Wood’s Tea

My whole life I have been fol­low­ing rabbit trails after new infor­ma­tion with­out any reason other than simply an inner com­pul­sion to do so.

This morn­ing, walk­ing through the kitchen, I saw the rinsed-but-not-yet-recycled Drifter Pale Ale bottle I’d left on the counter the night before. This made me think of the “WHERE’S THE BEER?” line that’s dubbed on to Mag­neto in one of the Jug­ger­naut, Bitch! videos¹. Mag­neto, hmm. What was the deal with him again? By this time I was at my com­puter look­ing him up on Wikipedia.

I have never opened an X-Men comic book, have never had any par­tic­u­lar inter­est in super­hero cul­ture, have never gone to see any of the X-Men films, Halle Berry notwith­stand­ing. Recently while trav­el­ing for busi­ness, I saw about ten min­utes of X-Men: the Last Stand on the hotel room TV after click­ing over during a com­mer­cial break in some­thing else…Baby Mama, per­haps? I rec­og­nized Mag­neto, who was bat­tling the X-Men some­thing fierce. He and his team of evils had a suc­cess­ful burning-car-projectile strat­egy going when Jean Grey, absent­mind­edly wan­der­ing about until that point, stepped up to unleash some Omega-​level pwnage, clear­ing the bat­tle­field. That was as far as I got.

Now the fact that I know that Jean Grey was/is? an Omega-​level mutant tips my hand: this morning’s foray into entries on the X-Men wasn’t my first. I’d once before gone look­ing, curi­ous about the alien char­ac­ters like Lilan­dra that show up in the Jug­ger­naut par­o­dies. In that instance I’d fol­lowed a series of links toward the entry on the Dark Phoenix saga. Nor­mally I wouldn’t have stuck with this for long, but a few lines in a review ref­er­enced by the entry hooked me:

‘The Dark Phoenix Saga’ is one of the most famous and sig­nif­i­cant X-Men sto­ries ever pub­lished. It’s still remem­bered as one of the best comic sto­ries ever writ­ten, and pos­si­bly the best X-Men story ever told. The ending shocked the comic book com­mu­nity when it was first pub­lished nearly 20 years ago…

I was in col­lege when Hirsch’s Cul­tural Lit­er­acy book came out and con­tinue to be vul­ner­a­ble to sug­ges­tions of this sort — that a par­tic­u­lar work is impor­tant enough that a truly lit­er­ate indi­vid­ual should know some­thing about it. I’m not sure when mutants are going to come in any con­ver­sa­tion I’m going to have, or per­haps pop up on NTN while I’m enjoy­ing a little beer-and-trivia at Pizza Uno (work travel, remem­ber), but by gum, I’m going to be ready when they do.

Even with­out that par­tic­u­lar moti­va­tion I’ll still follow these diver­sions. As a kid I had a set of World Book encyclopædias in my room, and if I’d come across, say, a table list­ing the top states and provinces for wheat pro­duc­tion (in the 1970 edi­tion, Kansas was second, after Saskatchewan), I’d then start pulling out other vol­umes to see sim­i­lar tables for apples or gold or oil. ADHD? Quite pos­si­bly. If so, I’m not entirely sure it’s some­thing I should be trying to sup­press, at least when some greater respon­si­bil­ity isn’t press­ing. I seem to get more com­fort­able with it as I grow older — just a part of who I am and have always been.