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Where some kids grew up with religion, I grew up with comic books. They helped shape my moral core. They taught me that the proper use of power, any power, is to help those who have none. No one taught me that better than Superman.

(And I learned a lot more besides. I could tell you what all the different colors of kryptonite were -- green, red, blue, white, gold, crystal -- and tell you what they did; I could tell you that a young Clark Kent fashioned his hornrim glasses from two circular fragments of the cockpit glass of his rocket, because regular glass would melt if he used his heat vision. You know, the important details. I had "non-fiction" books about Superman and I studied them the way I never studied anything at school.)

I don't remember, oddly enough, if I ever saw Superman: The Movie in a movie theatre. But I certainly watched it on video, a hundred times or more.

I've seen it since, in the cold morning after of adulthood. It's -- not great. The special effects are no longer convincing. Most of the acting (aside from the brilliant Christopher Reeve) is just not up to par. The script doesn't hold together. The jokes fall flat.

It's not the movie I remember. There's no way to go back and see something like that, from your childhood, and have it be the way you remember it.

Or so I thought until last night.

Watching Superman Returns at the Cinerama was, in so many ways, like having that experience, of seeing the original movie for the first time as a child, back again. It is every bit as good as I remember the original being, in every way that it really wasn't.

The casting is great. Okay, Lois Lane is kind of forgettable, but entirely competent. But Brandon Routh frickin' channels Christopher Reeve -- I kept forgetting it wasn't him, somehow given back to us -- and Kevin Spacey somehow manages to take Gene Hackman's version of Luthor and build on it, to make it something three-dimensional and dark and scary-crazy.

Superman Returns. Boy, does he ever. If you like awesome, go see it. At the Cinerama, if you can manage it.

Although the downtown core is small enough to casually cross on foot, it seems to contain pretty much everything I consider essential for life; used bookstores, teriyaki joints, antique stores. Shop windows blossom with flyers for a vibrant local culture -- bands looking for members, recording studios offering cheap rates, people looking for roommates, auditions, upcoming plays and political rallies. Oddly, I saw no used record shops, but there must be some somewhere. It's just that kind of place.

The local comics stores is called The Danger Room, and frankly, that's the best goddamn name for a comics store I've ever heard. Not just for the obvious X-Men reference, mind you, but for the implication that comics themselves are inherently edgy and subversive. The store itself is really nice, too -- clean, bright and open, situated on a corner that gets a lot of foot traffic, friendly staff, and get this -- their stock is mostly organized by genre, making it easy for a brand-new comics reader to walk in and find something they might like. This makes sense and almost no one does it. Most stores just arrange everything alphabetically, or divides by publisher. Can you imagine someone walking into a bookstore and saying, "Excuse me, where are your Bantam novels?"

Had lunch at the same little Japanese restaurant Cheryl and Bill took me to Saturday night. I wanted to be a little more adventurous, but I kept thinking about the bite I'd had of Cheryl's tonkatsu and wanted some of my own.

The walk down the hill to downtown had been pleasant; the walk back up the hill, in the heat of the the afternoon, was nothing short of torturous. I'm inside now -- their guest room is, thank gods, the coolest room of the house -- and am drinking ice-cool Vanilla Coke and putting off doing any yardwork.

I still want to write. Don't know what. Every idea I have sounds like something I don't want to tackle just yet. Several disparate short story ideas collided in my head this morning and seem to be coalescing into a fairly audacious novel. I really don't know if I want to start on that.