for Jeff Hammel
They decided that he would have a super-human capacity for masking despair with ironic incomprehension. Rejected then abandoned by those he loves, cut off irrevocably from the society that gave his life meaning, he resists any recognition of the cause of his woes. As consequence, he is shrouded from their import. Even his death lacks finality because of his subconsciously willed disorientation. He is, in a sense, immortal. If he does not save the world, per se, he rescues a inexorably degraded world–his own–from the damnation of consciousness.
It was a commercial catastrophe, especially in America.
Later, they would say, “I knew we should have left his superpower as the ability to turn into a bug.”
