys win, and the most awful tragedy is avoided. And there is real sadness in the fact that this isn't what happened in real life, that those more people in the Tate house had the most awful of endings.

Those final moments are the quietest of conclusions to a Tarantino film, and the weight of real history weighs heavily on this happy ending.

But if Hollywood is a place of dreams, this is the most pleasant of them, where the Manson killers pick the wrong fuckin' house to crash, and the world isn't poisoned by their stupid cruelty. That's worth a tear or two.

You're paying way too much for your pot, Lester

American Beauty's reputation has diminished greatly over the years, even if it does have a moment of sublime beauty with the trash bag. Most people bounce off the obviously problematic stuff with a middle aged loser lusting over a teenaged girl, but the thing that always annoyed me the most about this movie is how much Kevin Spacey was paying for his weed.

The late nineties were my peak stoner age, so I was having a good fuckin' time when I saw American Beauty for the first time, after the usual morning sesh with Shane over the back fence. It was totally a vibe movie, and I was into it. 

And then Lester happily pays two grand for a tiny amount of weed , and I could not believe what he was doing. Three hundred for the ounce of regular marijuana seemed legit, but in all my dealings, I never met - or smoked - a single strain of weed that was worth that kind of money. You might as well be buying cocaine if you're going to spend that much.

(It also cracked me up how it was "genetically engineered by the US government", when the best weed growers are old crusty guys named Funk or something who knew more about pot than anything any damn government scientist ever dreamed of.)

I think about this now and then, because pot is still largely illegal in this part of the world and the local constabulary like to put out statements saying they have busted a big cannabis operation and seized millions of dollars in weed, but then you only have to do some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations to realize the cops are full of shit because it turns out they're valuing it at $4000 an ounce, and nobody is ever going to pay that much for an ounce, even if it's personally sourced by the freaky kid next door.

So when I need my American beauty fix in the future, I might just watch the trash bag scene again, and forget about the rest of it. The cost of pot is enough, let alone the yuck of Spacey. 

Love and happiness forever!

It's a bit of a joke, when Ewan McGregor's insanely charming Alex makes the toast in Shallow Grave - forcing his partying flatmates to drink to 'love and happiness forever', He's being a dick about it, and it's all obviously about to go wrong and there will be corpse desecration and murder, but he's still demanding the oath. 

But I'll drink to that idea, any day. It's all everything we all need - what can be better than love and happiness forever? Maybe Nathan Barley's 'peace and fucking'.

Best dollar sale ever

I have always been a fiend for the $1 comic sale. Regular issues of American comic books are getting perilously close to $12 in local money, but give it a few years, and a lot of that stuff will end up in the cheap bins, and that twelve bucks will buy me a dozen slightly trashed old comics. 

A vast chunk of my comic collection was swept up from bargain bins, and I never miss the kilo sale at one of my local stores. But when the most excellent Iron Age Comics announced it was doing a special sale, I really did not expect it to be the best dollar comic sale I've ever been to. But that's what happened, all the same. 

It was a good sign when the first thing I see in the first box is Fantastic Four Annual #4, the one where the old Human Torch comes back - a pivotal moment in the early Marvel Universe, and it's just sitting there. It was missing a back cover, but was still a thing of beauty, in all its roughed-up glory. 

Then I found Avengers Annual #10 in there, and a bunch of other Avengers from the early seventies and many 60s and 70s oddities like ancient Justice League of America, prime Kirby Demon and loads of Marvel Two-In-One, and they're all just a buck each. 

They are, obviously, in awful condition. Some of them have been warped and torn by water damage, and some come with covers that have clearly been attacked by rodents, but a beat-up comic has just as much as charm as one that still smells like the printers. 

And if the cover is getting gross, there is so much thrills inside, so much beautiful artwork, for the cheapest of costs. Son of Satan issues and loads of terrific DC Comics Presents, including the one with the first ever New Teen Titans. A decent chunk of the post-Kirby Return of the New Gods, because why the hell not?

It's taken me weeks to get through them all, because Bronze Age comics are dense as hell, but two things are certain - short of straight-up stealing something, this is the best bang for buck in all  entertainment, and that I'll be there for the next sale, every time.

All the time in the world when you're unemployed

I haven't been properly unemployed for years now, but there were a couple of times when I was younger when I just could not get a job and I remember how much it sucked, so I'll be doing all I can to ever avoid being in that kind of situation again, especially when I have actual dependents in my life now. 

I was out of work for about four hours the last time I quit a job due to pisspoor management, and had two different offers in those few hours, so I hope I'll be okay. 

While there was some freedom to being free of the various obligations of employment, it fucking sucked. It sucked how much you had to scrape through every day with the barest of sustenance, and it sucked how much you were forced to rely on the generosity of family and friends just to pay the fucking bills. It sucked that you couldn't watch or read all the things you really wanted to, and you certainly couldn't go out at night, because there was no spare cash by the time the dole came through. 

The only thing you did have was free time, just acres of it, and I always managed to fill it out with endless books and movies, and so much of the film and general geek knowledge and experiences I have now is a result of the months when I had nothing better to do, so many years ago.

I didn't have the endless options of today, where you could spend all day on free streaming sites and never get bored, but I could hire eight movies on video tape out for a week for $8, and might even watch some of them twice. And when you're burning through so many films on grey Tuesday afternoons, it forces you outside your comfort zone, inspires you to try something different, and that leads down all sorts of wonderful paths.

And when I got bored of the movies, there was always books, and I would haunt the local library and again, try out novelists I wouldn't ordinary bother with. During my last extended period of homelessness, I started looking for older, classic books, and fell into an exceedingly pleasant Graham Greene wormhole.  

And when that also got a bit much, I could always try some writing myself, and churned out hundreds of pages of unreadable prose, trying to find some kind of voice.

The only other thing I would do is walk, a good walk never cost anything, is good for the health and the soul.

That's how I got through the day when the days got too long, and I didn't have any work to fill them, and there was some pleasure in it. It still sucked like nothing else sucks when you're an adult, but there was some light in those endless days.