Assemblers

This week I saw The Marvellous Avengers or Assembly of the Avengers or Go! Go! Team Avengebots or whatever it's called. As I quipped on the Twitters, it is now officially my all-time no.2 favourite Joss Whedon film. Serenity remains unassailably in the no.1 spot, of course. Apart from having the funnier script and the less-identikit blockbuster set piece what-the-hell-is-going-on? battle sequence, I was simply more invested in the characters. (Although I still totally want to be Tony Stark when I grow up.) And Serenity never had the impact on popular Olde English usage that The New New Avengers is likely to (cut to a playground where school kids are calling each other mewling quims). Hat-tip to Joss for Coulson's almost forth wall breaking final words. But I do wish he'd stop sticking pointy things through the chests of everyone's least-offensive favourite characters.

Empty

Some mornings you wake up to find yourself lying at the bottom of a deep dark pit and you have to claw your way up towards the weak grey light before you can begin another empty day. It isn't like feeling sad, although that's in there somewhere. It can hit you in a crowd on a bright sunny day. Being alone is a symptom. There's a hollowness at the centre of your being, a vacum which sucks the energy from your limbs and the thoughts from your mind. A cold aching void, a yearning nothingness. That's when the voices start, telling you that you're nothing, cataloguing all your failings, the things you've never done, the things you'll never do, the tests that you've failed and can never hope to pass. Telling you that all those people who want nothing to do with you have the right idea. When it strikes all you can do is curl up into a tight little ball and wait for it to get bored and move on. Which it does. Eventually.