I was watching this special on Whitney Houston. I used to be all about Whitney and her music when I was younger. I still will always have a place for her music I guess, but watching the stories about her now and how far she's fallen, it actually makes me kind of sad. Sad that a woman with one of the best voices, has some of the biggest personal problems. On top of it, it's a drug problem, which kind of makes me really sad for her. From the clips they showed, it really seems like the drugs have warped some of her mind. In the story it said she was trying to turn it around, but who knows really.

You know you've got problems when Michael Jackson is worried about you and thinks you've got problems.

I guess I am sad about this, this from a woman I never really knew because of my experiences with my own mother. It got me to thinking about my memories of my mom in her last days. I don't always look at it so closely but, I was privy to seeing the same thing happening to my mother. I remember seeing the effects of the drugs on my mothers mental state. She became very volitile and erractic. When I was watching the clips of Whitney, I remembered seeing that same sense loss in my mothers eyes. The drugs really make you lose so much of yourself, so much so, your emotions are no longer in your control. I think what really hurts, being so young, I knew that deep down, my mother wanted to get better and to change things, but by then, she couldn't and neither could I, being so young.

I wasn't planning to write about this, but something about that story has sort of triggered some memories, that perhaps I can never forget. I don't know if I will ever be able to forget having her crying and asking me to forgive her in my arms the day she died. In my life, I've always wanted to change that moment, I've always wanted to do something.

THat's sort of apart of my connections to comics. The thing I guess I relate most to, when it comes to the batman comics, is that want...the want to change things...to actually be able to save the ones we love. I don't know.... when I read Batman, I really do understand what the character is supposed to feel, because I too was a child wanting to save a parent, but being so young, was unable. In the end I think I will always be haunted by that thought.

It is a tremendous pain I will always carry and no one will ever be able to take that pain away. I don't dwell on that though, and I know with that pain a great sense of strength has arisen from it. Also, a tremendous sense of what is right and an equal compulsion to do the right thing, will always drive me.

The thing about Fiction imitating art or vice versa is so true. Sometimes I look at my life in terms of a story arc and in my story, the defining moment, the moment that will always stick in my mind is the memory of me crying outside my apartment, on my knees, pounding on the door, begging my mother to be alright and to just open the door. And somehow knowing she was dead and wishing I didn�t listen to her and leave her to go outside and play. And the symbolic object would be that door. � that fucking door.

We watch movies with heroes who can break it down as if it were a toothpick, but to a boy barely 7 years old, that door is something you�ll never be able to break down. As adults we all have our doors that we can�t break down. What�s odd is somehow though I really want to believe that the doors can be broken. I think that�s why I live, apart of me still has hope. It�s why I love comics so much, because it�s a world where things are possible. In life it is really hard to believe that things are possible, but they are, we just have to have faith.

But faith is fleetign sometimes. I didn't see my mother actually die in front of me, but I saw her dying throughout my childhood. I sometimes am afraid because I wonder if I am dying inside slowly, but I can't worry that I am, I have to believe I am stronger than that.