I am tired and harried and waay overworked, and that usually leads to Bleats with narrow concerns that bore 82% of the customers. (See also, yesterday.) Apologies; free-range Bleats resume tomorrow. Today: well, you’ll see.

Snow’s all gone, tulips are up. Sixty-four this afternoon and snow predicted for May First. I’d be tempted to say there is no God, but there surely is, and it’s Loki. All I know about Norse mythology I learned from my Thor comic books, but I know that Loki was a nasty trickster, a snow-in-May kind of guy. He usually dressed in a skintight green and yellow suit, with strange fabric horns coming from his head.

Why the Norse gods went from wolf-furs to bodystockings I’ve no idea.

And while I’m on the subject - I touched on the Thor problem in my Backfence column, and I’ll repeat it here. If Thor, God of Thunder, was indeed flying around Manhattan on a daily basis, what would this do to organized religions? Here’s a living incarnation of an ancient creed. Flying around. In broad daylight. Imagine the anguish: we’re all waiting for an incarnation to appear, and it’s THAT religion? Like, the God of SWEDEN? I would suggest that this would cause a meltdown in Western society, especially once Thor’s interviewed on TV. “Well, yes, Greta, I am immortal, as you put it." (Easy, gleaming smile.) "I have mastery over the elements - that’s not the same as being responsible for them, however; my lawyers want to make that point clear, because we’ve had some class-action suits from trailer-park residents who think I have something to do with tornadoes.”

Greta: “It’s an interesting legal question, whether your ability to control weather means you are legally responsible for not controlling weather that causes damage.”

Thor: “Well, it’s like the police and crime. The police can respond to crime, but you can’t hold them legally responsible simply because a crime occurs. And if I may, I’d like to point out that during the last season of tornadic activity in Texas, I was in heaven attempting to reholster the sword of Ragnarok, the unleashing of which portends the apocalypse and the destruction of the arrangement of matter as we know it.”

Greta: “So you’re saying you have an alibi.”

Legalisms aside, at some point we’d have to confront Thor’s manifest divinity: “I’m one of many gods, and we live up there, in the sky. Our leader is Odin, who’s your typical big fellow with a white beard. We’re the only gods up there, as far as I know.” People would come out of church, see Thor flying across the sky (with a hammer! A stupid HAMMER!) and feel this horrible pang of doubt.

What’s odd is that no one in the Marvel comic world ever mentioned this; it’s as if there was some unspoken agreement to soft-pedal Thor’s godhood, lest it reflect poorly on the Superhero-American community. Ixnay on the odgay. You’d think that J. Jonah Jameson would have been obsessed with Thor, not Spidey, because -

Well, let me backtrack a bit here. This is Relevant to the contemporary culture, since we’re all about to be inundated in a tide of Spiderman Fever if the movie is as good as predicted. Several notes:

1. The movie looks good in previews. But: the idea that Spidey shoots webs out of his veins, rather than mechanical devices he built himself, is stupid and wrong. Peter Parker was a science geek. He was smart. Sure, he had a variety of arachnid-based powers, but without his own inventive skill, he would have been nothing. His ability to shoot webs and swing from parapet to flagpole was dependent on his intellectual prowess, and without that invention he would have had nothing more than the ability to know when the pizza guy was here before he rang the doorbell. My Spidey-sense tells me that Domino’s is here! Also, the barking dog, and the fact that it’s been 30 minutes.

2. J. Jonah Jameson was the editor of the Daily Bugle, the paper that employed free-lance photographer Peter Parker, aka Spiderman. As a child, this was my introduction to the world of newspapers: they were run by an autocratic man with white sideburns who always had a cigar exactly six inches long (with a half-inch ash) jammed in the corner of his mouth; this editor would Stop the Presses, Remake Page One, and reshape the paper to fit his whims and fits. And this man lied. JJJ hated Spiderman. Hated him. Took every opportunity to portray him as a menace to the city, despite all the evidence to the contrary. In a town with many papers, JJJ had decided to play to the anti-superhero demographic - but why?

There’s an exceptional graphic novel called “Marvels,” a retelling of the entire Marvel comic stories that filled my childhood. At one point JJJ explains why he hates Spiderman and the others: because they are better than us. Because they do great things. Because the fact that we cannot control them makes their altruism all the more intolerable. We are less than they are and we know it, and some of us will always hate them for providing that example. It goes without saying that in this book, the superheroes are not only criticized by tabloid headlines, but subpoenaed to appear before Senate committees and explain why they laid waste to lower Manhattan in a battle against a 40-story itinerant planet-eater.

I hope the movie version of triple-J is true to the comics of my youth. I had to smile today at Target, when I saw some Spider-Man toys. There was a J. Jonah Jameson doll “with desk-pounding action.” A toy editor who sits at his desk and pounds it in impotent anger, enraged by acts of humiliating bravery.

3. I think I know how the movie ends. I was there almost 30 years when the story was told the first time. Comics provide lonely kids with an inner mythology as rich and tragic as the stuff of Greek legends, and it’s all the more precious because the adult world doesn’t care, can't be bothered, and will never know how cool it is. Of course, we’re all adults now; I need only refer to a political faction as “Yancy Streeters” and my old friend the Giant Swede knows exactly what I mean. But when you’re a kid, these stories grant passage to an unseen community, a world in which these ridiculous tales are treated with the respect you grant to your own imaginative fancies. When Captain Stacy (dying from a load of bricks dropped on him by Doc Ock) revealed to Spiderman that he’d always known who he was, and asked him to look after his daughter - well, I thought about that for days afterwards. You couldn’t tell anyone, because they didn’t care, and that made it all the more deliciously tragic.

And now that storyline comes to the screen 30 years later. Millions will watch it. For the first time I can actually talk to people my age - i.e., the very demographic that didn’t care about Spidey when I was a kid - and they will know exactly what I’m talking about.

Live long enough, and the adults all end up booing the Green Goblin too.

Sweet.

Incidentally: Marvels is still available as a collection, and it’s simply one of the best graphic novels ever. Just hit the Buy the Book link below, type MARVELS into the Amazon search field, and off you go. If you need more enticement: the story is told from the perspective of a man on the street who simply observes these creatures from afar. It spends not a moment in the superheroes’ world; there’s none of their corny dialogue, last-minute inventions, hothouse romances. Their battles take place soundlessly in the sky above, while ordinary New Yorkers watch and wait and worry. It’s one of the finest comic books ever done, and every nuance, every detail, every small revelation is spot-on. A few casting notes: Reed Richards is drawn to look like Russell Johnson, the Professor from Gilligan’s Island; Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, is drawn as Timothy Dalton; in the church pews at Reed Richard’s wedding to Sue Stark, you see Dick van Dyke and John Lennon and other mid-60s celebs. It’s just a delight.

Yes, it's just a comic book. So?

One more thing. Just checked the Amazon site, and read the reviews. There's one from "Hassan Galadari from Dubai, United Arab Emirates." He loved the book, and he knows his Marvel. Might there be something archetypal about these tales, that they speak to a kid in UAE?

Just asking.

UH Oh. War screed later! You're warned!

Had a fellow come ‘round today to price out some new steps. The concrete flight from sidewalk to cliff is the Shame of Jasperwood; they’re cracked, the bricks are coming apart, the railing is shot. Last fall I had a concrete company estimate the replacement cost, and I think I did a good job of keeping my eyeballs from popping out of my head and rolling across the table. (The trick is to inhale, sharply, and hold your breath.) It reminded me of the day when the remodelers presented their final plan for a proposed addition to the old house. We’d told them what we wanted to spend, and they came in a little over budget. One hundred thousand dollars over budget. And that did not include extras like - and I’m not kidding - floors. The interviews, the nights spent looking over plans, looking at materials, chatting over whether we wanted the deck to have an entrance here or here - all that time added up to that moment, and at that moment I thanked them and showed them the door. Cordially. We never spoke again.

You could make a good living doing this: taking a few grand to draw up plans, then blowing out the budget by such a preposterous amount that your client simply wants you to go away. For all I know, they never build any houses at all.

I’m sure I shared some responsibility here, what with my grandiose plans for a walk-in bathroom, floor-to-ceiling walls and floors everywhere, but still.

Yesterday I saw a flier on my doorknocker, advertising Stone Steps. I realized that the price of replacing the Shame of Jasperwood is unlikely to go down, so I called the fellow. He came over, sketched some ideas, and made a very reasonable estimate. (Which I instantly doubled, just to be realistic.) The cost is still horrendous - I don’t know why I thought steps would be cheap. It’s just sand and assorted chemicals, for heaven’s sake. Of course, there’s the cost of hiring assorted burlies to break up the stairs, but for some reason I assumed this would be inexpensive. Apparently I have in the back of my mind some Depression-era labor-market model, where men show up hat in hand asking if I’ve any work, and I grudgingly admit that yes, I’ve some steps that need demolishing. There’s a blueberry pie in it for you, boys.

My favorite line in the estimate was an “upcharge.” It sounded like an extra charge, an upgrade, a special fee for this type of stone. No, it’s a charge for hauling the steps Up. After a certain height, you get an upcharge. There was also a $300 charge for renting a Dingo, and when I asked what that was, I was informed it was a machine that climbed to the top of the stairs. At this point I also expected a $250 charge for the machine that goes Ping! but he explained that the Dingo hauled something, or compacted something, or hauled a compactor, or whatever. My fault for not understanding, perhaps. Work will begin in July. Which is to say August.

It's the

Five o’clock. I’m making supper. Doorbell: Dingdong. Dog barks as if criminals smeared with squirrel guts had forced their way into the house; Gnat, who is in the living room stacking pillows for no apparent reason, runs into the kitchen through one door as I exit the other. I cannot find her, and naturally conclude she has gone up the stairs, fallen, and broken her neck. BARKBARKBARK, meanwhile. Dingdong again. Gnat cries: she’s in the kitchen. I run to the kitchen, expecting bloody disaster, but she’s just a little unnerved by Jasper’s ungodly racket - I scoop her up, go to the door: UPS. The deliveryperson hands me a package. As I head back in I hear the unmistakable sound of the milk boiling over. Run to stove, swear. Later, wife comes home, flops on the sofa, opens a beer and tells a tale of her day at the office, and I think: you didn’t even say a WORD about the meal I made.

Utter, complete, total societal inversion.

The UPS deliveryperson was female, incidentally.

Not a total inversion. The UPS package was Castle Wolfenstein game, which I don’t think many 50s housewives would have enjoyed. Soon I will be playing it! Soon I will be ventilating Nazis! So let’s bang out a Bleat pronto. And for all who’ve asked for a certain something, that certain something is up today. As you’ll see.